Hosted by thyme.
Question of the Day
In what position do you sleep? Do you have a standard position, or can you fall asleep in any position? Do you stay in the same position once you're asleep, or are you likely to end up with your feet on the pillows by morning?
Neat
FMF News: NY Governor to Include Abortion Rights in Women's Equality Act.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) will include a section on expanding and protecting abortion rights in the state of New York as part of a Women's Equality Act.Huh. It's almost like agency and autonomy are key components of meaningful equality or something!
The Reproductive Health Act would expand the conditions under which a woman could have a late abortion in the state to include when the mother's health is in jeopardy or the fetus is not viable in addition to cases to save the life of the mother. This would bring New York state law on late term in sync with federal regulations. The act would also allow licensed health care practitioners to perform abortions and remove abortion from the New York penal code and place it under regulation by the state's public health law.
Feeling at Risk vs. Being at Risk
[Content Note: Violence.]
An excerpt from the New York Times' story on Oscar Pistorius today:
Mr. Pistorius said he and Ms. Steenkamp had gone to bed early on Wednesday night, but in the middle of the night he heard a noise from the bathroom and went to investigate...This underlines precisely the point I was making earlier regarding feeling at risk and actually being at risk.
"I am acutely aware of violent crime being committed by intruders entering homes," he said in the affidavit. "I have received death threats before. I have also been a victim of violence and of burglaries before. For that reason I kept my firearm, a 9-mm Parabellum, underneath my bed when I went to bed at night."
Pistorius felt at risk because of Things.
Reeva Steenkamp, however, actually was at risk because of Oscar Pistorius.
That's true whether it was an accident or whether it was murder.
I am not unsympathetic to Pistorius' feelings of insecurity. It is valid to be fearful of home invasions in a high-crime area. It is valid to be fearful after receiving death threats. It is valid to be fearful after having survived trauma. But fear of hypothetical harm is not a valid justification for killing.
Which is something about which we all seem to agree, when it's someone other than a white, straight, cis man doing the killing. In fact, when it's someone other than a white, straight, cis man doing the killing, we seem to have an unreasonably high threshold for what constitutes self-defense.
Funny how that works: The more privileged the shooter, the more inclined we are to define the crime by his intent. The less privileged the shooter, the more inclined we are to define the crime by hir victim's (claimed or presumed) intent. Whoops.
It is imperative that we stop treating feeling at risk and being at risk as the same goddamn thing. I am going to keep making this point until there is nothing left of me but shards of vinyl.
House of Cards
Has anyone watched (or started watching) House of Cards, the US remake of the old UK miniseries based on the book about a ruthless politico? It's a Netflix production, and Netflix made the entire series available via streaming on Feb. 1. Iain and I just finished the whole thing last night, and I found it a really compelling, often brilliant and often infuriating, show.
There is A LOT to talk about regarding the female characters in the show especially (and I recommend Leigh Kolb's piece at Bitch Flicks on that subject), so I figured I'd open a thread for discussion.
Because of the strange (but wonderful, in my opinion!) way in which the show was released, some people may not have viewed the whole season yet, while others have already viewed the whole thing, so let's be careful to indicate spoilers, as opposed to general comments about the characters, and those who haven't seen the whole thing, please proceed with caution.
Predators Exploit Prejudices
[Content Note: Sexual violence; rape culture; Christian Supremacy.]
A California man charged with two counts of rape met his accuser on a singles website. He is also suspected of raping other women he met through the site.
That a rapist would meet and solicit and groom potential victims on a dating site is not unusual. But this story seems to be particularly newsworthy because the site is the aggressively marketed Christian dating site, ChristianMingle.com
There's an embedded element of surprise, or outrage, that even on a Christian dating site OF ALL PLACES! could something like this happen.
I've written before, at length, about the foolishness of axiomatically equating Christian belief with ethical decency and about how that reflexive presumption is exploited by predators, so I won't go into it all again. I will just note, with regret, that the reporting on this case underlines how unexamined Christian privilege does not inoculate its vulnerable members from sexual predation, but in fact abets it.
My profound sympathies to this asshole's victims.
No-Gun Culture
[Content Note: Guns.]
So, I'm reading this story about a Virginia pizzeria that is offering a 15% discount to customers who bring in a gun or show a gun permit with their order, and it puts me in mind of a conversation I had with Jess over the weekend about how we talk a lot about gun culture in the US, but not so much about no-gun culture.
This is something Josh Marshall has observed, and probably other people, too, but just as much as there are people in the US who have been raised with and around guns, there are people who have not been raised with and around guns. I am one of those people.
In fact, not only was I not raised in the gun subculture, my formative experience with guns was my grandfather's relationship to his gun, which he carried because he was a detective with the NYPD. I don't remember my grandfather ever being cross with me a single time; I was very young when he died, but he was, in my childhood memory, a source of love and laughter, whose lilting voice would go flat and stern if I got anywhere near the dresser where he kept his gun. Stay away from that dresser.
When he got home from work, he would unholster his gun and put it safely away in the dresser in the corner of his bedroom, and I was not to go near it. Ever. For any reason. He wanted me to be scared of what that gun could do in untrained hands, and I was.
My grandfather, I understood, did not love his gun. He respected it. It was a tool of his job, and I daresay he regretted it had to be.
My only other meaningful experience with guns was being threatened by one. And that did not endear them to me.
I understand, really I do, that there are people who grow up with guns and know how to use and safely store them and who like or even love their guns. I live in a community that includes farmers and hunters, who have practical use for guns, and lots of gun aficionados who keep them for sport or self-defense.
But I'm not a part of that culture. I have only the most basic familiarity with it. I'm not comfortable with it. And it's not because I don't respect guns; it's because I do. I simply have a different relationship to them than pro-gun people do.
I really want gun owners to understand that there is an equally valid no-gun culture. It is okay for me to never want to own a gun, for self-defense or any other reason. It is okay for me to not want to have guns in my home. It is okay for me to want to go into public spaces without seeing unconcealed guns.
There has to be some sort of balance between the pro-gun and no-gun subcultures that coexist in the US, and that balance is upended utterly by the increasingly belligerent displays of carried guns in public spaces. Your right to bear arms is not predicated on your ability to brandish weapons anywhere and everywhere.
You want me to understand and respect that you grew up with guns? Cool. I want you to understand and respect that I didn't.
The Walking Thread
"Dear Diary: Still can't decide if I just like Gov. Cyclops, or like like him."
(Spoilers are lurching around undeadly herein. CN: Violence; rape culture.)
When last we left our struggling band of heroes [sic], things were falling apart pretty badly at Grimes Jail. Daryl, the only competent member of Grimes Gang, had run off into the woods with his oppressively obnoxious brother Merle, Glenn was turning into a murdery rage-machine because Governor Cyclops
On top of that, they're all pretty sure that the Unplesantvillagers are fixing to destroy them. So they can't stay put, but they can't run, since their tiniest new member is the human equivalent of a zombie whistle.
There are a lot of BIG AND IMPORTANT DECISIONS TO BE MADE, and no one fit to make them. Situation normal!
Anyway. The episode opens with Grimes spying on Michonne, who is living in a garbage bus on Grimes Jail land. Through his binoculars, he spies Ghost Lori at their makeshift graveyard, and he goes out to have a chat with her, but whooooooooops now Ghost Lori is outside the gates, which Grimes naturally leaves hanging wide open while he chases her into the weeds.
Naturally, Michonne closes the gates behind him, because she, like pretty much everyone else and moreso than most, would make a better leader than the bozo who immediately starts making out with a ghost in zombie territory.
Back in Unpleasantville, Governor Cyclops visits Andrea and fake-confesses that he is a terrible leader and fake-suggests she should be the new Mayor of Unpleasantville, which is an evident ploy to convince her not to go visit her old friends at Grimes Jail and hoodwink her into believing he's not about to go attack the fuck out of them. And Andrea believes this nonsense because she is very stupid. Except when the writers need her to be smart.
Governor Cyclops then pays a visit to Melvin Nerdly, and lets him in on his plan. Later, Andrea asks him where GC is, and Melvin Nerdly is all, "Uh, I don't speak English or whatever," which seems to tip Andrea to the fact that maybe GC is up to no good, in a way her previous observations of his behaving like a sadistic sociopath in at least seven different ways has not.
Meanwhile, Daryl and Merle piss and spit on stuff in the woods.
At Grimes Jail, Glenn and Maggie have a GREAT conversation in which she recounts being sexually assaulted by Governor Cyclops, and has to reassure Glenn that she wasn't raped. In the comic books, it was Michonne who was assaulted by the Governor, and she was raped, but in the show, Maggie is not. Now, I am obviously not a fan of rape as entertainment, but I'm also not a fan of writers shying away from rape (it doesn't need to be shown for it to have happened) because, as seems apparent to me here, they are afraid that their audience won't like a female character anymore if she's a rape survivor.
There was a really gross thread in that whole scene, in which Glenn seemed to serve as avatar for the audience, hoping Maggie wasn't raped primarily not because rape is terrible, but because it would have changed his/our feelings about Maggie. Yuck!
That, of course, happens to real survivors of rape all the time, and it was pretty foul for the writers of the show allow us the "relief" of Maggie not having been raped (just sexually assaulted without penetration), so our feelings for her wouldn't "need" to change.
Glenn, of course, still making Maggie's assault All About Him, then expresses feelings of guilt and failure over having not protected her, which reflects that interesting (ahem) piece of rape culture that deploys when there can be no victim-blaming of a male-partnered female victim: Chivalry failure. I should have been able to protect you from that rapist! (Sometimes also expressed by fathers, brothers, friends...) Which is another layer of inoculating rapists against the exclusive responsibility for rape: It is first a female victim's responsibility to prevent herself from getting raped, and then it is her male
There is A LOT wrong with this trope, not least of which is that it entrenches narratives of male policing of female bodies, but I'll leave it there for now or I'll never get back to detailing EVERYTHING ELSE that's wrong with this show!
Daryl rescues some people on a bridge in the woods, who have come under zombie attack. Then he almost murders Merle for being a huge douche, and they fight about how their dad was a monster, which I'm sure came as a real surprise to everyone. I never would have guessed these two characters were meant to come from a fucked-up family! WEIRD!
Hershel tells Grimes, who is still wandering around the perimeter like a sweaty hobo, that he needs to come back because Glenn is being "reckless." LOL FOREVER. Yes, Rick, please bring back your solid leadership that is never reckless! Pull up your pants and get back to leading! You can hump that log you think is Ghost Lori another time!
Grimes Jail is in real trouble, because there is a zombie leak somewhere and zombies are getting in. There aren't enough people to help find the leak AND guard the jail! Too bad Tyreese and Sasha don't exist in this episode! Maybe they could've helped!
Carol shows Mustache Prisoner how to use a gun, and he compliments her on being a lady, which I guess? is supposed to be an improvement? from when he thought she was a lesbian? Yikes. Well, no matter. She immediately uses his corpse as a human shield (good thinking, Carol!) after Governor Cyclops and his minions show up and start shooting at Grimes Gang.
This begins a shoot-out at the Oh Fuck Corral in which suddenly all of these crack shots who can shoot a zombie in the face at one million paces are now terrible shooters with garbage skills. PERFECT. Perfect continuity.
A van barrels through the Grimes Jail fences and a bunch of zombies pour out, some of whom immediately pin Grimes against the fence. Luckily, Michonne is not a terrible person like he is, so she saves him, even though he wouldn't do her the same favor. And then Daryl and Merle show up HUZZAH! and save Grimes (boo). The war is ON, motherfuckers!
Finally, three random things:
1. I read the other day that Jonny Lee Miller, currently starring as Sherlock in Elementary, my new favorite show, was in the running to play Grimes. I bet Season One, he was all fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, and now he's all LULZ YOUR GARBAGE SHOW!
2. Does this show take place in Seattle in the '90s? Why are so many of the zombies wearing flannel shirts?
3. My DVR won't let me delete the last episode of The Walking Dead. I hit delete, and nothing happens. It's just stuck there. The show itself is now a zombie. Is what I'm saying.
Discuss.
In The News
[Content note: Misogyny, homophobia, racism, Christian supremacy]
It's Tuesday and What The Fuck Is With This Snow?
Mexico's Supreme Court issued a sweeping decision in which it declared that bans on same-sex marriage are discriminatory and unconstitutional.
Thom Yorke's side project Atoms For Peace has made their new record available for streaming.
Rayne Brown, a North Carolina State Republican, has introduced a bill criminalizing nipple exposure.
Music icon Clive Davis talks for first time about being bisexual.
Tim Tebow is scheduled to speak at anti-gay church. Obviously.
Amazon used neo-Nazi guards to keep its immigrant workforce under control in Germany.
We're doomed: Subatomic calculations relating to the Higgs boson particle indicate a finite lifespan for the universe.
Quote of the Day
"When a physician removes a child from a woman, that is the largest organ in a body. That's a big thing. That's a big surgery. You don't have any other organs in your body that are bigger than that."—Republican Alabama State Representative Mary Sue McClurkin, who is definitely a genius and obviously bored with the anti-choice classics, so figured she'd drop some new material.
Via Maya, who observes that a fetus is not an organ (nor is it a child), that nearly 90% of abortions take place in the first trimester, during which the fetus is about the same size as a smelt, and that a "first-trimester surgical abortion takes about 10 minutes and usually doesn't even require general anesthesia," which is an unusual definition of "big surgery."
Whooooooops!
Downton Abbey Open Thread
Everything's coming up roses!
[MAJOR SPOILERS are telling secrets downstairs herein.]
So, let me just start by saying [major spoiler! last chance!] that before this season even started, I accidentally stumbled across the spoiler that Matthew died at the end of the season because Dan Stevens wanted out of the show. Just in the course of reading headlines, as I do every day, I saw this piece of information after the episode aired in the UK, so I watched the whole season knowing it was coming. Whoooooooops! And maybe it was because I knew it was coming, but probably not, I was just groaning miserably about the heavy-handed way in which it happened. Yikes.
Anyway. Back to the beginning of the episode.
One million years have passed at Downton Abbey, and baby Sybil is almost a toddler and Mary is visibly pregnant. The estate is running smoothly, thanks to Matthew's and Tom's intervention with Lord Whoops. And everyone is going to visit Cousins Shrimpy and Sourpuss in Scotland. ROAD TRIP!
They all pile onto the train for Inverness, a place where Iain and I once spent the night at an outdoor bus station being harassed by a biebillion seagulls, except Tom is not invited because he was born a garbage person. The train arrives, and it's all bagpipes and tweed and deerstalking, and Cousins Shrimpy and Sourpuss are a real pleasure to be around for everyone.
Cousins Shrimpy and Sourpuss don't like each other anymore, and Cousin Shrimpy has run his estate into the ground because he's not smart like Lord Whoops, a compliment Lord Whoops accepts without a blink of his whoopseye. The financial ruin has necessitated that Cousin Shrimpy continue his career in India, about which Cousin Sourpuss is very unhappy. They ask if they can send Rose to live at Downton, because you know
Edith's editor/suitor comes to visit, and they invite him to dinner, even though Mary disapproves, where he hopes to convince Lord Whoops and Lady Valium and the gang that he is definitely a perfect boyfriend for Edith, even though he's still married to a woman who lives in an asylum and doesn't recognize him. Matthew goes deerstalking and fly-fishing with Mr. Newspaper, and tells him to say goodbye to Edith, because even though Matthew is Edith's biggest (and only) champion, he recognizes she is nonetheless still a woman and needs a man to intervene in her love life lest she accidentally find lasting happiness.
Edith, however, tells Mr. Newspaper she's in it to win it, or whatever, and so I guess we'll be seeing more of their awkward and chemistry-free courting next season!
Everyone goes to a party where there is much reeling. By which I mean Scottish dancing. True Fact: Iain had to learn how to reel as a kid, and he can still do it, and it is very cute! Anna surprises Bates by reeling, after Rose taught her in secret, and there is a very nice moment at which Bates gazes at her and says how marvelous she is, and for the briefest of flickering instants, I remember that they were why I loved the show in Season One, and THEN THAT MOMENT IS GONE GOODBYE!
There is also intrigue between O'Brien and Lady Sourpuss' maid, whose name I don't remember, but let's just call her O'Bryan. Lady Sourpuss wants O'Brien to show O'Bryan how to do her hair like Lady Valium's, and blah blah yawn grim faces snore, O'Bryan spikes O'Brien's drink with so much Scotch that it tastes like pants, and so
Meanwhile, back at Downton, Carson isn't letting anyone have any fun! But Jimmy and Alfred sneak in a little bit of fun by SITTING ON CHAIRS! Until Mrs. Hughes busts their asses. The scamps!
A new food vendor has a crush on Mrs. Patmore, and he invites her to a fair. Pretty soon, everyone is going, except Carson, who at least has the good sense to know he's a buzzkill. There are ALL THE CRUSHES, as Gropey Hands crushes on Patmore, Dr. Mustache crushes on Isobel, and Edna the Maid crushes on Tom. But Gropey is gropeful, and Mrs. Hughes breaks the news to Mrs. Patmore, who's relieved. Isobel lets Dr. Mustache down easy. And Edna is kicked to the curb because she made Tom feel bad about being fancy now. Seeya, Edna!
There's SO MUCH FUN at the fair, with a rousing game of Tug-o-War that the Downton Boys win with the help of Gropey Hands, because ha ha he's fat, and Daisy winning a pound at a ring toss. Huzzah! But then the fun ends as Jimmy gets jumped for the money he won on a bet, and Thomas sacrifices himself in Jimmy's stead and his face gets totes destroyed in the fight. OUCH CUBED! But now they're BFFs, and Thomas will be able to torture himself with longing for Jimmy for at least another season!
Also: Carson holds Baby Sybil, which is very cute.
Finally! Mary returns to Downton to have her baby, after igniting labor with TOO MUCH REELING! She gives birth to a baby boy, who is Very Important, because he is an heir, and no sooner is Whoops II born than his father goes zipping off in his car to share the good news and gets killed in a car accident. If you thought having sex at Downton Abbey brought bad tidings, check out the great luck you have after having a baby!
Next Season: The Mary, Tom Branson, and Moseley love triangle!
Discuss.
Pistorius Update
[Content Note: Violence.]
Oscar Pistorius has been officially charged with premeditated murder, even as he continues to assert that he killed Reeva Steinkamp, who was dating Pistorius, because he mistakenly thought she was an intruder.
Track star Oscar Pistorius killed his girlfriend accidentally, mistaking her for an intruder in the pitch dark of his home, he told a judge in a statement read by his attorney during his bail hearing Tuesday.For a moment, let us presume that Pistorius' account is accurate. That means he's arguing he had no responsibility to turn on the lights, and no urge to make sure someone he knew to be in the house with him was not the person at whom he was shooting before pulling the trigger. That is an extraordinarily low bar for establishing a right of self-defense, or even an accidental shooting. And this comes back, once again, to the difference between feeling scared and actually being under a real threat.
"I fail to understand how I could be charged with murder as I had no intention to kill my girlfriend," Pistorius said in the statement.
Pistorius' attorney read the statement because the runner himself was too distraught to speak. He sobbed and heaved so much during the hearing that the magistrate had to stop proceedings and ask him to compose himself. He broke down each time Reeva Steenkamp's name was mentioned.
In the statement, Pistorius said he awoke in the early hours of the morning February 14 to noises in the bathroom and said a "sense of terror overwhelmed me." He said he thought Steenkamp was in bed beside him and that he was too scared to turn on the lights. He said he shouted to her to call police, but she didn't answer.
Over and over, we are subjected to men defending having murdered someone by saying they felt threatened, as though merely feeling afraid is the same thing as being in actual danger. Those are not the same things. And the conflation of the two is the inevitable result of privilege, which does not teach most men, especially most white, cis, straight men, how to sit with fear.
To have so little experience with actually being in danger that one cannot discern the difference between feeling afraid and being in clear and present danger is a luxury that most marginalized people do not have.
Pistorius, of course, does not have undiluted privilege. He is a person with a disability, and he stated in court that "he was not wearing his prosthetic legs and felt 'extremely vulnerable' and needed to protect himself and Steenkamp." But feeling vulnerable, with which I can totally empathize, is still not the same thing as actually being in danger.
(It is also Pistoius' rather curious claim that he was not wearing his prosthetic legs while he shot and killed Steenkamp, but, after shooting her, "he then carried Steenkamp downstairs. She died in his arms, he said in the statement read by his lawyer." Which seems to suggest that he put on his prosthetic legs to move her after he'd shot her. Prosecutors believe he was wearing his prosthetics when the shots were fired.)
Anyway. Even if Pistorius' story is accurate (and I'm not arguing that it is or isn't), it is yet another invitation for us to start talking to privileged people about how to sit with fear, and how to distinguish it from real danger.
Blog Note
I am taking the day off today, because my garbage back is still being garbagey, since, as you might have noticed, I'm not good at working without working full-tilt, so I keep turning every day that's supposed to be a light day into a full day. Whooooooooops!
I'll be back tomorrow, and I will do the Walking Thread and the Downton Abbey Open Thread then.
Happy Presidents' Day!
P.S. Dudley says hi.
Open Thread
Hosted by a decorative horse design on a tabletop.
This week's open threads have been hosted by random shit around my house.
