2009-08-15 13:50 | Onwards to the feminist stuff.

Two posts have been stuck in my tabs for the past week or so.

1) The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck, at Shakesville, by Melissa McEwan.  It's hard to find one good quote out of that essay, as I would end up quoting the entire thing.  I suppose one that would kind of summarise the post:

These things, they are not the habits of deliberately, connivingly cruel men. They are, in fact, the habits of the men in this world I love quite a lot.

All of whom have given me reason to mistrust them, to use my distrust as a self-protection mechanism, as an essential tool to get through every day, because I never know when I might next get knocked off-kilter with something that puts me in the position, once again, of choosing between my dignity and the serenity of our relationship.

Swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?

This is entirely exactly it.

2a) Harriet Jacobs wrote at Fugitivus about making rape jokes, and it is a good post, but one thing stuck out as something that hadn't occurred to me:

Whenever you hear about the epidemic number of women who are raped, bear in mind that there is an equally epidemic number of rapists.

So telling rape jokes isn't just bad because statistically speaking you might be telling this around a rape victim.  It's bad because statistically speaking, you might also be telling this around a rapist, or potential rapist.  And so you're contributing to the notion that rape jokes are just fine.

I have already nattered about how one can contribute to such things simply by being quiet.  I already know that rape jokes are perfectly awful for a myriad of reasons.  Just for some reason, that phrasing brought home to me, again, that the only reason why rape happens is that rapists exist, and also that I can't, just by looking, tell who they are.

Right, back under the covers for me.

2b) In that same post, she also wrote about jokes being a way to relieve tension.  Quote:

Jewelbeard is extremely liberal. He wants to help people regain their civil rights. He is pro-choice, he is pro-gay, he professes a unremarkable and unverified affinity to anti-racism. But he cannot stop calling his cats filthy sluts, or acting like a fucking asshole in D&D.

[...]

The bear confronted Jewelbeard with his zany douchebag antics, and Jewelbeard offered the excuse he always does: “It’s to relieve tension.” He went on to explain that he totally isn’t sexist — I mean, he’s pro-choice and everything! — and he completely respects women and sexism is wrong like definitely totally, but gaming is his place to cut loose and so that’s why he acts that way when he games.

There is nothing wrong with having a place and a time to relieve built-up tension. But by shifting the argument thataways, Jewelbeard neatly sidestepped the question of why there is a tension build-up in the first place. He is basically admitting that not getting to call women bitches and whores and treat them like he hates them on a daily basis creates an intolerable tension within him, and it must be let out somehow.

More for my "Gah, yes, this!" file. Absolutely.

2008-02-06 09:59 | Goodbye, goodbye.

2007-11-06 23:25 | H/t Pandagon.

Today, on shit I don't admit freely and in public:

This post, a letter written by a mother to her sons (in their future), made me cry.

Think about your duty as a man, as a human being. Think about Hugh Thompson. I know it will be hard. I know you could probably get away with doing nothing, or doing the wrong thing. I know you'll be called pussy, or faggot. I know you may lose friends. But know that if you are in a place where you have the chance to help those who can not help themselves, even if your help angers those who are presumably your allies, there will be a word you will also be called: Hero.

2007-10-02 08:49 | "Could you die in a fire?"

Speak up, I can't hear you – "Can it really be true that men and women understand language in different ways? Nonsense, says Deborah Cameron in this second extract from her new book – the supposed miscommunication is a myth."

Gray seems to be suggesting that men hear utterances such as "Could you empty the trash?" as purely hypothetical questions about their ability to perform the action mentioned. But that is a patently ridiculous claim. No competent user of English would take "Could you empty the trash?" as "merely a question gathering information", any more than they would take "Could you run a mile in four minutes?' as a polite request to start running.

I highly recommend reading that.  It's the second in a series of deconstructing this whole man/woman language barrier nonsense.  First part is here; last part comes out tomorrow.

Oo, another good one:

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out that someone who feigns unconsciousness while in bed with you probably doesn't want to have sex. But nobody criticises the defendant for being so obtuse. In these proceedings, the assumption does seem to be that avoiding miscommunication is not a shared responsibility, but specifically a female one.

EXACTLY.

Go read this article.

2007-09-18 23:15 | Reason #1 why I love my old ratty skirt with pockets

Today's pile of awesome is all in this paragraph:

And do you know what? If you're going to leave a comment that all those tiers would make you look OMG FAT!!!!, please don't bother. There is more to life than the bogus imperative to minimize your apparent body weight at all times. Just for a minute, put down that burden, okay? Think about how that gorgeous fabric would FEEL. Think about how it would SOUND. Think about how you would MOVE in it, where you would GO in it, what you would put in the POCKETS, even, and not on some imagined optical illusion of a few more inches here or there. Now imagine feeling like that all the time — imagine the question "Does this make me look fat?" didn't exist. How would that change your life? What would you do differently? Would it get you to wear this beautiful dress?

For some reason, I hear those last three lines spoken in the voice of the female lead from Chocolat.

2007-04-28 00:07 | That's a good goddamn question.

zuzu at Feministe asks a great question:

Why is this not called terrorism?

In other news, go ye forth and read this speech given by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1913.

2007-01-23 12:08 | I can't think of what else they might mean, either.

This is by commenter cabst90 on the post A Roe Resolution: Trust Women by Jessica Valenti, hosted at The Huffington Post.  I wanted to preserve it here for posterity, because hell yeah.  (Yall should check out the main post, as well.)

All anti-abortion arguments boil down to:

Any woman who has sex before marriage is a whore and should be punished (beaten, and/or forced to give birth and treated like a non-human entity).

Women are not human beings capable of handling moral decisions.

Ultimately men need to make this decision, not women. Male partners, male legislators, male clergymen, etc, because men have a superior moral position on everything. Women must not be given power or privilege in any way that is higher than a man's.

War does not count as murder because those (different race/religion) people deserve it.

The death penalty does not count as murder because everyone we say is guilty is obviously guilty. Mistakes are never made, and we (men) get to play God.

Fetuses are exalted beings because they haven't had the chance to sin yet, but soldiers who have husbands/wives and children are expendable.

Women who were raped probably deserved it or are just lying; women who are poor probably don't work hard enough; women don't experience any hardship by pregnancy or raising children; women who don't have a stable relationship to depend on are whores.

Pregnancy never puts a woman's life in danger.

Women who wait until the third trimester are just irresponsible and whorish. It could never be because of lack of education about her own body and about sex, lack of money, trauma related to abuse, or because certain illnesses in fetuses, or health risks for women may only be discovered late in a pregnancy.

They all seem to boil down to a few themes. Patriarchal nonsense, complete and total ignorance about women's lives including pregnancy, and a belief that a sexual woman is not a valuable human being deserving of basic rights the way a fetus is. A whore < an "innocent" clump of cells.

If I'm wrong, show me.

2006-10-29 12:25 | Someone else, natch, says it better.

Over at Because Sometimes Feminists Are Mean, Vicky quotes a passage from Catherine MacKinnon's book:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights defines what a human being is. In 1948, it told the world what a person, as a person, is entitled to. It has been fifty years. Are women human yet?

That's the beginning of it.  If I were to quote the awesome parts, I'd quote the entire damn thing.  Go ye forth and read it in its entirety, because goddamn.