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Ever notice how whenever someone starts crying about their right to free speech being impinged, that person is almost invariably a white guy? And how what they are actually crying about usually has very little to do with free speech and more with wanting to have the privilege to say and do whatever hateful things they want in regards to members of subordinate groups? Yeah, I thought you had.
This is something that’s been bothering me for a while, but reading about the online harassment faced by software programmer Kathy Sierra has really made salient to me what a load of bullshit this “free speech” argument is. Allow me to recap the story for you: Kathy Sierra is a software programmer who has recently been the target of hate speech and threats of violence, including lynching, throat-slitting, and rape. Because of this hate speech, and subsequent postings of her personal information, she has cancelled public appearances out of fear for her safety. The owners of the blogs which perpetrated this hate speech are coming under a certain degree of fire, as one might expect. But instead of admitting to being douchenozzles of the highest calibur and apologizing and vowing to never blog again, they are acting like they are the victims. One, Chris Locke, complained about having “been judged by the angry mob out there” and criticized Sierra for having the audacity to feel unsafe when facing death threats, saying, “I think her response, as it pertains to anything I personally wrote, was unjustified — but highly effective — character assassination. As a result, I’m sure I’ll be explaining for years to come that I’m not really an ax murderer and child molester. Nice work.” Another blogger defended Locke, bemoaning that, “A cry of misogynism pretty much shuts off debate…. The bloggers are behaving like a lynch mob, or a US president, looking for someone to string up, or a country to invade. Sierra is upset, traumatized, even; but it’s Locke’s reputation which will be, possibly quite unfairly, soiled by her accusation.”
To paraphrase Homer Simpson, so now we’re judging people based on things they’ve done? Real classy. Free speech is good. Free speech is necessary. But what free speech is not is the right to express whatever hateful, vitriolic bullshit that comes to mind without facing any consequences. Once a person gets to be past, oh, let’s be generous and say eight years old, a person is expected to take into account the effects their actions will have on others. Chris Locke appears to be well over eight years old and ostensibly should know better. A person may not face any legal sanctions for the things that they say, but there are still social sanctions in place, and people have as much right to defend themselves and their beliefs and the person and beliefs of others as they have to verbally piss all over them. If you act like an asshole, you’ll get treated like an asshole, and don’t try to act like a victim because your actions turn out to have consequences. For a long ass time, white men were able to do whatever the fuck they wanted to members of subordinate groups, but we have since won the right to fully exercise our own right to free speech, and we are fully within those rights to call someone out for being a total douche. This isn’t really about free speech at all: this is about longing for those bygone days when girls were girls and men could piss all over them simply by virtue of their being men and no one would say a thing about it. That is not a right, it is a privilege, and it’s a privilege that no one should be able to exercise.
Filed under: dumbs, feminism, misogyny, pc, sexism, victim blaming, violence | 4 Comments
Too fat to love
I am insanely busy and really don’t have much time to post, but I just saw like, 19 ads for Bulging Brides on the Fine Living Network or some other bullshit channel and I really need to Hulk out about it.
Women are told that if only they spend enough money on stuffed chicken breasts and place settings, their wedding will be the most magical day of their lives and they will be princesses for a day and really, isn’t that every 27 year old accountant/elementary school teacher/HR rep’s dream? To be a pwetty, pwetty pwincess? Weddings aren’t about the joining of two people who love each other or whatever other bullshit people try to delude themselves into thinking; they are an over-the-top, idealized celebration of patriarchy in its microcosmic form. When planning a wedding, women are made to concern themselves with trivialities like seating charts and the exact shade of midnight blue their bridesmaids’ dresses will be while their fiances are free to go about business as usual, only with the occasional tux fitting or cake tasting, all leading up to a bachelor party in which they will be fully encouraged to comodify the bodies of other women on their last night of “freedom”. In order for this day to be perfect in its devotion to the partriarchy, the bride cannot merely show up, her happy, smiling self. No, she needs to personify the “feminine” qualities of meek submissiveness by taking up as little space as possible. If she doesn’t? Then she has to suffer. And that’s where Bulging Brides comes in. Let’s roll the clip.
I can barely describe how insulted I am by this. There is so much wrong here, and in such a small amount of time, a mere two minutes! First of all, the “Bulging Bride” does not appear to be bulging by any definition outside the world of runway modeling. She is what would be referred to as being a “healthy weight” by people who like to pretend their fat hatred stems from concern about health. We see her flying in the face of her trainers by daring to ENJOY HERSELF at her bachelorette party, where we see several clips of her doing things as audacious as EATING and DRINKING! The scandal! Silly bitch, don’t you know that eating is for fat girls? And we all know that no man is capable of loving a fat girl. It’s just the way they have evolved over time. You can’t change nature.
Of course, we can’t let a woman get away with having a good time, so her trainer, Douchey McMuscles, shows up at her house at 6:30 the next morning for “payback”. He tells the women on the way to their mystery location that they are going to fufill a lifelong fantasy. Ugh. I should have known what was coming. It’s time for poledancing lessons! Yes, because it is every woman’s fantasy to be reduced to their boner-inducing capabilities. That’s why sex workers are among some of the most well-respected and influential people in society! I will admit that at one point I didn’t think that pole dancing lessons were the worst thing in the world. I mean, I like dancing, but I also have a tendency to move in awkward jerks that leave me bumping into things. Thus, dance classes have always seemed like they would be fun and energizing and might help me control my spastic movements. But having seen pole dancing lessons? Are they kidding? How can anyone delude themselves into calling that a “workout”? Slowly moving your ass in a circular motion does not make for good cardio, I’m sorry. That is ridiculous. They actually teach them how to give lap dances. Are you kidding me? Does that really need to be taught? I can teach you how to give a lap dance in one sentence: Take off your clothes and hump a dude sitting in a chair. There! Lap dance lesson complete. Now pay up.
Ostensibly, her “payback” workout should be something long, arduous, and capable of burning off a lot of calories. But no, this show isn’t actually about losing weight. It is about women learning to be “the perfect bride”, which will initiate them into a life of suffering and service to their families, as demonstrated when the bride’s future husband comes in to reap the rewards of her 6:30AM, spinny, hangoverey workout and receive an embarassing, public lap dance. Yay weddings!
The message that these women are given is not that their dress is the wrong size, but that their body is the wrong size. The trainers insult them, calling them “chubsters” and “bulging brides”. The episode descriptions are similarly mean-spirted. Take this one for an episode called “No Pain, No Gain”: “Sharon’s a former figure skater whose figure has been expanding ever since going to college and then having a baby. She has to slim way down in order to fit into her dress, but will her laziness keep her bulging in all the wrong places?” It’s not that she should have ordered the dress in a different size or that she’s too busy planning a wedding and taking care of a child or that hey, having babies has a tendency to put a few pounds on you. The whole reason the dress doesn’t fit is because she’s lazy.
I couldn’t find too many clips, but if you want to see more of this atrocity, I recommend watching Sarah Haskins take on bridal shows on Target Women. Then at least your tears of sadness will merge with tears of laughter!
Filed under: body image, fat phobia, gender roles, media, misogyny, victim blaming | 8 Comments
…in which I puke on myself
I was on the Details website the other day, having been pulled in by a repulsive picture accompanying a similarly repulsive article on how super rich guys have to cut back on their number of mistresses during these hard economic times, when I found an even bigger gem: Welcome Back, Asshole, a fluff piece about the triumphant return of male chauvinism, accompanied by a few repulsive pictures of its own:
The article begins with the tragic story of Dave, who is “a devoted spouse and a doting father to the three young children”. The poor bastard. Dave, this tragic figure on par with Oedipus Rex or King Lear, went to college during the “p.c. era”, which forced him to repress all his manly-man urges. But they could not stay under wraps forever, oh no, and now he allows these manly-man urges to release themselves into the mouths of masseuses who may or may not be but probably have been forced to serve in “massage parlors” against their wills for the sexual pleasure of POOR POOR DAVE.
My, where is the world’s smallest violin when you need it?
The thing is, the article does give a fairly accurate depiction of the state of masculinity in our society today. The author even got some quotes from Michael Kimmel, editor of the sociological journal Men and Masculinities, author of the recent book Guyland, one of the prevailing experts on masculinity, subject of one of my brain crushes, and all-around tubular person. To use the language of Talcott Parsons, our society is moving from one based on ascription, or personal attributes, to achievement, or… you know, the things people actually do in order to prove their worth. Men, particularly white, middle-class men, are finding that male privilege just doesn’t mean what it used to, but they can still recall a time when it meant a whole lot more, if not in their own past, then in their fathers’ or grandfathers’. They feel like they have been stripped of something to which they are entitled, and it pisses them off. However, the article, of course, says nothing about entitlement or privilege and actually deigns to use the word “postfeminist” and presents normal human dickishness as part of some ancient drive that only presents itself on the Y-chromosone. Sigh. We’re not going to be in a post-feminist age until we’re in a post-partriarchal age, and acting like a dick is not the sole province of men who are fed up with treating women like human beings and aren’t going to take it any more. People, both men and women, act like dicks because they are tired or cranky or selfish or just because they’re dicks, and it has nothing to do with some kind of hideously oppressive society that is keeping white men from their natural right to treat other people as less than human. I’ve used the pie analogy once and I’ll use it again: white, middle-class men are finding that they have a smaller share of the pie than their fathers did. Their fathers never deserved the amount of pie they had to begin with, but men today don’t see that, they just see pie that isn’t on their plate, and it’s making them pouty. They aren’t to be pitied any more than a spoiled kid throwing a tantrum in a Toys R Us because his parents won’t buy him a Wii, even though they aren’t even in stock. Life was never meant to be easy and for the majority of people throughout history it hasn’t been. That anyone who is privileged enough to be living in the United States with a job, a happy family, and a college education to think they are somehow pitiable, and that anyone could agree with them, is frankly a little sickening.
Hence the dry cleaning I’m going to have to take in tomorrow. I just hope it doesn’t stain.
Filed under: "science", dumbs, gender roles, media, pc, victim blaming | 3 Comments
It’s gonna be a good day
Joe Francis was arrested and is facing up to ten years in jail.
Okay, so it’s for tax evasion and not for any of the multiple rapes he has been accused of committing, but it still makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
Filed under: creeper, misogyny, porn, rape, sex, violence | 1 Comment
But what, sir, of the ladies?
As I was logging in to WordPress, I saw an interesting blog post entitled “How to Stump Anti-Abortionists With One Question”. That question? If abortion was illegal, what should be done with the women who have illegal abortions? There is a video of anti-abortion protesters being asked that question and it is, in word, awesome. For all the lip service they give to the concept that abortion is “murder”, they obviously do not equate it with actual murder. Their use of illogic is simply superb. I’m not going to get into it much here, because that isn’t the subject of this post, but I recommend checking it out. It’s definitely interesting.
I try to avoid reading the comments on posts such as these because, well, I prefer not feeling suicidal. This time, however, I just couldn’t help myself. Amidst a sizable amount of sane people and a few crazies who actually do believe women should be jailed as accomplices to murder in cases of abortion, there was this classy fella, identifying himself as Lance Williams:
We spend far too much time finding ways to fight than finding a real solution. I think a better question to ask is abortion good for the mother? It certainly isn’t for the child, but studies have found it is awful for the mother’s body & mental health.
So instead of trying to find ways to “stump” protesters a better discussion would be how do we solve this problem?
The protesters on both sides of the issue seem so bent of beating each other up that they have forgotten about the women who are looking for help.
When we become so entrenched in an ideology that we lose intellectual honesty we have lost far more than an argument.
Our ladies’ very delicacy is at stake! Douche lays on the paternalism so thick you could cut it with a knife. Guess what? It isn’t 1873! You’d think the computer sitting in front of him would provide enough evidence of that fact. There have been many changes in America since the Grant administration, and not just the perfection of Babbage’s analytical engine. Women can own property! We can hold jobs! We can serve on juries and in the military. We have the right to bodily safety, at least theoretically, and the right to choose our own destinies, regardless of what our fathers and husbands and sons may say, again, at least theoretically. And, as of the passage of the nineteenth amendment, we can even vote! In short, we are ACTUAL UNITED STATES CITIZENS, and not wards who need our weak and delicate minds and bodies to be protected from any element that may cause us harm. We are actually free to make our own decisions, and we do pretty alright for ourselves.
Aside from the paternalism, his argument suffers from fallacy. In regards to the supposed harm suffered by women who have abortions, if I wasn’t so lazy I’m sure I could find a million and seven sources that show that all the claims of breast cancer and mental illness and reproductive organs that shrivel up into barren husks from which no life can be brought forth and vaginas that collapse into themselves and form black holes have been made by crazy people. However, I am lazy and I will take the lazy person’s way out: anecdotes. I know two people who have had abortions. One had one, the other had two. Physically, they felt pretty crappy for about a week afterwards, as can be expected when undergoing any surgical procedure, but mentally they were, and remain to be, perfectly fine. Sure, they were a little cranky about having to get the abortion at all, as anyone who requires a surgical procedure would be, but now that they are over and done, there is no evidence this former psych major can find of depression, PTSD, paranoid schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, Munchausen’s, or fugue. And in any event, any physical harm caused by legal abortions is sure to be dwarfed by the harm caused by the Drano and coathangers of yore, just as any mental harm is sure to be lessened as there is less social stigma attached to abortion.
The women in the abortion argument have not been forgotten because we are PART of the argument. We are arguing on our own behalfs. Unfortunately, some of us are arguing against our behalfs. In exposing the hypocrisy of their beliefs, we are not just trying to amuse ourselves, we are trying to get people to understand our side and stop fighting against women’s rights, and if Lance is actually concerned about women, he should recognize that that is how women’s best interests will be served. But he doesn’t actually care about women. He cares about being a paternalistic douchebag and keeping women on a pedestal.
Filed under: abortion, dumbs, paternalism, reproductive choice, reproductive freedoms, sexism | 1 Comment
Aye, there’s the rub
I recently read Passing By, Carol Brooks Gardner’s book on gendered public harrassment, and I found an interesting quote I wanted to share. From a male interviewee:
It’s funny, but these kinds of happenings, of occurences, have been a sore point, a point of discussion, between my lady and myself. Not a week goes by but we don’t argue about them. Last week we were walking to the Vogue [a music venue in a Yuppie area of Broad Ripple] to hear some music, and a crowd of teenagers, both Blacks and whites, from Broad Ripple High was lounging near the entrance and shouting at her–you know, “Hey babe, cmere, give us what you got!” and all that. It got raunchy, obscene, but so what? Nobody hurt her or anything–O.K., one boy threw M&Ms at her, they hit her. We stayed up all night arguing about it.
There inlies the problem, folks. I think that most women believe that the men in their life are concerned about them and want them to be safe and happy. This quote completely contradicts this sentiment. This man’s “lady”, someone he ostensibly cares about, is telling him that she feels humiliated and scared and insulted, and he is defending the people, complete strangers to him, who are making her feel that way. This man cares more about defending his theoretical right to throw M&Ms at a woman and insult her than the feelings of someone he is supposed to care about. This is how little some men care about women, that even the well-being of the women in their lives is put secondary to their being able to dominate, humiliate, and frighten women in general. I once heard a subpar comedian say that when a man has a daughter, he becomes a feminist, but the evidence I have come across, part of which was gleaned from the rest of that man’s standup, has repeatedly shown me that for some men, misogyny just runs too deep to counter with any appeals to empathy. The women in their lives are casualties in their defense of male privilege and domination. As long as there are men–and women, for that matter–who think this way, feminism will still be necessary.
Filed under: feminism, misogyny | 2 Comments
Rape is not “ambiguous”.
It looks like Dan Savage has taken it upon himself to try and be as big a douche as possible in his latest column, which requires a trigger warning. He could have douched it up a little more, but he does do an admirable job as it is.
The letter, which is signed “Date Rape Engenders Awful Depression”, and its response really go to show you what’s wrong with the world. The woman who wrote it had gone to a party which was also attended by her ex-boyfriend. When she went out to her car accompanied by her ex to get her cell phone, he pushed her up against the car, and despite her repeatedly saying no, raped her, or, as she put it, “had sex” with her. The entire letter is so depressingly full of self-blame and hatred. She feels guilty because she had been drinking. She feels guilty because “I know it sounds stupid, but all I could get out were meek ‘nos’ and ‘I can’ts.’” And most of all, she feels guilty because her douchehound boyfriend seemed to misconstrue her saying, “I’ve just been raped” with her saying, “I just fucked my ex-boyfriend and in was FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC!”
After having settled into a nice, deep depression having just read that letter, Dan Savage tries his best to get you to feel again. That feeling is Hulk rage. He begins his response by telling her, “Understand that you were raped, DREAD—date-ish raped, acquaintance-ish raped, gray-area-ish raped, blurry-booze-soaked-lines raped, and raped under circumstances that would make bringing charges a futile exercise. But raped.” Allow me to translate. What he really means is, “You were raped–it wasn’t real rape, and you can’t do anything about it since you were drunk and have a vagina so that makes you fair game for anyone you’ve so much as smiled at in the supermarket, but it’s still rape, a little bit.” He then tells her that she needs to confront her ex and tell him that, “He needs to hear from you that you regard—and, for what it’s worth, I regard—what happened as rape” and that “if the circumstances were just a little less ambiguous, DREAD, that you would be going to the police.”
What’s so infuriating about this response is how it frames what happened to her as being inherently ambiguous. I understand the difficulty of putting a case like this on trial, not because of the act itself, but because it occured in a society that believes that by leaving her fucking house a woman is consenting to sex. There is nothing ambiguous about what happened to this woman. She repeatedly told him no, he used force, she tried to pull his pants back up… That is what rape is! Just because she’s fucked him before doesn’t mean she’s fair game for him as long as he lives. It is attitudes like this that engender rape, attitudes that say that yeah, rape is bad, but there’s nothing that can be done about it, like a hurricane or something. All you can do is prepare for the worst. That’s bullshit. Rape is committed by human beings and human beings, unlike destructive forces of nature, know when what they’re doing will hurt another person. If they still choose to do it, that makes them at best an asshole and at worst, in cases like rape when the act is illegal, a criminal.
For those of you who are familiar with Savage’s column, he is known for telling people to “Dump the Motherfucker Already”, or DTMFA. If ever a motherfucker deserved to be dumped already it is a man who goes around pouting because he blames his obviously depressed girlfriend for being raped. And yes, Savage does tell DREAD that if her boyfriend continues to be such a self-centered douchehound, she should leave him, there is no call to DTMFA. Well, if he won’t say it, I will. DREAD, your boyfriend is a self-centered, narcisistic, infantile asshole who, if God was just, would awaken one day to find his balls MIA. Incidentally, this is similar to the fate that should befall your ex, except his would ideally be a bit more painful. I implore you, DTMFA! No one needs to put up with that kind of shit after they’ve just been raped. He should be doing everything conceivable to make you feel better, not worse. None of this is your fault. You did nothing wrong. It’s your rapist ex who should be feeling like a guilty sack of shit because that is exactly what he is.
Filed under: misogyny, rape, victim blaming | 3 Comments
Television is a guilty pleasure for me, a guilty pleasure that often turns out not even to be that pleasurable. There is very little on TV that I’ve been able to watch because of the fact that I am a feminist and not in spite of the fact that I am a feminist. However, there is at least one show out there that doesn’t make me feel like I have a thin film of dirt on my skin after I watch it, or at least not in a bad way. That show is Mad Men.
What’ll it be, Stepford wife, sex kitten, or career gal? No matter which way you go, you’re pretty much fucked.
For those of you who haven’t been fortunate enough to see it, Mad Men is, on the surface, a show that centers around a man working in advertising in the early 60s. Beneath that, though, it is about how suffocatingly oppressive the patriarchal norms of the time were. Among the characters on this show you will find some of the deadest, most miserable human beings you have ever encountered. Everyone is trying to hide their misery and secrets behind a face of gender-normative happiness, but as the audience sees, it’s all fake. There isn’t a single well-adjusted person on this show. Fuck, I don’t even know if there’s a single likable person on this show, but it’s not necessarily because of any natural personality tendencies they may have, but because of the way they must operate in such an oppressive environment.
I think that part of the reason Mad Men is able to show the problems of sexism and oppression so well is that it takes place in the early 60s. Although a depressingly large amount of people seem to believe that sexism has disappeared, they are happy to admit that once upon a time, in the dark ages known as the mid-twentieth century, sexism not only existed, but thrived. Portraying sexism as problematic in the twenty-first century is crazy, but portraying it in the 60s? That’s history, and it’s pretty much the only way we’re going to get honest depictions of sexual harrassment, discrimination, rape, misogyny, and the opressiveness of strict gender roles on television.
Having said that, I have one qualm with this show, that being that in the second season, life seemed so much better than the first season. Not to say it didn’t seem completely miserable, but people appear to have mellowed out considerably. One of the copywriters dates a black woman? People look at them a little funny, but the offensive commentary from the peanut gallery is missing. A copywriter tells people he’s gay? There are a couple of jokes regarding which bathroom he uses, but nothing much worse than what you’d get from your standard issue douchnozzle these days. And whereas in the first season the sexism pervaded virtually every interaction, it was much more episodic in the second season; every so often they’ll show a little scene to remind you that hey, sexism existed! Those wacky 60s. But my love for this show runs deep, and I’m willing to forgive it a few minor missteps. Season one is on DVD, season two will be soon, and I hope with all my might that it won’t be long before season three starts up. Check it out: it has the official Crankosaur seal of approval.
Filed under: gender roles, media, misogyny, sexism, television, vintage sexism | 1 Comment
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