February 2008 – Feministe

Nominate Your Favorite Feminist Bloggers

Women’s Voices. Women Vote. is honoring all the great feminist blogging out there by taking nominations for your favorite feminist bloggers. Head over there or click the button above and nominate your favorite writers — and if you’re an awesome feminist blogger, don’t be afraid to shamelessly self-promote and nominate yourself.

This is why sitting down and shutting up isn’t an option

Because if you don’t make noise, you don’t get listened to. Obama’s open letter to the LGBT community, posted without comment:

Oh, what the hell

More random Junebug blogging. It’s been a while.

Can you see the new white patch on her muzzle? It makes Mommy sad.

Just because I’ve gone and earwormed myself with it…

The rest of you need to share the pain.

Enjoy.

Random Junebug blogging

“Seasons in the Sun” edition.

Well, without the dying and the sap and the Terry Jacks.

Words mean things, part 2

I read something today that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up (emphasis mine):

In the rest of the interview, she basically suggests that about 60% of the evangelical community is politically conservative and won’t ever vote for a Democrat. But the other 40% will, and those 40% are worth trying to appeal to. And one way to appeal to them is to acknowledge their moral qualms about abortion even if you don’t happen to share them yourself. Like this guy:

“I think that the American people struggle with two principles: There’s the principle that a fetus is not just an appendage, it’s potential life. I think people recognize that there’s a moral element to that. They also believe that women should have some control over their bodies and themselves and there is a privacy element to making those decisions.

“I don’t think people take the issue lightly. A lot of people have arrived in the view that I’ve arrived at, which is that there is a moral implication to these issues, but that the women involved are in the best position to make that determination. And I don’t think they make it lightly.”

That’s Kevin Drum, trying to gotcha Amanda Marcotte over her criticism of Amy Sullivan’s mealymouthed denial of being pro-choice even though she is, by any definition of the term. Drum’s point is that the guy he’s quoting is a prominent Democrat who acknowledges the moral quandaries that people have with abortion while still being “solidly in favor of choice.”

I’d just like you to consider the phrasing in that Democrat’s statement for a moment: the conflict is between those who believe that a fetus is not just an appendage but a potential life, and those who believe that women should have some control over their bodies and themselves.

Some control. Some. How very generous. And… solid.

A shameful Obama smear — this one from the mainstream media

This time around, the attack comes from Tim Russert. Josh is right — it is the MSM version of email smear campaigns. Obama handled it with grace, but damn if I don’t want to kick reporters sometimes.

If a fertilized egg is a person…

If a fertilized egg is a person like Mike Huckabee says, can a post-coital woman drive in the carpool lane?

Even more questions from the fabulous Pam. I for one would really like to be able to claim my fertilized eggs as tax deductions. I’ll even send my used tampons directly to Gov. Huckabee as evidence.

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The slightly sick side of me thinks that a campaign wherein women sent their used tampons to Huckabee’s headquarters — because, you know, there might be people on those tampons, and someone needs to examine them and offer a proper Christian burial — would be kind of genius. Unfortunately I’m pretty sure it’s a health risk and there would be some legal issues involved (also, I’d imagine mailing a “person” is illegal). But I still enjoy the thought of asking Huck to adopt all of our fertilized egg tampon-dwelling babies.

A bit more on that “one in four” statistic

Anti-feminists like Heather MacDonald continue to say that the “one in four college women experience attempted or completed sexual assault” statistic is false. I didn’t offer much of a rebuttal in this post, but I think it’s worth countering the oft-repeated claim that feminists are making up these numbers. In fact, the study that produced the disputed one-in-four statistic used Ohio penal code to define rape and attempted rape, and classified reported experiences accordingly. There was a separate category for coercive sex, and later studies proffered similar results. While many of the women whose experiences were legally rape did not self-identify as rape victims, 30 percent considered suicide after the experience, 31 percent sought help from a therapist, 82 percent reported that the experience had changed them, and only 11 percent said that they did not consider themselves to be victims.

But let’s not let the facts get in the way of the anti-feminist narrative that rape doesn’t happen, except to women who deserve it.

It’s Only a Myth if You Believe That Those Sluts Were Asking For It

Because if women don’t call it rape then it’s just not.

This op/ed is one of the most ridiculous I’ve read in a long, long time (and that’s pretty impressive). Heather MacDonald argues that high rates of sexual assault on campus don’t exist because women don’t always define their experiences as rape; she then goes on to say that women who say they were raped are lying sluts who exaggerate the truth and were probably asking for it. Compare:

A 2006 survey of sorority women at the University of Virginia, for example, found that only 23% of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped — a result that the university’s director of sexual and domestic violence services calls “discouraging.” Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of those whom the researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.”

Believing in the campus rape epidemic, it turns out, requires ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences.

With:

So what reality does lie behind the rape hype? I believe that it’s the booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the ’60s demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, promiscuous behavior that gets cruder each year.

…
In all these drunken couplings, there may be some deplorable instances of forced and truly non-consensual sex. But most campus “rape” cases exist in the gray area of seeming cooperation and tacit consent, which is why they are almost never prosecuted criminally.

“Ninety-nine percent of all college rape cases would be thrown out of court in a twinkling,” observes University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Kors.

Many students hold on to the view that women usually have the power to determine whether a campus social event ends with intercourse. A female Rutgers student expressed a common sentiment in a university sexual-assault survey: “When we go out to parties and I see girls and the way they dress and the way they act … and just the way they are, under the influence and um, then they like accuse them of like, ‘Oh yeah, my boyfriend did this to me’ or whatever, I honestly always think it’s their fault.”