[Content Note: Domestic violence apologia.]
Dear James Taranto, Editor of the Wall Street Journal's Online Editorial Page:
Nope. George Zimmerman is not "guilty of being male" for intimidating and/or assaulting his ex-wife and her father.
Please note: Using deadly weaponry to intimate and/or physically assault women is not a matter of manhood's course.
I am married to a man who has never physically intimidated me, physically hurt me, or given me any reason at all to call 911. Before him, I was married to a man who never physically intimidated me, physically hurt me, or gave me any reason at all to call 911.
I have been involved with a man who has done these things. He did not do them because he is a man, but because he is a garbage nightmare of humanity.
Although I will tell you, frankly, that attributing to maleness, masculinity, manhood what is actually simple indecency does not help dissuade such men from engaging in such behaviors.
Fuck Off.
Sincerely,
Melissa McEwan
P.S. I note once again the irony that it is feminists who are considered man-haters.
I Write Letters
Wednesday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by onions.
Recommended Reading:
Mimi: Why I Love Epic Fantasy (And Hate Game of Thrones) [Content Note: The post at this link contains Game of Thrones spoilers and discussion of violence and oppression.]
Vik and Al: Obesity and the AMA, Part Two [Content Note: The post at this link contains discussion of fat bias and discrimination.]
Jess: The NCAA, Sports Media, Priorities, and Rape [Content Note: The post at this link includes discussion of cases of sexual violence in college sports.]
Rafi: Michele Bachmann Says God Will Save Us from Hillary Clinton [Content Note: The post at this link quotes Bachmann using violent metaphors against Clinton.]
Fannie: What are women tangibly supposed to do with this information? Circulate it widely and reap the resulting mansplainy, asshole hyper-defensive comments and accusations of man-hating? [Content Note: The post at this link includes discussion of misogyny and gender essentialism.]
Kyler: Toys R Us Agrees to End Gender-Biased Marketing Policy
Jamilah: Muslim Woman Wins Hijab Suit Against Abercrombie and Fitch
Leave your links and recommendations in comments...
Number of the Day
19.3%: The percentage of total household income in 2012 pulled in by the top 1% of earners in the US, which represents the largest wealth gap among earners in the nation's recorded history.
The top 1% of earners in the U.S. pulled in 19.3% of total household income in 2012, which is their biggest slice of total income in more than 100 years, according to a an analysis by economists at the University of California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics at Oxford University.The richest USians believe the recovery has been successful, because it has been successful for them.
The richest Americans haven't claimed this large of a slice of total wealth since 1927, when the group claimed 18.7%.
...In a separate analysis, [prominent wealth and income researcher Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley] found the top 1% of earnings posted 86% real income growth between 1993 and 2000. Meanwhile, the real income growth of the bottom 99% of earnings rose 6.6%.
As for the rest of us...
Daily Dose of Cute
"U iz mines, Two-Legs."
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
A Chance to Teaspoon for the Hoosier State
by Shaker Harmony, a radical Hoosier fighting the Conservative Legislation Lab on the ground.
[Content Note: Hostility to agency; coercion.]
Here in Indiana, there is an amusement park called Indiana Beach. Their tag line is "There's more than corn in Indiana." I used to joke that they meant soy beans and basketball players. Increasingly, however, that "more" is becoming a willingness to persecute and prosecute pregnant people for their personal choices.
This week the focus is on pregnant drug users. Indiana's Attorney General Greg Zoeller is concerned about fetuses exposed to narcotics while in the womb. Well, actually, he seems to be concerned about the fact that it cost Indiana's hospitals $30 million to treat these babies in 2011. Regardless of the true nature of his concern, the fact is that Zoeller is calling on the state legislature to Do Something About It.
That something, as you might have guessed, is drug screens! Yes, they are considering drug screening every pregnant person in the state. Supposedly, it's only one of the options they are considering, but the fact that it's on the table at all is appalling to me. Here in Indiana, we are pressing fast forward to the day when we legally strip personhood from actual living, breathing people, to give it to fetuses.
AG Zoeller is not answering the tweets I sent him yesterday (imagine that), but there is another way to contact him! Tomorrow he will be a guest on PI Live. PI Live is a show that is done by the Palladium-Item (the local newspaper in Richmond, IN) and WCTV (Richmond's public access television stations). It will air live on TV in Richmond, but will also stream live on the web. Zoeller will be on the second segment of the show to discuss school resource officers, but they will be taking additional questions from live chat, and phone calls, emails, and tweets made in advance of the show.
The show can be streamed on the web at WCTV's website. Go to the broadcast tab and click Channel 11. However, Eric Marsh, WCTV's executive director, told me that streaming it from the Palladium-Item's site will be more friendly to Apple devices. That's also where you can chat live during the show to ask your questions.
In advance, you can email questions to Dale McConnaughay (the editor in charge of the show) at dmcconna@pal-item.com, call them in at (765) 973-4456, or tweet them to @pi_news using the hashtag #pilive.
If you feel comfortable using your teaspoon in any of these ways, I would really appreciate it. Indiana has a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in both legislative houses. Our best bet to stop things is before they become a bill to be voted on. These people aren't used to hearing "NO" very often. Those of us who are willing to stand up and say it have to be extra loud.
* * *
Many thanks go to: Liss for inviting me to guest post, my friend Natalie (@NaptownNat) who shared the original story with me, and Eric Marsh (who also happens to be my father) for giving me the heads up about tomorrow's show and for being committed to using his platform to connect people to their government.
Richard Dawkins, Again
[Content Note: Sexual violence; rape apologia.]
The thing about movement atheist Richard Dawkins is that he is the worst. And, yesterday, he reminded us once again why he is the worst by engaging in some truly gross rape apologia, while simultaneously disclosing that he is a survivor of sexual abuse:
In a recent interview with the Times magazine, Richard Dawkins attempted to defend what he called "mild pedophilia," which, he says, he personally experienced as a young child and does not believe causes "lasting harm."There are a lot of ways to respond to surviving sexual abuse. One of them is to minimize it. That is an understandable (and common) response to sexual abuse, and I am not in the business of policing people's individual response to trauma.
Dawkins went on to say that one of his former school masters "pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts," and that to condemn this "mild touching up" as sexual abuse today would somehow be unfair.
"I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today," he said.
Plus, he added, though his other classmates also experienced abuse at the hands of this teacher, "I don't think he did any of us lasting harm."
So if Dawkins wants to speak, for himself, about not personally condemning someone who molested him, and say, for himself, that he experienced no lasting harm, that is his right.
But the moment he starts extrapolating that response into a universal application, we've got a problem. It is categorically not his right to audit the lived experiences of other survivors and assert what the effects of surviving abuse have been (or should have been) on their lives.
This idea that anyone who was sexually abused in "an earlier era" doesn't or shouldn't experience lasting harm is implicitly victim-blaming, suggesting that anyone who has experienced lasting harm is weak, or wrong, or lying.
Embedded within it is also an argument that it's not the actual abuse that harms, but culture's response to abuse that harms. That is, anti-rape advocates are to blame—because it's not the actual abuse that causes harm; it's the awareness around abuse that causes harm.
This is a key piece of rape apologia—the idea that it's talking about abuse which traumatizes survivors, rather than the abuse itself. Naturally, no one should be made to disclose or discuss abuse against their will. But processing abuse is a crucial survival strategy for many victims—and, in fact, being denied the opportunity to process, being silenced, is a secondary trauma for many survivors.
Another key piece of rape apologia is the auditing and ranking of survivors of rape and/or the auditing and ranking of various acts of rape itself. Whether it's Republicans trying to redefine the legal definition of rape, Whoopi Goldberg defending Roman Polanski with comments about "rape-rape," the use of minimizing terms like "grey rape," calling rape "a disagreement between two lovers," or any of the other endless examples of language which posits there is some "real, serious, harmful rape" and some other sort of "sorta, kinda, not that bad rape," the idea that certain types of sexual abuse are tolerable is about the most basic rape apologia there is. "Mild pedophilia" is just not a phrase that should even exist, no less be uttered aloud.
The thing is, Richard Dawkins is a child rape apologist. One of the first things I ever noted about Dawkins in this space was his reckoning that a child is "arguably" better off repeatedly raped than raised religious:
In the penultimate chapter of his best-selling book The God Delusion, biologist and world-renowned atheist Richard Dawkins presents his view of religious education, which he explains by way of an anecdote. Following a lecture in Dublin, he recalls, "I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place." Lest his readers misunderstand him, or dismiss this rather shocking statement as mere off-the-cuff hyperbole, Dawkins goes on to clarify his position. "I am persuaded," he explains, "that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell."So, he "can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours" when it comes to the sexual abuse of children, but he's totes cool with it when it comes to religious upbringing. Priorities. He's got 'em.
It is my personal, individual experience that a Christian upbringing made my surviving sexual abuse even more difficult than it already was. I have real concerns about how certain, ubiquitous, rarely challenged aspects of religion both abet the sexual abuse of children and shame survivors while protecting abusers. This is a subject that desperately needs more attention and public conversation. Setting up "religion" and "rape" in some kind of vile contest for Worst Thing Ever, instead of engaging the intersection at which they interact to target children, isn't a helpful part of that conversation.
But, of course, Dawkins isn't interested in being helpful. He is interested in minimizing the gravity of sexual violence.
If he wants to do that for himself, for his own survival, fine. But he needs to leave the rest of us the hell out of it. The last fucking thing I need is another survivor publicly concern-trolling me for being affected, and offering himself up as a useful tool to the predators who share his loathsome opinion that a little rape ain't so bad.
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today!
Today is the anniversary of the terrorist attack of 9/11/01. Because the events of that day remain very triggering for a number of our readers and at least one of our contributors who was living in NYC at the time, I'm not going to be sharing images or writing anything evocative about what happened that day. There are plenty of other places to find that, if you are so inclined to mark the day that way. If you would like to read something that I wrote another year to mark the day, I will simply direct you here.
[Content Note: Guns; violence. Please note that video begins to play automatically at second link.] Police say that either George Zimmerman or his attorney are lying about Zimmerman having a gun at the scene of the attack on Zimmerman's estranged wife Shellie and her father. Rather, his former attorney. Because Mark O'Mara has quit.
In related news, the attorney for the medical examiner in the Trayvon Martin case, Dr. Shiping Bao, is preparing a $100 million lawsuit against the office of the medical examiner, the state attorney's office, and the Sanford Police Department, who he asserts were all biased against Martin. He alleges he was "wrongfully fired from the medical examiner's office" after being told to withhold testimony that did not favor Zimmerman.
[CN: Guns] Two Colorado state senators, John Morse and Angela Giron, both Democrats, have been voted out of office in a recall vote after they "provided crucial support for a slate of tough new gun-control laws. ...The election, which came five months after the United States Senate defeated several gun restrictions, handed another loss to gun-control supporters. It also gave moderate lawmakers across the country a warning about the political risks of voting for tougher gun laws." Swell.
Brittney Cooper has some great ideas about black women who are excellent candidates the be the next president of the NAACP.
[CN: Rape culture] Democratic California Governor Jerry Brown has signed three new anti-predation laws: "The first bill, AB 65, closes a loophole in California rape law by clarifying that someone who impersonates another person in order to coerce someone into sexual activity can be prosecuted for rape. ...Brown also signed AB 157, which will make false impersonation on the internet a criminal act of domestic violence, and AB 161, which will allow courts to ban domestic abusers from changing any insurance policies shared with their partners."
Congratulations to the US men's soccer team on earning another trip to the World Cup! The men's World Cup is next year; the next women's World Cup is in 2015.
[CN: Child abuse; sexual abuse; racism; disablism; exploitation] Reuters has an incredible five-part series on the United States' underground market for adopted children—specifically parents who have adopted internationally and now want to offload the child, or "disrupt" the adoption, which is accomplished in violation of laws that are not enforced, often by simply placing ads on the internet seeking to "re-home" the child, like an unwanted pet. It is tough but important reading.
AMC has canceled The Killing again. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! BUT IT WAS SO GREAT LAST SEASON! Dammit.
Transcription Update
Here is an update! On the ongoing process to transcribe the Wendy Davis filibuster, the associated citizen testimony, and the associated amendment debates! It is going to have lots of exclamation points! For science!
A) That Non-Profit Company Book Link Thing You May Have Seen On Twitter! A couple of you have written me about a non-profit company that has recently published their own Wendy Davis filibuster transcript. I was actually contacted earlier in our transcription process by that company; they asked to use our online transcript in their book, and I declined because I was concerned about retaining the right to set an affordable price point. I mention this only because a few people have worried how this might affect our transcript (it doesn't; I hold a copyright on our material) and whether they might have plagiarized us (I genuinely do not believe they have). So no worries!
(But I would strongly encourage people not to link to the book in this thread, as I am concerned that the ensuing inevitable conversation over their chosen price point may be distracting and potentially contentious and difficult to moderate. It's easy to find on Google.)
B) Emails! If you have sent me an email in the last two weeks and I haven't written you back, I totally will I promise. I have had all kinds of family drama and work drama and illness drama and SO MUCH DRAMA and there's kind of this Tragedy Of The Inbox situation now where the longer your email sits in my inbox the longer I take to answer it and arrrrgh. I'm sorry about that. I swear I will totally get back to everyone soon -- ideally this weekend, but that may be optimistic.
C) Progress! We are doing really, really well. You may recall we have 5 sessions slated for transcription. The Wendy Davis filibuster (1) has been basically done (i.e., either up or in proofing) for awhile now. The House Amendments (2) have all been spliced and sent out, way back when. Most of those are in proofing stages. The Senate Amendments (3) are 80% sent out; I've stalled on the last 20% and hope to finish that soon. Most of those are being transcribed as I type this.
The remaining two sessions -- the citizen testimony sessions that I couldn't map out myself because triggers -- have been sent out to their brave volunteers. (OMG THANK YOU, YOU TWO.) One of them is halfway finished and I have the capability to splice-and-send just as soon as I find the time. The other one got hir video last night, and has plenty of time because I still have the first one to splice out which is no small task. And while that may not seem like we're doing really, really well, for context's sake, I expected that by September we'd still be on the filibuster. Seriously, you guys, we are magic.
D) Volunteers! Having said that, if you have the time and spoons, please stay with us for the final stretch. We've lost roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of our volunteers to Other Life Priorities, all of whom we wish well and thank with deep gratitude, so that means all the remaining volunteers are that much more essential to the process. Which is totally not meant to be pressury and if you need to pull out, that's fine and I totally understand. But if you have the spoons to give, boy howdy we need them.
I think that's pretty much it! Once again, thank you all so, so much for all the support you're giving in so many supporty ways! And thank you all so, so much for being both generally and specifically awesome!
It's Flula Time Again
[Content Note: Scatological humor.]
Flula, a young white man speaking in German-accented English directly to the camera while lying in bed: I was speaking to my friend Eric tonight about horror films, you know, movies—movies that are scaresy. And he say: "Ah, Flula, have you—did you see Exorcist?" he say, "Exorcist?" I say, "No." Then he say: "Oh, Flula. Watch it. When you watch it, you will shit a brick."Case dismissed, Your Honor.
[blinks; raises an eyebrow; makes a perplexed expression] What? I will shit a brick?! Why, Eric? This is— Number One, it's not possible. Have you seen the hole down in the [points down] the basement here? Have you seen this hole, what is the shapes of it? Es ist kein viereck; it is not a square. It is a [makes fist and looks at the fist-hole] just some circle? Like an oval? Bricks cannot come out! They're cylinders! Cylinders can come out.
I'm not like, what, The Thing from Fantastic Four, you know, The Thing. He's made from rocks. Perhaps he shit bricks. I do not do it.
Or what—I'm like a German robot? Robot—a German robot? Where everything is [draws squares in the air with his index finger] corners corners corners corners. To include down here? [looks down] So when it come out, it's [robot voice and robot hand] beep-um bop-um pfffffft BRICK pfffffft BRICK pfffffft BRICK. (House.)
[perplexed face] No. No, Eric, I do not shit bricks. I poop tubes. I poop tubes.
Quote of the Day
[Content Note: Religious supremacy.]
"If these people don't like it, they don't have to live here."—Fox News fuck and former George W. Bush spokesperson Dana Perino, who is "'tired' of atheists attempting to remove the phrase 'under God' from the Pledge of Allegiance... The co-host of Fox's 'The Five' was referring to a suit brought by the American Humanist Association in Massachusetts, where the state's Supreme Judicial Court heard a challenge to the pledge on Wednesday."
It's neat how she's "tired" of people seeking the removal of a phrase which was added in by religious supremacists years more than half a century after the Pledge was written. Whooooooooops I thought conservatives loved strict constructionism!
I would say if religious people don't like it, they don't have to live here, but I'm not a garbagefuck.
It's Like a Black Fly in Your Chardonnay
[Content Note: Discussion of ending relationships; abuse.]
That is, not ironic. At all.
I don't know who Dr. Jenn Berman is, and I've never watched Couples Therapy, so I have no idea whether she is a competent doctor or whether the show is garbage—although, based on VH1's typical programming and the inherent subversion of a healthy therapeutic process care of its international broadcast, I can make some guesses.
But Dr. Jenn Berman's professional competency and the exact nature of the show itself is beside my point.
Which is this: No, it is not ironic that a relationship expert's relationship would come to an end. For many reasons. Like, for example, that being able to observe dysfunction and prescribe solutions for it doesn't necessarily translate into being good at relationships oneself. They are two separate skills. Or, as another example, being a relationship expert doesn't magically inure you from abuse.
But most importantly, there is this: A crucial part of being good at relationships is knowing when to end them.
Til death do us part may sound romantic as hell if you're in a great and fulfilling relationship you want to be in, but if you're in a relationship that makes you chronically and unresolvably unhappy, or in which you're unsafe, it's sadistic codswallop.
We have this pernicious idea that staying together, at all costs, is the only way to make a romantic relationship a "success." Anything less than the long haul is failure.
But letting go can be an act of love, too.
And going can be a necessary act of self-preservation. Preserving one's safety, or sanity, or sense of self.
Our only cause for public concern is when people cannot safely leave the relationships they need and/or want to leave. That is a failure. A community failure to create safe options for victims of abuse.
A relationship counselor getting divorced is not an occasion for public concern or judgment. And it's certainly not ironic. People go to relationship counselors for many reasons, one of which is helping them navigate a decision about whether they can and should stay together. Only in a culture where we imagine that staying together, at all costs, is the only conceivable success, and that a counselor's job is to find a way to make that happen, at any cost, would we find it "ironic" that a counselor would herself end a relationship.
Forever is romantic only when it's desirable. Otherwise, it's the cruelest curse.
Undermining Our Rights In Order To Save Them
[Content note: reproductive coercion, miscarriage, intimate partner violence, anti-choice laws.]
This week saw John Andrew Welden plead guilty to deceiving his partner Remee Lee into taking a drug that induced miscarriage. Reportedly, Lee was looking forward to carrying the pregnancy through and having the baby; Welden was opposed to her plans. Under the guise of bringing her amoxicillin for an infection, he instead dosed her with Cytotec, a drug that induced contractions. She began to experience bleeding and was hospitalized as she miscarried.
First and foremost, I am glad for any peace that this may bring Ms. Lee. I wish her healing and closure, and I hope this verdict makes it a little easier for her to go on with her life.
And I am glad that an abusive partner who treated the autonomy, rights, and life of his partner with such callous disregard will receive some punishment.
I am also deeply troubled by the message sent in this case.
Mr. Welden was charged with product tampering (okay) and murder under the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. As part of the plea bargain, the murder charge was dropped and a charge of mail fraud added. In return for pleading guilty to the lesser crimes, the plea agreement suggests that "Welden serve 13 years and 8 months, preferably at a low-security federal prison camp, as punishment."
I am well aware that prosecutors often face a terrible burden in getting charges to stick, particularly in cases that may invoke the usual misogynistic tropes against women ("she drove him to it," etc.) As previously stated, any healing or peace this brings to Ms. Lee is a good thing, and getting him behind bars is also a good thing. A mistrial or a verdict of not guilty would compound the tragedy.
But I am disgusted with a system that (in this case) gave justice by affirming a deep disregard for the basic bodily integrity of pregnant people.
Welden was charged with the murder of an "unborn child," not with harming Lee.
This is a man who sent her to hospital, who put her in a position where she might have bled to death. That is an act of violence against an intimate partner.
But the harm to Lee is not recognized in this case; neither the interference with her reproductive choice nor the potentially fatal nature of the attack on her body. Charging him under the federal statute may have been the best decision under the circumstances; this is not a post about nitpicking that decision. We could, optimistically, argue that the law indirectly acknowledges her right to make a choice, but against that must be weighed the next observation:
Had Welden been attempting to force his partner to carry to term against her wishes, state laws would actively abet him.
Florida's various restrictions on abortion set up a variety of barriers relating to cost and geographic access (although thankfully Florida's ban on abortions after 12 weeks was struck down in the courts). Limits on insurance coverage, on public funding, and forced closure of clinics that cannot meet state restrictions, are extremely helpful to abusive partners bent on reproductive coercion. Nagging, threatening, isolating, and otherwise hindering their partners becomes that much easier.
It is extraordinarily dispiriting that the only practical way, apparently, to obtain any justice for Lee was to exercise a law which tacitly affirms that her rights are less important than those of the fetus she carries. If this was the best law to use, then it underlines how fucked our system really is.
Because the message, taken in total, is clear: the state is yawningly indifferent about your right to self-determination, to bodily autonomy, to bodily safety, if you are pregnant. Your right to choice is so heavily weighted against the pregnant person, and so heavily weighted towards the fetus, that is not a choice at all.
(h/t: Liss.)
[Commenting note: This is not a post about federalism. Please stay on topic.]
Daily Dose of Cute
Zelly, composing her next blog post in her head while she enjoys the morning sunshine.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today!
Even First Lady Michelle Obama is skeptical about intervening in Syria.
[Content Note: Sexual violence; death penalty] Four men have been convicted in the fatal gang rape of a woman on a bus in New Delhi, a case that made international headlines and led to protests in India. "The men, convicted on all the counts against them, including rape and murder, now face the possibility of hanging. The sentences are expected to be handed down Wednesday." I am not a supporter of the death penalty; I will instead hope that they are remanded for the rest of their lives to a safe facility where they are never able to hurt anyone else ever again.
[CN: Guns; domestic violence] George Zimmerman will not be charged with making threats against his estranged wife, because of course he won't.
[CN: Gendered violence; death] Prominent female Indian writer Sushmita Banerjee, who wrote a memoir about "her life as the wife of an Afghan man in Kabul while the Taliban ruled," has been murdered by the Taliban outside her home.
[CN: Misogyny; homophobia; rape culture] Zoe Chevat's review of why Riddick is misogynist garbage is amazing.
Do you want to read about the new van Gogh painting that has been found? Y/N? If yes, click here.
[CN: Misogyny] Techcrunch weakly apologizes for allowing misogynistic presentations, including one about an app called "Titstare" that allows users to "stare at tits," at the Techcrunch Disrupt hackathon.
