If I were building a mandatory reading list for all men, this'd be on it.

‎"A man sexually desiring a woman often has overtones of threat in our culture. From street harassment to horror films to PUAs, women learn that someone desiring you doesn't mean they're going to be nice to you."

This is one of the things that is hardest to explain to guys who get pissed that not every comment they make about a woman's appearance is met with the gratitude they feel they deserve for it. What a lot of guys fail to understand is that a lot of dangerous (not just unpleasant, but actually dangerous) interactions for women start out with a man letting her know that he's attracted to her.

It sucks for guys, I'm sure, to have to fight past that kind of apprehension, but a woman can either err on the side of excessive caution and maybe hurt a man's feelings or frustrate him, or she can err on the side of excessive trust and not just get hurt... but get blamed by it for the very same people who would have told her another day not to assume all men are dangerous.

And yes, I have had to explain this to men before. They were not pleasant conversations. If the problem with a guy's perspective is that he doesn't care what it's like to not be a guy, it's hard to get him to think about... what it's like to not be a guy.

Ended up posting this someplace today.

This is my obligatory reminder to the internet that I am an angry feminist madwoman who believes that the person who has the final legitimate say on whether a pregnancy continues is the person who is pregnant.

Why people need to stop telling me that life begins at conception because that's when babby gets soul.

Being pro-life is a position I understand completely. It's a personal choice for many women that they would never get an abortion and can't understand how anybody else could. These women should not ever be forced to get abortions, which is why pro-choicers (and I think that doing a lot of activism for Planned Parenthood, I can speak with some authority on what pro-choicers tend to argue for) disapprove of compulsory sterilization and compulsory abortion. A woman whose personal convictions are strongly against abortion should never be forced to get one, because that is what informed consent is all about. That is what bodily autonomy is all about.

When it verges over into anti-choice territory, though, things start getting dodgy. When we start arguing that a pregnant woman is not morally mature enough to be trusted with the decision of whether to stay pregnant? Dodgy.

Furthermore, as far as the whole "life begins at conception" thing, that's not a scientific or medically-founded point. How do I know this?

Obstetricians define a pregnancy as starting at implantation (which is the point when the zygote sticks to the inside wall of the uterus). They do this because this is the point at which the woman's body acknowledges that it is pregnant and that it needs to start adjusting.

This isn't a political stance on their part so that they can help Planned Parenthood get women their whore pills. This is a medical judgement based on when a woman's body begins to behave "pregnant." The pregnancy doesn't start at fertilization, because in many cases the zygote will fail to implant and the woman won't even know that the egg she's flushing with this period was fertilized. Spiritual life as you define it begins at fertilization, but the pregnancy doesn't start until implantation.

I suspect that the medical argument isn't your primary point, though, so I'll address the theological angle.

I am always sort of puzzled by the whole allegedly-Biblical view that life begins at conception. I've been giving it some thought based on what I remember from the Bible study I did in college and looked some stuff up and wanted to bring what I pulled together.

RE: Life beginning at conception. Yes, I realize that it is Catholic dogma that this is the case. The Catholic Church also only admitted about forty years ago that the Earth revolves around the sun. Are we really going to use them as a science authority? I mean, I guess you can. I won't be. But this isn't even a scriptural or Biblically-founded point they are making. That stuff is NOT in the Bible.

So what's actually in the Bible? When does a human acquire a soul? Well, let's ask when Adam was alive. When God breathed life into him.

Genesis 2:7 “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

This is why, for a very long time historically, a woman's fetus was not considered an autonomous human being until it took its first breath. It's only when science gave us a view into what actually happens in the uterus that Christian churches had to start figuring out when this thing became a human with a soul.

At no point does any secular governing body have any call making law based on who has a soul and who doesn't. I certainly hope that in this thread we can agree on that much. However, for those Biblical literalists who care more about getting on Santa's Nice List than they do about what godless obstetricians say, I refer you back to Genesis. A fetus is a baby when it takes its first breath. Even Adam wasn't human before that.

Surprise surprise, Bible-thumping anti-choicers need to lern2Bible before pulling out their half-understood regurgitated dogma. Unless you're a Roman Catholic, your own Iron Age obstetrics manual (harr harr) points out that breath is life. Even the word "spirit" in Hebrew means "breath."

“There is a spirit [Hebrew, ruach, breath] in man: and the inspiration [breathing in] of the Almighty gives them understanding. ... The spirit [Hebrew, ruach, breath] of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty has given me life.” -Job 32:8 and 33:4.

So seriously, to the "life at conception cuz YHWH said so" regurgitating fundies: go get some formal Bible education and then come back and tell me what it says.

It's probably obvious that the Biblical view doesn't actually hold any water with me. I prefer to use obstetrics texts that were written after the advent of modern medicine. However, I know there are a lot of people who do care about what the Bible says about what we are, who we are, and how we should live. I also know that many such people haven't had opportunity to actually sit down and do formal study of this book that rules their lives, and have to simply believe what church authorities and their parents tell them is true.

So yeah. If you want to decide how to live based on what the Bible says, I'm gonna think you're a little nuts, but at least find out what's in the book before you start making decisions and constricting the decisions of others and make sure that it's really telling you what you've been TOLD it tells you.

Heinous victim-blaming, slut-shaming crap.

Someone on my FB page asked for my thoughts on this article, in which the reprehensible "No means yes, yes means anal" rape apologism at Yale is blamed on the sexual license argued for by feminists. Yes, that's right. It's all the uppity bitches' fault.

A group of mostly female students is suing Yale University for allowing a “sexually hostile environment” to exist on campus.

The women, of course, have a point. After all, when frat boys are allowed to parade around the old campus chanting “No Means Yes,” or to hold up signs that read “We Love Yale Sluts,” I guess you could say that’s a sexually hostile environment.

But may I ask a question? What did you expect?

The rage, it knows no bounds.

I think this man is an asshole who is bitter on behalf of all jilted men that women are fighting for the right to fuck, but not with him. I mean, look at this.

The disgusting, intimidating behavior at Yale -- and on many college campuses -- is a classic example of the post-modern impasse. For nearly 50 years, academia, the feminist movement, and post-modern society have embraced sexual freedom as the ultimate good.

And the feminists led the way. They wanted to control their bodies; to be free from any consequences of sexual license.

He completely misses the point that women want to control their bodies, even though it's right there in his own description of their goals. The goal of feminism was never that women's bodies ought to be treated like public property; that is in fact the PRECISE WORLDVIEW that feminism is still fighting.

This asshole seems to think it's perfectly natural and inevitable that uppity women who have the nerve to do what they like with their sexuality should be treated like disposable whores, there for the taking by any man.

As far as I can tell, Colson literally CANNOT envision a world in which female sexuality is not controlled by somebody other than the woman herself. He presents an utterly insane and backward choice for women--either you let Jesus own your sexuality, or it will lay there unclaimed and men will just rape you all the time because you don't belong to anybody.

"Does the Christian view of sex promote intimidation, harassment, and brutish behavior like we’re seeing at Yale, or does it promote moral and ethical virtue?"

By treating female sexuality as something which must always be in the possession and under the control of a man, it certainly does promote intimidation, harassment, and brutish behavior. By treating this as the natural outgrowth of women thinking they can just walk around like they're human beings with a right to do things other than powerspawn babies for their husband and Jesus, he reinforces the slut-shaming and depersonalization of women who fuck that is the very basis of the rape culture we live in.

This man is an asshole. He is an asshole, he is an asshole, he is an asshole, and if you want the most obvious indication that he is an asshole, he is blaming feminism for the culture of degradation and rape on college campuses INSTEAD OF BLAMING THE RAPISTS. Why? Well, because boys will be boys, and it's always the woman's fault if she gets raped. She had to have done something to ask for it, right? Like demand the right to vote, to have or deny sex, to hold a job, to decide not to have children. The natural outgrowth of the fight for women to have these things is not RAPE. That is the natural outgrowth of SOMEONE BEING A RAPIST.

Sucker Punch

Okay, so Sucker Punch.

Yeah, I liked it. There are a couple of reviews linked here which are super spoilery, so they're mainly for people who have already seen it. These are not what you want to read if you're trying to figure out whether you're going to like it. Go find a review that's written for that.

The short, spoiler-friendly version is this:

I am not the final voice on all things feminist. I am not a major authority on women's empowerment (at least, not any more than any other woman), and I am not anybody's fun police. That said? I am probably the loudest, least compromising, angriest ballbusting feminist that most of my friends know, and I am this way because that is a correct thing to be. I've been accused of being oversensitive and humorless and mean, simply for paying attention to what a particular song, movie, book, or television show is saying about me and mine.

At this point I generally trust myself to notice if there's some fucked up woman-hating bullshit happening.

I was, in fact, prepared for fucked up woman-hating bullshit, because in the previews it's basically FETISH MODELS IN TRENCH WARFARE VERSUS CLOCKWORK ZOMBIES AND ORCS WITH MINIGUNS AND BATTLEMECHA AND A KATANA WHILE WHITE RABBIT PEAKS and frankly, anybody who walked in expecting a brilliant history-making bit of cinema after that was a total fool.

That said? I was pleasantly surprised. I apologize for demanding that you take me at my word here rather than reading a great and involved explanation as to why, but I don't know how to do that without spoiling you except to tell you what I walked in with and how that had changed by the time I walked out.

If you have already seen it, here are the reviews. Did I give a spoiler warning? I hate spoilers myself, so consider yourself duly warned.

This is a good review that gives a more thoughtful look at it than 'why are they wearing fetish boots ugh this is for horny guys' which is apparently what a lot of objections to it seem to boil down to.

Dreamwidth user Silveradept also posted this review of Sucker Punch posted on the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center website. Yeah, you read that right.

now witness the POWER of this FULLY ARMED and OPERATIONAL feminist

Had to get up really early to be at the state house this morning, but it was worth it. I was testifying against a bill in a committee hearing to defund Planned Parenthood in Indiana, and I got to be the first of the opposition to speak (right after the lady from Right to Life, sitting there with her mouth all pinched up tightly as a cat's asshole).

I'm pretty proud of how I did, and I think I helped. One of the Planned Parenthood lobbyists asked me to email her my testimony so that they could use it as an example of How It Is Done (eeeeee!) and so I thought I'd relay it to y'all as well.

My name is [my name], here on behalf of Planned Parenthood, mostly because of how much I owe of my own health and success to Planned Parenthood. I'm the first woman in my family to get a college degree. My parents were supportive, but we're a military family and as you're all aware, people don't enlist for the money.

My parents were proud, but when it came to the financial end of a $120,000 education, that was entirely up to me. I had no money left over for doctors. I literally endorsed my paychecks and physically handed them over to Butler University.

It would have been easy to sacrifice my health for the sake of being the first woman to finish, but thanks to Planned Parenthood it wasn't necessary. They clearly don't believe young women should have to choose between an education and basic preventative care, and Planned Parenthood are the people doing something about it.

I'll be 25 in a month and I've only had one routine pelvic that wasn't provided at reduced cost by Planned Parenthood. For years, that made Planned Parenthood the only place I could afford to get checkups. I had one shot to get a degree, and I was willing to put everything else second.

I still did do it. My late great-grandmother, who was a young woman during the Depression, got to see our family, after almost eighty years, produce a woman with a college degree. We're talking about a woman for whom birth control pills might as well have been magic. I wasn't stopped by poverty. I wasn't stopped by the looming threat of pregnancy derailing this dream for yet another generation.

If not for Planned Parenthood, I might have been. I see in this legislation a clear statement that women in my position should have to choose between our health and our education, that I should have had to choose: either I can have doctors or knowledge but not both.

It's 2011... and we can give women better options than that. Planned Parenthood are the people offering better options.

Reliable access to preventative care and birth control were the difference between the women in my family for the past eighty years and this woman now. When you're asking yourself whether you approve of Planned Parenthood's impact on this state, you are asking yourself about me.

Do you approve of Planned Parenthood's impact on my life? Or don't you?

Because Planned Parenthood gives women access to a legal procedure that some people may wish you could keep them from having, are you really going to let my success story be one of the last?

This bill has to go, and by saying so here today I hope to repay in small part the debt I owe to this organization. I'm proud to give this act of testifying and my tax dollars for Planned Parenthood and the patients who need them. Thank you for your time.

There's a chance the bill will indeed fail, because the Democrats on this committee are people I pretty much trust not to be horrible shits. I also don't think it'll pass because they try this every damn year. However, both the House and Senate in Indiana are controlled by Republicans, so there's no saying for certain what fuckery they'll get up to.

I'm going back tomorrow, and this time the mister is coming with me. I mentioned offhand to the Planned Parenthood people that he's a pharmacist, and they told me the House added a bill regulating a RU-486 in a particular very stupid way to the committee schedule at the last minute. I got an emphatic Facebook message from the Planned Parenthood lobbyist ("CALL ME" and her phone number. "Right now?" "YES."). She wants him to be available to read a statement on the bill written by one of his former professors and answer questions if the representatives have them.

The Planned Parenthood lobbyist who alerted me to all this told him that we're her new favorite couple. We're my favorite couple, too. The couple that cockpunches the patriarchy together stays together, yeah?

Winning it with Metta

Canvassing used to eat up a lot of my patience for having sensitive and nice conversations, and I'm finally getting my groove back. I had a conversation with somebody who complained about how rude atheists can be, and I made a difference instead of just chewing their face off. I'm pleased with myself, and with the universe for rewarding my effort at kindness.

Yes, this is a Reddit thread.

Not everybody has the spoons to sit down and explain that sometimes atheists act like they're going to be attacked because--newsflash--we basically constantly are. This time I did, and I was pleased with myself and with the person I was talking to and with the universe in general that I was able to make an impact.

Sending out huge gratitude to all the feminists, LGBT activists and wonderful POC who teach me patience every time I say some dumbass thing and they're super nice to me and make me understand new stuff. Turns out atheists need to know how to do that shit, too.

"Enhanced" pat downs

Rape survivor devastated by TSA "enhanced pat down."

An area Wiccan discovered first hand what most of us are still unaware of – many flyers are now being forced to choose between allowing a TSA agent to see them naked or to have their genitals touched and squeezed as part of what the TSA terms “enhanced pat downs.” Celeste, a survivor of rape, described her experience with the new TSA procedures as devastating.

From a quoted bit within the article:

However, when meeting with privacy officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and TSA later that month, I was told unofficially that there were two standards of pat-downs. One for the normal situation where passengers are going through metal detectors and a different pat-down for those who refuse to go through the whole-body scanners.

With this latest announcement, TSA admits that it has been clandestinely punishing passengers for refusing to go through the invasive whole-body scans with an even more intrusive aggressive pat-down and that soon those more invasive pat-down will creep from airport to airport.

I don't even know how to comment on this, it is so outrageous. I'm generally pretty good at ranting, but I'm at a loss for words.

Stop Defending the Catholic Church: Day 2

Day Two: The Church Hates Women

Women can't be priests. Ordaining a woman is grounds for immediate excommunication, just like heresy, schism, and laying violent hands on the Pope himself. Giving women power within the organization is a serious serious crime and they will immediately kick you out for it. Enough said, right? Well, clearly not, because there are still women attending mass who don't hate themselves, so let's continue.

An individual Catholic priest argued that sexism is bad and women should be ordained, and the Vatican threatened to excommunicate him in the hopes it would shut him up. To be fair, he actually is being a rather poor representative of the church. He's giving people the wrong idea about what they actually stand for, which is sad because I happen to agree with him.

Here's the one that'll come as a surprise to those of you who have a "personal relationship" with Christ that doesn't require you to study the Bible personally. The RCC isn't against abortion because the Bible is pro-infant. They're against it because they hate women.

What, does that sound too unfair? A Catholic hospital performs an abortion to save the mother's life and is ordered by their Bishop never to do it again. Pro-life my ass. They're just anti-woman, and they're willing to leave her other four kids without their mother on this supposedly "pro-child/pro-family" stance.

Toledo Catholic Bishop Leonard Blair has banned parishes and parochial schools from raising funds for the Susan G. Komen Foundation, citing concerns that the global anti-cancer giant may someday fund embryonic stem-cell research. InteractiveLeaf summarized their apparent priorities well here. "It's not like breast cancer hurts real people. Just women, mostly."

Ever hear of Magdalene laundries? The last one finally closed in 1996. Oh, and by the way, if you're curious what happened to the ones who didn't survive, sometimes they were thrown in unmarked graves. But hey! I'm sure they at least got funerals, which is more than the RCC evidently owes gay people.

So yeah! In case there were any doubt, elevating the virginal mother of Jesus does not make you any less a tool of a misogynist system. If you missed it, here's Day One: The Church Hates Gays

Dads.

You just broke your child. Congratulations.

It's a letter to dads about being a dad, about children. I'm not usually responsive to the usual, "relink this for the children" pleas, but this was actually a goddamned good essay.

I apologize for the heatedness of my post. I believe a part of me feels like a coward for not saying something to the man in front of me at Costco. Consider this post to be my penance. Perhaps a part of me feels that if even one person reads this and decides to be a better dad, it was worth every second that I spent typing it. If one child has a better life because something in my words stirred their father to step up their game, then it was worth every ounce of begging and pleading with you to share this with others, of which I am inevitably going to be guilty.

Dads. Children are gifts. They are not ours for the breaking. They are ours for the making. So stand up with me and show the world that there are a lot of good dads around.

To the men and women who read this post... married or not... parent or not... share this post on Facebook and Twitter, even if it doesn't apply to you because you're already all these things. If you've ever seen a father break his child, share it. You never know what child might get his superhero dad back. You never know what tiny spirit might feel just a little more loved because Dad took the time to tuck her in tonight.

All because you were willing to paste one link and ask others to read it.

He asked for stories about good dads in the comments, and I'm betting that readers here will want one as well. If you've got a story about awesome dadness, I'd love you to post it here, but I'd love it even more if you went and posted it there. Here's mine.

My mother's third husband is an awesome dad. If I liked something that girls traditionally didn't, he got enthused and geeked out over his stepdaughter wanting to build a fort in the woods, or go squirrel hunting, or wanting to hit the military surplus store, or wanting to watch The History Channel all day, mall be damned. He was the one who finally convinced my mother that I needed an eye exam, and probably glasses. He was the only one who believed me when I said I couldn't see through one of my eyes, and I never forgot how jarring it was to speak to an adult and be believed.

I was once being bullied in junior high, and it almost turned into a fight. I think, looking back, that I would have been willing to do far worse to her than she would have to me, just because I was scared and she was merely pissed and insecure. It didn't come to blows, but the school was going to suspend both of us as part of their zero tolerance policy toward fighting.

He went to that administrator's office--in uniform--and asked her how in the hell she, as a woman, could tell another young woman that she deserves to be punished because she was victimized. That it wasn't just her fault, but that she was to be equally punished. I took great comfort in knowing that he made her cry.

My biological father? Eh. I could go on about him, but he's not as large a part of my life anymore. The guy I refer to when I say "my dad" is the third man my mother married, and I'm glad she had the freedom to shop around. I ended up with a guy who didn't want to silence his mouthy sharp-tongued little girl; he just made sure I could defend myself if someone brought me trouble because of it.

He taught me that it's good to stand up for people who need it, but even better to make sure it's safe for them to do it themselves. That's a hell of a good dad move right there.

Firearms

A lot of people I know hold the (in my opinion, rather unnecessarily extreme) position that nobody needs to own guns, and that things would be better if nobody did. These people are usually the sorts of well-meaning leftists that I agree with on damn near everything else.

However.

Here are the facts: I don't need some middle-class, white, nominally-Christian straight man telling me that I am safe without a gun. What does he know? Does he live with a target on his back because he's a woman? Because I do. Does he live with a target on his back because he's an ethnic or religious minority? No? Because I do, at least in the latter case. Does he live with a target on his back because there are seriously people in this country arguing we should burn fags not flags? Does he live with a target on his back because he's poor and nobody cares what happens to poor people?

Then why in the world should I let him look me in the eye and tell me that I'll be okay without a knife in my pocket? Without a gun in my bedside table? He lives in a completely different universe than I do, a universe in which nothing about him screams, "If you brutalize me, nobody will care."

I don't want to hear from that guy that I don't need a gun. Let him live in a world where a glance, a word, or a gesture can be a threat, and then he can tell me when I should feel safe, and what I should need to make that happen.

After all, what could possibly be scarier to the gay-hating misogynist theocrats who want people like me to disappear than the idea of gays with guns? It's been suggested that this is the real reason why people are afraid to have gays serve openly in the military: the potential horror of a half dozen men with M16s turning around and asking, "Who you callin' a faggot?"

Newsflash to the TEA Party: Middle-class straight Christian white people aren't the ones under siege. It's us.

Gun rights for everybody means for me, even if it means I'm protecting myself against the racist paranoid conspiracy theorists in the NRA who fought hardest for those rights in the first place. Thanks, guys. Now stay off my goddamn lawn.

Nuh uh YOU'RE a bigot!

Evidently complaining about racism, homophobia, and misogyny is just as bad as complaining about black people, gays, and women. Solution: refuse to have a problem with anything ever. Safe! (Bonus points for silencing minorities who don't realize yet that anger makes them bad people. TOP SCORE.)

I am really tired of being called angry and hateful because I have the gall to dislike the people who feed a system that shits on me (and several other sorts of people who may or may not be a lot like me) every day. I am particularly bothered by all the "bullying" language being thrown around. Here's what I feel is happening (and this is just my perception, but since it's coloring my reactions, I feel obligated to explain it).

A lot of people have a "zero tolerance" view of disliking other people the way that my junior high had a "zero tolerance" policy toward fighting. I ran afoul of this policy, and I think that the way it played out says a lot about how I approach these situations.

I was being bullied by a girl who not only followed me around the halls, but cornered me for what was clearly going to be a fight. It didn't come to that, but the administrators told both of us that fighting is wrong, wanted both of us to apologize, and we both got a suspension for in-school violence.

Seeing the connection? For those who aren't catching it, I'll beat the dead horse. Sometimes it isn't right to paint all parties to a conflict as though they are all equally wrong and all equally bad and all equally to blame for the situation. There are situations where this is the case, but they are far more rare than a lot of people would like to think.

The people who treat hatred of homophobia as though it were as bad as hating gay people, the people who treat revulsion toward racism as though it were as bad as revulsion toward other races, and the people who treat bitterness at misogyny as though it were as bad as bitterness toward women? They are doing to marginalized people what my school administrators did to me when I was a kid, and I don't stand for it now.

Just because there's a conflict doesn't mean everybody involved is a bad person, and just because someone finally hits back doesn't mean they're just as much of a bully as the person who's been brutalizing them all along. Conflating these two things is not only logically screwy, but it only serves to shame and silence people who are trying to finally stand up for themselves.

So yeah, I'll say it. I mistrust conservatives, mainly social conservatives. I mistrust social conservatives because people who identify that way have tried in many identifiable and clear ways to make my life less fulfilling than theirs, because I belong to several classes of people who have faced identical objections over and over to our desires to live as equal citizens in this country (whether it's my voting rights as a woman, my right to be free from religious coercion as an atheist, or my right to equal contractual rights when it comes to civil marriages).

My dislike is different from that of homophobes, religious zealots, or sexists, or racists, because I am not trying to deny them any rights except for their perceived right to hurt me. That means the roots of our dislike, as well as our intended aims, are not just a totally different animal, they're a whole world apart.

Every time somebody equates the two, calling both me and the people who hurt me "bullies," I kind of want to bite them in the face.

Roleplaying Characters and the Rape Fad

So... I know that on a lot of roleplaying boards, the way to have an edgy backstory for a tough female character is to say she's been raped. There inevitably will be at least a couple of characters like this (and should be, frankly, because it isn't uncommon).

What pisses me off is that on some boards (particularly one Star Wars board that I left a while ago), this is apparently the only way to create a tough female character or a fragile female character or... really, anybody with tits. Evidently the only kind of woman anybody can think of to RP is... well... a rape victim.

Disclaimer: I think that online collaborative writing and roleplaying is an awesome way to raise awareness and create teachable moments about all sorts of things that most people don't directly confront in their lives. Want to say something about racial inequality? A scifi setting is an awesome place for this. Want to say something about commodification of women's bodies? A well-written character who is or has been a slave, or who is tangentially connected with that whole messy business in Star Wars is totally doable and potentially hugely awesome, because it can get people thinking about things they're not ordinarily exposed to. It can also be a potentially-useful way for assault victims to work through that in their writing, and I get that, too.

It's gone too far, though. Somewhere a line was crossed. I've started being surprised when a player thinks of something to do in a woman's backstory BESIDES rape her. I can probably count on one hand the number of female characters I've RPed with from this place who were not raped at least once. Can't we think of something else for women to do in their lives besides be assaulted?

I mean, women do have other things going on besides being raped all the time. Sometimes we have other problems, or other obstacles, or even goals. Sometimes we even succeed at things. But from these characters all I see is rape rape rape rape. It's like every plotline in a female RP character's life is just a forgettable transition period between rapes.

Summary: Teachable moments GOOD. Rape as a shortcut to character development BAD.

Am I the only person who gets really pissed about this? It says something seriously creepy that nobody from this board knows what goes on in a woman's life or in a woman's head if they're not being raped.

I have no idea what to do about it, either. I don't want to tell people, "Some of you need to write this shit out of your backstories, because I'm sick of it and your little clone army of identical stereotypical rape victims is beginning to piss me off." But right now that is exactly what is going through my head.

"Vanguard?"

I'm reading discussions about the idea of a communist "vanguard" for the working class, and trying to sort out my feelings about the whole thing.

The bare bones idea seems to be that you can't wait for a group of people who've been marginalized, denied educational opportunities, and denied opportunity for political expression to figure out how to start a revolution and then do it effectively (since all that crap piled on them seems aimed at preventing precisely that). The solution some people have come up with (if I'm understanding what I'm reading correctly) is that what's needed is for a "vanguard" of intellectual working-class-allies to agitate the working class, get them all riled up and carve out some room for them to express themselves and start exercising the power they were always told they didn't have or deserve.

This sounds fairly reasonable, especially because it's speaking to the part of me that gets very frustrated with low-income self-identified conservatives who repeatedly vote against their own self-interest (oddly, in the name of protecting the sanctity of self-interest itself). However, I feel like I have to check that part of me. That part of me also says that these low-income self-destructive conservatives are obviously too stupid to know what's good for them, and clearly a bunch of educated elites like me (since, though it seems odd to me, an education is kind of an "elite" quality, for good or ill) to come in and take their whole lives and all their problems out of their hands so that someone who knows what to do can make it all better.

How fucking disempowering is that logic? That's why I resist it. If I look at people who disagree with me as though they must be saved from their own decisions, I stop being the person who's trying to help them realize their own power.

Seems to me that's the power and the danger of the "vanguard" notion as well. Obviously not all corners of middle- or working- or lower-class society are going to be class-conscious enough (or have the energy to spare, or have safe enough conditions, though those are obstacles I don't see mentioned much in leftist discussions) to go out and kick patriarchal classist capitalist ass. Obviously those people who have a better idea should lend those skills to something useful instead of using them to further their own power.

But they can use this to further their own power. We've seen this with TEA Parties organized by multi-billion dollar insurance companies that are agitating less-conscious working-class people to give their power over from working for their own welfare to working for the welfare of their oh-so-helpful-and-sympathetic new corporate masters. That's the really nasty thing about astroturf organizing like this; it uses people's suffering and gets them all riled up to diffuse that bitterness and hope in a direction that accomplishes nothing and is therefore "safe" for the companies holding their leashes.

How to organize without doing that? How is it possible to get people interested in a cause without taking their energy and directing it as a commodity belonging to whomever can take it?

I think it comes down to something I learned in a women's empowerment circle (and yes, I attended one for a little while, and still would be if my work schedule allowed it). There is a huge difference between offering support to someone while she works through her problems, and taking her problems out of her hands to solve them for her. One of these affirms her right and ability to control her own life, and one undermines it even as it attempts to assist.

It seems to me there's a place for a "vanguard," but the term makes it sound cohesive enough to worry me. The only reason I'm even conceding the term is that--should the seemingly-impossible occur and a revolution come or... or something--these people will have power. They will. Since I am firmly against power being wielded in secret (since power that is openly named can be more easily held accountable), naming this kinda-sorta-group of people is okay with me right now.

I'm just trying to sort out my feelings on the whole thing, and trying to figure out just what it is that people are advocating when they talk about a "vanguard." I guess it might just be like any "ally" out there. White allies to POC are good, but shouldn't use their advantages to take over anti-racist work. Same with hetero and cis allies to LGBT people, men who support feminism, etc.

Maybe this is a case of an archaic word being jammed into a discussion which has moved beyond it. I'm still not sure what I think; I'm just rambling here and hoping it goes somewhere useful.

I feel like I have to rehash this constantly

I'd just like to say super-quickly that being pro-choice or anti-choice has nothing to do with being pro-abortion or anti-abortion.

Most of the people I know who are pro-choice are personally anti-abortion. However, that's their personal decision, and they respect the right of women to make a different one, even if they disagree.

"Pro-choice" doesn't mean you don't have an opinion on abortion, or that you actually like it. It means that you believe you can only choose for yourself, and other people all have to choose for themselves. If you respect the right of other individuals to make decisions for themselves that you wouldn't make in their place, you're pro-choice. Period dot. You don't have to like abortion.

Personally? I am pro-abortion, and this is totally distinct from my identification as pro-choice. I think that there are so many children out there who need good homes that, if I were to bear my own child instead of taking in one of them, I would effectively be taking food out of the mouths of starving kids. If I can afford to care for a child, I want to take care of the ones we've already got before birthing a new one.

Yes, that means if I get pregnant I'm getting an abortion. Hell fucking yes I am. This may seem shocking to you, so if you want to look at me as a baby-hating monster, you go right ahead. I'm not the one who's increasing the human population knowing full well that we aren't feeding all the brothers and sisters and sons and daughters who are already here.

Look at me as a child-hater if you want, but keep in mind that when I see you playing with your own biological child instead of one that you adopted to give them a better chance at life, you keep in mind that if I were that kind of asshole, I could point the finger and be saying the same damn thing about you.

Most people reading probably already understand this, though. I'm pro-abortion because my first duty is to the people who need me who are already living, and this is how I express that. I'm pro-choice because you can decide differently, and that doesn't make either of us a bad person.

Get it?

What in the damn it.

Many thanks to ethrosdemon for posting a link to this pile of stinking misogynist horseshit.

Summary: A woman writes to Ask Amy of the Chicago Tribune asking if being date raped, well, makes her a victim of rape. Ask Amy responds that the questioner is indeed a victim--of her own "awful judgment." She adds after that that, yes, "no matter what, no means no," but that doesn't change the fact that the first thing she had to say was the same stupid victim-blaming that makes coming forward about rape that much more of a miserable experience for the victim of the assault.

I suggest emailing Ask Amy rather than commenting on the article page. askamy@tribune.com if you're interested.

Have fun, kids. Here's what I sent.

"First of all, thank you. I hope your letter will be posted on college bulletin boards everywhere. Were you a victim? Yes. First, you were a victim of your own awful judgment. Getting drunk at a frat house is a hazardous choice for anyone to make because of the risk (some might say a likelihood) that you will engage in unwise or unwanted sexual contact."

Good news! This is indeed being posted everywhere. It's being reposted by women and men who are horrified that your response to a woman sharing a story of date rape is to tell her that she brought it on herself.

All you should have said was this:

"No matter what -- no means no. If you say no beforehand, then the sex shouldn't happen. If you say no while its happening, then the sex should stop."

That's good stuff, and that's the long and short of it. You had no call qualifying and diminishing this excellent statement by prefacing it with the same old endlessly-repeated line of crap about how it's the rape victim's job to prevent rape by not being a naughty immodest drunken slut. Women have heard enough of this, and I hope that next time a woman comes to you with such a question, all you'll say is, "You didn't want to have sex. Someone had sex with you. That's rape." Because that is all there is to it.

When doling out responsibility and dishing out the blame, whether her level of intoxication provided an opportunity doesn't matter at all compared to the blame owned by the man who TOOK THAT OPPORTUNITY AND RAPED HER. A little perspective, please. You said "no matter what, no means no." No matter what means NO MATTER WHAT. It means don't include that victim-blaming crap next time, please. The fact that you included that is basically taking a woman who has been violated and kicking her when she's down. I hope you can see the problem with that.

You owe "Victim? in Virginia" an apology, and it might be a good idea to throw in an apology to every other woman who has looked to an authority figure for help after an assault and been told that she had it coming because it was her job to prevent it, and she failed because she's a bad woman. They deserve an apology for the insult you just added to their injury.

-(my name).

That fear thing

Rant:

You know... I tried to explain once to someone that the reason it's a douche move to make sexual advances on women who aren't interested isn't merely that it's stepping on the toes of whatever man has a claim to her. It's that it's treating a woman as though her chief value is as a potential mate--if not to you then to someone (regardless of her personal feelings in the matter, because a mate doesn't need feelings, just a serviceable cunt)--and no, god damn you that is not the same as lawyers and doctors being "prized" husbands.

It matters when men treat women that way because men have social power that women don't. Yes, I realize that this is a hard thing to think about as a man who would not want a woman to feel pushed around or bullied by him. Yes, I realize that this might be hard to understand for a guy who doesn't have to deal with any of it personally.

I just wish I could explain certain kinds of fear to people like that in some way that would be effective without oversharing, without opening up in ways that'd make me vulnerable to new angles of insinuation. The idea is to draw boundaries, not to get closer. Strong women get scared, too, but that doesn't mean we should have to air it all around to people who can't be trusted, just to make a point.

There are guys who don't understand this but at least know they don't understand. There are guys who've never felt afraid to walk home alone at night, but are at least willing to take a woman's word for it when she says it's not a good idea.

Then there are those guys who hear a woman mention that she's scared of men, that she feels she's in danger from them, and they get all offended like she's being unreasonable and sexist and bigoted and isn't that just like a white person saying that black people are a threat to them and that's just not fair to generalize about all men that way!

Because they don't understand that most women resist feeling that way. It doesn't make us feel superior to admit that men scare us shitless sometimes. It doesn't make us feel like we're of a higher order. I can't speak for anyone else, but it makes me feel weak and bitter and I hate it. I wish I could believe that I live in a different world than I do solely for my own peace of mind, but that would be absolute fucking insanity.

No woman likes thinking or feeling these things! We've just--somehow or other, over a long period of time or a short one--finally found inescapable the fact that men in many cultures are trained to hurt us, that according to messages in our culture that most men don't even think about they are entitled to hurt us, and that we're the ones who'll be blamed if one of them finally eventually does.

That's the thing that always gets me. This fear is such a nightmare precisely because no woman I know wants to feel this way, to live this way. But it's the only way to fucking survive this culture--to be aware and even if it means constant terror being on guard absolutely all the time because women really are not safe.

For most guys, assault (and therefore all things that might hurt a woman) is a terrible thing that they shouldn't do, nothing more or less. But they're so busy not thinking about themselves as "the kind of guy who'd do that" that they're afraid to see it in the men around them, either. And then they become part of the problem.

In case we needed any more proof that men who can't stand to think for too long about what it must be like to walk around in life as a woman are part of the problem, I give you this particular guy's response to me attempting to teach him that women are socially/culturally subordinated to men in a way that actually does disadvantage them yes it does, yes it does, you son of a bitch, quit shaking your head at me.

"I'm glad I don't live in your world." And a disappointed shake of his head. Stupid woman. Her soft emotional woman-brain has created a nightmare world in which crazy things happen which can't possibly be true. So glad he doesn't live in that nightmare.

He may be glad, but I refuse to believe that any good friend or decent human being would hear someone talk about the ways in which they're forced to lead a less-satisfying life and respond with that horseshit. I refuse to believe that anybody who cares what kind of world the people he suppposedly cares about are living in would respond to the difference with, "I'm glad I don't live in your world," like I've described some kind of insane schizophrenic horror in which all men are Evil Kitten-Eating Reptilians from Outer Space, and how terrible it must be to go through life thinking such a silly thing.

As cernowain said at the time, "Oh... I wish you hadn't said that. Because we all live in the same world."

Because Cern gets it, god damn it. We're all living in the same world. It's just that some of us can ignore huge chunks of it because blindness to the suffering of others is comforting, and if a thing is comforting, it must be worth believing, and if it's worth believing, it must be true. Never mind the people you could help but won't because you don't have the sack to even fucking look at them or what hurts them.

When one man on the street makes a comment to me, or stares at me, or makes kissy noises at me, or gods forbid walks a little too close to me, I check two things: I check to make sure there's only one of him, and I check in a store window afterward to make sure he's not following me, or following me with a friend or two. That's my immediate reaction.

I don't think, "Gee, what a lovely compliment he is paying to my outfit and hairstyle which I clearly worked hard on as a mating display for the benefit of onlookers who prefer decorative females." I think, "How many? Where? Am I being followed? If so, how far is it to my destination and could I make it if I had to run?"

But never mind that. Obviously the necessity of such thinking is all in my head. Obviously I'm living in some kind of horrible estrogen-fed madness.

Part of the problem. If a man can believe that women he knows don't have valid complaints about misogyny simply because it makes him feel better to believe it, he's part of the problem. He's part of the problem because he has effectively put the sanctity of his own comforting illusions above the sanity and safety of the women in his life.

Which is a hell of a set of priorities for someone who doubtless thinks of himself as being too smart to be sexist.

It'd be nice if this particular brand of idiocy weren't so fucking common, but then again... if it weren't so common, we'd all be living in a very different sort of world, wouldn't we?

/rant

Anti-Choicers Plan Annual Protest

You can help.

Found this via bifemmefatale, and here's what she posted.

from http://community.livejournal.com/fundiepharma/9856.html

40 Days of Life - Anti Choice Campaign set for September 23 - November 1
The 40 Days for Life Campaign takes place every year. Anti-choice protesters organize outside women's health clinics for silent protests, prayer vigils, etc. Take a look. If your local clinic is on there, why not call or send them an e-mail to give them a heads-up. They may not know they're being targeted. You could also show up to counterprotest, sign up at the clinic to be trained as a volunteer patient escort, or if you want to be really sneaky, you could sign up for blocks of protest time on the anti-choice group's site so they think they will have people there when they won't.

IL folks, there are a lot of targets in the Chicago area.

http://www.40daysforlife.com/location.cfm

I'm in Indianapolis, and they're targeting Georgetown Rd's Planned Parenthood. I'm going to give them a call tomorrow to make sure they know what's up, but if any of you can actually go give them a hand... I'm sure it will mean the world to them to know that the community supports them.

Control

Now and again when I'm canvassing for CAC, I'll have someone tell me that The Government wants to control health care so that they can control me. Seriously, they will wag a finger at me and say, "Because they want to control you! People need to realize that votes have consequences, and this government takeover of health care? They're just taking more and more control."

Leaving aside the facts (since people who fear what'll happen if the government provides health care to people who aren't elderly, veterans, active duty military, government employees, or really poor, or any of the other groups that already get it from the government are seldom actually looking at what works, but are instead obsessed with a dogmatic devotion to ideological purity and a standard of Constitutional orthodoxy about as well-informed as any obsessive attention to Biblical orthodoxy), here's what I damn near said to a guy yesterday.

Him: "Because the government wants to control you!"

Me: *thinking* "Yeah. They're always telling me that government officials have a right to make decisions for my body, they want to tell me when I'm gonna have kids and whom I can marry... Those liberals, man. When are they going to learn to let adults control their own lives?"

Do you think they'd get the sarcasm?

Noooo, of course not. You can't tell a social conservative that there's any connection between how they feel when the government threatens to take their guns away and how I feel when the government tells me the state owns my body, or that they're the final arbiter on which partnerships are "real."

Because that's different. They're worried about the government controlling the lives of people. Women? Gays?

Not people.

Political License Plate

So in all states, you can choose to get a license plate whose fees support the fight against breast cancer, environmental causes, a college or university, whatever. In Florida, there's a license plate for people who want to take a stand against this newfangled notion that the government doesn't control a woman's body, and the money goes toward so-called "Crisis Pregnancy Centers" (you know, those places where they tell you that you'll never be able to have a baby after an abortion, your abortion will give you breast cancer, you'll hate yourself for the rest of your life, and lie to you about the biological capability of an embryo to feel pain).

These people are responding by attempting to pull together support for a pro-choice license plate.

Here is where you can donate to help them along, if you have a couple of bucks. Florida needs it. Lest you think this cannot be done, Montana did it.

Gail Riecken for the Win

Some of you may have heard me going on and on about Senate Bill 89, which I discussed in more detail here. To pull out the bill specifics from that entry as background info:

SB 89 is a bill that the Republican-controlled Senate handed over to the House that originally stated that physicians performing abortions must have admitting privileges at their local hospital. This is ostensibly to ensure that physicians performing abortions have gone through the extensive background checking and whatnot that hospitals do, which is not a bad idea in itself.

The reason this is a problem is that hospitals are loathe to give admitting privileges to physicians who don't live in the area, and most abortion doctors don't perform abortions where they live, because it'll get your family harassed by anti-choicers. The other reason this is a problem is that it isn't necessary. The only thing admitting privileges really gains the woman is being able to have the same doctor at the hospital in case of a complication that she had performing the abortion. (...)

The real reason for handing this over is, of course, to shut down all but one clinic in Indiana that performs abortions by requiring doctors to jump through a meaningless hoop with no penalties for a hospital that refuses them admitting privileges simply because of why they want them. (...)

The House put language in it which accepted the premise that those performing [invasive] surgical procedures should have local admitting privileges as long as we apply it to all [invasive] surgical procedures. (...)

Senator Patricia Miller (R-Indianapolis) evidently doesn't like the fact that the bill would now cover all surgical procedures, and also disapproves of the amendment giving funding for preventative health care for women. That's right! These amendments strengthen the case of SB 89 being a bill about women's health, rather than an attempt to shut down most of Indiana's abortion clinics.

So the very things that make it viable as anything more than an imposition of an unconstitutional undue burden are the very things that might kill it in conference committee. If they want to say it's not germane to apply this to all surgical procedures, and if they want to say that it's not germane to amend other considerations of women's reproductive health, they're going to have to admit that the bill is attempting to do something else--something unconstitutional.

Well, guess what? I don't think they got a report out from committee last night, and those have to be out for 24 hours before they can be heard for the final vote today and... I don't think it was. So now that the bill has died, it was safe for me to talk to a Rep who really really earned my respect and gratitude through this.

I found the session video archive for April 15th (starts at 4:50), and here's what she said. To my knowledge this is the only transcript, but the damn thing is public record right on the State House website if people thought to look.

Let me say first that I am well aware that this bill is popular and will probably pass this evening. My intention in speaking is to put on record what I think is a major flaw in this bill. A disappointment, a great disappointment, to me in my first year in this House. It is the inclusion of the statement that a fetus might feel pain. The fetal pain requirement is simply medically unsound.

I had the occasion to talk with Representative Tim Brown this evening just before we convened, and he told me that he believes that life begins at conception, and I am not arguing that point. What I am arguing is that pain does not begin at conception. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, it is not physiologically possible that a fetus feels pain before 29 or 30 weeks gestation. Medical experts acknowledge that awareness of pain requires the involvement of the cerebral cortex, which is not yet developed at 20 weeks' gestation. Now understand that I am not a physician. But I believe that we must pay attention to good, sound, scientific and medical advice. According to the Indiana State Department of Health roughly 90% of Indiana Abortion patients have their abortion in the first trimester. That same data reports no abortions past 20 weeks.

My fear in this bill is the thought of what lengths we will go as a House to get a bill passed. I am not advocating the use of abortion as a method to halt or avoid pregnancy. I do believe in a person's right to have an abortion, however, I do not believe in abortion. I have raised my two daughters to make responsible decisions and I do not believe that they believe in abortions. I cannot accept this bill that is, under the surface, a pathway to denying women control over their own bodies.

I have seen, I have lived, and served women in another country where authoritarian control over women and their reproductive health produced only two things: shame and guilt. Finally, I believe in this bill we have climbed the hill to a very slippery slope. A slippery slope that will only result to restrict women and our right to be responsible adults, determined with our husbands and our doctors our reproductive health.

I will not be voting for this hypocrisy.

I felt really really good when she said that, because in Indiana those views often don't get heard. So when she said it... I felt heard. I wanted her to know that, and I think it made her happy to get that feedback. This is particularly true since this is her first term and a lot of people were probably urging her not to say anything because it would endanger her re-election prospects if Right to Life starts fanning the fires of misogyny in her district.

I hope she gets re-elected. There are a few Reps that I truly feel have both the insight and the conviction to actually stand up for my best interests as a voter in Indiana. Gail Riecken is one of them, and quite frankly I trust our legislature a lot more with her in it.