when the status quo frustrates.

Sonia Sotomayor’s judgement and the Duke Lacrosse case

Sunday, May 31st, 2009


Sonia Sotomayor at Princeton in the early 1970′s.

Not that these two things ever directly interacted, to the best of my knowledge–but I found myself musing on the latter while reading this article about the former this morning.

Way back in 2006, when the Duke Lacrosse case hit the fan and subsequently spread outwards into the media, I was coming to the end of a period of a year or two where I’d been fairly active posting on an MRA (men’s rights activists) message board. What the heck was I doing there, you might ask..? No, I wasn’t trolling, thank you!–I had simply encountered a few of them on another message board, a feminist message board, that I had been posting on since 2002 or so, and having never heard of any such animal, I was quite interested in the meaning of their existence and what on earth they thought they stood for. I mean, men’s rights activists? Did I miss the period in history where the gender male was actively and specifically legislated against..? The best notion I could come up with on my own was that they objected to Selective Service registration. (As it turns out, that’s not something most of them care very much about, though it does come up periodically.) One of the MRAs on the feminist message board, upon discovering my interest, invited me to an MRA message board that he participated on–I followed him over, and spent the next two years being enlightened on the subject.

At any rate, as one of the very few (I believe only, at that time) resident feminists on the board, I was immediately harassed for my opinion on the case. My opinion was that I didn’t have one–I had no details other than the bare minimum, that a woman of color working as as stripper had accused one or more members of the Duke university lacrosse team of raping her. I had no knowledge of the truth or lack thereof of the accusations, the denials, the claims of evidence, or anything at all, really. My opinion was that that’s what we have a police force and a judicial system for.

But, you know, I was a feminist! And the definition of feminist is woman who instantly believes every word that ever comes out of any woman’s mouth on any subject whatsoever if the persons disputing that word are men, right? …well, no. I am a feminist, and happy to acknowledge that, but I will point you to the dictionary for the definition of that word and subsequently, the definition of what I, a feminist, am.

I was reminded of all this when I read this excerpt from today’s LA Times article, called The Two Sides of Sonia Sotomayor:

After Princeton, at Yale Law School, as a prosecutor and a corporate lawyer in New York, and while serving as a federal judge for 17 years, Sotomayor continued to display a passion for minority rights. She was active on the board of directors of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund when it sued New York City over alleged discrimination in police hiring and the drawing of voting districts, as well as when it challenged New York state’s death penalty law.

Eight years ago, while sitting on the federal appeals court in New York on which she still serves, Sotomayor said it was “shocking” that there were not more minority women on the federal bench.

But little of that activist sentiment is revealed in the hundreds of cases Sotomayor has decided in her 11 years on the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, raising the question of which jurist will present herself if she is given the lifetime tenure and complete independence of a Supreme Court seat.

Thomas Goldstein, a Washington lawyer with a Supreme Court specialty, said last week that he had reviewed 50 appeals involving race in which Sotomayor participated. In 45 of those cases, a three-judge panel rejected the discrimination claim — and Sotomayor never once dissented, he said.

“This is a judge who does not see it as her job to fix all the social ills in the world,” said Kevin Russell, a Washington appellate lawyer who also has analyzed Sotomayor’s opinions.

But in her 1974 letter to the student newspaper–

Whoa, horsies! In the letter she wrote…35 years ago, when she was nineteen years old..? This has, excuse me, what relevance to her today? What were you doing when you were nineteen years old, and for your sake I hope it isn’t really a good and accurate snapshot of your activities now in your mid-fifties..?

But beyond the patent absurdity of such a side-by-side comparison, the deeper issue that I find unpleasant to see as such a widespread issue is that it is not possible to have philosophical beliefs in general and yet be unable to reason logically in any given specific situation. I’m not sure if this is a sexist or racist issue–is it impossible for people to believe that a woman, or a person of color, can be rational about any issue that even remotely touches on gender or race? However, I’m inclined to think it isn’t even that–I’m inclined to think that it is a human issue, because most people find themselves quite unable to formulate a rational, logical opinion on a specific incident that touches closely upon any general philosophical belief that they hold. And because they themselves can’t do it, they both assume that nobody else can, either, and they are subsequently terrified of anyone whose philosophical beliefs don’t agree with their own having any position of power or arbitration whatsoever in their society.

There’s certainly a great deal of evidence for this. Witness the unending struggle in multiple school districts to essentially ban the accurate teaching of the academic subject biology by people who are passionately committed to a religion with a creation story, for instance. And, to present another and more pertinent to this post example, witness the large number of self-professed feminists who quite eagerly first convicted the Duke lacrosse players without knowing a single fact of the case and then, as more facts did come to light, went even further off the deep end by simply flatly denying they could be true, at all. So, clearly many people, indeed, cannot function rationally if the situation in question touches upon their personal philosophical beliefs.

But really, I think it’s amazing to make a general assumption that just because you can’t do it, nobody can. History also abounds with examples of people who can do so and have done so. Harking back to the the evolution vs. creation debacle, most scientists do have spiritual beliefs of some description, and still function quite successfully in their work in unlocking the secrets of life on earth. Interestingly enough, though, these same scientist are far less likely than the general population to hold fundamentalist spiritual beliefs–ie, their belief system is specifically flexible. It seems reasonable to suppose that people in the judicial profession are similarly less likely to hold fundamentalist-style beliefs–or they wouldn’t be in such a profession in the first place, where the search for the genuine and accurate truth of any given situation regardless of preconceived notions is a core part of the profession.

Sonia Sotomayor, from her judicial record, would appear to be a person whose philosophical beliefs do not unduly influence her rational judgement. Will she be credited for that, or is that simply too impossible for those who are hopelessly enslaved to their own dogma to swallow? It’ll be interesting to watch the progress of her confirmation.

31.05.2009 Culture, Mutterings Of The Disturbed, Shame on you for being a woman, Shame on you for not being rich white and privileged, Soapbox, Ze Goggles! Zey Do Nothing! 3 Comments

Let’s Talk About Porn

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

No doubt in a disjointed fashion–frankly, porn is not a big part of my life. If I look at porn four times in a month, that’s unusual. Now, that isn’t because I don’t like sex–I like sex, lots. Nor is that because I don’t have a high sex drive–I do have a high sex drive, one that has not infrequently exceeded that of my partners in the past few decades. Mostly, I don’t use much porn because it’s just more trouble than it’s worth as a sexual aid.

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17.05.2009 Punkass!, Culture, Pr0n, Sex, Soapbox 27 Comments

Sex 2.0! Part Four: You Can Run But You Can’t Hide, Feminists!

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

(Parts One, Two and Three are linked.)

See, this is one of the biggest reasons I don’t listen to Ann Coulter.

(wtf? How did Ann Coulter get involved in this? you might ask. Well–)

Ann has made a career out of, among other things, trashing feminism. The last time I paid any attention to much of anything she had to say was one of the first times I ever paid any attention to her at all–basically I got to the point where she was saying that women needed to get out of public discourse, particularly political public discourse, because they weren’t suited to it and had been screwing everything up in it for decades. Once I heard her say that, I translated it to mean that there was no point in listening to her discourse publicly anymore, particularly politically–I mean, she’s a woman herself. And I never argue with other people who tell me not to listen to themselves, eh?

Generally I am underwhelmed by women who globally trash feminism. Not that being a self-identified feminist has a hell of a lot of meaning these days–given that Sarah Palin, Maureen Dowd, Catherine MacKinnon and Wendy McElroy all insist that they are feminists, I’m not sure exactly what assumptions about them we’re supposed to be making based on that. So, when women state that they have a problem with specific so-called feminists or specific schools of self-identified feminist thought, THAT I have no problem empathizing with. However–

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13.05.2009 Feminism, For the ladies, Lick My Jackboots of Love, Soapbox, What would we do without such great advice? 55 Comments

Don’t put away your #amazonfail tags just yet

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Amazon wowed and amazed us this week with their stunning ability to shoot themselves right in the feet, and while I haven’t seen what the formal resolution to that problem was yet, the general consensus was that they seemed to be trying to do something only moderately shady and fucked up hardcore. On Sunday the interwebs were furious, and by Tuesday they were begging Amazon to just fix the problem and give us a plausible mea culpa so that we could go back to loving them once again.

Unfortunately, they didn’t love us enough to give us even a plausible lie, and now people like my roommate, who care not for GLTB literature but do care about getting fucked on the internet, are seeking out – and finding – new reasons to never trust any Internet business that isn’t NewEgg.com.

A careful review of your account indicates that you have required refunds on a large majority of your orders for a variety of reasons.

In the normal course of business, the occasional problem is inevitable. The rate at which such problems have occurred on your account is extraordinary, however, and cannot continue. Effective immediately, your Amazon.com account is closed and you are no longer able to shop in our store.

There are so many things wrong with this, I feel sure there must be an error:

…3) I am now unable to access archived copies of the Kindle books I’ve purchased legally, and have no other way to legally purchase DRM’ed books on the device.

4) I also have no access to videos I have purchased from Amazon.

5) Since I can’t contact customer service, I cannot get any warranty service for my current Kindle, and the email explicitly states I can’t return anything (not that I’d want to!)

I’ve never had to return anything to Amazon, because I rarely return books and so far I’ve had good luck with non-book purchases, but this would make me pause before purchasing more from them. Returning too many products makes your Kindle not work? That seems a tad harsh. After all, not all Amazon retailers are selling top-quality merchandise (it’s easy to buy crappy electronics when searching for the best deals) and Kindles are not cheap. At any rate, heavy Amazon users might be well advised to look carefully at the terms of service before deciding to stick with what they know. I know I don’t often return things, but I’ve also stopped shopping at box stores if I heard too many scare stories about excessive banning of so-called expensive customers, and I don’t see myself making an exception for the internet stores.

16.04.2009 Soapbox, Technology, capitalism 2 Comments

More complaining about Watchmen!

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

I went and saw Watchmen the night before last. It was OK. I will give them credit for this much up front: it did not feel like a near-three-hour movie. It was not physically painful in the way, say, Titanic was. So, kudos on that, at least.

And I won’t get more into the Antigone/Marcotte topics, other than to give my two cents here rather then have my shining wisdom buried in long threads, which I have not read to their completion so if I ignore something you commented on, you know, forgive me.

And I will spoil the living fuck out of this thing, because my main gripe is with the ending. For your convenience, after my list of non-spoiling complaints, I provide a cut.

1) Dear Zack Snyder: Could you put more schlong in your movies? There’s really no such thing as too gratuitous.

I don’t know how to feel about the films of Snyder’s that I have seen. On the one hand, it’s nice to see male bodies treated like we’re used to seeing female bodies treated. I saw Watchmen with two guys, one who had seen 300 and one who hadn’t, and the one who had said “Well, you kind of feel bad about yourself after watching all those perfect-looking men run around basically naked the whole movie.” “Welcome to the world of women,” I said. Because it’s true. And I generally like his sex scenes, because he directs some of the only sex scenes I’ve seen in a movie theatre that even come close to looking like people actually having sex. Good sex, not romantic comedy sex, but actual sex where both parties get to enjoy themselves. Sure, the people having sex are generally far more attractive than people are in real life, but I’m ok with that because if I ever want to see normal people having sex, well, I have the internet. For movie ticket prices, give me sexy. But not too sexy, because I have to believe it, ya’ know.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s ok for sexy things to hit the cutting room floor. Watching a Zack Snyder movies always leaves me with a creepy feeling that I know too much about Zack Snyder’s fantasy life. And Dr Manhattan’s giant blue god-dick was creepy in its inert ginormousness, like a stuffed blue gym sock taped to his nether regions. I mean, if you’re going to put cock out there where everyone can see it, make it move a little so it doesn’t seem like it’s just kind of floating in the air in front of Dr Manhattan, untroubled and unconnected to the motion of his body.

2) A little updating might not have killed the story line. When the movie first ended, I was quite critical, until my roommate, who had read the comic, explained to me that it was written in 1985, and exactly how closely they had kept to the source material. Knowing that made it a little better. But what seemed gut-wrenchingly scary to people in 1985 (namely, the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction and the fact that there was now enough firepower on the planet to vaporize everyone and everything multiple times) is background noise to people my age and younger, and I am way closer to 30 than I’d like to admit. For us, it’s always been that way, and so the sense of urgency and fright the beginning of the movie was trying to convey seems almost as quaint as those 1950′s videos of children being trained to hide under their desks in the event of nuclear explosion. Oh! For those innocent times when only two superpowers had access to nukes, which were large and obvious and prohibitively expensive! Before the internet, there were no instructions to make your own nuclear bomb on the internet.

I’m old enough to remember the falling of the Berlin wall and the end of the cold war, and while I knew it was a big deal, I remember not being quite clear as to why. The fear of the Soviets and the complexities of the cold war did not make it down to elementary school children in a clear and convincing matter, which is probably part of the reason people who would never joke about the Nazis find Soviet kitsch to be hilarious. By the time we were old enough to understand, it was over, and it was recent enough in history to always be cut short by the end of the year – it was never treated with the same depth or repetition as say, the Civil War or WWII.

The result was I found a lot of that movie to be hokey until I really sat and thought about it. And I’m a thinking, reading person who loves Russian novels and has read quite a bit about Soviet history in the last year or two. Hell, I just returned a library book about fucking chess’ role in the Cold War, OK? I’m saying, I’ve done my independent study on this topic. If the point was lost on me until I had some context for when and why the story was written, imagine how little of it is getting to your average 18-35 year old movie goer? Yeah, that’s right. Your point just got lost in well-choreographed gore and gratuitous blue wang.

3) Could you have made Silk Spectre II look less like Xena? The whole time she was kicking ass I kept on thinking of that Simpson’s episode: “I didn’t know Xena could fly!” “I keep telling you, I’m Lucy Lawless!” She can keep the cute little wiggle dresses though. Those were awesome.

And finally, spoiler, and probably the only place Antigone might agree with me.
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11.03.2009 Cock!, Fiction, Film, Movies, Soapbox 11 Comments

Hailing From the Planet “Hydrocodone,” Maybe?

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

That’s my best guess as to why what’s coming out of Rush Limbaugh’s mouth bears absolutely no relationship to the reality that the rest of us citizens of the United States are currently living.

Jumping into the Wayback Machine–picture it: 1994. Yours Truly is a 21-year-old married mother of an eighteen-month-old, just about to start her first semester of college. She has no computer and only watches TV when forced to do so by either her equally young husband or small son (some things sure haven’t changed)–she gets all her information on what’s going on in the wide world outside her small apartment from, get this, newspapers and magazines! (Wow, does that seem Neolithic, though.) Anyway, one day she picks up one or the other of the latter, and sees a large, smirking, suited Conservadroid adorning the front with headlines screaming beneath–“Oh, That Rush Sensation!”

Mildly curious, she flips through the pages til she gets to the relevant article–”The new face of fear for liberals everywhere!” it breathlessly proclaims (or something like that–this was fifteen years ago, people). While she did not, at that time, particularly consider herself a “liberal,” she was interested to discover more about this man who supposedly had them all quaking in their boots–! Further perusal revealed that this Rush Limbaugh person had a radio talk show, so she resolved upon giving it a shot–she herself thought there were some real issues with the standard set of “liberal” beliefs as she knew them, and she wanted to hear somebody really tackle them in a populist fashion.

Heh. Well, she listened to him. And he was…well, stupid. As in, unintelligent. Clearly unintelligent. Objectionable too, yeah, sure–but she didn’t really care about that–she cared that he was D-U-M-B. This was the terror of the libs..? but he wasn’t even BRIGHT! Hadn’t stupid people opposed to liberal ideals already abounded for generations..? What was so special about THIS one..?

Jumping forward in time to the present day, no, I still haven’t figured out his peculiar draw. Much like with Ann Coulter, I admit I don’t and have not, since way back when, spent any real time trying to figure them out–lack of interest. It’s hard to respect an opponent, even one who clearly has a great deal of power and influence, who says things that really underscore the fact that the possessor, if not actually in the barely-100′s IQ range, is of an intellectual laziness that ends up producing the same result as if he or she were.

Mostly when I think of Rush Limbaugh (which as I said, is seldom), I remember something I saw him say on TV sometime during the nineties. He was looking at the camera–directly at it–and smiling; and he said, “I’m just a harmless, lovable little fuzzball!” (Now that I think of it, it might have been some kind of infomercial for a book or TV show or even his radio talk show. But I’m really can’t recall anymore.) I remember, though, listening to him say that, and watching his eyes as he said it–he had the smallest, deadest eyes–I’d seen plenty of eyes like that, growing up, on the most vicious of the wife-and-son-beating, daughter-raping backcountry crowd–the ones with fingernails black deep under the quick, years-old stench emanating from every possible bodily orifice, and always ready with a joke to underscore their hatred of women, minorities, gays, and God forbid, fuurreigners. I remember wondering if his devoted listeners actually felt that he WAS harmless and/or lovable, or if they got the joke–he was about as harmless and lovable as the men I described in the previous sentence, but also just as fuckin’ scary–the kind of man nobody messed with if they could avoid it.

But no matter how much I ignore him, Rush Limbaugh does not go away. Here he is again, happy to demonstrate as always that his perception of what’s really happening in the US is the same whether he is actually tripping on something at that particular moment or not.

Rush Limbaugh calls on conservatives to take back nation

Scary. They’ve had it for eight years, and we can all see what they’ve done with it. I mean, this is not me making some kind of brilliant and insightful point. This is common knowledge. This is a lot like the president of NAMBLA demanding that the cops give him back all the little boys they removed from his home.

Rush:

“We conservatives have not done a good enough job of just laying out basically who we are, because we make the mistake of assuming that people know. What they know is largely incorrect, based on the way we’re portrayed in pop culture, in the drive-by media, by the Democrat party,” the conservative talk show host told a mostly young crowd of energized supporters.

Again…what we know of who they are we have learned in the past eight years of watching our civil liberties gutted, our nation go to war and our economy collapse.

And another thing about that “mostly young” crowd. Was it, by any chance…a mostly male young crowd? The article doesn’t say, but I wonder.

Limbaugh’s impassioned keynote speech, punctuated by chest-thumping, fist-pumping and chants of “USA” from the crowd, capped off three days of talk at CPAC focusing on rebuilding the Republican Party.

“He played to his crowd here,” CNN political editor Mark Preston said. “And this crowd is now energized, something we haven’t seen from Republicans, certainly not conservatives, since the November election.”

Mmm…”Sarah Palin.” And we all saw how well that worked out for the Republican party, didn’t it? What is it about the Republican party that attracts these, well, televangelical showman types..?

Limbaugh used his self-described “first national address,” which ran more than an hour longer than his allotted 20 minutes,

These really massive and flamboyant egos…

to accuse President Obama of inspiring fear in Americans in order to push a liberal agenda of “big government.”

“He wants people in fear, angst and crisis, fearing the worst each and every day, because that clears the decks for President Obama and his pals to come in with the answers, which are abject failures, historically shown and demonstrated.

For the third time…the abject failure, historically–recent history, the past eight years!–shown and demonstrated, was the answers provided to us and implemented by the socially conservative, internationally Neocon, utterly unregulated “free market” government that I believe Rush Limbaugh has been masturbating to, loudly and on air, for the past eight years.

Well…if Rush Limbaugh really is the “new” face and leadership of the twenty-first century Republican party…one of two things will happen. His stupidity and insanity will come to its natural limits of a quarter or less of the population that are similarly stupid and/or insane enough to drink his up like Jonestown Kool-Aid, and that’ll be that–he’ll become yet another one of America’s quirky political sideshows that give the rest of the world so much fodder for their comedians. OR…he’ll galvanize a sufficient majority of the nation, the one that wholeheartedly embraced the “Patriot Act” and the war in Iraq, that we’ll find ourselves, in four years or so, tumbling back in the morass that was created by the Bush administration. If that occurs, certainly, the majority will get what they deserve. It will be rather hard on the minority that didn’t, but that’s one of the built-in flaws of a democracy.

As distasteful as it is, I suppose I had better keep an eye out…just so I’m not entirely taken by surprise however it turns out.

02.03.2009 Culture, If I have to suffer you have to suffer, Media, Politics, Soapbox, for reals 1 Comment

“Rapelay”

Sunday, February 15th, 2009


Not RapeLay. More like what my head does every time RapeLay comes up on the internet.

I’d heard of this game once before, sometime last year, I think–my initial and instinctive reaction was revulsion, of course, and it was the same this time when I came across it again–

But, I thought, for some reason this time impelled to actually analyze my feelings…why am I so revolted? The reason I actually felt moved to give it more thought this time round was because of a recent few minutes I spent watching my older son play Fallout 3.

I absolutely loved the first two Fallout games, and if I weren’t still deeply inmeshed in World of Warcraft, would no doubt have been all over it as soon as I gave it to my son this past Christmas (with a small token pause in my headlong rush in acknowledgement of the fact that I bought it for him, not me!). Naturally, by this time he’s already played it through more than once, but he was feeling at loose ends the other day and decided to give it another run, and I sat and watched him play for a little while.

If you haven’t played Fallout 3 yourself yet, lemme tell you–some of those deaths are gory. The Fallout 3 graphic captioning this post is actually not the most grotesque end your various foes in the game can come to at your hands–and just like the earlier games, you can target specific body parts, but unlike the previous games, the special effects graphics are really state-of-the-art when it comes to depicting the mayhem subsequently wrought. I was simultaneously fascinated and repelled, and it came back to haunt me later–why am I so up-in-arms about a videogame displaying cruel and graphic rape and yet relaxed enough about a game that displays cruel and graphic murder enough to buy it for my son for Christmas..? After all, I even consider murder a worse crime than rape–murder is the worst crime there is. Any other crime committed against your person, the chance always exists, however great or slight, that you may someday recover some to all of your quality of life. When you’re murdered, guaranteed! you will never get over that.

After some brow-furrowing thought, I managed to boil the salient differences between the two games down to three points:

1. The point of the game: Fallout 3 is not Murder 3. The object of the game is not simply to murder as many different people as possible, one after the other. In RapeLay, the object of the game is simply to rape, period. In Fallout 3, the player is trying to complete the main and side storylines present in the game–generally rescuing person A or finding site B or recovering important object C–the killing is also frequently in self-defense or in defense of others. In RapeLay, the player is there to rape every member of a specific family that crosses his path; there are no storylines to complete and certainly nobody that can be saved by the rapes committed–quite the opposite; the goal is to torture them all until they break.

2. The specificity of the victims: Fallout 3 is not Klansman 3. The people that are killed are of every race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation–those attributes are generally cosmetic only and quite irrelevant to the point of whatever storyline the player is engaged upon. Now, it would be quite different if the player was portrayed as white and every single person the player could kill was portrayed as black, wouldn’t it? In RapeLay, the player is there solely to assault females. Women. Girls. Period. The violence presented is aimed solely and only towards one specific subgroup of humanity.

3. The age of the victims: Fallout 3 is not Pedophile 3. As a matter of fact, in Fallout 3, you can’t kill kids at all. There are child characters, but they are unkillable. By contrast, in RapeLay, you are specifically encouraged to rape, I quote, “virgin schoolgirls.” ‘Nuff said.

Rape culture, anyone..?

15.02.2009 Gaming, Rape, Soapbox 15 Comments

The Revised Church of Homophobia

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

I am tired of the tiptoeing around and kid glove treatment that these assholes automatically get because they associate themselves with Jesus. Spare me this holiday season–please?

No? Well, let me help you, then.

The Pope’s Christmas Gift: A Tough Line on Church Doctrine Vigorous Support of Ten Years to Life in Prison For Teh Homos*

and

Split in Episcopal Church hits new level
Conservatives who fled liberal views of Scripture believe that Teh Homos should be publicly reviled and burn in Hell have formed a breakaway church in North America.

There–much more accurate. Don’t they want their message gotten across more clearly? I’m sure they do!

*The pope also says, Stop touching each other before Mass–we can’t tell which of you are Teh Homos when you do that!

04.12.2008 Human Rights, Media hackery, Moronic Religions, Soapbox, Teh Gay, Wankers, Ze Goggles! Zey Do Nothing! 1 Comment

The Evolution of A Feminist; or, Don’t Like Feminists? Stop Helping Create Them.

Friday, November 21st, 2008

(Cross-posted from Glenn’s site. Note: Feminist-friendly moderation is in effect.)

Pat Robertson said it best: “”Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” More succinctly put, feminism is a favorite whipping girl. Feminism has become that magical word–”mainstream”–but that hasn’t made it popular or generally regarded in a positive light. And of all the folks out there that really hate feminists, men’s rights activists are probably among the most virulent and vocal about it.

The big difference between hating black people or Jews and hating feminist women–the difference espoused by people who hate the latter and not the former, say–is that black people or Jews are born that way. It isn’t a choice; being a feminist is a choice, a philosophy, not an ethnicity. Very true–but this argument leads to another, conspicuously not followed through upon by those who advocate it. As they say, feminist women are, indeed, not born feminist. But this does beg the question, doesn’t it..? –why do they become feminist?

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21.11.2008 Dudes, Feminism, Men's Rights Activism, Rights? What rights?, Soapbox, for reals 91 Comments

I’m Not Happy

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

“My”* guy won last night. We have elected our first black president in the United States; a date that will go down in history and I am predicting might be one of our generation’s “Kennedy moment”**. We will be asked by our children where we were when we heard that the first black president was elected.

Anti-choice measures all across the country failed tonight (including the 3-peat “Parental notification” measure that failed in California). Children won’t have to worry about being thrown out of a house or beaten because of an unwanted pregnancy.

Dole, the atheist-baiting bigot, was defeated in Nouth Carolina.

But, like getting an A on all of your classes but failing one, my disappointment today is about Proposition 8 in California. I was hoping against hope that people wouldn’t want to take away people’s right to marry. I was hoping against hope that even though they wouldn’t give the rights to people, that they would recognize those self-same civil rights when the courts were forced to step in.

But they didn’t…

And now, after a major stepping stone forward for the civil rights of one group, all I can think of is the civil rights lost to the ones who tripped and fell. They lost their right to legal recognition of their love, and all of the privileges therein. All of the rights of marriage: the health care from the partners insurance, the community property, the tax break, the visitation rights; all of the things that took me and my Hubby 15 minutes and 65 bucks; are being taken away from people who are my friends and loved ones.

All so people don’t have to tell their children that gay people exist. All so people get to keep the magical word “marriage” to their happy little heterosexual selves. All so “traditionalists” who don’t what the hell the word “tradition” means can stay stuck in their backwards, bigoted world, afraid of how fast the world is changing, and too lazy to want to keep up with it. And this is bigotry; plain and simple. This is not wanting homosexual people to have the same rights as heterosexual people, because some pastor said that a 2000-year-old book written by a bunch of bronze-age, nomadic goat herders about a megalomaniac, sadistic sky fairy that had been translated and re-translated a bunch of time through the centuries had a few, taken-out-of-context phrases that meant to literally say that “gays are icky”.

I’m disappointed, and I’m furious. I’m angry because I’m now going to be told that the gay rights movement just needs to ask nicer next time, and if they wouldn’t be so in-your-face about it, and just wait nicely, then they would have won. I’m angry because people are proud in their bigotry: they are CELEBRATING it under some sort of fuzzy definition of “values”. And I’m angry because anger is a much more productive emotion than sorrow.

*Technically, I would have preferred McKinney. But, Obama’s the one I voted for.
*That and 9-11.

05.11.2008 Punkass!, Culture, FUCKING IDIOTS, Family, Godbaggery, Human Rights, Soapbox, discrimination 14 Comments

Mmm, Babies! They Stay Crunchy in Milk.

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

I like babies. They’re cute. I have about 50,000 pictures of my sons as babies and with the slightest encouragement, especially after a glass of wine or two, I will happily haul them out of the closet and make you admire each and every one of them.

However, I am pro-choice. I say “however” because clearly, there is a fair contingent of people out there who genuinely believe that people who are pro-choice don’t give a rat’s ass about babies. Sometimes, they even seem to believe that what pro-choice people really, secretly want to do is rend and splatter as many babies as possible limb from limb, and the only reason women are out there still getting abortions is because they just don’t realize that that’s what abortion is really all about. For example:

Oklahoma’s new [abortion] statute dictates that either the doctor performing the abortion or a “certified technician working in conjunction” with that doctor do the ultrasound, “provide a simultaneous explanation of what the ultrasound is depicting,” and also “display the ultrasound images so that the pregnant woman may view them.” The law goes so far as to specify the doctor’s script: The physician must describe the heartbeat and the presence of internal organs, fingers, and toes.

Widdle fingers and toesies! (ahem) I repeat, WIDDLE FINGERS AND TOESIES!!!!! To be smashed, crushed, torn, shredded into bloody BITS!!!!

Next up! Addendum to the statute: “Doctor (or a certified technician working in conjuction with doctor) must describe embryo’s desperate screams of ‘No, Mommy! Noooo! Don’t let them rip me apart, Mommy! I love you!’”

(Sigh.)

Usually, I’ve tried to shoot for compassion in my dealings with the pro-life mentality. As I said, I like babies and I think they’re cute. However, I’ve noticed that with the passage of years, my patience has shrunken gradually down to, well. The size of an eight-week old embryo. This big: ——-.

I’ve gone into great detail about my abortion stance and my feelings about the pro-life stance on more than one occasion already; I won’t rehash them yet again. I believe, though, that I am officially “done” with attempting to extend any sort of respect at all towards those who self-identify as “pro-life.” Seriously, why should I extend respect to people that have codified it into law that they have not only no respect, but anti-respect for those who self-identify as “pro-choice?” That does not mean that I will cease to extend respect towards those who personally would choose to never have an abortion; that is an eminently respectable position. It definitely doesn’t mean I will cease to extend compassion to any woman who was pressured into or otherwise regrets her abortion; that is a personal, not political, matter. However, anyone who affiliates himself or herself with any group of persons seeking to pass legislation that restricts, in any way, the right of women to choose..? I consider you fair game the minute you open your mouth (or heat up your keyboard) to say so. Be warned.

23.10.2008 Bodily Autonomy, Lick My Jackboots of Love, Purposefully Inflammatory, Reproductive Rights, Rights? What rights?, Soapbox, What Patriarchy? 26 Comments

Beauty, Power and Feminism: Part 1

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

Antigone, our happily married blogger, upon posting her wedding pics:

I would also hope that this would not undermine any credibility I have as a feminist, based on my appearance (for good or for ill), but again I have no guarantee of that. I always thought that people who put their photos out there (particularly feminist bloggers) were brave: they deal with all this stupidity day-in and day-out, and it just seems to roll off their back…If I write that “women are judged on beauty standards that don’t have a reasonable basis in reality, and those women who do meet those ridiculous standards are rewarded with illusonary and temporary benefits to undermine everyone else” someone can come back with “Well, you just say that because you’re ugly”. Even if I respond “that has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand, and whether or not those unreasonable standards are moral or not”, it is still an effective method in derailing the thread.

Is our Antigone imagining things? Being overly sensitive? Hysterical, perhaps? Nope, I don’t think so.

From Feministing’s troll mailbag just a few days ago, for a quick and easy example:

Why are you obsessed with Sarah Palin? Are you jealous of her? Are you pissed that she has accomplished things without whining like a little child? Before you get all upset and call me a right-wing nut, I’m not voting for McCain/Palin or Obama/Biden. They all suck. But, you girls on feministing.com are what I would call stereotypical women. You are jealous, angry, and resentful of women who have success. It’s probably because she is hotter than any of you girls on feminsting. And that is at age 44. You girls have no chance of being that hot when you are that age.

Yep, yet another in an endless line of variations on the theme of feminists and how butt-ugly they are. Endless, seriously. And it’s completely ridiculous, because as any random sampling of pictures of women all over the philosophical spectrum when it comes to gender equality will demonstrate to you, feminists as a group are neither unusually ugly nor unusually beautiful. They look like…brace yourself!…women who aren’t feminists look as a group! They look like, well, just like women in general.

So why is “ur uglee!” such a pervasive and frequent component of anti-feminism? One easy answer, of course, is that people who don’t like feminists want to hurt feminists’ feelings, and it is a cultural standard that to insult a woman’s looks is the harshest criticism of her you can put forth. Her beauty, after all, is her most significant intimate personal asset, as a man’s virility is his, and the types who have a burning resentment of the ideals of feminism are frequently obedient robots when it comes to regurgitating the most reactionary of cultural stereotypes. So, no doubt they feel they’re delivering a crushing personal blow. But I think it goes deeper than that.

(more…)

04.10.2008 Culture, Feminism, Human Rights, Lick My Jackboots of Love, Soapbox, What Patriarchy? 62 Comments

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