Shakesville

Quote of the Day

[Content Note: Rape culture.]

The troubling reaction of many media outlets to the sentence of two teenage football players who were convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl is a crystal clear example of how society continues to teach boys that girls and women are "less than." As we saw in Steubenville, and its aftermath, this approach to masculinity leads some men and boys to perpetuate violence against women and other men and boys to remain silent.

This kind of toxic masculinity creates a culture that leads to a national of conversation that express sympathy for the young boys that committed a crime, focusing on their destroyed football careers and uncertain futures in prison, while completely ignoring the victim. Where was the sympathy for her?

We must challenge how we raise boys regarding masculinity, as it is often at the expense of women. I've realized that society doesn't raise boys to be men; we raise them to not be women. The lives of men are inextricably interwoven with the lives of women. Women's issues of safety and equality directly affect our lives as men. Beyond that, women are humans, with the same rights to safety and freedom as men.

Instead of allowing the humiliation of a young girl to pass unchallenged through social media and text messaging, we must teach men it is our moral responsibility to not remain silent or passively on the sidelines, but to be actively engaged in confronting this problem in every corner of homes, communities, and societies.

—Former NFL quarterback and feminist Don McPherson, in a press release on the Steubenville rape case and the ugly media aftermath, continuing to be awesome.

See also: Zerlina Maxwell, Professor Salamishah Tillet, and Irin Carmon.

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Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

Belle & Sebastian: "Wrapped Up In Books"

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Afternoon in America 2.0

[Content Note: Invasion of Privacy, Stalking]

Creative Good—The Google Glass feature no one is talking about:

Now pretend you don’t know a single person who wears Google Glass… and take a walk outside. Anywhere you go in public – any store, any sidewalk, any bus or subway – you’re liable to be recorded: audio and video. Fifty people on the bus might be Glassless, but if a single person wearing Glass gets on, you – and all 49 other passengers – could be recorded. Not just for a temporary throwaway video buffer, like a security camera, but recorded, stored permanently, and shared to the world.

Now, I know the response: “I’m recorded by security cameras all day, it doesn’t bother me, what’s the difference?” Hear me out – I’m not done. What makes Glass so unique is that it’s a Google project. And Google has the capacity to combine Glass with other technologies it owns.

...Ten years from now, someone, some company, or some organization, takes an interest in you, wants to know if you’ve ever said anything they consider offensive, or threatening, or just includes a mention of a certain word or phrase they find interesting. A single search query within Google’s cloud – whether initiated by a publicly available search, or a federal subpoena, or anything in between – will instantly bring up documentation of every word you’ve ever spoken within earshot of a Google Glass device.

This is the discussion we should have about Google Glass. The tech community, by all rights, should be leading this discussion. Yet most techies today are still chattering about whether they’ll look cool wearing the device.

Neat! I'm sure that this feature won't adversely affect people's privacy, and I'm confident that any information collected through these features will never be misused by the federal government, large corporations, or internet hackers. I'm sure any fears to the contrary are completely overblown.

And here is the thing: I wasn't really following the Google Glass development, given that I have no intention jumping on another Google product after having been burned by Blogger accessibility issues and Reader being closed down this summer. But Mark Hurst's post at Creative Good has pretty aptly demonstrated that even if I never use Google Glass, that doesn't mean I won't be affected by it.

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Daily Dose of Cute

image of Matilda the cat lying in a funny, tucked-chin position, making a silly face

"Urgle burgle!"
I seriously have no idea wtf face she was making when I took this picture, but it made me laugh for ten million years. She is the goofiest cat that has ever lived.

As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.

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Seen

"The BIBLE says MARY was WITH CHILD, NOT TISSUE"
I saw this awesome bumper sticker over the weekend, quoting from that font of scientific knowledge (unicorns, flat earth, whut?) that is the Bible. Neat! Solid rationale, for sure!

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And Then This Happened

[Content Note: Misogyny; harassment.]

So, last week, I wrote a piece about being a female atheist alienated from movement atheism. Then, in response to PZ Myers asking "What can I do better?", I made some suggestions for atheist men who genuinely wanted an answer to that question.

Of course there was the usual blowback—plenty of atheist men eminently willing to prove the point, by telling me to fuck myself, to shut up, to go away, fat cunt, blah blah yawn.

There were also some very nice reactions—lots of women, and a few men, too, who expressed appreciation for my willingness to do One of Those Things which will inevitably obligate the navigation of hateful garbage.

And then there were the atheist men, in most cases ostensibly sympathetic to my position, who piped up to let me know that I wasn't talking about them, that they were one of the Good Ones. Even Myers linked to my list with the curious line: "Melissa McEwan has some Advice to Atheist Men. The long list sounds very good, but I do have one reservation: none of it is exclusive to atheists or men. I think it's more Advice for Decent Human Beings."

I'm not sure why my "long list" (of 18 suggestions) would engender reservations simply because it is not "exclusive to atheists or men," unless one is keen to deflect accountability for being part of the group being urged to decency.

Not a few atheist men, in comments here and in my inbox, were eager to tell me that I was really only talking about a "small but vocal group."

Which of course I knew, because it is always, always, a "small but vocal group" of men who marginalize, harass, and threaten me in response to having said something they don't like.

A "small but vocal group" of atheists.

A "small but vocal group" of comic geeks.

A "small but vocal group" of gamers.

A "small but vocal group" of fat haters.

A "small but vocal group" of antifeminists.

A "small but vocal group" of men's rights advocates.

A "small but vocal group" of men who are rape apologists.

A "small but vocal group" of men who want me fucking dead. And tell me. Often.

Don't get me wrong: I know this is true. I know, in most cases, it is really is a "small but vocal group" of any community who engages in silencing and intimidation.

But of the "large but silent group" of all these communities, who supposedly don't agree with the hostile disgorgements of the "small but vocal group," the people most likely to speak up do so primarily to defend themselves, to distance themselves from that "small but vocal group," to oblige me to reassure them that I know there is a "large but silent group" who is totally on my side, even though their silence indicates otherwise.

They reach out to me, while I'm navigating the expected bile of typical garbage nightmares, in order to seek my assistance in salving their own discomfort of affiliation. Which is exactly as unwelcome as it sounds.

"Hey, the rest of us aren't like those knuckleheads!" is not a comfort. It is a way of obliging me to concede that simply not being a dirtbag is sufficient action to consider themselves my ally.

I will not concede that. Because it isn't.

This urge to distance oneself from the "small but vocal group," and attempt to mask as solidarity what is actually a deflection of accountability, is a phenomenon I've previously described, not coincidentally, in a piece on Christian privilege and being asked to make distinctions between "real Christians" and the self-identified Christians who seek to do harm:

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Genetic Testing is not Genetic Engineering

[Content Note: Infertility, IVF, Eugenics, Hostility to Reproductive Rights, Animal Cruelty, Hitler]
[NB: Not only women have uteri, get pregnant, and/or have need of access to abortion.]

Richard Dawkins needs to stop talking about pregnancy, as far as I'm concerned.

Last Wednesday, he felt the urge to devote a series of tweets rehashing an old discussion he had with Peter Singer regarding whether or not the mythical pain supposed felt by an aborted fetus was hypothetically comparable to the pain felt by an adult pig slaughtered in inhumane conditions and came to the conclusion -- all the while ignoring the fact that human women can demonstrably feel pain too -- that while Dawkins was generally supportive of abortion and reproductive rights, he felt that fetal pain "could outweigh a woman's right to control her own body."

Presumably feeling that the attention generated in the wake of these tweets -- as bloggers such as myself pointed out that Dawkins' position absolutely requires the rhetorical removal of the pregnant woman from the discussion of her rights -- was particularly satisfying, Dawkins decided on Sunday to recycle his old arguments in favor of eugenics with this series of tweets.

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In The News

[Content note: Racism, homophobia, ablism]

Relax, Don't Do It:

Singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked has shocked fans after launching an anti-gay rant onstage in San Francisco on Sunday night.

Bauhaus singer Peter Murphy was arrested Saturday on hit-and-run charges and suspicion of driving under the influence.

Rocky Horror Show writer Richard O'Brien has said he is now 30% woman after taking female hormone estrogen for 10 years.

Dinesh D'Souza is making a new movie, and boy, does it look awesomes. The trailer is just perfect!

Seven Marines from a North Carolina unit were killed and several injured in a training accident at a military depot that serves as a storage site for munitions.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-epugnant) has opposed a Senate resolution commemorating Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Week. Obviously.

Natura Pet Products has announced it is recalling four of its most popular brands of dry dog, cat and ferret foods due to possible contamination with Salmonella bacteria.

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Whoops the US Sewage System

Emily Badger at The Atlantic—It's Not Just Overflow—Everyday Leaks from Sewer Systems Lead to Alarming Amounts of Sewage in Our Waterways:

Sewage runoff into our waterways is both an environmental and a political problem when we can see and smell it. If you live in an older U.S. city with a combined sewer system – one where storm water and sewage share the same pipe network, overflowing through the same outlets – you've probably had the visceral experience after a big storm of approaching a river with a musty sheen.

We know, though, that city sewage in some form finds its way into our rivers and bays even in good weather (and without as much noxious evidence).

"We know that the sewers leak," says Marion Divers, a Ph.D. candidate in geology and planetary science at the University of Pittsburgh. "But that's the thing – we really don’t know how much they leak. That was our big unknown."

What Divers and coauthors Emily Elliott and Daniel Bain found is that an estimated 12% of the sewage produced by the people living in their study area makes its way into Pittsburgh's Monongahela River "just from one tiny little watershed in the city of Pittsburgh."

Cities like Pittsburgh have had a hard enough time dealing with overruns from combined sewer systems (for which many of them are currently under consent decrees with the EPA). Back in 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country a D-minus for its handling of wastewater, citing aging systems that discharge billions of gallons of untreated wastewater into waterways each year. The latest edition of that report card is expected this week, and it's hard to imagine that our sewer systems are doing any better four years later, especially as researchers learn that they may be causing even more (less visible) harm than we thought.

"Even fixing the combined sewer system," Divers says, "taking all the combined sewer overflow discharges out of the water here in the city will not solve the problem of sewage getting into our waterways."

Swell.

Welp, good thing we've been doing all that hard work around the world smashing other countries to bits and then "nation-building" them back into worse shape than they were when we got there.

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Today in Rape Culture

[Content Note: Rape culture; revictimization.]

The carelessness of this is unconscionable:

CNN, Fox News and MSNBC recently aired the name of the underage victim in the Steubenville rape trial during reports about the case.

Two high school football players were found guilty of raping a 16-year old girl in a controversial case in Steubenville, Ohio. The verdict was handed down on Sunday.

All three cable news networks aired a clip of one of the defendants, Trent Mays, apologizing to the victim in the courtroom. Mays had addressed the victim by name, which was not censored during CNN and MSNBC's broadcasts on Sunday and Fox News' broadcast on Monday. Local CBS affiliate WTRF also aired the clip without editing the victim's name out.

"I would truly like to apologize to [redacted], her family, my family and the community," Mays said. "No picture should have been sent around, let alone even taken."

It isn't enough that virtually every cable media outlet has at least one on-air personality engaging in brutal victim-blaming; they've got to broadcast the survivor's name to the world, too. Whoops.

And then rape apologists have the nerve to wonder aloud, suspiciously, if there are as many rapes as anti-rape advocates say, why so few of them are reported.

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Open Thread

image of the characters Andy Travis and Venus Flytrap from the sitcom WKRP

Hosted by Andy Travis and Venus Flytrap.

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Question of the Day

What movie have you re-watched recently, after not seeing it for awhile, for which you've found a whole new appreciation?

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Let's Talk About Names

Ten days ago, Grace and Jess announced that Flyover Feminism and Grace's space, Are Women Human?, would co-host a roundtable on naming. The first post, by Nikki, is up at AWH? and you can read it here. An excerpt:

So, when people ask me why I changed my name when I got married, I usually tell them, “I’m adopted – and it’s complicated.” If they press for details, and stick around long enough to listen, I tell them what I’ve just shared here. A new name and a new identity were given to me – some might say imposed on me – when I was adopted. When I changed my name upon marriage, it struck me as a way of determining my own name – and, in all honesty, that choice did make me feel empowered.

Go read the whole thing!

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An Observation

[Content Note: Rape culture; sexual violence.]

I have heard from a number of friends today who are defriending people on Facebook left and right over rape apology (victim-blaming and/or sympathy for the rapists) in the Steubenville rape case.

And, of course, that kind of shit is all over the news media, and the blogosphere, and social media, and comments at all of the above.

There are literally countless people today who are expressing, explicitly or implicitly, that it's okay, or acceptable, or not that big of a deal geez for a person or multiple people to penetrate the body of an unconscious person.

Are they saying, straightforwardly, that they would do the same thing themselves? Not generally, no. But to someone who would never in a million years imagine trying to find some way to excuse that act—because why? why would you try to excuse that act?—it seems incredible and terrifying that so many people are keen to do precisely that.

And, sure, some of them are people who want to minimize acts of sexual violence as a fucked-up way of trying to deal with their own feelings of vulnerability. But some of them, some of these lots and lots of people, are people who just don't think there's anything fucking wrong with doing that to another human being.

Which is something to remember, maybe, during the next kerfuffle about anti-rape advocates who make a point about not being able to magically discern if someone is a rapist, since rapists don't announce themselves or wear signs or glow purple.

And something, too, to remember, maybe during the next round of defending "ironic" rape humor, on the basis that "everyone" agrees that rape is a terrible thing.

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Monday Blogaround

This blogaround brought to you by the color grey.

Recommended Reading:

Benjy: CPAC Event on Racial Tolerance Turns to Chaos as 'Disenfranchised' Whites Arrive [Content Note: Racism.]

Jess: Beyond Bodice-Rippers: How Romance Novels Came to Embrace Feminism [Content Note: Rape culture.]

Sophia: The Rape of James Bond: On Sexual Assault and "Realism" in Popular Culture [Content Note: Sexual violence and rape culture. Additional notes available at the top of the post at the linked page.]

Maya: New Poll Finds the Majority of Women Voters Consider Themselves Feminists

Jorge: Obama's New Labor Nominee Gave Him a Long Thank You en Español

Sean: What "The God Particle" Hath Wrought

Echidne: Feminism Is Dead. Take 4358. [Content Note: Gender essentialism; evo psych.]

Andy: Panel of Notorious Homophobes Advised Mark Burnett on The History Channel's 'Bible' Mini-Series [Content Note: Homophobia.]

Leave your links and recommendations in comments...

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The Walking Thread

image of Andrea peeking through a broken window in an abandoned building

Peek-a-BOOOOOOOOOOOO!
(Spoilers are lurching around undeadly herein. CN: Violence; rape culture; misogyny; disablism; stalking.)

Previously on The Walking Dead: Clues to what will happen in this episode of The Walking Dead! Can you guess what things will happen in this episode, based on the scenes just shown to you? Can you guess what characters are about to REAPPEAR? Unless your brains have been zombified, I BET YOU CAN! Especially if you watched "on the next episode of The Walking Dead" at the end of last week's episode! Because this show continues to be great in every way.

This is the episode where we go on Andrea's Big Superfun Journey of Conscience with her. Which I bet would have been an interesting episode, if only for the fact that any human being who isn't a total dirtbag would have left Unpleasantville about sixty-seven years ago and never would have fucked Governor Cyclops in the first place! Whoooooops!

The episode opens with a Lostian flashback sequence of Michonne and Andrea sitting around a campfire making s'mores or whatever, while Michonne's chained, armless zombie pals stand watch. And by "stand watch," I mean gurgle and hiss and flail desperately. Andrea asks Michonne how she came upon them, and Michonne conveys with a look that she knew them. She then tells Andrea, "They deserve what they got; they weren't human to begin with."

Now, I don't know about y'all, but the way I interpreted this was that these men (who I swore Michonne said in another episode were her brothers, but maybe I'm misremembering) hurt Michonne, and probably in a very specific, sexually violent way. In which case, thanks a shitload, writers of this show, for introducing the Rape Turns Ladies Into Superheroes! trope. OF COURSE Michonne only kicks ass because she was raped, or in some other way violently hurt by men, because that's the only thing garbage writers can ever imagine could underlie female strength. WAY TO GO.

The camera zooms in on Michonne's prisoner zombies' chains, which segues into chains on a torture contraption Governor Cyclops is building. (Way to draw a bullshit equivalence between Michonne and Governor Cyclops, assholes.) Cy is real excited about this torture device, and he pops a huge boner or whatever as we cut to the titles. And I can't believe we're only at the titles, because I already feel like I've watched three hours of this episode.

After the commercial break, through which I fast-forwarded because year of our lord Jesus Jones two thousand and thirteen, we find ourselves in Unpleasantville, where Martinez & Co. are preparing for war by stocking a military vehicle with lots of weapons. Andrea stumbles across this scene and says, "I thought there was a deal on the table," and we all laugh because this show is a comedy, right? This show is definitely a comedy.

Melvin Nerdly pays Cy a visit, and gets all freaked out by Cy's torture workshop. Really, Nerdly? REALLY?! You're still surprised by evidence that this guy is a monster? Fuck's sake. You and Andrea should get married and have the stupidest babies on the planet, and you can all marvel together at the DELIGHTFUL SURPRISE of the sun coming up each and every day.

Melvin Nerdly spills all the beans to Andrea, about Cy's TOTALLY PREDICTABLE OMG plan to shock-and-awe the fuck out of Grimes Gang at their next diplomatic negotiation. Andrea says she has to stop it, and Melvin Nerdly tells her, "I don't think you can." Welp, that's the smartest thing he's ever said. No, Andrea, you cannot stop Cy's evil machinations, because you are too goofy to realize when he's evil-machinating in the first place! You have the deductive reasoning of a table lamp, and also you are not in possession of your own militia! Which, let's be honest, is not something we can trust Andrea to have noticed.

Melvin Nerdly shows Andrea Cy's cool torture chamber, and he tells her to GTFO and go warn Grimes Gang. Andrea says she has to kill Cy instead, and, as they watch him LITERALLY WHISTLE WHILE HE WORKS as he sets up his torture chamber, Andrea aims her gun at him. But Melvin Nerdly stops her, telling her if she kills Cy, Martinez will just take over. Which, okay. That's probably true. But I have to say, Martinez just seems like a garden-variety jackass, not a zombiequarium-having torture-head. It's not even evident if Martinez is totally aware of the depths of Cy's depravity, no less that he's totes signed off on it. So maybe take your chances with Martinez? I'm just saying.

Anyway.

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