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Open Thread with Scratching Badgers

tigtog

Some wiggly badgers with a scratchy soundtrack feature for this week’s Open Thread. Please natter/chatter/vent/rant on anything* you like over this weekend and throughout the week.

So, what have you been up to? What would you rather be up to? What’s been awesome/awful?
Reading? Watching? Making? Meeting?
What has [insert awesome inspiration/fave fansquee/guilty pleasure/dastardly ne’er-do-well/threat to all civilised life on the planet du jour] been up to?

* Netiquette footnotes:
* There is no off-topic on the Weekly Open Thread, but consider whether your comment would be on-topic on any recent thread and thus better belongs there.
* If your comment touches on topics known to generally result in thread-jacking, you will be expected to take the discussion to #spillover instead of overshadowing the social/circuit-breaking aspects of this thread.

67 thoughts on Open Thread with Scratching Badgers

  1. It’s been a stressful and or weird week. I spent the day in emerg the other day, after a week of headaches, fever and general malaise where they made multiple attempts to give my fluids by IV, only to have them be completely unable to secure the IV. So I’m a lovely mess of bruises, and don’t really know what the problem is.. Possibly a sinus infection.

    (TW suicide)

    Then I found out today that a friend of mine from university that I lost touch with a few years back, killed himself by self-immolation. I was watching an outdoor assembly at my kids school when the helicopter to take him to the hospital in Toronto flew overhead. He died of his injuries last night.

    So it’s been weird, listening to people speculate on his mental state, or if drugs were involved etc. I just feel bad for him, but also angry on behalf of the people who witnessed it.

  2. TW: sexual assault, harassment

    I hate it when creepy dads (whether it’s mine or a stranger) see me as though I’m their “son”, talk to me non-stop while sitting an inch away from me shoulder-to-shoulder, and nearly grope me in front of my friends. And I hate how every time this shit happens I’m too afraid of upsetting those men and I feel guilty about hurting their feelings. I swear to god I’m more likely to emotionally process with men about how hurt they felt by my (benign) actions than actually try to walk away.

    All I can do is stay close to friends. This one dude I encountered yesterday was only able to get to me because I was sitting far away from my friends at the time. My friends suggested that I sit with them and then he left me alone. I can’t stop them from fucking with me but at least I can feel safer in numbers.

  4. Dear Feministe,

    I am a big advocate for the LGBT Community and I have composed two CD’s in their honor: “Men in Love…” and “Women in Love…”. I would love to send you these CD’s to have you review them in your blog. My goal is to raise money for the LGBT Community with them. Do you have an address where I can send them?
    Here is one of the songs that I put on youtube – titled: ‘Missing – The Day I Can Marry the One I Love’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dStxR0pbBs Also, my website: http://www.jmrproductions.com/ has the songs to the albums.

    Thanks so much.

    Karen Sokolof Javitch

  5. In the book Ender’s Game (spoiler alert) Petra Arkanian falls asleep during a battle. Can anyone tell me if she does this (or screws up otherwise) in the movie version? Thanks.

  6. There is something that has been bugging me and I need somebody to explain it to me like I’m five.

    What is the difference between rape fantasies and rape jokes? Why is one OK and the other not OK?

    1. [TW: rape fantasies, rape jokes, rape trivialisation]

      The main difference is that rape jokes tend to be jokes told by someone about somebody else getting raped, in front of audiences which statistically are likely to include rape victims who are likely to find an audience being encouraged to laugh about a traumatic experience such as they personally experienced to be alienating and potentially retraumatising.

      Rape fantasies, on the other hand, tend to be one person telling a sexual partner in an intimate situation that they are interested in role-playing being physically overwhelmed by that sexual partner as part of their foreplay. So they are talking about their own personal kink preferences rather than mocking somebody else’s sexual violation. There remains the possibility that a person with a rape fantasy kink might end up unknowingly retraumatising a sexual partner who had a history of sexual violation by asking them to roleplay as a violator, but at least there’s hardly likely to be an audience listening to and laughing at the whole interaction.

      1. What if a rape joke is being told between 2 people, alone where no one else can hear them (like their bedroom)?

        And if rape jokes can be seen as mocking somebody else’s sexual violation couldn’t rape fantasies be seen that way too?

        1. A joke is mockery, by definition, and most rape jokes make light of rape and/or mock people who have been raped.

          A sexual fantasy is not mockery by definition. I’m not sure how you get from “sexual fantasy” to “mockery.” Perhaps if you elucidate that, your confusion can be cleared up.

          Regardless, the difference between them is about harm. A private sexual fantasy harms nobody. A fantasy shared in a non-asshole way with a partner harms nobody. A sexual fantasy enacted between/among two or more consenting adults is harming nobody. Making light of rape and/or mocking people who have been raped in the context of a culture in which those people and their trauma are routinely devalued is indeed harming them.

        3. I don’t see how. By definition, a joke makes light of something. Making light of somebody’s pain in a context where that pain is already devalued is a lousy thing to do. Having a sexual fantasy…doesn’t do that. Because a sexual fantasy is not a joke. I honestly do not see that commonality that you’re claiming.

          As for the second question, I already said: it’s about harm. One encourages a culture in which people who are raped are the butt of a joke. The other…doesn’t.

  7. Back in Zurich and have been mainly attempting to de-stress before the beginning of term.

    I’ve been reading a lot of books in the last couple of days:

    Ian Bank’s The Quarry (good book, with a great narrator)
    Herman Koch’s The Dinner (Not sure if I liked it. An interesting critique of bourgeois parents, but I think I preferred Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin)
    Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Just beautiful; melancholy and sad but definitely would recommend.)
    Have now begun Love in the Time of Cholera, which I’ve been wanting to read for ages.

    Also finished Six Feet Under, and unsurprisingly teared up completely during the finale.

    And finally, have a collection that I edited heading to the printers next week, which I’m excited about, but also nervous.

  8. I didn’t want to post this on the self-promo thread, because it’s not even remotely related to anything about feminism, but this is one of the things I’ve been dealing with in the last few months – https://peggyluwho.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/expedia-sucks/

    And this week I’m just pretty meh.

    But I read a great book. “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr. Probably going to try to do a YouTube review of that sometime this week.

    Anybody want to be GoodReads buddies? https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/32957846-peggy

    2. OMG that sounds like a nightmare! I’ve never used Expedia before, but I will certainly not after hearing about your experiences.

      All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr looks great; will have to put it on my reading list.

    3. It seems that writing that blog, and posting it all over social media might have helped. American Airlines tweeted me back and asked for my ticket # to see if they could help. Not sure what they’ll be willing or able to do, but it’s nice to get a response from someone.

      2. That’s fantastic news! Although I did have to look up the urban dictionary for ‘DM’d’. I feel so old now… 😉

    4. This may have been resolved by me complaining on Twitter. I got an email from Expedia saying that they are refunding the money. I’ll believe it when it shows up on the credit card’s website.

      1. I’ve found Twitter can be very useful for resolving tech support issues, at least with some companies. Submitting a tech support ticket can take hours/days to get a response, submitting a ticket on their system then tweeting that help-ticket number to the company twitter account can lead to a much faster action.

  9. TW: racism

    I miss my culture so much. I wish I could wear kurtas, saris, and shalwar kameez – beautiful clothes that so many other Pakistani women wear. I wish I knew how to cook my favorite Pakistani dishes. I wish I could speak my own language without being reminded of abusive family members who speak the same language.

    And most of all, I wish I could break away from the internalized racism that my father contributed to, by reinforcing the idea that I’m worthless, unclean, corrupt, and terrorist for being Pakistani on the one hand – and on the other hand, the idea that I shouldn’t be called Desi because I have “beautiful fair skin” that automatically makes me white. (Thereby erasing all of the violence that white male abusers have done to me.) Abusers robbed me of my ethnic and racial pride.

  10. I imagine everyone here already knows, but in case it slipped through the cracks – Yes Means Yes has been passed in California.

    Gov. Jerry Brown announced Sunday that he has signed a bill that makes California the first in the nation to define when “yes means yes” and adopt requirements for colleges to follow when investigating sexual assault reports.

    State lawmakers last month approved Senate Bill 967 by Sen. Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, as states and universities across the U.S. are under pressure to change how they handle rape allegations. Campus sexual assault victims and women’s advocacy groups delivered petitions to Brown’s office on Sept. 16 urging him to sign the bill.

    De Leon has said the legislation will begin a paradigm shift in how college campuses in California prevent and investigate sexual assaults. Rather than using the refrain “no means no,” the definition of consent under the bill requires “an affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.”

    College is a distant memory for me these days, so I can’t really comment directly, but I am all too aware of how shamefully many colleges have handled sexual assault issues in the past. Maybe this law can be a step forward in handling them in the future.

  11. (TW for Racism)

    I was sat in the tram today and saw an ad with the tag/expression ‘Ein Indianer kennt keinen Schmerz’… – I haven’t linked it but the company is ‘Kytta-Salbe’ . First of all I just couldn’t fathom why anyone thought it was acceptable to have this as an ad. Am I missing something? The expression is a German one, but even the online dictionary states it is offensive (if you were to miss out on that)… Where I live in Switzerland there seems to be a fashion for cultural appropriation in this respect – they often have ‘native styles’ clothing ranges. Anyway, I was fuming all the way into work and needed to share.

    1. I’d never heard or read the expression before (but I’ve never read any Karl May, either), but it got my hackles up right away. I’m still trying to put my finger on exactly what I found so awful about it. My first candidates:

      * It lumps all “indians” together into one stereotype and others them.

      * It excuses mistreating “indians” because they “don’t feel any pain, anyway.” (Reminds me of how, during the Vietnam War, people would say that torturing and massacring Vietnamese wasn’t so bad because “people in that part of the world don’t place the same value on life that we do.”)

      I then googled it, and while I didn’t get an explanation of why it was offensive, I did learn (a) it probably comes from Karl May’s stories about American Indians (who he calls “Rotindianer”) and (b) boys get told that when they cry or complain about being mistreated. So I can add:

      * It’s propaganda for the idea that manhood requires never showing any sort of weakness or softness.

      Anything else for the list?

      1. Thanks for articulating this so much better than I did! And for the explanation regards Karl May.

        I have to admit I think I was wrong about it being considered offensive (as in on online dictionaries); I think I got confused about the classification. A German friend said it wasn’t considered ‘PC’, but that it is still used often as an expression.

        I agree with your points, and also thought the whole thing about it being a ‘natural’ or ‘herbal product – and thus we have to advertise it with an indigenous person – also creeped me out.

        I’m sure there is more too!

      2. It’s part of a super weird thing that Germany has going for (their mental image of) First Nations. Prepare to vomit: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/02/24/star-trek-convention-native-enthusiasts-inside-german-pow-wow-153712

        I’ve heard from a couple of my Native professors (back in the day) that they were contacted by German “enthusiasts” only to be berated for being insufficiently “authentic,” i.e., for the audacity of having a dynamic and responsive culture and religion.

        It’s just SO bad.

        1. Rather than saying “Germany” has a thing, as if the country is in some sense a being, I should have said that this phenomenon occurs in Germany, as indeed elsewhere with perhaps less energy/popularity.

        2. As someone who lived in Germany for a number of years, I think there are a couple of things going on here:

          1. Karl May’s stories about American Indians are very popular in Germany and for most people their only source of “information” about them. There are (virtually?) no American Indians there, so there’s nothing to counteract those stereotypes and essentially nobody to complain about them.

          2. One part of German culture is that there is one right answer to any question, and if you know it, it’s your obligation to correct people who are Wrong. It’s sort of like Mansplaining. I was on the receiving end of it about USAan culture, the English language, and I don’t know what all.

          It’s not just non-Germans they do it to, either. Look up the word “Besserwessi”

          (Disclaimer: #NotAllGermans…)

  12. TW: transmisogyny, dysphoria

    I love how even remembering a few scenes from Rocky Horror Picture Show is enough to severely trigger my dysphoria. I can’t stop thinking about the transmisogynistic tropes in that movie. What a deeply disturbing, disgusting, horrifying film. I wish I could just erase it from film history somehow.

    1. There are definitely a bunch of really problematic tropes in Rocky Horror (trans person as sexual predator/killer, film ending with death of trans person, name joke about genitals etc), so I can see why you’d have a really negative reaction and it super sucks that it triggers dysphoria for you.

      I first watched Rocky Horror as part of high school English work on Frankenstein, which set up a fairly specific context which still colours how I experience the film, which is that I tend to see the problematic tropes as referential, which ameliorates them somewhat for me, and I tended to identify with Frank over the other characters, even before I found out Richard O’brien, the writer, was himself non-binary trans. It was kind of one of those set of texts that was important to me as a queer teen even though the queer villain tropes in it were really obvious. But then, I’ve also kind of always identified more with villainous/monstrous characters.

    2. What can I say: when I first saw it at a midnight showing in the mid 1970’s, not long after it first came out in 1975 — it didn’t take long at all for it to go that route — I loved it, and loved Tim Curry. Why? Problematic tropes aside (and I think I was at least semi-aware of them even then — it not only had a trans character, but presented transsexuality as something magnetic and glamorous. Where else in the world was I going to see something like that back then? Not watching Jan Morris on a talk show, I can assure you!

      Of course, I was careful not to let any of the friends I saw it with know why I found it all so fascinating.

      So, I would be very sad if it were erased from film history.

      1. Of course, I was careful not to let any of the friends I saw it with know why I found it all so fascinating.

        I wondered if I found it fascinating for that reason as a teenager, alongside my interest in The New York Dolls, Bowie, Wayne County, Warhol’s Factory Girls etc. However, the evidence of the last 25 years would imply that my obsession was different than yours. I can’t explain it any more than you.

        1. Obsession might be the wrong word to describe why I found the movie fascinating. Plus, I thought I did explain?

          As for why you found that kind of thing fascinating, there are certainly all sorts of possible reasons for being drawn to expressions of gender variance that have nothing to do with being trans.

        3. Ah, OK, I see what you meant. I didn’t have to explain it to them, because it wasn’t only that I didn’t explain why I was fascinated — I didn’t disclose that I was fascinated in the first place.

      2. Dr Frank N Furter IS magnetic, isn’t he? Completely in control of his own domain (or so it seems), and what is 90 billion times rarer in media today, *happy.* He is completely happy with himself.

        Something to mitigate his death: his crime is not breaking gender barriers, but being a homicidal maniac, and I think this is shown by the fact that he is killed during an attempted arrest by fellow citizens of Transylvania, whereas the FBI (or whatever they were… that professor guy, the forces of straight society) were helpless against him, indeed, somewhat converted by him. Not that this helps 100% in a vast wash of depictions of dead queer people, and certainly it does not help with the “killer queer” trope, but perhaps worth taking into account.

        I saw this movie when I was a kid at a summer drama camp, and was the first depiction of sexuality I saw presented in fiction. I came away with the impression that queerness is a position of tremendous strength and grace. I have no doubts that others could have gathered worse impressions, but that was my experience, for what it is worth.

    3. I understand that it is not up to todays standards in terms of respect for trans women, but I used to go every saturday night I was in 8th grade(198-81,0 and not just because 13 year olds could smoke weed at the 8th st theater or that we could buy booze from any littler liquor store.

      Ally, I totally understand why you don’t watch it, but it does sadden me that you can’t get the pure enjoyment I get from listening to Richard O’brien’s unabashed masterpiece ‘Science Fiction Double Feature,’ a piece of genius among a song list that is unparalleled.

      1. I mean, I certainly can see how others night like the movie, and I’m not going to judge them for their taste so long as they acknowledge its bigoted aspects. Kind of like how I’m sure there are good movies out there that have rape scenes, but I refuse to even watch a few scenes of those films simply because I’m severely triggered by graphic depictions of rape. Which isn’t to say that I’m comparing RHPS to any movies in particular. Sorry if I sounded judgmental.

    4. P.S. It’s nice to see you’ve gone back to posting as ‘Aaliyah,’ as it was cool that you we’re taking a positive aspect of your culture in the face of al the negativity heaped upon you by certain members of your culture. Plus it’s far less ambiguous that Ally (unless that’s what you’re going for.) There are two guys named Ally at the place I work for in London, and the manager of Rangers is called Ally McCoist, yet I’ve never met a dude called Aaliyah.

  14. If anybody ever needs an example of white privilege, just point to this case.

    The clinic already gave them a refund for the service they provided. What she’s suing for is having to deal with racism for the first time in her life. She’s suing for moving expenses to a more “diverse” community where she won’t have to drive all the way to a Black community for her child’s haircare products.

    She and her partner would’ve been perfectly fine raising their white child in a predominately-white neighborhood among over racists. But now that she actually has to deal with the racism, she’s suing for the inconvenience.

    smh…

    1. She’s suing the sperm bank because her town and family are a bunch of racists? Fuck that noise.

      To say nothing of what that’s going to do to the kid–it’s one thing to say “You don’t look like Mama because the man who donated sperm was black” and another to tack on “and that was so unacceptable to us that we sued.”

      If your goddamn family is so racist that you have to move away, sue them.

      “I don’t want her to ever feel like she’s an outcast,” Cramblett told NBC News.

      Well, then I guess the best way to proceed is to file a lawsuit that makes it clear you didn’t want her or anybody like her for a child.

      ” In an instant, Jennifer’s excitement and anticipation of her pregnancy was replaced with anger, disappointment and fear,” the court papers say.

      Really? All of it? I can see being anxious about what would happen with an unknown donor whom I hadn’t been able to screen for conditions that run in my family, or whatever, but all of a sudden, no more excitement about having a baby, because you learn that baby’s going to be black? That is some racist bullshit right there.

      Cramblett said she wants to move somewhere with more cultural diversity and good schools.

      Because…otherwise she would’ve been fine with whiteness and crappy schools?

      1. The astounding racism of the mom aside (I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I were that kid and then had to read about this later), I do kind of think the mom has a right to sue the sperm bank. If race weren’t the issue, I’d have a problem with medically getting basted with something that I haven’t cleared.

        I wish it weren’t couched in her obvious racial issues, but there’s a lot of “malpractice-ish” sentiment for me.

        2. Both you and EG have touched on something I hadn’t even thought of before: not being able to screen for any medical issues of the unwanted donor.

          That, to me, is actually a very serious issue that I haven’t seen raised anywhere – not even by the mother.

        3. Yeah, that is a thing that if she were talking about, I’d have a lot more sympathy for. Depression runs hard in my family, both sides, multiple generations, and I would really like to give any kid I have a fighting chance to avoid it, so if I were choosing a donor, I’d look extra hard at that.

          But you know…she’s not saying that. It’s all, my kid is black, look how hard that is making life, when racism in Uniontown, OH is not the sperm bank’s fault, and this kind of fuck-up would have been no less a fuck-up if the family lived in NYC or wherever.

          And honestly, the fact that she’s willing to put all this on record, on the internet, with photographs and names, where her kid and her kid’s friends can easily find it in a few years and learn that her mother sued because she hadn’t wanted a kid like her (and there’s no way the kid isn’t going to think it’s All About Her, because kids think that), makes me think that she isn’t prioritizing the kid’s emotional well-being.

          Sue the sperm bank for screwing up–“this was the luckiest mistake in the world, because otherwise we wouldn’t have had our wonderful daughter, but it did mean that we weren’t able to screen for any illnesses in the family, blah blah blah.” But…”I live in a racist place and my friends are racist”? Yeah, no shit. That’s not the sperm-bank’s doing.

        4. I think someone should be appointed to sue the sperm bank on the child’s behalf for the future damages to her from being born without her consent into a racist white family, as a result of the sperm bank’s mistake.

    2. Can I also just say…the prime example of inconvenience she can come up with is having to drive to another community where she is not “overtly” welcome to get the kid a haircut?

      That’s…a sad story, sister. Who could have anticipated that having a child might involve some mild inconvenience and discomfort?

    3. Whilst I am completely disgusted by this woman’s attitude, putting the race issue aside, it is a pretty shitty thing to get the wrong sperm. If she hadn’t have brought race in to it, I would support her lawsuit,

  15. So after being rushed out the door so my landlord could get the house painted ( we paid all of September and were out by the 23rd) meeting all the damn painters ( who she found on Craigslist and one showed up drunk) selling her left over crap for her and arranging for a cleaning lady to come, I have been yelled at, hung up on then unfriended on Facebook by her. Why? Because the painter trashed the house. There’s a fine layer of paint on all the floors and counters. The tile in the bathroom has paint on it. There’s plaster in the toilet. It’s bad. Really bad. And my cleaning lady asked ( rightfully) for more money to clean. So I sent her home because 1) I can’t afford it 2) it’s going to take a professional with chemicals to remove paint from the laminate floor and the tile and 3) it’s not my obligation to pay for cleaning up the mess left by the painter. My crime evidently was sending the cleaning lady home instead of having her clean the oven and fridge. For that she pitched a fit and defriended me. I don’t even have the ability to properly convey my anger at this.

    1. You know what? Much as I don’t think you should have had to take the fall-out, that fuck-up couldn’t have happened to a nicer person (meaning your friend had it coming, given how she’s treated you, and you’ve gone above and beyond).

      These past few months have given you a run of shit luck, pheeno. I hope October is a turning point.

  16. Hello Feministers, I had a sleep in after a week of medical adventures, so I forgot to put up a new Open Thread at the usual time. I’ll schedule it to go up early tomorrow morning NYC time.

      1. I’m doing a fair bit better, thanks. The pinched nerve has resolved, although I’m still noticing that feeling you get when you know a injured area is not yet fully healed (and I’ve got old joint problems there, so it will never be completely healed, just ideally only a minor discomfort).

        I’ve still got this rotten respiratory infection, although it’s mainly phlegmy congestion and a sore throat rather than anything more severe. Still tedious in the extreme. Just started a new course of antibiotics, so fingers crossed that it might finally clear up shortly.

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