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Jill Stanek thinks punching women so they have black eyes is hilarious

LOL the GOP is punching people in the face. Hilarious.

That link goes to a cartoon of a man armed with a GOP-labeled boxing glove. He stands next to a woman with a black eye whose name tag says “Planned Parenthood,” and men with black eyes whose name tags read “Unions” and “NPR.” A man with a “Wall St.” name tag is smiling and unhurt. It’s a cartoon by a liberal commentator, who is illustrating the fact that the Republican party is attacking Planned Parenthood, unions and NPR in the name of budget cuts, while letting Wall Street off unscathed.

Stanek says, “Excepting the liberal bias in this first one, I like the Black-Eyed PP…”

Of course she does. This is the woman who feels sympathetic to a fictional serial killer because he’s “pro-life” (lolz), and says that The Godfather II is a pro-life movie because Michael Corleone hits his wife after she tells him she had an abortion — and “That spontaneous slap was the reaction of a real man who a woman had just told she aborted his baby.”

But sure, nothing about the anti-choice viewpoint is founded in hostility towards women. No undercurrent of misogyny at all. No desire to see women harmed.


48 thoughts on Jill Stanek thinks punching women so they have black eyes is hilarious

  1. She was amused by the fact that PP was drawn with a black eye, not that PP was represented by a woman.

    But sure, nothing about the anti-choice viewpoint is founded in hostility towards women. No undercurrent of misogyny at all. No desire to see women harmed.

    A cartoonist draws a cartoon in which PP, which is represented by a female character (Cecile Richards?), is drawn with a black eye. One pro-life blogger is amused by the image. How on earth does it follow from that that the “anti-choice viewpoint is founded in hostility towards women”?

    1. Oh and yes, she was amused by the fact that PP was drawn with a black eye, but PP was represented as a woman for a reason — it’s an organization that serves enormous numbers of women.

  2. I thought that PP’s character might have been Cecile Richards, although we really can’t tell thanks to the poor quality of the drawing.

    What I think is funny is how both sides of this issue constantly demonize each other, but never really interact, or engage in any sort of mutual discussion. I’m sure I could look through the Feministe archives, and find a completely one-sided presentation of the pro-choice position. And I’m willing to bet that I could read a pro-life blog, and find an equally one-sided presentation of the pro-life position.

    Muckrakers, that’s what you all are! Muckrakers, I say!

    1. What I think is funny is how both sides of this issue constantly demonize each other, but never really interact, or engage in any sort of mutual discussion. I’m sure I could look through the Feministe archives, and find a completely one-sided presentation of the pro-choice position. And I’m willing to bet that I could read a pro-life blog, and find an equally one-sided presentation of the pro-life position.

      No! On opinion blogs that don’t claim to be neutral reporters of news?! Imagine that.

      Bye bye, Boy Mulcaster, you have ravaged my last nerve.

  3. Yes…’cause blackeyes are totes hilarious.
    The Godfather is not pro-life, it is pro-patriarchy and sometimes… I do not see the difference.

  4. One side wants to actively dehumanize any human being capable of becoming pregnant. One side wants to form an underclass out of any person identifying as a woman by stripping us of our rights. One side doesn’t give a shit about anything other than the supposed ‘life’ of a zygote (and later, fetus), much less the welfare of people with, oh, I don’t know, actual lives.

    Anti-choicers are demonized? Most of them are pretty crappy people to begin with. Let’s see here… shameless liars who preach propaganda in the place of facts to anyone and everyone? Check. Funding aggressive public ‘awareness’ campaigns meant to shock and disgust people using photos of miscarriages and images from the Holocaust? Yes. Constant slut-shaming, verbally and physically harassing anyone who disagrees with them, being racist asses… yep. The list goes on and on.

    However, like you, I do agree that the whole abortion ‘debate’ is pretty one-sided, though: pro-choice or no choice. Don’t like abortion? Don’t get one. Criminalizing the procedure will not end abortion and save 7 bajillion precious white babies (and maybe some of those black babies, too, but considering they’re such an ‘endangered species’ and all, those lovely anti-choicers might not be able to save them in time!). Women will die in unsafe abortions. End of story.

  5. The Godfather movies don’t advocate patriarchy, they describe and portray it, particularly its twisted manifestation in 20th century Italian-American organized crime. Such clear-eyed portrayal can be more damning than some overt, hectoring “message”.

    Here’s another failing of political pressure groups: they think all art must be viewed as pieces of advocacy, rather than reflection and comment on events, or even as pure abstractions. When you always have an ax to grind, everything’s a sharpening stone. But many artists laugh at that.

  6. ITA with Shannon. The abuse of women is not a joke. It is not funny.

    Eneya, I don’t think there really is a difference between the two, and it scares me. The patriarchy hates women. I think it hates the women it cannot control the most.

    Sometimes I feel like the US is a runaway train…it’s zooming back to the 1950s and most of the time it feels inevitable and unstoppable. So I waffle between apathy and depression on this issue. My representatives don’t give a shit what their non-Republican constituents have to say, so my letters and calls have fallen on deaf ears. It’s just so disheartening.

  7. Seriously – anti-choice isn’t anti-woman? Really? This is so nonsensical. I’m with Shannon on this one – there isn’t any common ground on this issue.

  8. More seriously though, my uterus != common ground. Patriarchy, please stop trying to stand on it? Y’all’re gonna have to get your jackboots off of my bits before we can start agreeing on stuff…

  9. (Shannon @5, you’re too demanding! Can’t you see that one of PP’s eyes wasn’t punched? That’s a compromise! They’re trying to meet us halfway!)

  10. This. Exactly this.

    Bagelsan: (Shannon @5, you’re too demanding! Can’t you see that one of PP’s eyes wasn’t punched? That’s a compromise! They’re trying to meet us halfway!)  

  11. One-sided huh? That’s rather funny. Especially since Mulcaster decided to just gloss over the rest of the post as Jill pointed out, y’know the part where Stanek has a history of say talking about how violence against women who abort is A.OK and that ‘real men’ should apparently be encouraged to do it.

    I’m pretty sure it’s not demonizing when it’s right in front of your face. There’s not going to be much mutual discussion when people like that still think of women as merely human incubator servants who have no right to control their own bodies and should be ‘put in their place’ by ‘real men’ if they dare try to. ‘Pro-life’ never sounded more dishonest.

  12. The thing is, I am actually down with trying to find some common ground with people who are anti-abortion, even if I think that being anti-abortion is being anti-woman. For instance, I have (kindly! understandingly! sincerely!) suggested to many anti-choice people I know that if their top priority is fewer abortions, then we should work together to promote comprehensive sex education and expanding access to affordable contraception (things that organizations like, say, Planned Parenthood do). And make sure any woman who chooses to carry a pregnancy to term has health care and food and day care and other social services for her baby and herself.

    I am sure you will be shocked, shocked, to hear that so far not one of them has been interested in working together. Perhaps the problem is my one-sided presentation, in which I assume that women are valuable human beings!

  13. Oh darling troll of ours, you are a confused boy. You seem to be particularly confused about the meaning of the words “cooperate” and “discuss”. You see, I have in the past talked to pro-lifers, and their understanding of these words appears to be “you will agree with everything I say or else”. Which isn’t actually a discussion.

    Also, just in general, I’m not really up for discussing why I should hand control of my body over to a bunch of other people for my own good. Call me crazy, but that just doesn’t seem like a discussion that I would find useful or enlightening.

  14. Oh, while were’re on the subject on linguistic confusion – muckracker. That word does not mean what you think it means. If I were to say “I think the pro-life movement is wrong about everything”, that would not be me being a muckracker. If I were to write an article about how many people in the pro-life movement have actually had abortions/paid for or pressured their partners into having abortions, then that would be muckracking.

    (Which is an article I’d be happy to write if anyone wants to pay me to do so, by the way, since it would involve a lot of research, given how prone pro-lifers are to lying about this issue. Let’s start with GWB.)

  15. I will say that many men, even male allies, sometimes overlook imagery and language like this. That a woman could miss the point is even worse.

    Earlier today I had to explain to another man that it is completely invalidating and offensive to not allow a woman (or any woman) the ability to speak her mind in an argument, even if it grows heated. His inclination was to just tell the woman in question to be quiet and not talk, so to easily end the contentiousness. This was a demand, however, that he did not make upon the man who she was calling out for making sexist comments.

    It did not end well.

    Not the best course of action he could have taken, but it’s a testimony to Patriarchy’s influence just how utterly oblivious he was. I had to try to explain it to him as best I could, and I’m still not sure he got it.

  16. Boy Mulcaster :Please explain why I should waste valuable time and energy engaging with people who don’t believe I’m human.
    (This actually explains why I tend to avoid conversations with men. I have no guarantee they’ll treat me as a human- so why bother?)

  17. The comments at Jill Stanek’s pathetic excuse for a blog are terrifying. And since when did President Clinton supposedly rape someone? Are they really that crazy?

  18. ellid: The comments at Jill Stanek’s pathetic excuse for a blog are terrifying.And since when did President Clinton supposedly rape someone?Are they really that crazy?  

    Actually he did rape someone. Google tells me her name was Juanita Broaddrick. He also sexually assaulted Paula Jones.

  19. Please watch your language people. “Crazy” is ableist, and hides the fact that mental illness has no connection with ignorance and bigotry.

    Boy Mulcaster, you might find this post interesting.

  20. Juke: Please watch your language people. “Crazy” is ableist, and hides the fact that mental illness has no connection with ignorance and bigotry.Boy Mulcaster, you might find this post interesting.  

    “Crazy” is a blanket reference to irrational behavior which carries or deserves social stigma. For precisely this reason it is not used in serious discussions of mental illness.

    If you were objecting to the use of the term “schizophrenic” or “autistic” (autism isn’t precisely a “mental illness” but the grouping makes sense contextually) this would be a rational position. Saying we can’t use “crazy” is only marginally less *ahem* crazy than saying we can’t use “asshole” because it’s disrespectful to people who’ve died of rectal or anal cancer. It’s a deeply disturbing step towards reducing our adjectives to “good” and “ungood.”

    And this is coming from someone with multiple psychiatric diagnoses.

  21. And this is coming from someone with multiple psychiatric diagnoses. Azkyroth

    Azkyroth, be aware that there are other readers with psychiatric diagnoses who strongly disagree with you about the use of the word “crazy.”

  22. @Azkyroth: Actually I’d have to agree that Crazy is an ableist term myself. It’s the exact reason why using ‘insane’ to describe bigoted/ignorant people or violent murders is ableist. Your comparison of it with asshole does not really match up I think, especially since the social stigma that disabled and mentally ill people have to face compared to people with those forms of cancer cannot possibly be compared.

    I’m pretty sure there are other words to use that would describe it just as well. You don’t know until you try and all that. So not using that one wouldn’t really be that big of a deal would it?

  23. @ all – What is the proposed alternative to “crazy”? People keep insisting that there is one that’s obvious/useful, so what are they suggesting that it is? Irritional is an obvious one, but that’s linked to sexism too. Almost every word that implies the same thing is linked to sexism just because we live in a society that likes to imply that women are mentally unstable and unreliable. I’m not convinced that there is a word that implies the same concept that hasn’t historically been used in biased ways against women (and POC, and gay people).

    My preferred adjective is “batshit”, but a. the word “crazy” is sort of implied there anyway, and b. not everyone is going to be as comfortable with casual profanity as I am. And since apparently everyone has to state their stakeholder status in order to be allowed to participate in this discussion – I’m OCD, have suffered from clinical depression on and off all my life, and am formerly anorexic. And I don’t think “crazy” is ableist so much as just, as stated above, somewhat polluted by context (but so are most of the alternatives that I can think of).

  24. To be clear, as a neuro-atypical person myself, I’ve never really had a problem with the word “crazy,” however, I’m trying to respect that many people here do.

    To answer the question of what good alternatives there are, it depends on context, but “Are they really that crazy?” could be replaced with “Are they really that stupid?” It may lack the “bite” of “crazy”, but that’s not really an excuse, is it?

  25. But is stupid actually what’s being implied? It seems more like what people are aiming for is “disconnected from reality in an alarming or grimly amusing way” most of the time. Which is descriptive, but a bit long winded.

  26. …yes, but they are saying the people are stupid be using a term that compares them to people with mental illnesses, and reinforces the stigma thereof. Like, when people say something is “so gay,” they reinforce the stigma against gay people.

  27. The problem here is that there’s really no consensus about whether or not colloquial use of the term “crazy” is ableist, offensive, etc. There are a small number of people who think that it is, and a (larger as far as I can tell, but who knows?) number of people who feel that it isn’t (and both groups are composed of people to whom the term could be applied, clinically speaking). So I’m not sure why the assumption that group A’s wishes override group Bs wishes is a reasonable one. If there was a consensus it would be different, but there really isn’t.

    And no, I don’t think people are using “crazy” to mean “stupid” at all. People are mostly using “crazy” to mean unbalanced, or disconnected from reality, or irrational. So not at all the same thing as using “gay” to mean “uncool”. For example, people have recently been upset by other people calling Gaddafi “crazy”. Despite his showing quite clear signs of possible mental illness and a fairly strong (and increasing) disconnection from reality. Now, would “potentially suffers from Narcisstic Personality Disorder, and possibly some form of psychosis” be more precise? Sure, but it’s not at all the same thing as a kid calling a band/movie he doesn’t like “gay”.

  28. Nobody can convince me that denying the right to hoose what happens with your body and the options to control yourself isn’t anti-women.

    I mean… American welfare system already treats poor people like shit and everything is so fucking expensive and now this?

    If life is what is valued here, why these groups are not trying to help the kids who YOU KNOW… FUCKING EXIST??
    Because I am not buying that before a kid is born it could be treated as independent person. f can’t survive outside one’s body… then pay respect to the person in whose body it is.

    Because I really don’t like this idea – women are people as long it is not about babies, control over their bodies, choices, education and sexuality.
    What exactly do we have left with anyway?

    I know I digress but… I am truly scared but the things that happen in your country. Because if this happens in a place where feminists are so many… what will happen in other places and what will happen next?

  29. Azkyroth, be aware that there are other readers with psychiatric diagnoses who strongly disagree with you about the use of the word “crazy.”

    I strongly agree with Azkyroth. “Crazy” has multiple applications – both negative, positive, and fairly ambiguous. There’s a reason why, for example, one of the most famous cabarets in the world is le Crazy Horse – it has so much to do with gender, with views on sexuality, with behaviour, etc. I think that policing the word “crazy” and encouraging others not to use it in this manner is actually a disservice to the English language – and I’m a person who has repeatedly suffered from the “she’s crazy” stigma herself.

    Doesn’t mean that anyone has to use this word if they are uncomfortable or opposed to it, obviously. I understand that there are multiple viewpoints on this, and strive to respect them.

  30. @RD –

    Paula Jones was not assaulted. She was, at most, propositioned, turned down the proposition, and suffered no consequences to her professional life. FAIL.

    As for Juanita Broadrrick, didn’t she submit a sworn affidavit denying that she’d been raped? I also confess that I found the use of a World Net Daily article as a source for her Wikipedia entry disturbing, considering that WND is a notorious right wing smear site that has lied about every Democratic politician for years. NOT PROVEN.

  31. OT: I’m a bit nervous to make this point, because I dislike very strict language policing but….

    Different mental illnesses face different stigma, and I think it does the disability and mad pride movements disservice not to acknowledge that.

    When people make fun of “emos” for being crazy, they are using stereotypes of depressive and PTSD people – crying for no reason, cutting wrists, “just wanting attention,” etc.

    When people make fun of Gaddafi, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann to name a few that have been frequently been called “crazy” – they are using stereotypes of people with paranoid schizophrenia or (my own diagnostic) bipolar disorder. That is to say, delusions of grandeur, out-of-control impulses, loss of contact with reality, etc. Or adversely, they’re going with the “personality disorder” angle with diagnostics of psychopathy and all the prejudices that are associated with that.

    I’m not depressive, and used to make fun of emos (I’m a former goth) until someone pointed out I was being an ableist asshole.

    I’ve noticed online and IRL that people defending the use of the word “crazy” as applied to politicians are rarely schizophrenic or bipolar themselves, just as people defending the use of “crazy” concerning emos are rarely depressive or PTSD. I believe in mad pride and I believe that we crazy people derive strength from working with each other regardless of diagnostic, but I think we’re missing the point if we talk about language without realizing that we’re not all exactly in the same basket.

    (I’m not saying that people with say paranoid schizophrenia are “more oppressed” than depressed people btw – just that we are different and that the same word may not cut us all the same way.)

    On-topic: I used to go to a Catholic college and most of my friends identified as “pro-life” and sometimes went to rally, but when asked by me to clarify their position they would say something like “I believe women should be able to get abortions if they absolutely want to but I also believe that abortion is always wrong.” I (or another pro-choice friend) would then point out that they were, in that case, pro-choice. Most of my pro-life friends went “huh” and eventually stopped going to rallies. The ones that continued…had other issues that eventually lead to an end to our friendship.

    This goes to show how profoundly the pro-life movement has been allowed to manipulate the terms of the debate to get people who are anti-abortion but pro-choice to give them money and support. If you ask everyone on the street, whether or not they are well-informed politically, if they are “pro family values” most of them including myself would say “Of course,” but the term has been defined so far from common sense that we might unwittingly be giving support to anti-LGBT bigotry or domestic violence. I’m not sure at this point if we should just give that term up as lost, or campaign to redefine it.

  32. Yes, because it’s SO funny punishing women for being baby-aborting whores by destroying low-cost healthcare options. THAT’LL SHOW THEM.

    And wow, troll comment in one. What a prizewinning douchecanoe. I don’t want to discuss common ground when it’s being taken out of MY BODY. Yes, mine personally. I think that gives me a unique vantage point from which to say go fuck a pumpkin.

    re: Azkyroth and “crazy”

    I am bipolar, and use this word both to describe myself, and on my own journal and in comments to it to mean a variety of things, including “scary and wrong,” and “irrational.” That’s because my journal is my space, and I therefore administer it as I see fit. It’s a small space that serves a narrow group of people, almost all of whom I would assume are not ableist or they would not be reading me, because I am mentally ill and I talk about it kind of a lot.

    This is not my space, it’s a large public space that serves many people with a variety of needs, preferences, and identities. I don’t know everyone here, and they mostly don’t know me. I DO know there are people here who don’t want to have to deal with that word. I see their point, I respect those people even though I don’t know them well, and I respect this space and want it to feel safe so those people can use it. It costs me absolutely nothing to use a different word while I’m in their company.

  33. Thank you, Naamah.

    For everybody using crazy as a slur:
    I think there’s a big difference between using Crazy to describe yourself (if you so choose) and using crazy as a slur.

    If you mean ‘stupid’ or ‘confused’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘moody’ or ‘misrepresenting the facts’ or ‘irrational,’ then USE THOSE WORDS. They’re there for a reason. We have many words to choose from, many of which are much more specific.

    I just had to have a come-to-Jesus talk with a coworker who, when discussing another coworker’s recent irritability and general jackass behavior, said “It’s like he’s bipolar or something.” I said “No, it’s more like he’s being an asshole or something. Using ‘crazy’ as shorthand for ‘being a giant jerk’ is not okay.”

    I’m Crazy (Manic Depressive) and I strongly prefer that mental illness not be constantly conflated with “being a giant asshole.”

    A good rule of thumb is that if you’re using crazy to insult somebody or invalidate their argument, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.

    1. Ok folks, we’ve had the “is it ok to use crazy as a slur?” conversation approximately 565 times. You are welcome to your opinions on the matter, but since it’s a term that does harm to some of our readers when used in a particular way, we ask that it not be used in our comment section. So, please, quit the use of “crazy” and let’s move on.

  34. I will say that many men, even male allies, sometimes overlook imagery and language like this. That a woman could miss the point is even worse.

    Comrade Kevin: I know your heart is in the right place, so please don’t think I’m trying to harsh you.

    I was caught by your statement because I immediately disagreed. Are you familiar with the whole “it’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head” concept? I think this is a good example in that women are not required to police themselves in light of the social comments (say a cartoon) that reminds them of their second class status. I mean, it isn’t worse that a woman fails to see the underlying message. Maybe they’re so prevalent that she takes them for “normal”.

    Not sure if I’m making sense (and I don’t want to derail anymore). Just food for thought.

  35. What I think is funny is how both sides of this issue constantly demonize each other, but never really interact, or engage in any sort of mutual discussion.

    Oh, FFS. As one of those people who is directly and personally affected by forced-birthers attempts to infringe on my civil and human rights–both legislatively and through terrorism–I find this laughable. Let’s see how kindly you take it if/when people muse oh-so-rationally about ways they can curtail your civil and human rights, demonize you for having the gall to get pissed off about it, and then talk over you and ignore you to reach a “compromise” that means you give up and they aren’t affected.

    Until then, STFU.

  36. There are a lot of problems with using crazy as a slur. One of them is that its long been used as a slur against mad persons specifically because it invokes the image of the violent madman (crazy, one who is crazed, one who is prone to bouts of irrational violence) in order to oppress and silence people who do not conform to social norms and expectations. If you look at how “crazy” was being used here, we’re still using it that way.

    We use it as shorthand to silence someone, to verbally exclude them from the discourse. When we say someone is crazy in this context what we mean is that what they say or do is so unreasonable as to be unworthy of consideration because they are like mad persons. Not only is it offensive to those of us who have had to shoulder the weight of madness because of social stigma but its fucking lazy rhetoric that reeks of attempting to co-opt the language of oppression for our own uses.

    Still, I think the use of the word crazy is especially important in the context of what Feministe’s Jill is talking about. Jill Stanek isn’t crazy. She isn’t likely to be unpredictably violent. She’s a bad person who advocates the use violence and the threat of violence to enforce her worldview. By calling her crazy we’re not just using an old trope thats been used to malign mad persons since at least the enlightenment, we’re also suggesting that the violence people like Stanek employs is somehow unreasoned or irrational. It isn’t. Jill Stanek knows exactly what she’s doing, she is using violence in the way oppressors have always used violence. There is nothing unpredictable or irrational about it, there is no temporary craze from which she is likely to emerge, she’s fondling the same club that the powerful always use to beat the weak into submission. You might not like it, you might not agree with her, you might think her positions are deeply immoral (which itself would throw some rather unflattering light on your use of a word like crazy to describe her), but she is not operating from the position of error or ignorance that a word like crazy implies.

    The good news to me, though, is that all the little liberties which shock conventional morality are out of their box and the Staneks of the world aren’t able to beat them back into hiding. They’re getting older, they’ll die someday, and their constituency faces the same limitation. Hell, even the religion in which their oppressive ideas are rooted is in it’s death throws. Their extremism, though deeply troubling in the short term, is a sign of desperation.

  37. I agree with Gentleman Cambrioleur. If “crazy” is being used as a slur implying psychosis and/or disconnection from reality (as others have said, that’s inaccurate here but that’s a little beside the point), and dismissing someone based on that, it matters more how the term affects people with psychosis and/or disconnection from reality then people with a mental illness who don’t have that. So if you are depressed, have ptsd, anxiety, bipolar 2, etc. and it doesn’t bother you maybe its being used in a way that doesn’t actually really apply to you. And maybe if someone was being dismissed and called crazy for being a cutter, or mental/emotional “instability”, etc., then the slur might affect you more. Or, it might not, but it would affect many of your peers.

    Ellid – so he was just smeared? How about Assange, I suppose you think he was just smeared too?

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