In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: March 2006

Coming Soon: HIV Prevention Pill

Great news. Not to be too glass-is-half-empty, but how long until the religious right comes out against this drug because it wouldn’t punish fucking by death?

Thanks to Lauren for the link.

Gender, Class, Race and Rape

Rachel says it all.

46 members of the Duke Lacrosse team are taking DNA tests after some of the players were accused of gang raping a woman who they invited to be a dancer at a party. I also don’t want people to think about this story as a gender issue, but as incident that reveals how racism, sexism, and classism intersected to make this young woman particularly vulnerable to a sexual assault. If you read this report from ABC News you will hear very little about race. However, if you this story you get a better idea of what most likely went on. A group of young wealthy White men felt that it was ok to assault this woman, raping her and yelling racial slurs at her. This should be blowing up in the blogosphere folks. This is also one of those “if this had happen to a White woman would we have already heard about it” stories.

From the Duke student newspaper:

Police photographed 46 of the 47 lacrosse team members and collected DNA samples in the form of cheek swabs Thursday afternoon following allegations that the athletes gang-raped, sodomized and strangled a dancer at a March 13 party.

From Rachel:

The young woman is a student at North Carolina Central University (a historically Black University), and she is the mother of two. She was working for the escort service as a dancer to support her family and pay for college.

The race/class/gender dynamics of this whole case are really scary, and they reveal a great deal about our power structure in this country. This young woman ended up in the vulnerable position of being a sex worker because she was trying to better her family and her education. The two young women left the party after the racial slurs began and they feared for their safety, but I can’t help wondering if they were thinking about how they were going to pay their bills or feed their kids when they went back in, something most of these young men don’t even have to think about. I wonder if these guys were thinking about how much power they had over this young women when they yelled racist slurs and when they physically and sexually assault this women? I also wonder if those guys who remained silent were more concerned about protecting their buddies than stopping this terrible assault. How much do they think this woman’s life is worth?

UPDATE: Terrance has more:

Read More…Read More…

Posted Without Comment

Because I think it’s valuable to let people speak for themselves.

A.

B.

C.

The crux, I think, of the issue:

People have been trying to say that they see racism and exclusion going on in terms of content and discussions at major feminists blogs. You can either choose to listen with an open heart or not. I think that, if we choose the latter, then we are only hurting ourselves.

Turdblossom Strikes Again?

Andy Card out as White House Chief of Staff, Joshua Bolten in.

Not nearly as much fun as the Donald Regan/Nancy Reagan smackdown, but you just know Rove is behind this somehow.

Fun fact:

To the public, Card may be best known as the aide who calmly walked into a Florida school room and whispered into Bush’s ear that America was under attack on Sept. 11, 2001. He was known for keeping his cool under pressure. When Bush’s father, then President George H.W. Bush, got sick at a banquet in Tokyo, aides and security officials ran toward the president. Card ran in the opposite direction, out the door to make sure the motorcade was ready to rush Bush away.

Does anyone remember the clip on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update showing the monkey that someone in Japan had dressed up in a suit and trained to fall over on the command, “Bush-san”?

More on the Immigration Protests

Crooks and Liars has an email from a teacher at Hollywood High School:

“We have been sitting in class for the last hour and a half in full lockdown. I was able to go to the restroom and heard the thousands of marching teens from LA High converging on Hollywood and Highland. The din was unbelievable! The walkouts are spreading throughout all of Los Angeles, including the valley. We are fine here, but this is expected to go on for several more days. It is all unorganized, impromptu and is getting a life of it’s own. Absolutely amazing!

And CNN reports:

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — Tens of thousands of students walked out of school in California and other states Monday, waving flags and chanting slogans in a second week of protests against legislation to crack down on illegal immigrants.

In Washington, 100 demonstrators wore handcuffs at the Capitol to protest a bill that would make it a felony to be in this country illegally and would make it crime to dispense aid to the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants.

Immigrant supporters also object to legislation that would also impose new penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants and would build fences along part of the U.S.-Mexican border.

The Senate didn’t go along with the Sensenbrenner-introduced House version of the bill; instead, the Senate Judiciary Committee is looking to grant amnesty to current illegals as well as create a guest-worker program:

WASHINGTON, March 27 — With Republicans deeply divided, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on Monday to legalize the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants and ultimately to grant them citizenship, provided that they hold jobs, pass criminal background checks, learn English and pay fines and back taxes.

The panel also voted to create a vast temporary worker program that would allow roughly 400,000 foreigners to come to the United States to work each year and would put them on a path to citizenship as well.

The legislation, which the committee sent to the full Senate on a 12-to-6 vote, represents the most sweeping effort by Congress in decades to grant legal status to illegal immigrants. If passed, it would create the largest guest worker program since the bracero program brought 4.6 million Mexican agricultural workers into the country between 1942 and 1960.

Have the protests and their sheer size (remember, Saturday’s LA rally alone had 500,000 people, and tens of thousands spontaneously walked out today) scared the Republicans? It could be. After all, the economy depends on the work of illegal aliens to a degree that many people don’t think about unless something like this calls it to their attention. From Tbogg:

The assertion that they are “unwanted guests” is, how should I put it, oh yeah, crap. People may not like the idea of illegal immigrants, but only as long as the illegal immigrants they’re talking about are the ones who aren’t cooking their food and cleaning their houses and cutting their lawns and answering their phones and working in their warehouses and pouring their cement and loading their trucks and, well, you get the idea.

If this weekend’s organizers could get 500,000 people to turn out on Saturday for their march, imagine a one-day work stoppage. If all of my Hispanic employees and the Hispanics who make deliveries to us or provide other services didn’t come into work for a day, I’d be screwed. Now imagine if they all stayed home and didn’t buy anything for a day. They could bring California to its knees and you’d have business owners and factory owners and large contractors and the entire service industry screaming bloody murder. I still have fond memories of the stories of then Senator Pete Wilson getting a pissed-off phone call from a certain well-connected San Diego hotelier when one of her hotels was raided by la migra.

Republicans: meet your new boss.

You better play nice.

Ooh. Backstabby.

Karl Rove is way more Machiavellian than you.

According to several Pentagon sources close to Rove and others familiar with the inquiry, Bush’s senior adviser tipped off Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to information that led to the recent “discovery” of 250 pages of missing email from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Rove has been in the crosshairs of Fitzgerald’s investigation into the outing of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson for what some believe to be retaliation against her husband, former U.S. Ambassador to Gabon, Joseph Wilson. Wilson had been an ardent critic of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

While these sources did not provide any details regarding what type of arrangements Rove’s attorney Robert Luskin may have made with the special prosecutor’s office, if any, they were able to provide some information regarding what Rove imparted to Fitzgerald’s team. The individuals declined to go on the record out of concern for their jobs.

According to one source close to the case, Rove is providing information on deleted emails, erased hard drives and other types of obstruction by staff and other officials in the Vice President’s office. Pentagon sources close to Rove confirmed this account.

So Turdblossom threw Libby under the bus. Nice.

More on Self-Appointment

I read this article by Heather King about James Frey’s many sins several months ago. It’s not directly related, but I think her writing on recovery pretty much covers my feelings towards ally status vs. ally work.

Now that the accusations of lying have surfaced and I’ve actually read the book, I see the differences go even deeper. Drama is the movement from narcissism to humility, but Frey is exactly the same at the end of his story—minus the drugs—as he is at the beginning: an insecure braggart without a spark of vitality, gratitude or fun. “A ballsy, bone-deep memoir,” Salon.com called it, but for any alcoholic worth his or her salt, throwing up blood, puking on oneself, and committing petty-ass crimes in and of themselves couldn’t be bigger yawns. What’s gritty is the moment, knowing you’re dying, when the world turns on its axis and you realize My way doesn’t work. What’s ballsy isn’t just egomaniacally recounting your misdeeds; it’s taking the trouble to find the people you’ve screwed over, looking them in the eye, and saying you’re sorry. What’s bone-deep—or might have been if Frey had done it—is figuring out that other people suffer, too, and developing some compassion for them. Oprah speaks of “the redemption of James Frey”—but redeemed from what, and by whom? Sobriety, in my experience, isn’t the staged melodrama of sitting in a bar and staring down a drink to prove you’ve “won”—as Frey does upon leaving rehab. It’s the ongoing attempt, knowing in advance you’ll fall woefully short, to order your life around honesty, integrity, faith.

Self-Appointed

In comments on Chris Clarke’s post about why he does not refer to himself as feminist, Dr. Virago said this:

I guess all I’m trying to say is that if you conclude that only some people (i.e., women) have the right to claim themselves “feminist” then you make feminism itself much less politically viable. You also reify the very gender categories that feminism seeks to undo.

On the contrary, I think you emphasize the experiential knowledge that feminism seeks to communicate. Women have the most direct contact with misogyny, and the greatest personal stake in ending misogyny. I get kinda suspicious if people-otherwise-known-as-straight call themselves queer activists; there’s a disturbing subsequent tendency on their part to arrogate the right to speak to my problems and my needs.