From the Telegraph's Pictures of the Day for 4 November 2014: A sheep has been rescued by a skier after tumbling down a mountain. Pete Oswald, 29, skied and carried the injured animal to safety down Hector Mountain on New Zealand's South Island. [INCOGNITO MEIDA/ CATERS NEWS]Amazing.
[Content Note: Pranks; bullying; hostility to consent; child abuse.]
Every year, late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel invites parents to "prank their kids" by telling them they ate all of their Halloween candy, then film the kids' reactions and send them to his show so they can be compiled into a supercut of upset kids at which everyone can laugh.
This year's video is going viral, just as the video does every year. And every year, I get emails about it.
The thing about parents pranking their kids—and I cannot believe I need to write this—is that it fundamentally shatters children's security and trust in the idea that their parents will not harm them. (Which, in some of these families, may never have existed in the first place.) The takeaway for a child whose parents like to prank them is that their parent(s) might harm them, and no amount of "JUST KIDDING!" can fully repair the crack in the edifice of what should be an inviolable trust.
Parents who prank, tease, and ridicule their own kids, even if they're "just kidding," do so at the risk of their kids' ability to feel safe even in their own homes. That is not a risk any parent should be willing to take with a child.
And somehow, I don't imagine that "but I only did it so people could laugh at your despair on NATIONAL TELEVISION!" would bring a whole lot of comfort.
Stop it, parents. Just stop.
And you, too, Jimmy Kimmel. You're urging parents to harm their kids and then broadcasting the "hilarious" results on national television. None of these children can consent to what's happening to them. None of them can consent to their pain being broadcast for strangers' amusement.
Stop it.
I have never seen, but would love to, a TV show centered around characters who...
(This could be anything you like. Characters who are of a certain demographic, characters who live in a particular culture, characters who have a specific job, whatever.)
"The main goal is to see whether we can make progress for the country. But obviously, the president is the only person who can sign something into law. So whether we can make much progress the next few years depends on him."—Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, telling a funny ha-ha joke about how the President might be a big old meany obstructionist if the Republicans reclaim the Senate majority.
I mean, he might be. I hope he is. But it's hilarious that the leader of the most obstructionist caucus in the nation's history is preemptively whinging about obstructionism.
McConnell also said today: "This is a chance to begin to save this country." Hoo boy.
Here is some stuff in the news today...
Today is Election Day in the US, and there is a lot at stake. Thanks to a series of garbage rulings by the Supreme Court, there is also a lot of money at stake care of people trying to buy elections.
[Content Note: Illness; death] Damn: "A fresh outbreak of Ebola in a part of Sierra Leone where the virus was thought to have been contained has raised fears of a new, uncontrolled infection chain that could send the death toll soaring. A Red Cross ambulance team was sent to the remote district of Koinadugu, which had prided itself on being the only area to have kept Ebola at bay, from on Tuesday to urgently collect 30 corpses for medical burial."
[CN: Homophobia] Aggressive homophobia in Russia: "A memorial to Apple Inc founder Steve Jobs has been dismantled in the Russian city of St. Petersburg after the man who succeeded him at the helm of the company, Tim Cook, came out as gay." The company who erected the memorial cited "the need to abide by a law combating 'gay propaganda.'" Fucking hell.
[CN: Police brutality; racism] Police officers have been absolved of killing Darrien Hunt, the 22-year-old black Utah man who was shot and killed because he was carrying a sword while cosplaying: "Utah prosecutors announced on Monday that officers were justified in fatally shooting a young man who was wielding a sword as part of a Japanese anime costume. Two Saratoga Springs officers feared for their lives and the safety of others in the bustling shopping centre where the encounter occurred when they fired seven shots at 22-year-old Darrien Hunt on 10 September, the Utah County attorney, Jeff Buhman, said in a news conference on Monday." Rage. Seethe. Boil.
RIP Tom Magliozzi.
Neat! "Astronomers may have found out exactly what a certain thin, bizarre object at the center of our galaxy might be. They've discovered that this object isn't a hydrogen gas cloud, but may instead be a pair of binary stars that is orbiting the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy."
At this link, you will find a picture of Tom Hardy kissing a puppy. You're welcome.
[Content Note: Sexual abuse; hostility to consent; privilege.]
A few days ago, a rightwing website published excerpts from Lena Dunham's new book, which detail inappropriate sexualized interactions with her younger sister.
Dunham immediately pushed back, and a number of high-profile feminists (mostly or all white feminists) jumped to her defense. The website was accused of mischaracterizing Dunham's words, despite the fact that the site had published exact excerpts.
The truth is, the people who write content for that website would not have given the tiniest shit about this subject, were it not for the fact that it gave them an opportunity to discredit a visible and celebrated feminist. But the fact that they're opportunistic fucks does not mean that the issue they've raised is without merit.
The passages—which I will not be republishing here, but they are easy enough to find if you are so inclined—are upsetting and disturbing. They do not strike me, in any way, as the harmless, typical sexual exploration that happens between children. (Especially siblings six years apart in age.) It's alarming to me that no one during the entire process of editing and readying this book for publication suggested that their inclusion as charming childhood anecdotes would be inadvisable.
A lot of the public discussion around this has centered around whether the acts themselves were sexual abuse, and I certainly have thoughts on that, and what was going on with her parents, and I certainly have thoughts on that, too, but I'm not inclined to engage in remote psychoanalysis of Dunham, or her family, to try to understand the context in which these acts happened. (I'm also not inclined to define Dunham's sister's, or anyone else's, experiences for them.) I'm more concerned at the moment with Dunham's decision to publish them, and what that says about her respect for consent and agency right now.
Over the past couple of days, one of the pieces of information I was hoping to find was whether Dunham's sister Grace, prominently featured as the subject of Dunham's sexually inappropriate (and admittedly predatory) behavior, had consented to have these incidents included for publication.
Grace Dunham's only public comment that I have found is three tweets, which do not condemn (and seem marginally to defend) her sister, but do not explicitly comment on the issue of her consent regarding publication of the incidents.
In an interview earlier this year, the sisters had the following exchange regarding Lena having outed Grace to their parents:
Grace then rolled her eyes saying, "Without getting into specifics, most of our fights have revolved around my feeling like Lena took her approach to her own personal life and made my personal life her property."Welp.
"Basically, it's like I can't keep any of my own secrets," Lena said. "And I consider Grace to be an extension of me, and therefore I couldn't handle the fact that she's a very private person with her own value system and her own aesthetic and that we do different things."
[Content Note: Racism.]
"The president is the most racist president there has ever been in America. He is purposely trying to use race to divide Americans."—Conservative shitlord Ben Stein.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL FUCK YOU.
Stein went on to add: "What the White House is trying to do is racialize all politics and they're especially trying to tell the African-American voter that the GOP is against letting them have a chance at a good life in this economy, and that's just a complete lie."
OMG. Ben Stein, here is just a big bag of SHUT UP.
[Content Note: Descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Spoilers are lurching around undeadly herein.]
[Content Note: Sexual violence; police brutality; revictimization.]
In the wake of the allegations against Jian Ghomeshi, there has been another round of victim-blaming in the form of auditing the victims' responses to their assaults, specifically with regard to official reporting.
This happens every time there are allegations against a prominent man, or during any discussion of rape prevention. Potential victims are tasked with preventing their own rapes, and actual victims are tasked with preventing future rapes by reporting.
All to avoid tasking predators with the responsibility of not raping people.
Lately, suggestions of mandatory reporting by survivors have become increasingly frequent.
You know how I feel about those.
Over the past couple of days, I have read these two stories: The first, from Texas, is about police officers making rape jokes. The second, from Florida, is about a police officer being arrested after raping a woman on the hood of his patrol car.
I don't think mandatory reporting will ever be a good idea, for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is the reality that there are a number of people tasked with taking such reports who themselves are abusive and/or predators.
The variation on this theme is telling survivors that we must speak out and tell our stories. That, even if we don't want to make an official report, we are obliged to publicly disclose our histories of sex abuse and educate the world about its ubiquity and gravity.
This, too, is garbage.
I am someone who has spoken publicly about being a survivor of sexual violence, and I know the power that disclosure can have for other survivors. And the power it can have to educate people. But I am also keenly aware of the personal consequences and costs to speaking out.
Whether to tell one's story publicly, or privately, is a deeply intimate decision. And there is no One Right Choice.
No one should be shamed for silence, which can be a crucial act of self-care.
I desperately want survivors who want to tell their stories to be able to tell them safely. Which is why I have spent enormous amounts of my time and energy trying to build as safe a space as possible for that to happen—instead of lecturing survivors on what they should be doing, inside the context of a culture hostile to survivors, where speaking out is very likely to result in revictimization and secondary trauma.
I'm never going to tell survivors they have to do anything.
I cannot abide the vile fuckery of telling survivors they have to speak up about their abuse when there are so few people who feel they have to listen.
I cannot abide the cruelty of telling survivors they have to make official reports of their abuse when there are so few people to whom they can report who feel they have to take them seriously and keep them safe.
Maybe everyone who busies themselves telling survivors what we have to do could instead redirect that energy toward telling other people that they have to make safe spaces for us to report and tell our stories; that they have to listen to us and believe us.
Because, for real, what difference does it make if we report to people who don't care; if we all speak up all day every day, if we're not going to be heard and believed?
This blogaround brought to you by roof shingles.
Recommended Reading:
Ragen: [Content Note: Fat hatred] CDC Encouraging Workplace Discrimination Against Fat People
Libby Anne: [CN: Racism; misogyny; antisemitism; genocide] Science, Privilege, and Power
Martha: [CN: Religious supremacy; reproductive policing; misogyny; homophobia] Pope Francis' "Synod on the Family" Raises Hope, But Fails to Deliver Change
Miriam: Debunking the Myth That Latinos Are Anti-Choice
Charles: Majority of Adults Say Employers Shouldn't Discriminate Against LGBT Workers on Religious Grounds
Rachel: [CN: Discussion of reproductive policing; heterocentrism; privilege] I'm 41, Single, and Pregnant
Prison Culture: New Resource: "I Live for Trans Education"
Leave your links and recommendations in comments. Self-promotion welcome and encouraged!
[CN: intimate partner abuse, violence, assault, workplace harassment, BDSM discussion. For background on ths story, see here and here and here.]
Three women, including actor Lucy Decoutere, have gone to the police with their complaints about Jian Ghomeshi. The police have not yet interviewed Ghomeshi, but are appealing to the public for information. In particular, they are looking for photographs, videos, chat messages, and similar evidence.
There would seem to be plenty of people with information of some sort. Students at the University of Western Ontario were, apparently, warned away from internships at Q. In a podcast, Jesse Brown interviewed Roberto Veri, a CBC employee who describes the stories that circulated in the workplace about Ghomeshi, and the behavior that he actually witnessed. In the interview, he corroborates the story of the former employee who has already brought her story to the media, and explains why he did not go forward at the time.
According to an article by Kevin Donovan at the Toronto Star, Ghomeshi vaguely threatened him in September, probably in order to head off the story." You need to watch yourself...People in this city need to understand that I have a long memory. You need to understand that and be very, very careful." How nice. And it apparently never occurred to him (as Donovan observes) that some of those "long memories" might well involve Ghomeshi attacking women.
In other news, the Polaris Music Prize has removed Ghomeshi from its jury.
A U.S. newspaper re-ran a flattering, pre-allegations profile of Ghomeshi over the weekend. Whoops.
Also: I hate to break it to Rich Copely of the Lexington Herald-Leader, but when your big concern in this story is whether or not you'll still have a nifty radio show to listen to, you are kind of definitely missing the point.
More to the point: the #BeenRapedNeverReported tag has provided many people a chance to explain why they chose not to report. The Huffington Post Canada covered the tag yesterday as well.
If there are more updates, I will post them here.
Here is some stuff in the news today...
Welp, tomorrow is the midterm election in the US, and the big news (from the future!) is that the Republicans are definitely going to win! So why even bother voting? HA HA DO NOT LET THAT STOP YOU FROM VOTING. Even the media coverage of elections is profoundly anti-democratic in this country. Fucking hell.
[Content Note: Police bruality; racism] Of course: "The U.S. government agreed to a police request to restrict more than 37 square miles of airspace surrounding Ferguson, Missouri, for 12 days in August for safety, but audio recordings show that local authorities privately acknowledged the purpose was to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests. ...The AP obtained the recordings under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. They raise serious questions about whether police were trying to suppress aerial images of the demonstrations and the police response by violating the constitutional rights of journalists with tacit assistance by federal officials. Such images would have offered an unvarnished view of one of the most serious episodes of civil violence in recent memory."
[CN: Racism; appropriation] The protest this weekend against the Washington NFL team's name that is a Native American slur was massive. And activists are not going to let up: "Buoyed by thousands of protesters from Minnesota and at least 10 other states who converged on TCF Stadium on Sunday, activists determined to retire the Washington [redacted] nickname vowed to take their campaign to every remaining Washington NFL game this season." Right on!
Here comes winter with a terrific howdoyoudo: "Thousands of people in Maine woke up in the dark Monday morning after an icy blast knocked out power and buried parts of the state in almost two feet of snow seven weeks ahead of winter. More than 130,000 homes and businesses were left without electricity as of Sunday night and Maine Gov. Paul LePage declared a state of emergency. Although Monday was expected to bring warmer weather across the East, snow was still set to fall until lunchtime in parts of northeast Maine. As much as 21 inches fell in Cary, near the border with Canada, and double-digit totals peppered the Maine map." I am really hoping that everyone is able to stay safe and warm, and that electricity is restored promptly.
Something something highwire stunt in Chicago. Watching Wallenda praying with prosperity gospel huckster Joel Osteen afterwards was a major news story on the local Chicago news last night. Just imagine my face.
I don't know how I feel about this: "An federal district court in Oregon has declared Secular Humanism a religion, paving the way for the non-theistic community to obtain the same legal rights as groups such as Christianity." I feel like I'd rather a federal umbrella category have been created, which encompasses all belief groups, instead of treating "religion" as the default and alternative belief groups as ersatz religions.
[CN: Sexual assault; misogyny] Soraya Nadia McDonald writes an interesting piece for the Washington Post about how it takes a famous man condemning famous male sexual predators before the world will even begin to listen, no matter how many female victims speak out.
According to preliminary research, plants supposedly know when they're being eaten (at least by caterpillars) and don't like it! Damn. My childhood self would have been completely horrified to hear this, as I was always convinced plants knew they were being eaten—although my theory was that vegetables knew their destiny was to be eaten, so I felt terrible for the vegetables I was letting down if I couldn't eat all of them and had to throw some of them away. I GUESS NOT!
[CN: Animal endangerment] The fanged deer is back! Woot! Unfortunately, it is still critically endangered. Boo.
This story of a pit bull who found a new home is pretty much the best. ♥
[Content Note: Illness; assisted death.]
Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old woman with terminal brain cancer who used the last weeks of her life to advocate for expanding US access to doctor-assisted death, died over the weekend, as planned, in accordance with Oregon's Death with Dignity law.
In her final Facebook post, she wrote: "Goodbye to all my dear friends and family that I love. Today is the day I have chosen to pass away with dignity in the face of my terminal illness, this terrible brain cancer that has taken so much from me ... but would have taken so much more."
My condolences to her family, friends, and colleagues.
One of the interesting things I've noticed in the coverage of Maynard's death is the routine use of language that Maynard killed herself. Which is, of course, technically true. But it's more complicated than that, too. An aggressive form of brain cancer is the cause of Maynard's death. The pills she took to die on her own terms merely decided the day that death would happen.
That may seem like an irrelevant bit of semantics, but it's not. Assisted death for terminally ill people is not about deciding to end their own lives, but about knowing their lives are ending and taking control over when and how that will happen.
That's not a choice everyone wants to make, but it should be a choice all of us have the option to make.
I have abundant admiration for Brittany Maynard, who used her life to do such poignant and important advocacy around death.
[Related Reading, including discussion of concerns around consent: Right to Die.]
