As you know, Bob, MWMF has always called itself a women-only space. That’s cool; the world being what it is, there’s a place for women-only spaces, and POC-only spaces, and so on. But the organizer and many attendees get squicked when it comes to transgendered women. (Transgendered men, for some reason, are welcome to attend.) So they’ve set up a “NO TRANSWOMEN ALLOWED” fort and used the academically problematic term “womyn-born-womyn” to exclude certain undesirable sorts of women from the event. (I always wonder how they check these things, but anyway.)

Here’s a great post detailing why MWMF is problematic, and what you can do to fight transphobia there, and in your own life.

In the age of analyzing oppression and owning up to our own privilege, MWMF is an anomaly time-warped from the 70s. Defining a women’s space that excludes trans women in effect defines them as other than women. Denying their common experiences, challenges, struggles and triumphs as women serves to further limit their access to community, health, well-being and dignity. It creates a class of disposable women.

Go read the whole thing.

Best line in the whole article.

Usually I don’t blog about these kinds of studies, as they irritate me no end–either they are driven by a need to prove women are “inferior,” or if the study doesn’t pan out in that desirable direction, they are full of inanities delivered in tones of hushed astonishment–“Girls have caught up on test scores, which researchers attribute to more taking higher math classes like calculus.” Wow! What a brilliant and insightful theory that is. Next they’ll be trying to tell me that if I start eating an extra meal every day, I’ll gain weight.

Just… gyah!!! I mean. Ick. How…? Bleagh.

Our fair leader with March of Dimes national ambassador Catharine Aboulhouda. There’s definitely symbolic layers to this imagery. Layers I would rather not think about.

Whatever It Is, I’m Against It is always good for an interesting snap or six. But jeez, dude, a little warning next time would be nice. There are just some images that can’t be unseen again.

Predictably, the article doesn’t call it sexual assault. But what does this sound like to you?

The girl, who was 16 at the time of the incident, said she was held down by four officers, one for each limb, while a taser was used on her legs and groin area. She said the third shock lasted between five and eight seconds and left her screaming in pain.

This is after they stripped her naked and threw her in a cell. It gets worse:

The girl, who is a high-school student, said her wounds were painful for days. The taser broke the skin, leaving red and bloody circular marks on her thighs. The police didn’t tell the girl’s mother about the incident when she picked her up the next morning, and the girl was too ashamed to tell. As a result, the wounds became infected.

Anyway, as is usually the case with these sorts of gross human rights violations—particularly in cases that involve racialized youth—the cops investigated themselves and found themselves innocent of any wrongdoing.

The Globe and Mail’s pathetic excuse? She was “behaving badly.” Sickening.

She concludes, wondering,

Why, in a country purportedly founded upon the rights of the individual to choose any number of things–why we have created a situation where doing so is overwhelmingly disapproved of, a situation where the only fix in terms of general societal approval would be to remove entirely that right..?

I think it’s because we… don’t. We as a society don’t genuinely value individual choices, desires, and responsibility. We don’t like agency, and we don’t like individuals to have actual power to affect change. We like to say we do, though, because we can leverage that narrative of free choice to legitimize our institutions. “See,” we might say, “women don’t actually want access to employment and equal pay, for when completely free of coercion of any kind, they choose to stay at home and have kids.” Or we might say, “Look, those poor blacks / immigrants / white trash wouldn’t be poor if they didn’t choose to live that way.” Or perhaps, “Fattie fattie fattie stop choosing to be fat fat fat.”

The thing is: if you hold a gun to someone’s head and say, “Believe this. Do this. Live like I tell you to,” you lose a certain amount of authority to claim that your way is superior to any other. Shallow Nietzschen ethics aside, we have some intuition that “because otherwise I will shoot you,” is not an argument that supports, “society should be structured like this.” We aren’t, in short, interested in a free, liberated society because such a thing is valuable for its own sake. We are interested in a free, liberated society—or at least the appearance of one”because it supports our ideology. Because then we can say, “hey, whatever your qualms, with it people freely choose to support a white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” as if such a thing were even possible.

So first of all, this is why it’s important to make individuals responsible for every single negative thing that has happened to them—if not directly, then situationally, in that they have failed to choose to overcome the same adversity that everyone else obviously does. Mockery, derision, and distilled shame are the only effective medicines.

It’s also particularly evident when we decide to—what’s the euphemism? “Export colonialism?” “Engage in neo-democracy?” Something like that, anyway. Especially when the state we’re trying to build isn’t particularly popular with anyone, y’know, living there, maintaining the illusion that this is Exactly What They All Want is crucial.

This is also why we like innovative! entrepreneurial! driven! straight! white! men! who are rebels! bucking the system! by making money and exploiting others in a very slightly novel way. We particularly like IEDSWMWARBTS when they aren’t technically straight, white, or men—after all, Oprah shows us that any black woman can attain incredible wealth, fame, and power, since, see, one has!

In all of these cases, it is completely acceptable and desirable for anyone and everyone to passionately pursue their desires and boldly make individual statements and choices, so long as those choices support and reify patriarchal power structures. Women choosing their career over their children are obviously heartless and demonstrate the need for men to help them make the right choice; women choosing their children over their careers obviously demonstrate that feminism did no good for anybody; women insisting that the choice is a false dichotomy and working against to support their carers and family are, sadly, simply unrealistic.

And God help you if you’re a childless lesbian (tragic), a lesbian with kids (gross!), or a single lesbian (metaphysically impossible).

But lately, we’ve been running into an increasing number of problems, from government organizations. Now, since this is North Dakota, I don’t truly expect them to be on the cutting edge of social justice, but there bureaucratic hangups have started to be annoying.

First, Hubby moved in with me, so my name is the primary leaseholder, but he is on the lease. But, even though he’s on the lease, they still won’t tell him what our rent and utilities are a month. Yesterday, he went to the housing office to pay rent, and he had to guess how much money he needed to put in to cover expenses. It’s really ridiculous.

Last week, I got the title to my car in the mail, and it had the name as “Ms. Antigone Hisname and Mr. Hubby Hisname”. I called up the state DMV, and explained to the clerk that my name was Antigone MYNAME, not Hisname. She looked at the records she had, said “You’re right, you signed your name as Antigone Myname, we are sorry about the mistake. Please just send back the title to the same address, with a note explaining what’s wrong, and we’ll correct this name problem.” So, I sent the title back, and today I got it returned with my name fixed- and his name now “Hubby Myname”. So I called up the nice lady again, and we had the following exchange.

Me: I’m afraid we have a problem. I and my husband have a title to my car, and last week you had it Antigone Hisname and Hubby Hisname. I called up, saying that MY name was wrong, and this week you sent back a letter with Antigone Myname and Hubby Myname”.

Lady: What’s the problem?

Me: Now his name is wrong. His name is “Hubby Hisname”, not Myname.

Lady: I thought you said he was your husband; are you guys not married yet? If you’re not married, we’re going to have to send you a different form for joint title-holding.

Me: No, we’re married; we just both choose to keep our own names.

Lady: Why?

Me: Um, it was easier this way. Why, is this a problem?

Lady: (sounding a little embarrassed) No, I’m very sorry for the mistake. You guys BOTH signed your own names, it was just a mix-up. Please send the title back again, with a note saying that your names are different and we shall fix it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

In the grand scheme of things, these things are minor inconveniences- not worthy mentioning in the face of huge problems. But, they do add up. If my choice to keep my own last name upon that was truly what I said it was, a choice, there wouldn’t be these kinds of problems. I wouldn’t have to worry about carrying around my marriage certificate just because my name is different. If the choice to keep my name over changing it was a toss-up, there would be no problems in convincing people that I was really married. And if it was all about us having the same last name, it wouldn’t be just me, and not my husband, that has to deal with all of these problems.

I really wish I could share more details. The incident gave me some thoughts about working with children that I wish I could get out in the open. But I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement with my company, I’m not using a pseudonym here, and let’s put it this way: my boss is on Facebook, and he’s not afraid to use it.

After spending some extra time at work to deal with the aftershocks from the incident, I made it home. That’s when an earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale hit northern Japan. I was 350 miles south when it came, and it still felt pretty big to me.

Anybody else have an interesting day?

(His previous weighing-in can be found here.)

Being anti-war and being feminist are not mutually exclusive. After all, it’s impossible to support gender equality for women who you’re killing, or even for whom you’re just creating a constantly life-threatening environment. War zones, even once they’re ex-war zones, are where rights for women go to die.

(All pictures from here.)

Though I have argued that Obama appears to share McCain’s bloodthirsty imperialist core, it’s absolutely true that war is not the only issue that our choice of president could affect in meaningful ways. So, despite the fact that Obama has always been pretty lukewarm toward feminism, it’s also true that McCain has been downright hostile to it. Obama as president would surely be better for American women in general.

Women in Iraq, on the other hand — or in any other countries we’re raping to serve the business interests of the Great and Powerful Patriarchy — I’m pretty sure they won’t give a shit. Living in a war zone means the very fight for survival comes first. The things that feminists (quite rightly) fight for in America must seem like impossible dreams to Iraqi women who are forced to sell their bodies in order to keep their children from starving to death. Why is this our problem? Because we’re the ones who put them in this situation.

Since America invaded Iraq, an estimated 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed as a direct result. Surely everyone realizes that this means we’ve killed over half a million women in the bargain? I know it’s hard, but please take a moment and try to imagine what it would be like if some new threat (misogynistic terrorists, militant MRAs, whatever) had arrived on the scene five years ago and begun violently killing over half a million American women, with more killing still to come. Or if that seems like I’m rigging the argument too much, just make it over a million people of both sexes. Or, to make it even more analogous to Iraq, we can just say 3% of our population (9 million people, give or take).

Any which way you cut it, there would be absolutely no other topics of discussion in America. It would be priority number one to deal with. There would be no compromises that allowed the killing to continue at a slower place, no half-solutions which involved convincing the killers to target Canadians instead of Americans or somesuch.

But it’s hard for Americans to imagine that this is really happening to people just as human and important to themselves as we are to ourselves. Our compliant propagandistic press doesn’t show us life on the ground in Iraq. True critics of this war– those who say it’s wrong on every level, not just the way it’s been “poorly managed”– are marginalized and derided in our national discourse.

Let’s face it, the reality of war is just not pleasant to think about. Let’s watch HBO instead.

UPDATE: Ampersand points out that my assumption of 50% female casualties is off by quite a bit. Now I’m certainly no statistician, but if I’m analyzing the Lancet study (pdf) correctly, provided that the male/female death ratio has stayed more or less the same since 2006, we’re looking at 20% female mortality. Which means “only” about 240,000 female deaths directly caused by US involvement so far. (As opposed to 960,000 males. A particularly sick case of “The Patriarchy hurts men, too”.)