When a man—Bill O'Reilly, say—does something totally despicable, as part of a long pattern of contemptible things, and people comment on it, they often start their comments like "This asshole" or "This wankstain" or "This diabolical scumbag" or "This nausea-inducing and rage-making human manifestation of pure, unadulterated evil," as in "This jerk wouldn't know an honest statement if it walked up and introduced itself in seven different languages."
But.
When a woman—Sarah Palin, say—does something totally despicable, as part of a long patterns of contemptible things, and people comment on it, they tend to start their comments like "This woman..."
I'm sure that's not reflective of a profoundly misogynist culture in which calling someone a woman in that particular way, spitting it out like venom, is worse than calling her a monster.
Ahem.
In Curious Things
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
You Know What You Need?
A rat playing pan flute:
(With thanks to whomever sent this to me last month, my memory fails, sorry.)
Today in precision marketing
I've got a couple of Gmail accounts. If you're familiar with Gmail, you've probably figured out that Google uses the power of the internet to display advertisements about what you care most about.
At one point I had an account where I was getting (and sending) tons of mail about roller derby. Oh, and I also get a lot of mail from trans organizations at that account. I'd get ads for videos featuring hot transsexuals with knee replacements or some such nonsense. If that's not precisely what I care about most, I don't know what is.
When I signed on as a contributor at Shakesville, I set up a separate Gmail account. Just now I noticed the latest bit of laser guided marketing:
O HAI, if you LOL @ Shakesville, you'll love Charlie St. Cloud.
What part of Deeky's letter didn't y'all read? Gawd.
Quote of the Day
[Trigger warning for sexual violence, misogyny, fat hatred.]
"I find it ridiculously funny that the person crying and getting butthurt is some fat ugly bitch who no one would probably ever rape. Pity the poor man who tried if so, hahahaha!"—One of the many, many trolls in one of the two Penny Arcade threads (one and two), who are deeply invested in defending rape jokes by repeatedly asserting that they don't matter, even as they use rape jokes to try to needle a survivor of rape. (Irony, thy name is the Rape Apologist Troll.)
I, of course, am non-needleable at this point. I have been called variations on a fat, ugly, unrapable bitch more times than I can be arsed to count.
Which is news to me. And the man who raped me.
At this point, I merely find it bitterly amusing that posts criticizing the use of sexual violence in humor inevitably get an influx of people desperate to defend rape jokes, which they assert are meaningless.
Oh yeah? If they're so meaningless, why's it so important to defend them then...?
Prove my point MORE.
[It's truly Fat Princess all over again.]
The NQDTR Discussion Thread - F100813
Hiya, Shakers, time for another Discussion Thread for the Not Quite Daily Teaspoon Report!
This is the thread in which you may offer congratulations or admiration for a teaspoon or teaspooner. If you're posting with just congrats or admiration, though, do take a moment and check the thread to see whether other people have said so a number of times already. Remember that no one is required to read here just because they posted over there, so there's no guarantee you'll get a response to a given comment.
The Not Quite Daily Teaspoon Report - F100813
This seemed a good day for another Teaspoon Report; I think we could all use a reminder of the power of the spoon again.
Leave comments here that describe an act of teaspooning you encountered or committed. They don't have to be big, world-shaking acts; by definition, a teaspoon is a small thing, but enough of them together can empty the ocean.
If you would like to discuss the teaspoons here reported, or even offer congratulations or your admiration to a fellow Shaker, we ask that you do so over here in the Discussion Thread for today's NQDTR.
Shaker bgk has been kind enough to get a Twitter-pated version out there for you young twittersnappers (and by the way, get off my lawn, you meddling kids! *shakes cane*). You can find the details about the Tweetspoons project right here. That runs all the time, as far as I'm aware (*grumblenewtechnologygrumble*), and we encourage you to let other people know that there's at least one tweetstream talking about just going out and doing good things for the human species.
Teaspoons up, let's hear 'em, Shakers!
ô,ôP
Survivors Are So Sensitive
[Trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence and rape jokes.]
Yesterday, Shaker Milli A wrote a guest post about a Penny Arcade strip that included a joke about rape. The two authors, in response to criticism of said comic, then published a follow-up, in which their avatars simply peer out at the audience and say the following:
Tycho: Hello, this is Tycho Brahe, of Penny Arcade. We recently made a comic strip where an imaginary person was raped imaginarily by a mythological creature whose every limb was an erect phallus. Some found that idea disturbing.Quite a pithy—and familiar—reaction. It encompasses the three same old tired strategies that defenders of rape jokes typically employ:
Gabe: We want to state in clear language, without ambiguity or room for interpretation: We hate rapers, and all the rapes they do. Seriously, though. Rapists are really the worst.
Tycho: It's possible you read our cartoon, and became a rapist as a direct result. If you're raping someone right now, stop. Apologize. And leave. Go, and rape no more.
1. Misrepresenting critics' primary objection as the assertion that rape jokes "create" rapists and/or "cause" rape.
2. Summarily treating that idea as absurd.
3. Concluding that critics are thus hypersensitive reactionaries with no legitimate critique.
Most critics of rape jokes object on one of two bases, neither of which are "your rape joke will directly cause someone to go out and commit a rape." (That idea is absurd—which is why it's so appealing to defenders of rape jokes to deliberately misrepresent critics' arguments in such a fashion.) One criticism is that rape jokes are triggers for survivors of sexual violence (and/or attempted sexual violence). The other is that rape jokes contribute to a rape culture in which rape is normalized.
It's that second objection that tends to get repackaged as "your rape joke will directly cause someone to go out and commit a rape," which is, of course, a willful and dishonest simplification of a complex argument. The rape culture is a collection of narratives and beliefs that service the existence of endemic sexual violence in myriad ways, from overt exhortations to commit sexual violence to subtle discouragements against prosecution and conviction for crimes of sexual violence. The rape joke, by virtue of its ubiquity, prominently serves as a tool of normalization and diminishment.
No, one rape joke does not "cause" someone to go out and commit a rape. But a single rape joke does not exist in a void. It exists in a culture rife with jokes that treat as a punchline a heinous, terrifying crime that leaves most of its survivors forever changed in some material way. It exists in a culture in which millions and millions of women, men, and children will be victimized by perpetrators of sexual violence, many of them multiple times. It exists in a culture in which rape not being treated as seriously as it ought means that vanishingly few survivors of sexual violence see real justice, leaving their assaulters free to create even more survivors. It exists in a culture in which rape is not primarily committed by swarthy strangers lurking in dark alleyways and jumping out of bushes, but primarily by people one knows, who nonetheless fail, as a result of some combination of innate corruption and socialization in a culture that disdains consent and autonomy, to view their victims as human beings deserving of basic dignity.
That is the environment into which a rape joke is unleashed—and one cannot argue "it isn't my rape joke that facilitates rape" any more than a single raindrop in an ocean could claim never to have drowned anyone.
But let us pretend for a moment that rape jokes do not convey and sustain the rape culture. That still leaves us with the other criticism on which critics' objections are based: That rape jokes trigger (some) survivors of sexual violence.
Being triggered does not mean "being upset" or "being offended" or "being angry," or any other euphemism people who roll their eyes long-sufferingly in the direction of trigger warnings tend to imagine it to mean. Being triggered has a very specific meaning that relates to evoking a physical and/or emotional response to a survived trauma.
To say, "I was triggered" is not to say, "I got my delicate fee-fees hurt." It is to say, "I had a significantly mood-altering experience of anxiety." Someone who is triggered may experience anything from a brief moment of dizziness, to a shortness of breath and a racing pulse, to a full-blown panic attack.
A survivor of sexual violence who experiences a trigger is experiencing the same thing as a soldier who experiences a trigger, potentially even including flashbacks. Like many soldiers who return from war, many survivors of sexual violence are left with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Unlike soldiers, however, they are not likely to receive much sympathy, or benefit from attempts to understand, when they are triggered. Instead, triggered survivors of sexual violence are dismissed as oversensitive, as hysterics, as humorless, as weak.
Well. Trivializing the concerns of a person whose traumatic experience of sexual violence has been triggered is a legitimate response. But it's not a very kind or decent one.
I will never understand why anyone wants to be the total jerk who evokes someone's memories of being assaulted by blindsiding hir with a rape joke (or image, or metaphor, or whatever), in the guise of "humor." No "joke" is worth triggering someone. Not if you understand what triggering someone really means.
Quite honestly, my objection to rape jokes is not even because I particularly find the jokes personally triggering anymore; I generally just find them pathetic and inexplicable. And while I'm bothered by the fact that the jokes normalize and effectively minimize the severity of rape and thus perpetuate the rape culture, I'm more bothered by the thought of a woman who's recently been raped, who's just experienced what may be the worst thing that will ever happen to her, and goes to the site of her favorite webcomic, or turns on the telly, or goes to the cinema, or a comedy club, to have a much-needed laugh—only to see that horrible, life-changing thing used as the butt of a joke.
I don't understand—and I don't believe I ever will—why anyone wants to be the person who sends that shiver down her spine, who makes her eyes burn hot with tears at an unwanted memory while everyone else laughs and laughs.
And I won't understand as long as I live why people who are told by survivors the damage their rape jokes do—on an individual, intimate level—respond by dismissing survivors as oversensitive, instead of considering the possibility that maybe being desensitized to the abject horror of rape isn't really rather worse.
That maybe it is not survivors who are too sensitive, but they who are simply not sensitive enough.
If Tycho and Gabe want to make rape jokes, that's their prerogative. I'm not calling for a repeal of the First Amendment or asking their strip to be censored; to be perfectly frank, I would love nothing more than for them to continue their comic with a newfound appreciation for why rape jokes fucking suck, and thus not use (or defend) them anymore by their own choice.
But, failing that, I'd like to see them at least be honest enough to admit that their critics are not accusing them of "creating" rapists or "causing" rape—and have the courage not to hide behind mendacious misrepresentations of why people object to their continued use of rape jokes, and the honesty to admit they just don't give a fuck about survivors.
Concentration
From the Florida AP/Miami Herald:
A candidate for the Florida House of Representatives says "camps" should be built to house illegal immigrants in Florida until they can be deported.Yeah, let that sink in. Said candidate seems woefully unaware of how similar ideas have worked in U.S. history. Or, you know, maybe she is.
As if that isn't enough:
Marg Baker, who is seeking the Republican nomination for House District 48, says officials could "collect enough illegal aliens until you have enough to ship them back."The dehumanization in that sentence--as if referring to people as "illegal aliens" is not a clear indicator of her mindset, she actually makes the suggestion that the government "collect" them and "ship" them as if they are cargo.
Baker even threw in a little classism* for good measure:
Baker added the housing would be "regular homes like a lot of poor people live in."Then, just to be sure the us vs. them sentiment came through (minus words like "undesirable" and "dangerous"), Baker warned:
"We need to have camps because there are a lot of these people roaming among us."Emphasis mine.
Ignorance hers.
H/T Quaker Dave He found video (that I just saw this morning and as I am on my way out for a while, I can't transcribe right now). Scratch my idea that maybe she doesn't know about historical precedent. She actually says:
We can follow what happened back in the 40s and 50s. I was just a little girl in Miami and they built camps for the people that snuck into the country because they were illegal. They put them in the camps and shipped them back... we must stop them.
Ms. Baker... while you're reminiscing about history, please remember someone else used camps in the 40s.
__________________
*Of course, much of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, particularly anti-Latino immigrant rhetoric, is classist already.
Jaw-Dropping
This racist rant by Dr. Laura Schlessinger is truly unbelievable, even coming from her intractably pan-bigoted ass. I mean, she had said some unbelievable shit—about LGBTQI people, about women, about people of color, about atheists, about progressives—in her day, but this just takes the everloving cake.
I particularly love the part where she ends the exchange with Jade, her caller, a black woman who is upset her white husband doesn't intercede when his white friends and family members make racist comments, by sniffing: "You know what? If you're that hypersensitive about color and don't have a sense of humor, don't marry out of your race." Wow.
Media Matters notes that audio of the exchange "appears to have been excised from the recording of that day's show that appears on Schlessinger's website." Huh.
Friday Morning Argiope aurantia
Warning: if you do not like spiders and images thereof, please do not look below the fold!
Inspired by Jill's garden spider post, I went out this morning and took a few shots of the glorious black and yellow garden spider (Argiope aurantia) we have living on our front porch in Texas. She does not have a catch this morning, but about every other day, she's working on some large meal.
A black-and-yellow writing spider in the center of her web.
The same spider from a slightly different angle. The focus is not as good here, but I like the sense of depth--you can really see how plump and healthy she is!
Two spider egg sacs by a brick wall under the eaves of our roof. One of the sacs looks to be empty already.
Good Morning! Here's Something That's Awesome.
Our Daughter Isn't a Selfish Brat; Your Son Just Hasn't Read Atlas Shrugged, by Eric Hague. LOL.
[H/T to Shaker RedSonja.]
Today in Bad Ideas
Elle sent me the link to this post by Jamilah King at Colorlines about former Federal Communications Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate's proposed plan (pdf) "to hand out vouchers for broadband service in poor communities, presumably in place of ensuring affordable high speed Internet in every household"—vouchers to which she's given the rather stunning name "broadband stamps." Y'know, like food stamps.
"Rather than new indiscriminate broadband spending initiatives, perhaps certain eligible Americans could have 'broadband stamps,'" she writes in her proposal. The stamps would "allow certain low-income eligible citizens to purchase broadband services on a technology-neutral basis from a cable, telephone, wireless, or satellite provider."King quotes Nate Anderson's description (pdf) of how the plan would work: "The idea is to give low-income Americans a broadband voucher that they could use to order a 'minimum broadband package,' with 'minimum' in this case meaning 'enough bytes to surf the Web and send e-mails to family members.' Tate wants to make sure that this 'circumscribed' broadband offers only rudimentary Internet access so that those who want better service will put some skin in the game and add their own money."
In Tate's view, the vouchers represent a logical alternative to keeping what she termed "Big Government" away from "dictating what Americans 'should' get or what is 'best for them'" when it comes to broadband. The news came just days before Google announced a deal with Verizon that aims to preempt federal regulation of wireless Internet services, a move that could spell trouble for many users of color. And an almost immobilized FCC is scrambling to make good on its National Broadband Plan promises to significantly increase services in rural and urban communities, though first it has to outline its position on how — and if — to regulate service providers in order to make sure that increase happens. So far, it's not looking too good.
Mmm. Call me cynical, but I don't think encouraging tech corps to subsidize this idea is the reasoning behind Tate's advocacy of truncated internet access at all; I would stake money on the real reason being that she imagines, with breath-catching horror, giving poor people internet access only for them to use it to surf porn and play online poker instead or whatever vices she imagines they'll indulge instead of spending their time reading dispatches from the RNC and Focus on the Family.
There are simply too many layers of irony through which to plow in a proposal that asserts to keep "Big Government" from "dictating what Americans 'should' get or what is 'best for them'" by providing vouchers that allow access to limited content arbitrarily chosen by…well…someone! Who isn't Big Government, that's for darn sure!
I'm all for expanding broadband access; the US is significantly lagging behind other developed countries in terms of its broadband infrastructure, particularly in rural and poor urban areas, and we need to be making serious investments in our digital infrastructure as desperately as we need to be rebuilding roads and bridges, if we've any interest in maintaining a marginally competitive economy in the near future. But this proposal just, as Elle said in her email, misses the point.
Not only is its potential efficacy dubious at best; it condescends to the people whom it purports to want to help—people who are already routinely patronized for being "out-of-touch," or some variation on that theme, as it is, by virtue of being too poor to be well connected (in both senses of the term).
And I truly wonder how many of the homes Taylor Tate imagines will qualify for her "broadband stamps" are even in a position to benefit from them. One of the big barriers to poor and/or rural people—at home, at school—getting online (never mind online via broadband service) has long been the cost of the actual technology. PCs are a lot cheaper than they used to be, but that doesn't make them objectively cheap.
A "broadband stamp" won't be of much help to someone who doesn't have $500 for a computer in the first place.
There are better, way better, ideas than this. Of course, they're of the socialist sort, the BIG GOVERNMENT sort, that makes people like Taylor Tate cover her delicate ears with the invisible hand of the market.
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
(Taken from an actual conversation Deeks and I just had...)
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Prop 8 Update
Judge Vaughn Walker has ruled that same-sex marriage in California would not be indefinitely kept on hold while opponents mount their appeal. He has given them six days to fuck around some more, but ordered that same-sex marriage should resume on August 18 failing a contradictory ruling from the appeals court.
Walker said on Thursday that ban proponents didn't convince him that anyone would be harmed by allowing same-sex marriages to resume.I quite genuinely cannot believe the dinosaurs challenging this thing haven't just given up already. Surely even they feel the homomentum at this point. Yeesh.
"The evidence at trial showed, however, that Proposition 8 harms the state of California," Walker said.
…Walker also said that no one can claim harm by allowing same-sex weddings to go forward, but banning them harms gays.
Finally, Walker said it also appears doubtful that the opponents of the ban have any right to appeal his decision striking down a state law that he said should have been defended by either Gov. Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Brown.
Quote of the Day
"One's a virgin, another has slept with 50 men—can you guess how many lovers these women have had? You may be surprised..."—Actual headline in the Daily Mail, on an article in which pictures of women are posted alongside the number of sexual partners they've had in a sort of Aesop's Fable for adults, the moral of which is "You can't judge a slut by her cover," or something.
There is a lot of cringeworthy stuff here, but I am particularly fond of the implicit admonishment to be SHOCKED! that an Asian woman hasn't racked up loads of partners, because you know how they are, with the "sucky sucky long time" and all that, book-ended with the implicit admonishment to be SHOCKED! that a fat woman has slept with FIFTY PEOPLE! because you know how they are, with the being grodius maximus and totes unlovable and stuff.
And lest you think I'm exaggerating, or finding something that isn't there, consider that the entire premise of a surprising reversal ("You may be surprised...") only works if the stereotypes of the Asian whore and the unfuckable fatty are juxtaposed against an Asian virgin and a fat woman who's had lots of lovers.
Fucking UGH.
[Via.]
