[Description: Camper shell with window decal of giant waving American flag (duh!) and a bald eagle (double duh!) and the phrase "Conservatism Works" (huh?) Beneath that: "Palin 2012".]
Seen
[Description: Camper shell with window decal of giant waving American flag (duh!) and a bald eagle (double duh!) and the phrase "Conservatism Works" (huh?) Beneath that: "Palin 2012".]
Open Thread
Hosted by Blue Danube.
This week's open threads have been brought to you by things
that share names with song titles.
The Virtual Pub Is Open
[Explanations: lol your fat. pathetic anger bread. hey your gay.]
TFIF, Shakers!
Belly up to the bar,
and name your poison!
Friday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Liss the Big Fat Ugly Slag dolls. For girls and boys!
Recommended Reading:
[TW for racism] Resistance: Citizenship and International Adoptees
Andy: All About Steve: A Big Round-up on JetBlue's Rebel Flight Attendant
[TW for domestic violence] Victoria: Domestic Abuse Survivor Granted Asylum
Atrios: Can't Actually Tie Hands
Melissa: Frances McDormand Takes on a New Role – Producer
Mannion: The preening self-righteousness of a civic-minded blogger...er...um…I mean the humble reflections of a good citizen who happens to blog.
Leave your links in comments...
Bi-Monthly Reminder & Thank You
This is, for those who have requested it, your bi-monthly reminder* to donate to Shakesville.
Asking for donations** is difficult for me, partly because I've got an innate aversion to asking for anything, and partly because these threads are frequently critical and stressful. But it's also one of the most feminist acts I do here.
So. Here's the reminder.
You can donate once by clicking the button in the righthand sidebar, or set up a monthly subscription here. We first made the Subscribe to Shakesville page available last March, which means most of the subscriptions are running out and have to be renewed if you want to keep your subscription active.
Let me reiterate, once again, that I don't want anyone to feel obliged to contribute financially, especially if money is tight. Aside from valuing feminist work, the other goal of fundraising is so Iain and I don't have to struggle on behalf of the blog, and I don't want anyone else to struggle themselves in exchange. There is a big enough readership that neither should have to happen.
I also want say thank you, so very much, to each of you who donates or has donated, whether monthly or as a one-off. I am profoundly grateful—and I don't take a single cent for granted. I've not the words to express the depth of my appreciation, besides these: This community couldn't exist without that support, truly. Thank you.
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* I know there are people who resent these reminders, but there are also people who appreciate them, so I've now taken to doing them every other month, in the hopes that will make a good compromise.
** Why I ask for donations is explained here.
Photo of the Day
The leading contenders for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, according to a new CNN poll. The five dingalings pictured are, from left to right: Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Ron Paul. Fine choices, all! [Getty Images]
In Curious Things
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.
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.
