[Content Note: Violence; homophobia; racism.]
FMF News: "An amendment to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) proposed by Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-IA) failed yesterday on a 65 to 34 Senate vote. The proposed amendment would have removed protections for LGBT victims of domestic violence, allow for new restrictions on U visas given to immigrant victims of domestic violence, prevented tribal courts from prosecuting non-Native defendants who are accused of assaulting Native women on tribal lands, and would even eliminate the language 'woman' from the largest grant program within VAWA."
Basically, Grassley's amendment wanted to remove all the things that Republicans used to justify blocking the reauthorization of VAWA, protections which Republican Senator Jeff Sessions accused Democrats of adding to the legislation specifically so the GOP would object to them.
These are the great minds [sic] of the modern Republican Party: Unilaterally opposed to protecting vulnerable people from domestic violence and abuse, and so profoundly removed from good faith that they assume anyone who supports protecting vulnerable people from domestic violence is only doing it to make them look bad.
Good Riddance
Number of the Day
[Content Note: Gun violence.]
67%: The percentage of Republicans who believe that video games "are a 'bigger safety threat' than firearms — only 14 percent think the reverse."
I honestly can't even wrap my head around the sort of selective thinking that allows one to hold such a belief. As has been loudly and contemptuously observed by Iain (and rightfully so) every time he has to listen to that shit on some cable news show, the US is not the only country in which people play lots of video games, including violent first-person shooters. The US is, however, rare in its easy access to a wide variety of guns for most of its residents.
Friday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by fruit roll-ups.
Recommended Reading:
Veronica: Dear GOP: Latinas Vote Too
Indian Homemaker: From the Patriarchy Ain't a Picnic for Men Either Files
Verónica: Immigration Reform: What Queer & Trans Immigrants & Our Allies Need to Know
Rachel: New Study Shows Excellent Outcomes in Birth Centers
Andrea: The Curious Incident of the Trans Feelings
Jorge: NYPD Breaks Down "Stop-Frisk" Data by Precinct and Race
Mike: A Deficit Reduction Plan I Can Get Behind
Sarah: Putting Sexual and Reproductive Rights at the Center of the HIV Response
Trudy: If "President Fitzgerald Grant" of Scandal Were Black
Angry Asian Man: Race Is Not a Party: Fraternity suspended for "Racist Rager"
Leave your links and recommendations in comments...
The Parks and Rec Open Thread
"The Knope Way involves a lot of uterine cartoons."
(Spoilers are eating fartcicles herein.)
Oh, Parks and Recreation. How I love you! Let me count the ways! I THINK IT'S ABOUT ONE MILLION!
Taintball! Treacherous calzones! Farts McCool! Fruit roll-up thumbs! I don't even know what to do about this episode! It was an embarrassment of riches!
First, this was a great episode for April—dare I say the episode for which we have all been waiting! Yay for April! She rocked it big time. And it was always going to be that April succeeded when she did it Her Way, but it was still a triumph when it happened, because Parks and Rec is amazing.
Second, I looooooved the dudes doing the wedding planning, and because I am a blub-monster, I totally got all choked up when JJ told Ben he was sending some waffles for Leslie and Ben's eyes lit up with the obviously perfect idea of having JJ's cater the wedding of the millennium. Perfect.
Third, the entire food poisoning scene was so fucking hilarious, I was absolutely breathless. Ron Swanson's butt-clench walk totally sent me over the edge. Brilliant.
And last but definitely not least, I could not have been any more thrilled with the way this episode obliquely dealt with the issue of choice, and how even pro-choice women sometimes struggle to balance their principles against a culture that exhorts us to judge women's choices. "I tried to impose my dream on you and that's wrong. And I'm sorry." So terrific. SO TERRIFIC.
Other things!
"It was LITERALLY just a small calzone." "Fleetwood Mac Sex Pants—new band name! I call it!" "I was dying earlier today. And then I died. Now I'm dead." "Whoa! It smells like some vomit took a dump in here! What happened?!" "I have driven Ann right into the belly of The Douche!" "This bag is full of fruit roll-ups and baseball cards!" "There's not gonna be a topless park, Darius! Nobody wants your creepy stoner eyes staring at them while they're enjoying a park, okay? Stop being gross." "What is more cuterous than your uterus?"All the swoons. Discuss!
Daily Dose of Cute
Zelda
Dudley
Look at those faces. I love those faces SO MUCH! They are the sweetest dogs, and every day I have the privilege of knowing them, I am heart-swellingly grateful that they are a part of my life.
Please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
In The News
Your regular In The News correspondent, Deeky W. Gashlycrumb, MD., is off while he delivers a Butt Seminar at the Stethoscope Institute.
[Content Note: Drones; violence; homophobia; fat hatred.]
John Brennan defends the Obama administration's drone strike policies during the Senate hearing on his nomination to head the CIA.
Meanwhile, the FAA has released a drone authorization list, showing 81 public entities that have applied, through October of last year, for FAA drone authorizations, for the purpose of surveillance. SO THEY SAY!
The search continues in California for ex-LA cop Christopher Dorner who is suspected of killing three people.
Some Bush family emails have been hacked and personal information made public. This is terrible, because hacking private email accounts is the fucking worst and also because I had to read about the Bush family.
Six health classes of students in Maryland got an eyeful of "ex-gay therapy" garbage before the video was pulled. Gross!
Paul Krugman reminds us that austerity is a terrible, no-good, very bad idea.
Meanwhile, austerity measures are already affecting education, food safety, WIC programs, housing, social security, child care funding, aviation safety, and community investment. Whoooooooooops!
Viola Davis is tired of playing a maid. She is THE BEST.
Rex Reed, who is a horrible jerkbag, lobs vicious anti-fat bigotry at the amazing Melissa McCarthy in his review of her new film, Identity Thief.
All dogs go to heaven in England must be microchipped by April 6, 2016.
Do you want to look at some things fitting perfectly into other things? Welp, here ya go!
Discussion Thread: Elementary School Gym Games
Recently, Kenny Blogginz and I were recalling the parachute game in elementary school gym class — we're all UNDER the parachute! now we're all ON the parachute! — and how we both thought that it was unique to our school because the gym teacher had just found some old parachute lying around and made up inexplicably weird games with it, and how surprised we were to find out it was A Thing.
From there, we reminisced (often cringingly, since neither of us was exactly a gym class star) about the rope climb, and how no one ever taught us to shimmy up the rope like it was an innate human instinct and how we never understood how to do it and would just dangle at the bottom limply, lol, and about the dreaded dodgeball, and basketball sprints, and jump-rope stations. We laughed at how many of these seemingly random games that seemed surely to be the products of our gym teachers' (lack of) imagination were actually super common gym class games for American (and often not-American, as Iain has confirmed) kids.
About the only game I remember really liking was four-square, probably because it was one of the only regular elementary gym class games at which I had even the slightest proficiency.
Anyway! What gym class games do you remember? Which ones did you like? Which ones did you dread? Did YOU play with a rainbow parachute? DO TELL!
Headline of the Day
[Content Note: Fat bias.]
Politico: Chris Christie struggles with politics of his weight.
Ha ha sure. Or: Chris Christie struggles with fat bias, body policing, and gross prejudice.
Yeesh.
Question of the Day
You have been tasked with casting a big-screen adaption/reboot of the classic sitcom Laverne & Shirley, and you have to cast the roles of: Laverne, Shirley, Lenny, Squiggy, Mr. DeFazio, and Carmine. You are not bound by gender, nor are you required to cast them as any particular race, age, body type, etc. The DeFazios can become the Nguyens or the Joneses in the rewrite, for instance.
So: Who do you cast?
Laverne: Rachel Dratch.
Shirley: Melissa McCarthy.
Lenny: John Carroll Lynch.
Squiggy: Ian Gomez.
Mr. DeFazio: Gene Wilder.
Carmine: Questlove.
[Previously: Star Wars: Episode IV; The Matrix.]
Important Announcement
The photo was taken at the opening of Pink's Hot Dogs in Universal City in April 2010, and I just love everything about it. I love the ferocity with which she is biting into that hotdog; I love the expression on her face; I love her daintily raised pink-manicured pinky, which is hilarious specifically because it is not an affect, but just part of the natural way a lady eats a dog with gusto OBVIOUSLY.
She's the best.
Today in Rape Culture
[Content Note: Sexual violence; victim-blaming.]
Last month, I mentioned that the Somalian government had arrested Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim, a freelance journalist who wrote a story about a woman who had been raped and alleged that her rapists were government security forces. Ibrahim has now been sentenced to one year in prison for helping the woman "fabricate a false claim."
The woman has also been sentenced to a year in prison, after a midwife conducted "a finger test, an unscientific and degrading practice that has long been discredited because it is not a credible test."
The grounds for the convictions are unclear, but the court appeared to convict the two under Somalia's penal code and newly added charges under Sharia (Islamic) law. The journalist, Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim, was sentenced to one year for fabricating a false claim – even though he never published the allegation anywhere – entering the home of another man without permission, and falsely accusing a government body of committing a crime that damages state security. The woman was also sentenced to one year in prison for fabricating a rape case that damages state security.Clearly, the implications for challenging human rights violations when victims and journalists and/or advocates are jailed are dire.
..."These guilty verdicts mean that any Somali who is raped or otherwise abused by Somali security forces will think twice about reporting it to the police, and journalists will be cautious of even interviewing victims of human rights violations," said Netsanet Belay, Africa programme director at Amnesty International. "The government should quash the case and order the immediate release of the journalist from prison."
In an official statement, the US State Department registered its concern about the case and called on "the Somali Government to act quickly to protect human rights and strengthen the rule of law." Which is kind of a muddled statement, in that the rule of law is currently what's undermining human rights. Still, this is good:
Respect for women's rights and media freedom are fundamental to ensuring the development of a strong, stable, and vibrant democracy in Somalia. Women should be able to seek justice for rape and other gender-based violence without fear of retribution, and journalists in Somalia must be free to work without being subjected to violence and harassment. These prosecutions run counter to protections contained in Somalia’s provisional constitution, and send the wrong message to perpetrators of sexual and gender-based violence. We have raised our concerns directly with the Somali Government and have urged it to uphold its constitution, including with respect to media freedom, women's rights, and due process of law.
To contact the US State Department and urge them to continue pressing for justice in this case, go here. For those who would appreciate a sample letter, I'll drop the letter I sent into comments.[Via FMF News.]
Fatsronauts 101
Fatsronauts 101 is a series in which I address assumptions and stereotypes about fat people that treat us as a monolith and are used to dehumanize and marginalize us. If there is a stereotype you'd like me to address, email me.
[Content Note: Fat bias; body policing.]
#18: You can diagnose fat people's health issues by looking at them.
No.
I kind of want to just leave it at that, ahem, but I feel obliged to note that even this myth has embedded within it another myth—that all fat people must have health problems. Which: Also no.
And even when a fat person has a visible health and/or mobility issue, it is, as I have observed many times previously, bad math to axiomatically presume that the issue is caused by fat. Sometimes they are unrelated. Sometimes, in cases where they are related, weight gain may have been a result of the health and/or mobility issue, rather than the other way around.
When you look at a fat person, all you can fairly conclude about them is that they are fat.
Anything else is prejudice.
-------------------------
Previously:
#17: Fat people's choices are always dictated by their fat.
#16: You are helping fat people by shaming them.
#15: Fat people hate having their pictures taken.
#14: All fat people are unhealthy.
#13: Fat people looooooooooove Twinkies!
#12: Fat people don't like/want to see media representations of themselves.
#11: No one wants to be fat.
#10: Fat people need you to intervene in their lives.
#9: Fat people don't know how they look.
#8: Fat people don't deserve anything nice.
#7: Fat people are permission slips for thin people to eat what they want.
#6: Any fat person eating a salad or exercising is trying to lose weight.
#5: Fat is axiomatically ugly.
#4: Fat people eat enormous amounts of food.
#3: Fat people are jolly/mean, and fat people are shy/loud.
#2: I can tell how someone eats all the time, because of how they eat around me.
#1: Everyone who is fat is fat for the same reason.
Quote of the Day
"I'm much wiser, I'm much more aware, and I'm much sexier."—Betty White, on the difference between being 90 and 91.
Tweet of the Day
[Content Note: Othering; disablism; fat bias.]
So, this tweet is going around the internets today...
Are you albino? Then I want you in my video. Email: musicvideocasting2013@gmail.com
— JARED LETO (@JaredLeto) February 6, 2013
The totes edgy auteurs of this garbage typically defend their carnival art with some sanctimonious lipservice to inclusion or the beauty of human diversity or some colossally insufferable routine about how we're all freaks in our own way, but the appropriation of visibly different bodies is the opposite of inclusion: It's Othering.
And many of the people whose bodies are most desirable for this specific sort of Othering—the bodies of people with albinism, the bodies of people with dwarfism, people with fewer (or more) than four complete limbs, people with superfat bodies—are people whose physical differences are also disabilities. To fetishize albinism for its aesthetic, for example, casually elides the medical issues that most people with albinism face.
Defenders of this farcical bid at "inclusion" love to toss out that fetid rhetorical about why people with visibly different bodies agree to appear in such projects if it's so offensive, which is the reddest of all the herrings. When the only opportunities for visibility are Othering, the people who take those opportunities can't be blamed: They're not choosing between "token albino in Jared Leto video" and "lead in a serious motion picture whose casting director is open to casting someone who happens to have albinism, though it's irrelevant to the plot."
That's yet another instance of tasking individuals with finding solutions to systemic problems. It's neither just nor reasonable to expect one person to bootstrap one's way to a complete cultural overhaul in how we regard bodies like theirs. Even the most effective teaspoon is still only one teaspoon.
Further, I know that there are, for example, superfat ladies—always a favorite staple of super edgy artists who are gleefully horrified by the exposure of fat flesh—who happily and proudly participate in carnival art, who may even find it personally empowering. And it can simultaneously be personally empowering for them and profoundly disempowering for me, as I watch a superfat body, visibly different in the same way mine is, exploited and Othered.
To be the one who volunteers to play freak is a very different place than to be the one who watches, powerlessly, hir body implied to be freakish.
If Leto and his cohorts aren't interested in perpetuating the gross Othering of people with visibly different bodies, then they should try creating projects where being a person with albinism (or whatever) isn't the cost of admission, but is instead not a barrier to participation.
Of course, Leto's most recent movie role is as a trans woman, so I doubt he's going to lead the charge on non-appropriative and non-exploitative art.
Anyway. This reminds me of one of my favorite movie scenes of all time, from Living in Oblivion, in which Peter Dinklage's character takes the film-within-the-film's director to task for using a person with dwarfism in a dream sequence:
Nick [Steve Buscemi]: Look, Tito, it's not that big of a deal. It's a dream. Strange things happen in a dream. All I want you to do is laugh. Why is that such a problem for you?Perfect.
Tito [Peter Dinklage]: Why does it have to be a dwarf?
Nick: What?!
Tito: Why does my character have to be a dwarf?
Nick: It doesn't have to be a dwarf.
Tito: [laughs contemptuously] Then why is he? Is that the only way you can make this a dream—put a dwarf in it?!
Nick: No, Tito, I—
Tito: Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it? Do you know anyone who's had a dream with a dwarf in it? NOOOOOO! I don't even have dreams with dwarves in them. The only place I've seen dwarves in dreams is in stupid movies like this! "Oh, make it weird; put a dwarf in it!" Everyone will go: "Whoa whoa whoa, this must be a fuckin' dream; there's a fuckin' dwarf in it!" Well, I'm sick of it! You can take this dream sequence and shove it up your ass!
[Tito storms out; the crew shifts uncomfortably; Nick looks stricken and perplexed and collapses into his director's chair.]
Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime
Hooverphonic, "Renaissance Affair"
This orchestral arrangement of this song is truly one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard.
In The News
Your regular In The News correspondent, Deeky W. Gashlycrumb, MD., is off while he attends a Butt Convention at the Stethoscope Institute.
[Content Note: Misogyny; hostility to consent and reproductive agency.]
Some dipshit introduces legislation in Idaho that would require "every Idaho high school student to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and pass a test on it to graduate from high school." That's such a perfect idea, it's almost TOO perfect.
Fox News jackasses joke about Hillary Clinton's "facelift."
SHOCKING NOOZ! Giving teens access to contraception decreases teen pregnancy rates. Who woulda thunk it?!
Michigan becomes the latest state to consider legislation mandating transvaginal ultrasounds as a requirement to access abortion. Gross.
The UK House of Commons advances marriage equality in a bill that further includes a provision which allows "transgender individuals to be legally recognized as their preferred gender without jeopardizing their unions."
Disgraced Illinois politico Jesse Jackson, Jr. is prolly going to jail.
Outgoing Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says the US is "one big pothole right now," because of our inadequate infrastructure spending.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie tells a doctor who has never examined him but is nonetheless certain about the state of his health because of his weight to STFU.
And a new new prime number has been discovered! It's 17 million digits long! YOWZA! That's a lot of digits!
Headline of the Day
[Content Note: Guns; violence.]
This is one of the most mendacious headlines I've ever seen.
Granted, the Washington Examiner (to which I'm not linking, because fuck them, but the article is easy to enough to find if you're so inclined) is a garbage conservative rag, but even by garbage conservative rag standards, this is some real horseshit.
The headline refers to the shooting at the anti-gay Family Research Council's DC offices last August, which resulted in the shooter, Floyd Corkins, being indicted on a terrorism charge, to which he's now pleaded guilty. Corkins claims to have targeted the FRC after finding them on a list of hate groups tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
If that's true (and I am not generally a conspiracy-minded person, but I find this entire scenario very curious for various reasons), that does not mean the SPLC's website "triggered the FRC shooting." What led to the shooting was Floyd Corkins' decision to pick up a gun, his access to guns, our culture of violence, and his fucked-up decision to use a gun in a terrorist act.
Funny how conservatives are all about individual responsibility until it comes to blaming someone for hurting them.
[Previously: Shooting at Family Research Council, SPLC Responds to Tony Perkins, Two Facts.]
