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

Month: June 2011

Permanent Wave’s 4th SOUND WAVE: Benefit for SUPPORT NEW YORK

This Thursday is a great benefit for Support NY, an organization that provides support for sexual assault survivors. The details on Facebook:

MORENO and MATA are just two of the people who get away with rape every day in our country. we are furious with and disheartened by the omnipresence of rape and sexual assault in our culture and society and we will NOT shut up about it. come out and make some noise while benefiting SUPPORT NEW YORK, an organization dedicated to supporting victims when our justice system falls short.

Death by Audio
42 S. 2nd St. BROOKLYN
8PM
…all ages
$7

L to Bedford
-or-
JMZ to Marcy
-or-
G to Broadway

music!
::MINDTROLL – http://terribleinformation.org/MindTroll/
:::DELTA HOTEL – http://deltahotel.bandcamp.com/
::::CLINICAL TRIALS – http://www.clinicaltrialsmusic.com/
:::::CAVE CRICKET – http://www.vimeo.com/18861041

baked goods for sale! (write on the wall if you want to donate yours)

all proceeds from ticket sales benefit SUPPORT NEW YORK

“Support New York is a collective dedicated to healing the effects of sexual assault and abuse. Our aim is to meet the needs of the survivor, to hold accountable those who have perpetrated harm, and to maintain a larger dialogue within the community about consent, mutual aid, and our society’s narrow views of abuse.

We came together in order to create our own safe(r) space and provide support for people of all genders, races, ages and orientations, separate from the police and prison systems that perpetuate these abuses. We believe that experts are not always able to provide everything we need, and that all of us are capable of helping each other heal. This is an open call for anyone who needs support.”

www.supportny.org

Hope folks can make it!

The Pregnancy Cult

A lady’s story of utilizing the services a “pro-life” crisis pregnancy center to get free stuff, even though she had no plans to terminate her pregnancy. Bonus: Free stuff. Downside: Total assholes.

When I found this online, I decided to scam the pregnancy cult for all they were worth. I went in, faking that my pregnancy was accidental. I took a simple out-of-the-box pregnancy test and was immediately taken upstairs for an ultrasound. For the uninitiated – this is the part where they try to show you the baby’s eyes, toes, lungs, heart, etc in order to convince you to keep the baby. I, of course, had no plans to abort, especially as I was at 24 weeks. My ex-husband sat there with me, uncomfortably shifting in his seat as the Christian music blared in the background. That is when and where I found out I was having a boy.

After a suitable time of oo-ing and aw-ing over the ultrasound pictures, I had a “counseling session.” They gauged my belief in God, which was confusing to them to no end. Then, I was ask – do you feel safe in your home environment. I suddenly had that moment, where I knew this was my way out. I answered honestly – “No, it’s not safe. My husband is a fucking psychopath, and I need out.” This apparently was not the usual answer. I would love to tell you that the church group whisk me away to a safe place and got me and my unborn child away from that monster, but alas, no. I was given a lecture of wifely responsibilities and duties. I was told that I obviously was at fault for not letting him lead, and I was somehow aggressively subjugating his masculinity. I felt defeated, but this still seemed like a small escape to my otherwise closed-in and closely monitored existence.

I was given a schedule. I would come back every week for a three-hour session. I would watch videos on childbirth and pregnancy for an hour and a half, then I would be cornered in a small room with two lovely Christian ladies who would then tell me what a horrible person I was for being in such a marriage where I refused to accept my husband’s ruling with an iron fist. “Spare the rod and spoil the child is meant for the wife as well in some more difficult cases,” they said. I was routinely told that if I did not accept Jesus Christ as my savior I would go to hell no matter how I had lived my life or what good deeds I did. For each session, I would get points. The points led to baby items. I was determined to get a pram (a stroller that is more for infants and kind of old fashioned).

Good rules, pregnancy center. Make all the necessary baby stuff come with lectures about how women should suffer through abuse.

How do men have so much fun shopping for swimsuits?

Unfair. If only we could all be this upbeat about finding the perfect suit, trying on dozens of them and not feeling discouraged by our perceived imperfections. I’m imagining this article written by a 49-year-old woman, and it reads a little differently. But I do want to go on vacation with this guy:

I made a reservation on the jitney. Doubting that any changing room would be open by the time I reached the beach at 7 p.m., I wore the suit under my pants to make the trip out to Long Island; as I boarded the bus, I found myself smiling slightly, and thought, “I am wearing very exciting underpants!”

I have a weird thing for very exciting underpants (some women like shoes, some like bags, I like undergarments) and “I am wearing very exciting underpants!” is the best of all clothing-related feelings.

Shopping for bathing suits is one of the worst of all clothing-related feelings, though, at least for me (second up: shopping for shorts). Because, basically, this (via the Hairpin):

Hi everybody! How’s it going? If you’re a woman, I hope your answer is “I’m fucking starving!” Bikini season will be here before you can say “Jamochachino Surprise,” so you better be torturing yourself and focusing your meager intellect and out-of-control emotions on shedding those pounds, girlfriend! I saw an article in a magazine yesterday that highlighted “four problem areas” a woman can have. Are you shitting me? I’m assuming that article was written by a woman, because if you think you’ve only got four problem areas to worry about you’ve gone so deep into the “Red Tent” of feminine insanity you might never come back. I don’t have a dedicated bank of super-servers in rural Washington State to store a giga-list of everything that could be or probably is wrong with your body, so I’ll just name a few:

Saddle bags, upper-arm fat, cottage cheese thighs, midriff-bulge (aka F.U.P.A aka “gunt”), flat chest, asymmetrical breasts, butt-beard, bacne, pit-cheese, cankles, surprise tampon string cameos, eczema, ham spatula, ashy elbows, feet of any kind, hairy knuckles, beef knuckles, uncle’s knuckles, vaginal halitosis, bald spots, loaf latch, sideburns, flatbottom, creeping jimson weed, dowager’s hump, treasure trail, Pepperidge Farm, razor bumps, leakage, phantom dangle, and panty dandruff.

SO MANY PROBLEM AREAS! Definitely our fault for having bodies at all. Put down that sandwich.

links for 9-6-2011

In Canada,the Supreme Court ruled against the idea that an unconscious woman can give “advanced consent”. However, it was not a unanimous decision, as three of the judges thought this:

The three dissenting justices argued that it would further women’s right to autonomy to create a new doctrine of “advance consent,” so that unconscious women can have “sexual adventures.”

Thanks guys! Glad to know someone out there cares about my right to have “UNCONSCIOUS SEXUAL ADVENTURES”. BECAUSE I WOULD BE SO AWAKE AND COGNIZANT AND THEREFORE HAVE FULL CONSENSUAL PARTICIPATION IN AND ENJOYMENT OF SAID “ADVENTURES”. Who are these people and how do they become judges?

Three Food Not Bombs Activists were arrested in Orlando for feeding the homeless because…? Seriously, if you can tell me why this is should be an illegal activity, I’ll… probably call you a fascist.

TRIGGER WARNING for transphobia:

Andrej Pejic, androgynous Aussie model, makes FHM‘s 100 sexiest women list. FHM has since apologized. Pejic was also the subject of another incident of heteronormative panic when Barnes and Noble censored his Dossier cover under the assumption that it was obscene. (I’m using a male pronoun here because as far as I’ve seen in interviews Pejic identifies that way, but please let me know if I’m wrong). Pretty sure I’ve seen the same amount of skin on every shot of a woman’s body on Cosmo, Maxim and GQ, and no one’s censoring those.

Via Colorlines:

A new report has been released detailing the experiences of trans inmates. It’s pretty comprehensive and devastating.

Have y’all seen Rhianna’s new video? Personally, I love it, and think it’s a complicated, painful, nuanced and intense discourse on rape culture. Here are some great articles that say why better than I can.

For your dose of awesome today: This Australian senator calls out sexism like a total badass.

Florida: Targeting the poor, refusing to protect children

Two new laws on the books in Florida: One to require drug tests for welfare recipients, and one that makes it illegal for doctors to ask patients about their firearms. Interesting priorities.

Testing welfare recipients for drugs is a massive waste of taxpayer dollars, and a major privacy invasion. It’s been found unconstitutional in some circuits, since the 4th Amendment protects Americans against unreasonable searches. It’s a scary precedent to suggest that receiving public funds should leave you open to government invasion of your body. The argument in favor of drug testing seems to be, “Some people don’t deserve welfare.” Except, really, everyone deserves to eat and to have a roof over their heads — including drug users and addicts. If we want to help folks with addiction, the solution isn’t to make their lives harder and cut off their (already minimal) income source; it’s to fund social service programs for the poor, and make addiction treatment accessible and reasonable for low-income people. And as a practical point, if the goal is saving money, drug testing doesn’t do it — testing every welfare recipient is more expensive than maintaining aid without testing. But of course, this isn’t about saving money. It’s about targeting and punishing the poor.

Also on the Florida GOP target list? Children’s safety. Florida has passed a law preventing doctors from asking patients about their firearm ownership and use, which on its face sounds silly — why would your doctor ask you about your guns? — but is actually relatively important in pediatric care. As Dahlia Lithwick details:

The scuffle over “docs vs. Glocks” seems to have started when a pediatrician in Ocala asked the mother of a young child whether she kept guns in the home. She refused to answer because, as she put it, “whether I have a gun has nothing to do with the health of my child.” When the doctor told her to find another pediatrician, the women threatened to call a lawyer. Consider: According to a suit filed this week by the Brady Center, 65 children and teenagers are shot every day in America, and eight of them die; one-third of American homes with children under 18 have a firearms in them; and more than 40 percent of those households store their guns unlocked and a quarter of those homes store them loaded. What was it that mother said again? Oh, right, guns have nothing to do with the health of our children.
…
Pediatricians are trained—indeed, they are explicitly advised by the American Academy of Pediatrics—to inquire about the presence of open containers of bleach, swimming pools, balloons, and toilet locks in the homes of their patients. It’s part of their job to educate parents about potentially lethal dangers around the home. (Pediatricians have also been known to ask about menstruation, painful sex after childbirth, birth control, and the travails of potty training, all in the interest of patient well-being, by the way). So one might wonder why an inquiry about guns is the place to draw the line in the sand, the ultimate threat to personal privacy.

It’s not like pediatricians can take away your guns, but that’s what the NRA and the GOP seem to think — the NRA initially suggested that the punishment for violating the “no asking about guns” law should be prison time or a $5 million fine. Seems reasonable. I think we should institute the same punishment for wasting everyone’s time and money on stupid laws that actively harm the most vulnerable. The NRA alone could solve the U.S. debt crisis.

Weasel Attack

The local news is so great:

HOQUIAM, Wash. —

Police say a man was carrying a dead weasel when he burst into a Hoquiam apartment and assaulted a man.

The victim asked, “Why are you carrying a weasel?” Police said the attacker said, “It’s not a weasel, it’s a marten,” then punched him in the nose and fled.

The attacker was apparently looking for his girlfriend and had gone to her former boyfriend’s apartment Monday night where the victim was a guest.

KXRO reports he left carcass behind.

Police later found the suspect arguing with his girlfriend at another location and arrested the 33-year-old Hoquiam man after a fight.

He said he had found the marten dead near Hoquiam, but police don’t know why he carried it with him.

A marten is a member of the weasel family.

Just normal relationship stuff.

Catholic Pro-Life Warriors Still OK with Women and Girls Dying

How very pro-life of the Catholic Church:

Today marks the opening of a United Nations general assembly “high level meeting” on Aids in New York City that will evaluate the progress of that body’s response to the pandemic over the past five years and set the agenda for the next decade. Serra Sippel, president of the Centre for Health and Gender Equity (Change), declares that “this meeting is where we decide how serious we are about beating HIV, and how serious we are about women’s equality.” If so, the Holy See has left no doubt about their stance on either issue.

For months now, their all-male team has been trying to strip all references to sexual and reproductive health and rights from the meeting’s declaration; gutting all mentions of education and prevention other than marriage and fidelity; and insisting that “families” be replaced with “the family”, as though that monolith even exists or that it provides some kind of magic shield against HIV.

Either the Holy See does not understand, or does not care that their hardline stance is not actually “pro-life” in any sense. They ask that paragraph 60 of the declaration, which addresses research and development for treating and curing HIV, delete all mention of “female-controlled prevention methods”. This despite the fact that female condoms and the very promising looking microbicides now being developed have no relation to abortion and represent the single greatest potential life saver for women worldwide.

Ditto for paragraph 58, which makes the all-important and entirely sensible promise that the UN will “commit to ensuring that national responses to HIV and Aids meet the specific needs of women and girls”. The Holy See, allied with the African Group and Iran, asks for the deletion of the very sentence that spells out what that really means:

“… by ensuring that women and girls can exercise their right to have control over, and decide freely and responsibly on, matters related to their sexuality in order to increase their ability to protect themselves from HIV infection, including their sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence.”

Heaven forfend.

Control over women’s bodies > women’s actual lives.

You’re such a dog.

Via the Hairpin, this is the funnest game ever: Upload a picture of yourself, and the Doggelganger program will find a dog that looks like you and that is also in your area. Unfortunately the program thinks I am in New Zealand, so I can’t actually go and get my doggelganger Elliot. But look how cute he is! And we are definitely twins. Someone adopt him:

Jill and Elliott the Dog

Ok go play.