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.

Things I am reading!

Obligatory mention of the attacks in Oslo.

Obviously the groups he was a member of and who were his (apparent) ideological guiding posts are appalled, you guys, just aghast and amazed that someone went out and did what they all seem to want done.

Sound familiar to you? Sounds familiar to me. Remember, kids. Every politically-motivated right-wing white murderer is an isolated case and not a real terrorist representative of any kind of trend and remember that people on the left are just as likely to gun down strangers. Right? So let's ignore the right-wingers and get back to being scared of brown Muslims.

More links!

Anders Behring Breivik was deranged, but also a serious conservative political thinker! Didn't complain enough about Jews in his manifesto, though, so Richard Spencer is going to fill in some gaps by linking to Kevin MacDonald. Can't make this shit up, guys.

The Political Ideas of Anders Behring Breivik

Okay, so. I resolved not to post anything about Amy Winehouse (because the Norway incident is obviously kind of a big deal), but this blog entry sort of made me curl up in a ball, so I judged it worthy of passing on. It's only partly about her. It's about the people like her that we can't see because there's no money in dragging them out to die in front of the world. Read it.

Yes, I’m an addict too: Why I’m no different from Amy Winehouse (H/T stoneself)

Unrelated, and in (sort of) better spirits: Scarleteen is one of the best things on the internet. I think if my hometown had had sex ed that looked more like this website, I would have seen a lot less rape and unplanned pregnancy among my peers through junior high and high school.

How You Guys -- that's right, you GUYS -- Can Prevent Rape.

It’s obviously hard for guys to really look at this stuff, but it’s also hard for women to know that rape is nearly always a crime done by men (as well as to live in a world where it’s something we are afraid of). We love the men in our lives dearly, very much want to be able to trust men, and we think of men, as a group, as our brothers. Suffice it to say, it’s also really tough for us to have to know that our actual brothers, our fathers, our boyfriends, our male friends, might be or have been rapists: it’s a terrible betrayal. So, while we women can’t personally understand, in some ways, how it’s got to feel for guys to be suspect with rape, or to know that it’s a crime almost exclusively perpetuated by a group to which you belong, in plenty of ways, we feel your pain, because men belong to at least one of our groups too: to the all-people group.

That's all I've got for now.

The Exception

I have blogged before over here on what I think of the so-called "rape exceptions" in anti-choice legislation. To grab an excerpt:

"Well, they should have thought about that before they started having sex," you might say. It's a common enough argument. If women don't want to get pregnant, they shouldn't engage in risky behavior like sex. Most people will agree that a woman who is raped or molested at a young age is not "to blame" for her sexual activity, and as a result an abortion is okay in these cases.

But here's what this really says. A woman who doesn't choose to have sex deserves the choice of whether to keep an unwanted child. A woman who does choose to have sex does not deserve the choice of whether to keep an unwanted child. What makes this misogynist is that it takes a moral imperative ("good women don't sleep around") and uses it as a framework to give "bad" women fewer rights than "good" ones.

I was reading something that made another point about this exception, and it's here. The author mentions those anti-choicers who're willing to admit that rape is terribly sad but "why should the baby have to pay for someone else's wrong?" She rightly questions just whose wrong we're looking at here, suggesting that the figure blamed is seldom the father who didn't wear a condom, but the woman who "wrongly" took an interest in sexual activity.

And here's an excellent question, one that is asked but seldom by people who seriously offer an answer. What about the woman? Whose choices should she suffer for, and to what degree?

I know, it’s a radical thought, but really: what of them? Why should they have to pay for someone else’s wrong? What about their lives? Don’t they matter a damn bit? Or again, are we just assuming that they are partially at fault for the wrong committed?

Of course, anti-choicers will argue that we’re looking at disproportionate interests/rights. The “baby” has a life; the woman just has “convenience” and her lazy, selfish desire to not have a physical reminder of her traumatizing experience every second of every day for 9 months, not to mention a child created by that rapist at the end of 9 months.

In fact, regaining control after a rape experience really can be about a woman’s life. Thankfully, I don’t know the trauma of having been impregnated as the result of rape. But I do know the trauma of rape itself. And I know, or can read in tons of readily accessible literature, about how rape takes away a sense of control over one’s body. It can, in fact, heavily make one question who that body belongs to.

And anti-choicers want that answer to be the government. In spite of the fact that the right to an abortion after rape really can be about a woman’s life — since a woman may be easily made suicidal over a forced pregnancy as the result of rape, or simply traumatized forever because of it — anti-choicers think that a fetus’ rights overrule it. When forced to choose between the life of a fetus, and the life of a woman (and often thereby her fetus due to simple biology), anti-choicers choose the fetus time and time again.

Once again. The unborn always take precedent for an anti-choicer over the already-born. Whose suffering has worth to you? Whose life has worth to you?

This is why the anti-choice position is not pro-child. It is anti-woman. That's why we don't call them pro-life, because it sure as hell isn't my life they're fighting for, nor is it yours. They'd sacrifice you in an instant if it meant that those dirty fornicating whores get what they deserve, subhumans who should have kept their damn legs closed, or not had that third drink, or not worn that skirt, or screamed a little louder, fought a little harder.

It's not about protection; it's about punishing women who step out of line--a line drawn by misogynist factions of our culture more concerned with keeping women in their proscribed "traditional" gender role than with keeping women safe.

Women in "Godly Marriages"

I was having a discussion once with a born-again Christian who was arguing passionately that it is best for women to be under the "loving headship" of a man, the way that the church is under the loving headship of Christ. The ideal marriage is not an egalitarian one, but one in which a man governs the woman based on his own consideration and love for her.

I did not see this as an ideal marriage, and have little interest in it. I'm one of those college-educated "women's libbers" who feels that I'm qualified to have my own means of economic support, and the same social and political autonomy as a man. Most importantly, I feel I'm better off this way.

My issue with taking the gender roles offered in the Bible at face value is that traditional heteronormative (if you'll forgive the jargon) marriage roles are upheld as "Biblical" (which is itself a largely-undefined term), but advocates are really just picking and choosing from what's in the Bible to support what they'd like.

Now, I know that "picking and choosing" is a trigger-phrase for a lot of people who are debating the Bible, and it's often used as a way to instantly condemn as "UnBiblical" whoever gets it applied to them. I feel it's appropriate here, though. There are a lot of aspects of the submissive-woman/leading-man arrangement that clearly came from the culture in which the Bible was written.

Levirate marriage is the best example of this I can think of. Because women in those times didn't have any economic power of their own (aside from prostitution, which is not exactly desirable), they had to be married to survive. If their husband died, it was his brother's duty to marry the widow (often in addition to his own wife) so that he could support her and give her the offspring that his late brother could not.

This came up in Matthew 22:23, and Christ doesn't deny the worth of this practice. He just says that in the world to come NO ONE will be married. If Christ had a problem with the practice, that was his chance to say something. He did not, and Matthew 22:23 is actually a better argument against romantic relationships overall than it is against Levirate marriage.

The reason I bring up Levirate marriage is that it's a practice that was assumed as normal in the time of Christ, and not condemned by him as adultery. The reason people don't practice it today is because we live in a different culture. "Oh, that's just what they did then," people say. "We know better now. Marriage is between one man and one woman, and these are the obligations each has to the other. The Bible says so (in the parts that we choose if we ignore the parts that we don't like)."

Marriage in the time of Christ (and in the early church of Christ) was a much more complex thing than it gets credit for, and if we can accept that Levirate marriage doesn't belong in our modern society, why are we blindly accepting all gender roles attributed to the Bible? To put it another way, if we can trace practices like Levirate marriage back to the culture of the Bible's authors and thus dismiss their applicability for us, but we ascribe divine sanctity and authority to the parts we DO like... how is that honest? At the very least I think it requires that we find another definition of what counts as "Biblical," since clearly "it's okay in the Bible" is not enough.

Of course, another alternative is to pay close attention to what the cultural atmosphere was like at the time the Bible was written. What did the authors take for granted? What was "normal" to them, and what was deplorable? It was normal and natural to them that a woman could not support herself without a man. It was normal and natural to them that if men are good, women will be supported. If men are not good, women are the ones who suffer. Oh well.

And that's my big problem with attempting to reinstate millenia-old cultural norms by encouraging women to be economically dependent on men. Sure, in an ideal world this'd all work out fine. But we don't live in an ideal world, and in the world where we live now... if anybody in this system fall short (which Christian theology teaches that they must) women suffer. Women will bear the brunt of their own failings AND the failings of the men on whom they are dependent.

That's why feminists don't like these gender roles. It's not that they hate men. It's that men have to be perfect in order for this system to work, and even Christian theology admits that this is a lost cause. Because feminists are concerned with women being able to survive in a world where humans are imperfect, they assert that women need to have their own social and economic viability. Feminists therefore take issue with the Christian "traditional" marriage. It assumes that it's important for women to be healthy, safe, and otherwise well off, but not important enough to build a system that will actually produce that end.

Woman in Charge, Women Who Charge

Woman in Charge, Women Who Charge

By Judith Warner

Is it a coincidence that the bubbling idiocy of “Sex and the City,” the movie, exploded upon the cultural scene at the exact same time that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy imploded?

Literally, of course, it is. Figuratively, I’m not so sure.

And before I set off an avalanche of e-mails explaining why Hillary deserved to lose, I want to make one point clear: I am talking here not about the outcome of her candidacy – mistakes were made, and she faced a formidable opponent in Barack Obama – but rather about the climate in which her campaign was conducted. The zeitgeist in which Hillary floundered and “Sex” is now flourishing.

It’s a cultural moment that Andrew Stephen, writing with an outsider’s eye for the British magazine the New Statesman last month, characterized as a time of “gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind.” A moment in which things like the formation of a Hillary-bashing political action group, “Citizens United Not Timid,” a “South Park” episode featuring a nuclear weapon hidden in Clinton’s vagina, and Internet sales of a Hillary Clinton nutcracker with shark-like teeth between her legs, passed largely without mainstream media notice, largely, perhaps, because some of the key gatekeepers of mainstream opinion were so busy coming up with various iterations of the nutcracker theme themselves. (Tucker Carlson on Hillary: “When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” For a good cry, watch this incredible montage from the Women’s Media Center.)

Stephen is not the first commentator to note that if similarly hateful racial remarks had been made about Obama, our nation would have turned itself inside out in a paroxysm of soul-searching and shame. Had mainstream commentators in 2000 speculated, say, that Joe Lieberman had a nose for dough, or made funny Shylock references, heads would have rolled – and rightfully so.

But 16 months of sustained misogyny? Hey — she asked for it. With that voice, (“When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, ‘Take out the garbage’ ” Fox News regular Marc Rudov, author of “Under the Clitoral Hood: How to Crank Her Engine Without Cash, Booze, or Jumper Cables,” said in January). With that ambition, and that dogged determination (“like everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court,” according to MSNBC commentator Mike Barnicle) and, of course, that husband (Chris Matthews: “The reason she’s a U.S. Senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around.”). Clearly, in an age when the dangers and indignities of Driving While Black are well-acknowledged, and properly condemned, Striving While Female – if it goes too far and looks too real — is still held to be a crime.

In a culture that’s reached such a level of ostensible enlightenment as ours, calling a powerful woman “castrating” – however you choose to put it – ought to be seen as just as offensive as rubbing your fingers together to convey a love of gold coinage when you talk about a Jew. It’s nothing other than an expression of woman-hate — and the degree to which such expressions have flourished, in the mainstream media and in the loonier reaches of cyberspace this year, has added up to be a real national shame.

Which brings me back to “Sex and the City.”

How antithetical Hillary’s earnest, electric blue pants-suited whole being is to the frothy cheer of that film, which has women now turning out in droves, a song in their hearts, unified in popcorn-clutching sisterhood to a degree I haven’t seen since the ugly, angry days of Anita Hill and … the first incarnation of Hillary Clinton. How times have changed. How yucky, how baby boomerish, how frowningly pre-Botox were the early 1990s. How brilliantly does “Sex” – however atrocious it may be – surf our current zeitgeist, sugar-coating it all in Blahniks and Westwood, and yummy men and yummier real estate, and squeakingly desperate girl cheer.

Take Miranda: a working mother archetype for an anti-woman age. She’s so callous now that she won’t let her nanny eat a decent meal, and so defiantly sexless that she’s let her pubic hair grow in. Take Charlotte: the Good Mommy, with an angel’s face and no employment, a seemingly limitless credit line and an adoring troglodyte of a husband (so short, so bald, and yet so good with the gelt). And then – please – take Samantha. At 50, she’s the one girlfriend aged enough to bear the baggage of old-time, Clinton-era feminist sentiment. She’s a self-centered heart-breaker, a real man-eater — you should see how she rejects a drooping roll of sushi — her corruption made manifest by the fact that, at film’s end, she develops (gasp!) a gut.

Yes, a gut, girls, like yours and mine and that of virtually any real woman who’s over 35, or has had children, or has something more important to do than full-time Pilates.

“Sex and the City” is the perfect movie for our allegedly ever-so-promising post-feminist era, when “angry” is out and Restalyne is in, and virtually all our country’s most powerful women look younger now than they did 20 years ago.

Oh, lighten up, I can hear you say. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.

Earnestness is so unattractive (in a woman).

im in mah womb killin ur babehz

What the Huck?

The world is much stupider than I think it is. I require daily reminders of this, though it really ought to be a given by now.

Today, Governor Mike Huckabee is scheduled to travel to Georgia to commemorate the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. There he plans to join Georgia Right to Life to lend his support, as well as the focus of the national media, to HR 536. This legislation, also called the Human Life Amendment, is a state constitutional amendment that reclassifies the most effective and popular forms of contraception as abortion. The goal of the amendment is to create a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade while also defining life as beginning at fertilization. The anti-abortion movement believes that hormonal contraception (the pill, the patch, the depo shot, the nuva ring, the IUD) can destroy a fertilized egg. By setting in law the assertion -- the unproveable assertion -- that life begins at the moment of fertilization, the most common forms of contraception become abortion.

(snip)

That's why, for many pro-life leaders, Huckabee's support of their anti-contraception campaigns makes him the real deal. Randy Alcorn, author of Does the Birth Control Pill Cause Abortions? (Alcorn's answer: yes) earned a spot on Huckabee's Faith and Family Values Coalition beside others who are deeply opposed to contraception.

Huckabee is not the only candidate wooing the anti-contraception base. Mitt Romney, as Governor of Massachussetts, vetoed a contraception bill claiming the emergency contraception was an "abortive" drug. The McCain campaign boasts he has always opposed funding of family planning programs. Neither of these two frontrunners have embraced the anti-contraception rhethoric and strategy as fully as Huckabee, however. When Huckabee describes himself as "consistently pro-life" this is what he means. If only the majority of pro-life voters who overwhelmingly support contraception understood that.

AAAAGHGGDHGSDFGDSGBDFGFDGD

There. I feel that about sums it up.

Compartments

I've added a new blog to my little list. Compartments: Secrets, Lies, and Living a Double Life

It's written by a callgirl, and goes through a surprisingly informative bit of her daily life. As an anthropologist, these are the details that tell me the most. The thing is... I knew in my head that a lot of women find sex work fulfilling and practical (at least as much as nine-to-fivers, that poor despairing cube-farming lot), but reading someone talk about daily life like this is just... different.

She's not blind to the practicality, or to the sexism. She's not blind to the emotional drain or the ego boost. She's not one of those victimized and exploited women who simply don't have the will or motivation to go get "real" jobs.

There are some things that are just about her, things like Lying to a Boyfriend, and the occasional entry about the jobs themselves, such as Fat Men Can’t Come. What was most interesting to me was not the humor or the frankness of the entry, but the conversation afterward. I'd never gotten a chance to hear about the "afterward." After the job's technically done, after obligations on all sides have been met. What is there? Sometimes a conversation about porn. Not so different from anyone else's post-sex familiarity, but certainly just the "single serving" version. She talks about that too, in Immediate Intimacy.

The temptation is always to look at this journal and treat it like a side-show curiosity. "Lookie there! One o'dem there whores just like on da HBO!" But that wouldn't be fair to the candid and sometimes moving accounts here. I knew before that sex work couldn't be all terror and desperation and sleaze, but even though I don't know where she lives or what she looks like or whether she'll have a call today... even if I don't know her as well as I feel I do... there's a person out there.

Men's Abortion Rights?

Bit of a hiatus while I get started on classes, but I had to relay this article I was sent.

Men's Abortion Rights: What Will They Think of Next?

Despite the lack of evidence for post-abortion syndrome in either gender, anti-abortion advocates suggest "lost fatherhood" can lead to domestic violence and an addiction to sex. Both claims seem to suggest a rationale for men behaving badly. Men, they suggest, experience symptoms of post-abortion syndrome equally if not more powerfully than women. Male victims throughout the country are sharing stories of "their abortions."

*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*

This has been your daily dose of WTFery.