March 2011 – Feministe

from [redacted]
to [me]
date Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 4:53 PM
subject Heard on Medved. How many?

Greetings Ms. Filipovic,

I just heard you on the Michael Medved show. I ask, in all seriousness:

How many abortions have you committed; that is, how many times have you hired someone to kill the ultimate underdog, the most vulnerable person in the world, the defenseless infant growing in your womb?

Again, I ask in all seriousness, as I’m convinced that your radically disordered Weltanschauung is fundamentally related to your commissioning the slaughter of at least one of your pre-born children (along with your use of abortifacients like “the pill” etc.).

By the way, do me a favor. No matter how ridiculous, how absurd, how repulsive it seems to you at the moment, overcome any resistance and say this, right now, three times:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

You did it. Thank you. Now, please continue to say it three times after you wake up every morning and three times every night before you go to sleep. It’ll be hard at first, I know. No matter. Continue…. At some point, you may wish to read this great work by a great Saint:

http://https://www.tanbooks.com/index.php/page/shop:flypage/product_id/829

Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum,

Jackson K. Eskew, Esq.

“”It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”

-Mother Teresa

“A country that legalizes the murder of its own children is doomed.”

-Dietrich von Hildebrand

______________________________________________

from [redacted]
to [me]
date Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 5:00 PM
subject Corrections

Hello again, I need to correct two things from my first message I sent to you. Say this:

I forgot that last word.

And here’s the correct link:

https://www.tanbooks.com/index.php/page/shop:flypage/product_id/829

Cheers.

______________________________________________________

from [redacted]
to [me]
date Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 5:03 PM
subject Last correction!

NOW here’s the correct link:

http://www.tanbooks.com/index.php/page/shop:flypage/product_id/829

Sorry. This email program is really annoying.

Fat stigma goes international

Being concerned about public health is fine and good; it’s part of a government’s job. Promoting public health is also part of that job. What doesn’t promote public health? Stigmatizing fat people. And yet.

How much time do you need?

There’s a piece at Reuters called No votes for women in Saudi municipal elections:

Women in Saudi Arabia will not be allowed to vote in the long-delayed municipal elections to be held in September, the election commission said on Monday.

[…]

“There is nothing to stop the participation of the woman but this needs some preparations and we cannot make these preparations in all regions of the kingdom,” the commission said in a statement.

Voter registration opens on April 23 and the elections will be held on September 22, an official at the commission told Reuters.

There’s been an Internet campaign to get women the vote for months now. And I was reading this AP article from 2005:

Prince Mansour also could not say whether women would be allowed to take part in the next round of municipal elections in 2009, stressing that would be up to the committee planning those polls.

The electoral law has no provisions explicitly banning women, he said.

“It’s difficult, given the limited period of time we have, for ladies to participate in the elections,” the prince said at a news conference.

Well then.

There’s a lot more nuance to the whys and wherefores, obviously, so please click through to the articles.

There are no words, really.

Please note that this post makes reference to sexual violence.

Have you ever felt so disgusted you thought you were going to choke?

A group of 11 women from Guatemala have sued the Canadian company [HudBay] and its subsidiaries in an Ontario court. They are seeking $11 million in general damages and $44 million in punitive damages for the alleged gang rapes in 2007.

The suit alleges the women were attacked by security personnel from Compania Guatemalteca de Niquel, along with members of the police and military who were forcibly removing families from a community near a mine.

The Guatemalan subsidiary, CGN, and its corporate parents are accused of negligence in the supervision of the security personnel and in a request for the forced evictions of the Mayan community of Lote Ocho.

How unspeakably terrible.

That quote is from a CTV News article called HudBay defends against allegations in gang rape lawsuit. How curious that the headline centres the company; how curious that the CTV article I first saw, titled Women sue Canadian company for alleged gang rapes, is now down; how curious that it becomes not very much about these women or their communities at all.

Things to Read

An Open Letter to Good Morning America Concerning the Chris Brown Situation. Maybe the best thing you’ll read today. Key line: “But so here is why I am writing this letter to you, Good Morning America: WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM? Not only are you not pressing charges against Chris Brown, but now you are asking him to return to the show? What kind of pandering, pro-violence, egomania-enabling, fucked up world without consequences (for a chosen few) do you live in, you assholes?”

Sex and the long-term relationship: People who have been together for a long time don’t do it enough. And everyone (not just men, duh) wants to bone more, suggesting “it’s not just an issue of differing sex drives, but of other tasks and obligations competing for a couple’s time.”

A heartbreaking story from a man whose wife terminated her pregnancy, and the medical hoops they had to jump through.

The New York Times is now requiring digital subscriptions (you still get access to 20 free articles per month; beyond that, you pay, but clicking on a New York Times article that was linked through a blog or social media will still be free, even if you’ve exceeded your 20-article limit). People are mad. This is basically how I feel about it.

How to do drugs and not die. Uh, hmm.

Corporal punishment in schools is still allowed in 20 states(!). Although the issue does lend itself to hilariously-named organizations, such as People Opposed to Paddling Students (because yes, there are actually people who are for paddling students!).

Remember the 11-year-old girl who was raped by more than a dozen men in Texas, and whose style of dress and “mature” behavior were reported in a shockingly victim-blamey article in the Times? (Trigger warning). Yeah, turns out that she was being raped over a three-month period by numerous members of her community, and dozens of adults helped in the cover-up. Nineteen men are being charged. Community members saw the 11-year-old spending time with adult men, some of whom were convicted sex offenders and some of whom were convicted of an astonishingly wide variety of other charges (ranging from robbery to murder), and the conclusion was, “She’s a slut.” Let’s re-emphasize that: Adults across an entire community colluded in the repeated gang rape of a sixth-grader.

Why the Wal-Mart sex bias case is the most important one the Supreme Court will hear this year.

Doree Shafrir writes a touching piece about her dog, and it will make you cry.

Early puberty and environmental injustice: The biological impacts of environment change.

The New Old Boys Club

Hey, did you get the memo? All of the influential young pundits in Washington D.C. are young and male, and at not-quite-30 they’re already looking back on their younger days and opining on what’s changed and how far they’ve come. So that’s cool.

Ann Friedman has a great parody response, noting that lady-journos have been around all this time, without much recognition. Journalists of color have also been around for a while; they also aren’t getting cable news spots.

None of this is to take away from the hard work that writers like Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Brian Beutler, Dave Weigel, etc etc have put in. Those guys are all really smart; they’ve all hustled and put in all kinds of time and effort to get where they are. They are all immensely talented writers and thinkers.

But there are lots of women and non-white people who have put in time and effort too, and who have hustled just as hard. The focus, though, still remains on the “juicebox mafia” guys — they’re the ones being asked to be on TV; they’re the ones getting newspaper columns; they’re the ones getting New York Times articles written about them. Again, that isn’t to take away from the great work those dudes have done, but it is to say: Why isn’t there more room at the table for people who don’t look like those guys? Why are the only women mentioned in the article either (a) older “establishment journalism” women who are portrayed as nay-saying bitter bitches, or (b) fiancees of the men in the article? (Despite the fact that Annie Lowrey, who is engaged to Ezra Klein, is a successful journalist in her own right?).

Ann lists a lot of women (and not just white women!) who could have been covered just as easily: Annie Lowrey, a reporter for Slate; Suzy Khimm and Kate Sheppard, reporters for Mother Jones; Marin Cogan, a reporter for Politico; Phoebe Connelly, a freelance writer and former web editor for The American Prospect; Britt Peterson, an editor at Foreign Policy; Dayo Olopade, a writer for The Daily Beast, Kay Steiger and Shani Hilton, editors at Campus Progress; Kat Aaron, a reporter for the Investigative Reporting Workshop; Monica Potts, a blogger for The American Prospect; Amanda Terkel, a reporter for The Huffington Post; and Laura McGann and Sara Libby, editors for Politico. There are also men of color in DC who are doing fantastic work, like Adam Serwer and Jamelle Bouie at the American Prospect.

In other news, Bob Herbert has left the New York Times, and they’re looking for a replacement columnist. No offense, white dudes, but I hope the Times doesn’t pick one of you. I’d love to see Herbert’s spot filled with someone like Dahlia Lithwick or Ta-Nehisi Coates. Who else?

Where are you from? Part 5

Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

How do you relate to where you are now? Does it feel like home? Who lets it feel like home?

I have lived in this city all my life and it still feels transient. I’ve never quite understood the feeling and rhythm of this city, never known where and how to be and how I might fit in. There are places I’ve visited that feel vastly more like home. Maybe it’s that coldness with which Sydney is so often characterised, or maybe it’s finding that the Australian mainstream likes to alienate people like me, but I never have felt quite settled here. It’s kind of awful and fascinating that this place which has been my place of residence as long as I’ve been alive isn’t home. If not here, where? I might be “from” this city, but I’m not really “of” it. The belonging implied is as insubstantial as smoke.

Sometimes I think that it’s not so much that I have a different culture, but that the mainstream culture here is so actively hostile to other cultures. Supposedly, Australia is a multicultural society in which people of all backgrounds are accepted, but the trade-off is that we have to give up our cultures, our foreignness, ourselves. And we give it up not to be absorbed into a mix of cultures, but a specifically Anglo-Australian one such as is constructed as racially and ethnically neutral.

I’m still not sure what makes a hometown, or a place of belonging. Have you found that sense of home in where you grew up, and where you are? How is that influenced by whether you share a background with the people in those places or not, or how accepted you feel?

Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

It’s that time of the week once more. Post links to and short descriptions of posts you’ve written this week. Be specific; don’t just link to your whole blog.

Not quite sure how this HTML deal works? Just use this as an example: <a href=”http://BlogPostAddress.com”>BlogPostTitle</a>

Voter Intimidation

I had a rather unpleasant experience when I went to vote in my first state election.

As we know, I voted in my first federal election last year, and it was a wonderful experience. All the party volunteers out the front got along beautifully, and they were all excited about my first vote, no matter for whom I was planning to vote.

Well, not so this time. I live in a heavily Liberal area (the Liberal Party is actually Australia’s main conservative party) (just… go with it). The New South Wales Labor Party, who were in power up until the 26 March election, are so despised by the good people of NSW that their election campaigning had by the end degenerated to “we don’t know what the Liberals’ plans are, so don’t give them too much power”. Essentially, I’ve been living in Liberal central while the state’s been falling apart the last little while.

I was trotting along to my polling place with my mother, minding my own business and contemplating the gravity of what I was about to do, when we were hailed by a volunteer. Well, my mother was; I was ignored, because young people tend to become invisible when there’s a Responsible Older Adult in Charge present. She asked my mother which her electorate was, and then whipped out a shiny how-to-vote flyer. ‘You put a 1 next to [the Liberal candidate],’ she said.

‘If we want to vote Liberal,’ I put in, knowing that it’s against the rules for any polling place volunteer to tell you how to vote. Volunteers can quite honestly tell a voter ‘here’s what you do if you want to vote for the Liberals,’ just not ‘here’s how you vote’ without any specification as to party or whom they are representing. Now, that stirred the pot.

Month: March 2011

Abort This.

Remember that time I received multiple emails from someone telling me to quit killing dogs babies?