What everyone is really mad about is that @adriarichards didn't let The Gatekeepers filter her lived experience thru their validity prism.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) March 22, 2013
One More Thought
Daily Dose of Cute
"Everything over there is making me happy!"
"Everything over there is making me happy!"
"Everything is making me happy! Yay! It's a day! IT'S A DAY!"
In The News
[Content note: Gun violence, homophobia]
There is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean:
The Senate has soundly rejected a budget plan authored by irresponsible douchebag Paul Ryan.
A Marine killed two colleagues at Quantico last night before shooting himself.
The Osmonds are hosting an anti-gay rally in Salt Lake City.
Chinua Achebe, Nigerian author of the 1958 best-seller Things Fall Apart, a sobering tale about Nigeria at the dawn of independence, has died.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!! LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!! LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!! LOLOLOLOLOL!! LOLOL!!! LOLOLOL!!!!!!! LOLOL!!
Yeah, I voted for Dengar.
A Few More Thoughts on Adria Richards
There are a couple of common criticisms I'm seeing to which I want to provide a response:
1. To send a picture was cowardly. Nope. I don't know Adria Richards, but I feel reasonably confident that she knew damn well that she risked this exact kind of backlash, in nature if not in scope, by taking the approach that she did. She was not a coward. She was brave.
2. She should have politely asked the guys making sexist jokes to knock it off. Nope. It is a privilege to be able to imagine that politely asking would have stopped their behavior. And it doesn't matter if in this one specific case it would have, which we cannot know. The context of this situation is that women have been politely (and impolitely) asking men to stop behaving in sexually inappropriate ways for centuries, and asking DOESN'T WORK. In most cases, confronting men who are behaving in sexually inappropriate ways only escalates unsafety, rather than minimizing it. This argument also elides racial power disparities while simultaneously scolding a black woman for her "uppity" behavior.
3. She should have gone and personally spoken to the conference organizers. Nope. See aforementioned disparities. Also: It was not incumbent on Adria Richards to get up and leave a professional conference and miss part of something she wanted to experience in order to contact the conference organizers. Her approach centered her right to be there.
4. She has a history of responding inappropriately. Nope. I am not going to audit the way Adria Richards has responded to anything else, ever. What I am going to do is observe that how and where someone responds to something marginalizing is extremely dependent on how one perceives the likelihood that they will be listened to and taken seriously.
I am also going to share my own personal experience, for some perspective: My concerns about anything are routinely dismissed on the basis of my being a fat woman. It doesn't matter what the issue is: Even talking about Adria on Twitter this morning, comments about how fat I am were immediate. Women who have intersecting axes of marginalization learn by experience that even people who are our ostensible allies by other pieces of shared identification may be disinclined to listen to us.
That has created, for me, an urge to report concerns and criticisms in my own space or via my own alternative methods, in places and ways that feel safe to me. It has also meant, straight-up, that I'm more likely to be heard than following traditional channels and routes.
I don't know if this was part of Adria's calculation. I can't say that it has been a conscious strategy of mine, but I identify my own instincts to "go rogue" within her story. I certainly know other women of color—and fat women, and queer women, and disabled women, et. al.—who have adopted, consciously or not, the same strategy.
If you've got a problem with that strategy, take it up with the people who necessitate it, not those of us who use it.
LOL FOREVER
Joshua Green in Bloomberg Businessweek—The Secret Gingrich-Santorum 'Unity Ticket' That Nearly Toppled Romney:
It's one of the great untold stories of the 2012 presidential campaign, a tale of ego and intrigue that nearly upended the Republican primary contest and might even have produced a different nominee: As Mitt Romney struggled in the weeks leading up to the Michigan primary, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum nearly agreed to form a joint "Unity Ticket" to consolidate conservative support and topple Romney.Cannot. Stop. Laughing.
"We were close," former Representative Bob Walker, a Gingrich ally, says. "Everybody thought there was an opportunity."
"It would have sent shock waves through the establishment and the Romney campaign," says John Brabender, Santorum's chief strategist.
But the negotiations collapsed in acrimony because Gingrich and Santorum could not agree on who would get to be president.
Adria Richards Does Belong at Tech Conferences
[Content Note: Harassment.]
Yesterday, Julie Pagano sent me a heads-up about developer evangelist Adria Richards who had heard men making sexual jokes at the PyCon conference, took and tweeted their picture asking, in alignment with the conference's stated codes of conduct, for the conference to enforce that code, and then was subsequently fired from her job as a result of the "public nature" of the enormous backlash against Richards, which included the usual barrage of misogyny, racism, and violent threats.
I am always torn whether and how much to write about these things in the middle of them, without the explicit consent of the woman at their center, because I fear the possibility of sending more harm her way, along with more support. I don't have Adria's consent to write about her story. My preference, as I told Julie yesterday, was to give Adria the opportunity to share her story here, if and when she was so inclined. That is still my preference. But.
But, since yesterday, I've seen so much bullshit being written about her, often from ostensible allies, which is not fucking supportive—which tone-polices her, which begrudgingly admits she was right but should have gone about it some other way, which calls her right on the merits but still unlikable, etc. Fuck. Just fuck.
Adria's site has been under a DOS attack, but I encourage you, strongly, whenever you are able to access her site, to read her account of what happened and her carefully considered decisions about whether and how to take action.
Her piece is called "Forking and Dongle Jokes Don't Belong at Tech Conferences," on which the title of this piece is a play. Because, yes, forking and dongle jokes don't belong at tech conferences, and Adria Richards does. The end. No qualifications. No caveats. No urgent need to express my discomfort with her tone or her method of action.
I unilaterally support Adria Richards.
The men who were making sexual jokes and creating an unsafe space at a professional conference in specific violation of the code of conduct were wrong. I do not support them.
The people who responded to Adria's public report of harassers by criticizing her method of action were wrong. I do not support them.
The people who are bullying, harassing, and making violent threats against Adria are wrong. I do not support them.
Her employer, SendGrid, who fired her for becoming the center of a shitstorm caused by harassing fuckwads, are wrong. I do not support them.
Conversations, and the people who have them, that center picking apart the quick decisions that any woman makes in a moment of experienced sexual harassment, centering concern for harassers, are wrong. I do not support them. I support hollerin' the fuck back.
And I do not support the idea that only likable women are allowed to draw firm boundaries. Especially when I know as well as any woman and better than most that nothing makes a woman more "unlikable" than drawing firm boundaries. I am on to your Can't-Win game, apologists. And I will not play.
I support Adria Richards.
Question of the Day
[Content Note: Scatological humor.]
What is your favorite euphemism for having a bowel movement?
Honestly, I find just about any expression more pleasant than "having a bowel movement," lol. "Taking a shit" is probably the one I use the most, although the best I've ever heard, and it still makes me laugh, is when Spudsy, writing about his fear of shitting in public, said: "Maude forbid, if I'm out at a bar and I have to punch a grumpy, I'll go the fuck home."
Punch a grumpy! *falls over laughing*
What I'm Listening To
Supertramp, "The Logical Song"
Actually, I am not listening to this right now. This song was on the car radio when I left the doctor's office earlier today. I thought some of you might appreciate the amusing serendipity, as I did.
Also: Just a fucking good song.
Lyrics available here.
[CN: Misogyny.] And, for the record, I am not only a radical, a liberal, fanatical, criminal—I am also a fat cunt. And the more people tell me that is Who I Am, the more I wear it like a badge of honor.
Photo of the Day
From the Telegraph's Pictures of the Day for 21 March 2013: A map of the earth is seen through a droplet of water in Marseille, southern France. [Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images]
Two More Entries in the Naming Series
1. Let's Talk about Names: Patricia.
Latinos live on the crossroads of two different cultures. In our adopted country we want to keep our traditions alive but the need to assimilate is oftentimes much greater.Go read the whole thing! It's so good!
To answer everyone's question on whether or not I will change my last name when I get married, the simple answer is no. My name was already changed when I moved to the United States, and while I have no sentimental attachment it, it is the name I first learned how to write in kindergarten, the name I used through my adolescence when I won spelling bees and perfect attendance awards, and the name I used to introduce myself to my future husband.
I've grown to see my name as an extension of my identity.
...Not all women feel the same way about their last names. Some do not want to be associated with their families, others simply enjoy the idea of a new identity, and others feel pressured by their society. The truth is that changing names should be a personal decision, but oftentimes societal pressures can become burdensome. In a society where women feel pressured to "have it all" we need to understand that letting one thing go does not make us less of a feminist.
2. Let's Talk About Names: Hafidha.
I was still "Little Heidi" in their eyes. Still the fat and happy baby whose cheeks they had pinched; maybe they had even done me the kindness of feeding me or changing my diaper. I let them call me "Heidi"; after all, what did it matter? They may have been family but they were still strangers to me, and the likelihood of seeing them again was remote. I read their attempts at affection and familiarity as clutches at the past, a common behavior of adults. They weren't interested in who I was now, so my old name served them well enough.Go read the whole thing! It's so good!
...As a child, when I allowed relatives to call me "Heidi," I was using that old name in a kind of autotomous fashion. Autotomy is the act of an animal shedding some part of its body to escape a threat. The predator is left holding just a small part of what it wanted, meanwhile the part that is shed regenerates on the animal that was in danger. "Heidi" was useful in that it was a part of me I could do without, and I let these people I barely knew have it; they might have thought they'd got a hold of me, but in reality I was no longer connected.
I am loving this series so much. My profound appreciation to Grace and Jess for all the work they've done conceiving and producing the roundtable, and to all the amazing participants.
This is the greatest thing you will ever read.
Twenty money-saving tips from bankers and their wives. Care of Shaker itsdanilove, who highlighted in her email what was also my favorite tip (that's what zie said):
7. Don't carry so much cashLOL OMG LOL.
The more money you have in your pocket, the more you will want to spend it. "Stop carrying a wedge of cash around with you," said the ex-Goldman banker. "It reduces the temptation to tip people so much."
That was definitely the best, although I also like this very much:
11. Sell the second homeIf you're like me, you're wondering what the fuck you're supposed to do if your boat mansion is at your second home? Well, listen, peeps: The truth is, in this day and age, you just can't have it all. Either you can have your gold-plated car elevator, or your boat mansion, but you can't have them both.
Anecdotally, this isn't happening much yet – but it could start happening soon. "The second home in the country is where you rack up the most serious costs," said the hedge fund manager. "A lot of people I know are talking about ditching the country house. No one's done it yet though."
Unless you can, obvs.
Also: I didn't know all bankers were straight men. Neat! You learn something new every day.
Mods Get to See the Darnedest Things
Fished out of deleted comments, care of mod Scott Madin:
If you expect people to follow certain guidelines or complete required reading before posting their comments, I strongly suggest you post a disclaimer somewhere. It will save you the trouble of repeating this conversation and perhaps retain a subscriber or two, as I will not be returning to this site either.Like the "Welcome to Shakesville" text right at the top-right of the page, you mean? Thanks for the advice!
Blame the Girls
[Content Note: Rape culture.]
At CNN, whose coverage of the Steubenville rape case continues to be abysmal, Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, has a novel approach to holding girls and women accountable for rape:
Is anyone else wondering why the Steubenville, Ohio rape victim's two best friends testified against her? With this week's arrest of two other girls who "menaced" the teen victim on Facebook and Twitter, we have the beginnings of an answer.That is how the piece opens. It is followed my many paragraphs about how girls are socialized to see their worth via sexual appeal to boys, and how that can make girls competitive and traitorous toward one another, with some parts of which I agree and some I don't.
Rape culture is not only the province of boys. The often hidden culture of girl cruelty can discourage accusers from coming forward and punish them viciously once they do.
It is certainly not a universal experience: None, and I mean none, of my close girl friends in middle- and high school were ever nasty to me or one another over a guy, and we wouldn't in a million years have failed to support and defend one another against sexual violence. Nothing piqued our ire more than a dude who mistreated another of our circle. And it certainly wasn't because we didn't view our value as defined by the ability to get and keep boyfriends: I regret to say we did. But that doesn't necessarily intersect with the "mean girl" apathy to sexual violence that Simmons asserts it routinely does.
The piece ends thus:
I am not saying that Jane Doe was raped because of girls' silence. Girls may choose not to speak up for many reasons, but it's hard to ignore the power of a culture that pushes them to choose boys over each other and punish other girls to protect their own reputations.So, she's "not saying that Jane Doe was raped because of girls' silence," but she is saying that boys "would be less inclined" to commit and share on social media acts of sexual violence if only girls "banded together to support each other." Okay.
We must talk to girls about their responsibility in situations like this. If we want to prevent another Steubenville, we need to teach children from an early age about gender-based violence. The word "slut" is not just an epithet; it is a word that has given adolescents permission to abandon and hurt each other when a girl needs support most.
Girls must understand not only their moral obligation but their power to be allies to each other at parties and other potentially unsafe spaces for girls. If boys knew that girls banded together to support each other, they would be less inclined to share on social media, much less commit, these horrific acts of sexual violence.
There is truth to that, in the sense that any number of people showing unified condemnation of sexual violence is an effective deterrent. But that's not just on girls. It isn't enough for boys to not rape; they need to stand in solidarity against the boys who do, too.
Especially because boys largely aren't risking retributive sexual violence being visited upon them if they stand on the line between a rapist and his target.
It's remarkable the number of ways we can find to blame girls for their own disproportionate victimization and excuse boys from any responsibility whatsoever.
In The News
[Content nore: Transphobia, homophobia, Christian supremacy]
Mouth Is Alive With Juices Like Wine:
The G4 Network is going away. Neat! Unfortunately it is being replaced by the Esquire Network. Sad face.
A rare Chinese bowl bought for about $3 from a yard sale in the U.S. sold for $2.2 million at an auction.
Canada's House of Commons has passed a bill making it illegal to discriminate against transgender people.
Tony Perkins plans to start a third party. Yay, dominionism!
Did you know that eating chickens injected with hormones causes young boys to turn gay?
New results from looking at the split-second after the Big Bang indicate the universe is 80 million years older than previously thought.
Daily Dose of Cute
Olivia Twist would like all the petting, please.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
Please, No More Dating Guides
[Content Note: Rape, Sexual Harassment]
It happens every time there's a rape trial given national attention or an incident of sexual harassment highly publicized within a community: people start churning out dating guides purporting to teach men how to find sex without resorting to rape. And these "dating guides" have always bothered me, but it took an in-depth conversation with Liss for me to really understand why they irk me so much. This post is a product of that conversation and her collaboration, and is posted here with her permission.
I understand the good intentions behind these guides, I really do. More often than not, the authors reference the idea that we need to teach men not to rape (rather than disseminate "rape avoidance tips" centering on victim behavior and victim-blaming narratives) and feel like a post on how to date and/or hook-up without raping would be a positive contribution to that effort. But I also think that such guides, published in direct response to a very public incident of rape or sexual harassment, stand to do more harm than good. Allied persons inclined to speak to men about the value of consent-seeking need to be aware of the harm of writing them in explicit response to specific acts of sexual violence.
The guides ignore the actual current narrative in favor of a fictional one. The posts I've seen in the wake of the Steubenville rape case have largely centered around not sleeping with women who are awake-but-drunk -- a narrative that obscures the fact that the Steubenville rape victim was unconscious. The posts I saw in the wake of Rebecca Watson's elevator encounter largely focused on how and when and where to pick up women -- a narrative that ignored the fact that Rebecca Watson had explicitly and publicly stated that she didn't want to be picked up at all. These guides are wrenching real narratives away from women in order to tell a different story with a completely different context, and that's appropriation.
The guides reinforce the narrative that rapists don't know what they are doing. Some rapists are not aware that what they are doing legally constitutes rape. But most do. When we talk about "teaching men not to rape", we are not saying that rapists do not understand consent, but rather that rapists are not taught to respect consent -- as well as to respect the humanity of the women they might otherwise choose to rape. The framing that rapists are cultivated to deliberately dehumanize their victims and override their consent in a way that needs to be systematically addressed by comprehensive socialization and education is fundamentally different from the framing that rapists are just "clueless dudez" who need instructions on how to get laid in a safe and satisfying manner.
The guides reinforce the narrative that rape is a misunderstanding. Similar to the above, when these "how to get laid, rape-free" guides lay out in painstaking detail how to not 'accidentally' rape someone, the narrative that rape is one big misunderstanding is reinforced. The Steubenville rapists knew they were raping an unconscious woman, even if they didn't choose to apply the word 'rape' to the situation -- and guides which elide that fact in order to present rape as this exceedingly confusing and "gray area" situation where reasonably people can be completely baffled about consent and active participation is harmful to rape victims by suggesting that reasonable people can disagree about the validity of her rape.
The guides elide the reality that for most rapists, rape is not a bug, but a feature of sexual interaction. Again: teaching men not to rape is more than just teaching them what rape is. Teaching men not to rape means teaching them to see women as fully human and entitled to their bodies and boundaries, and teaching them that masculinity isn't about force and sexual gratification isn't about power. These are things that can be taught, but they are rarely things that will be taught in a dating guide. What can be taught in a dating guide is the false narrative that men are solely motivated by sex and that the rapist will give up his raping ways once he finds a sure-fire method for getting consensual sex.
Almost all rapists have access to consensual sex. Some rapists have access to consensual sex from their victims. The availability of consensual sex has nothing to do with the rate of rape, and these guides obscure that reality. The Steubenville football star rapists didn't rape an unconscious girl because they literally could not find any consensual sex and had to resort to rape instead, and it's terribly wrong to pretend otherwise.
The guides invisible women with prior intimate relationships with their rapists. Framing rape prevention within the narrative of a dating guide elides the fact that many rape victims have existing intimate relationships with their rapists. I had prior sexual interactions (including, in one case, a long-standing established sexual relationship) with my rapists. My rapists were not confused about my consent or about my boundaries; instead they allowed me my consent when it was convenient for them so that they could maneuver me into a position where they could override my consent without repercussions. Teaching these men to respect my boundaries might have prevented my rape; teaching them how to have consensual sex with me would not have prevented my rape because they already had that.
The guides entrench patriarchal entitlement to women's bodies. Too many of these "how to win consensual sex so you don't need to rape!" guides read like pick-up artist instructions. If we frame rape as something that happens only when consensual sex is unavailable, then we enter the misogyny-laden twilight zone where shirts like "Stop Rape. Say Yes." are made. Not all women want to be picked up. Not all women want to be flirted with. Not all women want to have sex with the specific man reading the dating guide du jour.
When these guides read like an encouragement that the man on the other side of the computer screen can have anything he wants and without having to resort to rape, it ignores the fact that he can't have "anything" he wants because sex with me is not on the table. He almost certainly can have sex with someone, but he equally certainly cannot have sex with anyone. Yet because these guides implicitly suggest that all women are available, and that all women are attainable, they entrench patriarchal entitlement to women's bodies. "You are available; therefore you must be available to me" is actually in fact a very common rape justification -- it simply cannot be salvaged for use in rape prevention.
The guides imply that Not Being A Rapist isn't a good enough reward. When we teach men not to rape because women deserve bodily autonomy and boundaries, then men learn not to rape because rape is wrong and it makes them a bad person. When we teach men not to rape because it's not necessary and there are lots of other, more valid ways to get sexual gratification, then men learn not to rape because they'll be rewarded if they don't. You don't get cookies for not being a rapist. Nor should you. The dating guides that dwell on the male author's experience and how awesome they were for not giving in to the temptation to rape are particularly guilty of this, because too often they seem to be suggesting that there's something laudable about choosing not to rape.
Choosing not to rape isn't a laudable act. It is a necessary-but-not-sufficient part of the bare minimum needed in order to qualify as a decent person. And yet dating guides which suggest that men questing for love on a nightly basis are brave and courageous and awesome for not raping women with alcohol, drugs, coercion, and/or fear are a major part of the rape culture problem by normalizing rape and elevating not-rape as something unusual and special and going-the-extra-mile. And this, too, entrenches the idea that men are entitled to womens' bodies: this idea that men are owed "reward sex" on the grounds that they haven't raped anyone lately.
The next time a rape trial is given national attention, or sexual harassment splashes across the headlines, or sexual violence is publicized long enough and loud enough and sensationally enough for everyone to weigh in on the issue for a few short days, please do not write a how-to-get-laid-without-raping guide. Please. Do teach men not to rape by teaching them that all women are people, that consent is crucial, that boundaries are a human right, that active participation is sexy, and that rape of any kind and for any reason is not condoned by you. But don't "teach" them how to avoid raping women by getting consensual sex from them instead, because you're not only missing the point, you're part of the problem.
Quote of the Day
[Content Note: Objectification; dehumanization; misogyny; rape culture.]
"The women we feature in the magazine are ornamental. I could lie to you if you want and say we are interested in their brains as well. We are not. They are objectified. We provide pictures of girls in the same way we provide pictures of cool cars."—Alex Bilmes, editor of Esquire magazine.
I don't guess I need to point out that equating pictures of women with pictures of "cool cars" reduces women to items to be possessed, and ownership leaves no room for agency or consent. It leaves nothing but consumption at will.
