March 2007 – Page 4

Question for the technically-inclined

For about a week or so, I’ve noticed that I can’t hear sound on YouTube videos on my home computer. There’s nothing wrong with my speakers, so I can hear other things. But while I can see the videos fine, I can’t actually hear them.

This is true both for videos at the site and embedded videos.

Also, for some reason, when I went into YouTube today for the first time since noticing this, I realized that I wasn’t automatically signed in as usual; instead, when I went to log in, my yahoo login and password were filled in, not my YouTube login.

Anyone have this problem? If it helps, I’m on Firefox.

Department of Missing the Point

So I’m reading this story on Yahoo about an abstinence group at Harvard. It pretty much runs the course of most articles of this sort: blahblah students are oversexed, blahblah the university promotes sex, blahblah we formed a group to talk about how much sex we’re not having and how much sex we’re imagining all the other students are having blahblah “hookup culture” blahblah they’re being intolerant of my intolerance of their sex lives blahblah.

Then I got a little surprise. Why, there is something new under the sun in stories about abstinence groups on college campuses!

True Love Revolution members say the problem starts with the university. They say Harvard has implicitly led students to believe that having sex at college is a foregone conclusion by requiring incoming freshman to attend a seminar on date-rape that does not mention abstinence, by placing condoms in freshmen dorms, and by hosting racy lecturers. (Harvard students have also launched H-Bomb, a magazine featuring racy photos of undergraduates.)

Let that sink in for a moment. This group is upset that the university is requiring students to attend a seminar on date rape and not mentioning abstinence during the seminar.

Harvard trying to prevent date rape, and raise awareness that yes, getting someone drunk so you can have sex with them when they can’t really consent is actually rape, and these dipshits in True Love Revolution think that’s promoting the idea that sex is inevitable? I mean, let’s not even get into the fact that by definition, rape is sex without one’s consent. Abstinence ain’t got nothing to do with it.

(Also, a student-run porn mag has to do with the university how, exactly? But that’s just poor reporting.)

I see that magical thinking is alive and well among the young and righteous at Harvard. Because the only reason I can see for getting bent out of shape about the failure to talk about ABSTINENCE at a DATE RAPE SEMINAR is the belief that an abstinence pledge is some kind of magical force field that prevents someone from slipping a roofie in your drink.

Of course, it’s not at all hard to find virgins on college campuses, even among the secular crowd. The idea that everyone’s having wild, hot sex on college campuses — everyone who isn’t actively resisting it via purity pledge, that is — seems to be a popular one among these people, and it’s wrong.

“Sometimes that voice on campus is so overwhelming that students committed to abstinence almost feel compelled to abandon their convictions,” Murray said. He acknowledged he “slipped up” and had sex earlier in college but said he has returned to abstinence with Kinsella.

Dr. David Rosenthal, director of Harvard health services, disputed the notion that the university promotes sex.

He said students mistakenly think everyone on campus is having sex. The National College Health Assessment Survey, which included Harvard and hundreds of other campuses, found that about 29 percent of students reported not having sex in the past school year. For the 71 percent who are having sex, it is crucial to promote safety, Rosenthal said.

“Some students may have a feeling that acknowledgment is condoning,” he said, “and it’s not.”

I know I’ve mentioned before that I was a virgin throughout college, as were a number of my friends, and none of us were virgins for religious reasons, nor were we saving ourselves for anyone. We just hadn’t found anyone we wanted to sleep with. It wasn’t that big a deal. Because we weren’t obsessed about everyone else’s sex life (and nobody seemed to be obsessed with ours, for that matter). Well, other than roommates’, but mostly where that prevented access to the room or a good night’s sleep.

And the fact that my university gave out condoms and put up posters detailing safe and unsafe sexual behaviors, some of which I had to ask the guys on the second floor to explain? I’m rather glad in retrospect that I had that exposure and education. It certainly made it much easier for me, when I eventually did start having sex, to insist on protection. Since I wasn’t actually having sex when I learned all this, it wasn’t something I’d have to introduce to an existing pattern of behavior. Plus, since the university gave me a condom compact, I had one at the ready the first time someone tried to pull the “I don’t have one, but it’ll be okay” gambit.

But then, my university treated me like an adult. Which is something that Harvard does for its students, and something this abstinence group would clearly like to end.

Disenfranchised for wearing a veil

Quebec’s chief election official has decreed that women who wear veils that cover their faces, such as niqab, must appear uncovered at the polls for Monday’s election, or they will not be allowed to vote.

Marcel Blanchet had been criticized by Quebec’s three main political leaders for allowing voters to wear the niqab, which covers the entire face except for the eyes, and cast their ballots if they signed a sworn statement and showed proper ID.

Reversing his earlier decision, Blanchet said he was exercising his authority to amend articles in the electoral law to avoid disruptions when residents go to the polls. Prior to the amendment, the law did not include any provisions barring voters from covering their faces.

“Relevant articles to electoral laws were modified to add the following: any person showing up at a polling station must be uncovered to exercise the right to vote,” said Blanchet, who was assigned bodyguards after having received threatening phone calls and e-mails from voters outraged over his initial decision. Some voters threatened to protest by showing up at polling stations wearing masks.

Well. So nice to see that Muslim women are being used, yet again, as a convenient and visible way for xenophobes to express their anti-immigrant rage. And this doesn’t even seem to be based on voter fraud concerns, which you’d think would be the first thing raised. Or maybe I’m just too familiar with Republican vote-suppression tactics.

This isn’t the only recent incident of a veiled Muslim woman being forced or simply discouraged out of participation in public life in Quebec.

Wife-beating legal in Germany

…if you’re Muslim. Sort of, anyway.

A German judge has stirred a storm of protest by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim woman’s request for a speedy divorce on the ground that her husband beat her.

In a ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, noted that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote in her decision, sanctions such physical abuse.

Except that (a) German law is not Qu’ranic law, and (b) it is certainly not a settled issue that Islamic law allows men to beat their wives. In many majority-Muslim nations which apply Islamic law, physical violence is grounds for divorce. Under Moroccan family law, a wife is not legally obliged to obey her husband, and both parties have a right to divorce. I need to look this up, but I’m relatively certain that a man does not have the right to beat his wife under Moroccan law. Understandably, Muslims in Germany and elsewhere are pretty angry:

Muslim leaders agreed that Muslims living here must be judged by the German legal code. But they were just as offended by what they characterized as the judge’s misinterpretation of a much-debated passage in the Koran.

While the verse cited by Judge Datz-Winter does say husbands may beat their wives for being disobedient — an interpretation embraced by fundamentalists— mainstream Muslims have long rejected wife-beating as a medieval relic.

“Our prophet never struck a woman, and he is our example,” Ayyub Axel Köhler, the head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, said in an interview.

It irritates me that the author of this NY Times piece pits it as a battle between “Western values” and “Islam.” No, it’s a battle of misogyny verses legal equality — and no religion has a monopoly on misogyny. This was a German judge who laid down this ruling, not an Islamic one. She had no obligation to use her own interpretation of the Qu’ran and Islamic beliefs — an interpretation that Muslims around the world disagree with — and yet she chose to anyway. And somehow this is still being billed as a case of crazy Muslims in conflict with Western values.

This is flat-out racism and misogyny. To wit:

In January, the judge turned down the wife’s request for a speedy divorce, saying her husband’s behavior did not constitute unreasonable hardship because they are both Moroccan. “In this cultural background,” she wrote, “it is not unusual that the husband uses physical punishment against the wife.”

Domestic violence is indeed common in Morocco, and Moroccan women face a hell of a lot of oppression. But there isn’t anything unique to Moroccan “cultural background” which makes abuse acceptable or oppression any more debilitating in Morocco than elsewhere. A woman is beaten every 9 seconds in the United States. Nutty Christian sects promote “domestic discipline.” Domestic violence is a pervasive and wide-spread problem, and affects women of every nationality and religious (or non-religious) tradition. And while one German judge’s interpretation of Islamic law may serve as a sufficient cover for her own misogyny and her general failure to properly uphold German law, it does not actually say much of anything about Islam, the experience of Muslim women, or the supposed battle of values between the “West” and the Muslim world. And I’m pretty sure that Morocco is west of Germany anyway.

This ruling is devastating to German Muslim women, who are not being considered full citizens under German law, and who are apparently not invested with the same rights that non-Muslim Germans are accorded. Protection from physical abuse should not be offered on a sliding scale. The German judge needs to be held accountable for her own woman-hating and her racist, uninformed justifications for her decision. This does not need to be framed as yet another example of how backwards Islam is — because while domestic violence is certainly ass-backwards, it’s not an Islamic invention, and the decision to justify that abuse came from a supposedly enlightened Western woman.

The person who needs to be held primarily accountable here is the man who beat up his wife. Secondary accountability needs to be held by the people who enabled that beating, and who made it more difficult for the woman to escape — including this judge.

Just One Question

Why?

When I saw photos of Travolta in drag on my Yahoo main page, I thought that surely he must be taking over the role on Broadway.

Oh, no.

They’re remaking the movie. Or they’re adapting the Broadway adaptation of the movie for the screen.

Which, why?

Plus, Travolta’s wig is too neat. Edna Turnblad in both film and stage versions was a frowsy, dumpy housewife until Tracy and/or Motormouth Maybelle pulled her into bewigged fabulousness.

I loved the Broadway play (with original cast!), but it wasn’t a substitute for the movie, it was a stage adaptation (plus: Harvey Fierstein!).

That really can’t be put back onto the screen (hell, look what happened to The Producers).

Miss USA

Head on over to the Huffington Post and check out my piece on the Miss USA pageant. I’d love to hear your comments here or over there.

And this would probably be a good time to announce that I’ll be blogging fairly regularly over at HuffPo. Feministe will remain my primary blog, and I won’t be cutting down on my posts here, but I should have something up over there about once a week.

Pricier contraceptives for college women

Well this is fantastic. Prices of oral contraceptives are doubling and tripling on college campuses. While $30-45 might not sound ridiculously expensive — after all, you are preventing pregnancy — that’s a lot of money for a student living on a tight budget, especially if they’re used to only paying $10 or $15. My birth control is currently free and will hopefully stay that way since it isn’t an oral contraceptive, but I drop between $50 and $100 a month on other health-care-related expenses — jack that up to almost $150 and I would seriously consider going off if it. Some people are apparently arguing that if you want it bad enough you’ll shell out, but that’s just not an option for students who are living off of loans, who have no source of outside income, and who may have other expenses like children. If “pro-life” Republicans were actually concerned about keeping the abortion rate down, you’d think that they wouldn’t pass legislation that would make it harder for college women to prevent unwanted pregnancy. But as we’ve established time and again, preventing unintended pregnancy and abortion is the last thing on the “pro-life” agenda.

Provide half the raw materials: get $10,000. Provide the finished product: get $500.

Doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, does it?

But wait until you hear what the payments are for:

$10,000: ova.

$500: a baby.

Yes, a bill introduced in the Texas Senate by State Sen. Dan Patrick puts a price on infants:

Sec. 50.001. ADOPTION INCENTIVE PROGRAM. (a) The
department shall develop a program to encourage pregnant women to
place their children for adoption rather than have an abortion.
(b) The program must include a $500 payment to each woman
who is a resident of this state and a citizen of the United States*
who places a child for adoption rather than have an abortion.

Note the catch: the child must be placed for adoption instead of being aborted. How to make sure that the filthy little slut really was going to abort before that $500 payment caught her eye?

Sec. 50.002. APPLICATION FORM. (a) The department shall
develop an application form to be used by a woman who applies for
funds under this chapter.
(b) The department may only distribute the application
forms to abortion providers.

And how to make sure the baby butchers give the applications to women instead of just taking their money and their fetuses and rubbing their hands together with glee that they’ve dashed the hopes of yet another set of adoptive parents who are facing the cold reality of a vanished healthy white infant supply?

Sec. 50.005. NOTIFICATION REQUIRED; APPLICATION FORM. (a)
Notification of the program under this chapter is required as part
of the informed consent requirements under Chapter 171.
(b) An abortion provider shall distribute a copy of the
funds application form to each woman who comes to the provider
seeking an abortion.

But, Sen. Patrick, isn’t selling babies kind of illegal?

(b) Section 25.08, Penal Code, does not apply to the grant
or acceptance of money under this section.

I see.

As others have pointed out, $500 is remarkably cheap for a fully-cooked baby, and doesn’t even come close to covering the cost of extra groceries consumed during pregnancy, let alone prenatal health care. Moreover, if we’re using the legal fiction of being compensated for time and effort rather than the actual baby,** then the actual compensation works out to 7 cents an hour. You read right: seven cents. I believe that we can agree that those are slave wages.

According to Texas lawyer Norbizness over at Prof. B’s, this guy is a joke, and the bill has no hope of passing, even in Texas. But the anti-choicers are nothing if not both creative and persistent in their efforts to water down abortion rights (and provide a steady supply of white babies for adoption, like in the old days).

h/t Lorraine Berry.

__________
* Can’t have any Mexicans dragging themselves across the border for the big bucks! Interestingly, as Egalia notes, the citizenship of the father (or, indeed of the baby itself) isn’t mentioned. She posits that it’s because Dan Patrick Hates American Men and doesn’t their American Babies are worth $500. I suspect it’s because Patrick can’t conceive of a situation in which a woman with a man in her life would abort, let alone give a child up for adoption. Though in most cases, both parents, if the father is known, have to sign away their parental rights.

** Very much a fiction in the case of egg donation, in which your fee ultimately depends on how many eggs you produce. The investment of time, effort, Big Honkin’ Needles and physical discomfort is exactly the same, but whether you get $6000 or $10000 depends on your output. Of course, you won’t get in the door as an anonymous donor unless you’re healthy, well-educated, good-looking and, in most cases, white.

Christian Warriors: Fighting immodesty, one guilt-inducing erection at a time

I should have known better than to browse through the results of a survey about modesty, given to young Christian men. But I couldn’t resist. We wrote about this one a while back when it was just a survey, but now the results are in. And they’re… interesting. I’ll let you scroll through on your own and see what these Warriors for Christ think women should and should not be wearing (hint: just about anything other than sweatshirts and loose skirts or pants fall under “should not”). There are some fairly telling results, especially in the “posture/movement” section, where girls (and they’re always referred to as “girls”) standing, walking and sitting are all deemed to be “stumbling blocks” for Christian men.

So have fun with that, since I don’t have the stomach to look through it again in order to properly post on it. However, I have read through most of the responses to the open-ended questions, and good God are these young men disturbed. Predictably, they think that women who dress “immodestly” are sluts (“harlots,” in their vernacular), and flat-out say that women’s bodies exist for male pleasure and to take care of children.

We’ll start with the less ridiculous stuff, and leave the best section for the end. The following are responses to the question, “If you could say one thing to your sisters in Christ about modesty, what would it be?”

A girl’s dress proclaims her priorities and values louder than if she got on a chair and screamed them to the world. When critically examining a woman’s get-up, I consider the following: Could she get down on the floor and play with a group of toddlers without losing several articles of clothing? Could she get away from a threatening situation without spraining an ankle? Could she prepare and maintain a house and its members easily? Could she be the Proverbs 31 woman dressed like that?

Just when you think fashion couldn’t get any more misogynist…

It goes and surprises you.

On a recent episode of America’s Next Top Model — hosted by Strong Woman Tyra Banks — the models were made to do a photo shoot in which they were all supposed to look like they had been murdered. Each woman got a different style of death — electrocuted, stabbed, shot, strangled, etc. And each woman is made up and positioned to look beautiful, sexual, and as if she had been violently killed. I don’t really know what to say beyond, “Holy shit,” but luckily Jennifer is more articulate:

The lithe lot of ‘em are arrayed in awkward, broken poses, splayed out in cold concrete corridors, lifeless limbs positioned bloodily, just so, at the bottom of staircases, bathtubs and back alleys, mimicking their demise via stabbing, shooting, electrocution, drowning, poisoning, strangulation, decapitation and organ theft (!), to judges’ comments of “Gorgeous!” “Fantastic!” “Amazing!” “Absolutely beautiful!” and, of my favorite, “Death becomes you, young lady!”

Like Jennifer, I’m not going to post the pictures here. They’re absolutely grotesque and extremely disturbing, but you can view at your own risk here.

Most of the models are dressed like super-sexy sirens, with a bra-covered breast hanging out of a shirt, or skirt hiked up as far as it can legally go without breaking obscenity laws and legs splayed, or dressed in sexy lingerie and laying on a bed. They have blood sprayed across their chests, or bruises around their necks. It’s clearly intended to turn the viewer on, while equating desirability and eroticism with violence against women.

To borrow a Twisty-ism, I think we often underestimate just how much they hate us. But they aren’t really trying to hide it, are they?