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

Month: May 2012

When Feminists Face Abuse

“I want to make you happy”. That’s what he used to tell me sometimes after another rage fit of his. And for almost two years I believed that. I believed that even after he slapped me for the first time, taking a swing at my upper arm. I stopped believing it after the second slap, the one that landed on my back (luckily, not with full force).

Christian group invites Thai sex workers to come to Daddy

This is the story of a video by eleven young women from the U.S.–almost exclusively white–who went to Thailand to save the “bar girls” to Jesus. “We found that we were the perfect ones to fight for them,” say the title cards. “Because we used to be women in chains… Just like them.”

Chastened?

Here’s the tl;dr for this post: Dawn Eden made herself a nuisance to this blog and others about five or six years ago. Just Google her name along with that of pretty much any feminist blogger or blog and you’ll see what I mean. Now she’s reared her head again, mentioning me and this blog (and my reviews of her first book) in an interview about her new book. I don’t care all that much about what she said about me, personally, but the interview and book bring up a lot of issues that Dawn and I (as well as other feminist bloggers) have gone at each other over before and which I feel merit a response. Dawn has long been an engaging if fundamentally dishonest writer, particularly on the subject of feminism and women’s sexuality, and in the interview and her book, she accuses feminists of, essentially, causing child sexual abuse by supporting sexual freedom for adult women. In addition, there’s a good bit of inside-baseball stuff about the Catholic church and the clerical sex abuse scandal, and how Dawn addresses – or rather, fails to address – that scandal in the context of a book, written from a specifically Catholic perspective, about using Catholic writings and teaching as a means of healing from childhood sexual abuse.

Policing Native Identity

Apparently there’s been a big to-do over the fact that Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat vying for Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate seat, has Cherokee and Delaware Indian ancestry, and that ancestry was reflected in her listing as a minority law professor. People are mad! People are mad because Warren isn’t “really” Native American — she’s only 1/32, which is not enough Native American blood to count as “real,” I guess. Of course, as Sarah Burris points out, white-lady clubs like the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Colonial Dames of America don’t have percentage rules for their bloodlines — you’ve just gotta have one relative who fit the bill. And if being 1/32 Native American isn’t enough to make you “really” Native American, someone should probably tell the current chief of the Cherokee Tribe.