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

Spread the word to end the word

The casual use of the word “retarded” just sets my teeth on edge. I can’t tell you the number of self-described liberals/progressives I hear use it. I’ve actually thrown down with more than one friend – again, people who work in progressive nonprofits, in civil rights, in advocacy – over its use, and been told it’s not a big deal, it’s not an insult to people with disabilities, or I’m just being too sensitive.

So I’m more than happy to pass this along. Special Olympics has launched a campaign, “Spread the Word to End the Word,” to get people to think about how their language affects others. They offer a lot of ways to support the effort.

H/t Jen at Change.org. Note especially the tweetchat – if you’re interested, it starts in just a little while here.

Make a pledge on http://www.r-word.org/

Tweet about it: “I pledged to end the use of the r-word today – can you? http://www.r-word.org/ #rword.”

Donate your Facebook Status: “I pledge and support the elimination of the derogatory use of the r-word from everyday speech and promote the acceptance and inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities. http://www.r-word.org/ #rword”

Join the Tweetchat at 4 PM EST:

  • Allow Tweetchat to “authorize” your Twitter Account.
  • Enter #rword to enter the Tweetchat

Watch the videos.

Cop-killers, policing, crime and justice: Talking about Lovelle Mixon

Samhita caught some heat last week for writing about Lovelle Mixon, the Oakland man who murdered four police officers. Now she follows up with a post fleshing out her thoughts, and it’s well worth reading.

For a lot of us who are raised white and middle-class, police officers are protectors and sometimes heroes. They’re people we’re taught to trust — and often, though not always, we can trust them. We believe they help keep us safe. Sometimes they do keep us safe. And sometimes they don’t — just ask a rape survivor, or a woman seeking protection from a stalker or abuser. But the cultural narrative of the white middle-class is that the police are the good guys.

We also don’t interact with them very much.

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Rules of Engagement

Sometimes I think we should mandate comprehensive conflict resolution the same way we do sex education or driver’s education.

Because I’ve realized that I have rules within disgreements that, when broken, are dealbreakers, and I’m wondering if other people are this way too. Between my profession and the bazillion years of therapy in my past (I’ll admit it), I have pretty clear boundaries for what I will and won’t put up with in a disagreement, personally, professionally, or blogially.

For example, to me, name-calling in anger is a dealbreaker. I genuinely try not to do it because I bristle when people do it to me (and when I get there it’s a clear sign I need to disengage), but I’m finding when I talk to other people that this kind of thing is relatively normal, even in familial relationships between kids and parents, between partners, between siblings. But because this is such a dealbreaker to me, I find it a little appalling that something I consider so triggering and violent in intent is a norm.

So my question is really, I suppose, where to draw the line between what we call emotional abuse and what is relatively normal or forgivable within heated disputes? Do you have rules for interpersonal arguments? If so, are they spoken, negotiated rules?

Posted in Uncategorized

Lying: It’s the Pro-Life Way

Well this is special.

I work in a call center for prescription meds. A woman called thinking we were her health care, and she asked if abortions are covered.

I didn’t tell her we were not the right company, I just said, “I’ll take your baby.”

She said, “What?”

“I’ll take your baby and adopt it for my own, please don’t kill your daughter.”

She got mad and said,”Lady, I don’t need no preachin’. Just give me the information.”

So I said, “Well, you’ll have to call a different number,” and then I gave her the number of the local Care Net crisis pregnancy center.

I figure if Rahab was honored for lying to save the Israelite spies in Jericho, then I can take liberties with the truth to save a life, too.

I hope whoever the caller was contacts this person’s supervisor and gets her fired. If your job is to give people information about prescription meds, it’s totally outside of your job description to send them to a crisis pregnancy center under the guise of giving them information about their insurance company. It’s also pretty odd to think that giving someone a CPC phone number = saving a life.

Women’s Right to Vote, the Beginning of the End for America?

This is simply amazing. In a highly emotional and grammatically-challenged screed, the author argues that the lady-vote ruined America by turning us into a country of emotion-driven sissies. He writes:

The result of the 19th amendment has been the ascension to power by the same kind of Marxists Ronald Reagen defeated from the Soviet Union. The weapon of destruction was not a nuclear warhead though, it was an emotional outburst that melted the brains of logic.

Almost all important issues today come down to an argument between an emotional feeling and a logical thought. When you raise a child it is logical to slap their hands or spank their behind when they do bad things. It is the interference of emotional feelings that allows laws to be passed that condemn that kind of love as child abuse.

I think the fundamental problem is that we may be dealing with different defintions of “logic” and “emotion.” Getting mad about something and responding by hitting the person who caused your anger is not, according to my defintion of “logic,” a reason-driven response; instead, it seems to be anger-driven, and last I checked, anger is one of those emotion-type things. As far as I can tell, when the author says “logical” he actually means “Whatever I believe to be right.”

It wasn’t long before the politicians started passing laws that made the more emotional voter satisfied. Just a cursory look at many of the feel good laws that have been passed by the federal, state, and local governments since 1920 is enough evidence to make my point. Just in California alone, over 200 new laws get passed every year by politicians who think more with their hearts then with their brains.

Why else would California have a law on the books that requires all persons under 18 years of age to wear a helmet while operating a non motorized scooter or skateboard. Or while wearing in-line or roller skates, or while riding upon a non motorized scooter or skateboard as a passenger? Then there are the Federal laws that restrict the use of children under 18 from doing any of a number of non dangerous tasks for an employer. Laws which only limits the employers desire to even hire minors. These are just two examples of laws that only an overprotective mother would support.

I realize that these laws have been passed by mostly men, but the only reason these men got elected was because they played upon the fears of women and castrated men during the election campaign. A couple of years ago I read a story that said there is over 100,000 federal, state, and local laws on the books that regulate or restrict some sort of normal human behavior. If you read all these laws you would see one common denominator, emotion. These laws play to an emotional tugging of the heartstrings.

Right, like all those laws passed more than a century ago outlawing certain types of consensual sexual activity. Clearly those were all penned by women, or supported by female voters, right?

It is this very emotional kind of feelings that is getting Americans to go along with Global Warming? Think about it? Who isn’t moved by the picture of the cute little white furry polar bear who is stranded upon a floating ice berg? The fact that polar bears can swim and average of 100 miles without even tiring matters not a bit, because logic does not play a role in the dbate. These days, a politician cannot raise taxes to save the planet from the evil humans without using emotion.

Yes, because the global warming debate is really about how far polar bears can or cannot swim. Logic at its finest!

Read the whole thing — it’s hilarious. And of course the Freepers are on board, and in agreement. They take it a step further and suggest that only property owners should be allowed to vote.

Feministe’s Next Top Troll, March Madness Edition: The YOU WHORES JUST NEED A NICE GUY LIKE ME Bracket

It’s March Madness, Feministe-style: We’re doing a troll run-off to highlight some of our all-time favorite comments and pick the winner of Feministe’s Next Top Troll, Season 4. This is Bracket Seven, the YOU WHORES JUST NEED A NICE GUY LIKE ME Bracket.

Potentially triggering troll comments below the image. Vote for your favorite of the YOU WHORES JUST NEED A NICE GUY LIKE ME Bracket at the bottom.

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