feminist blogs

You know that weird feeling when something bad happens on the internet and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, or just walk away and go outside and maybe breathe into a paper bag if you really need to?

Women didn’t need a video of a woman getting cat-called over a 100 times to know that a genuinely enraging amount of sexual harassment still happens to women all the time. But someone made one anyway, so great, cheers etc. As you can imagine, the responses are predictable to the point of mind-numbing tedium, going along these lines:

Women: ‘Welcome to my life lol’
Men: ‘Wow, it’s quite bad actually all that sexual harassment isn’t it’
Some other men: ‘Women stop saying this is harassment it’s not CAN’T WE JUST GIVE YOU A COMPLIMENT!!!’
Some other men: ‘I got cat-called once. Must make a video undermining women’s experiences ASAP’

And that last thing, it has now happened. And I’m really glad, because one thing that we really needed was another video where some blokes undermine the shit time that women are forced to have because they non-consensually have to live in a patriarchal society. (Don’t know if you saw that one recently where it turns out that 99.9999% of domestic violence cases are women beating the shit out of men. I know men are supposed to be emotionally repressed but seriously, how are they managing to hide that that’s what’s really going on?)

So anyway, BORING I know, but it turns out some men still don’t really get it about this cat-calling business. Hey man, just because someone once called you fit when you walked down the street does not mean you are also a VICTIM OF STRUGGLE. There are a hundred other articles about why cat-calling is bad and I am loathe to write another one, and it’s not the oppression olympics, but there is a unique sense of irritation I feel when I hear men claiming that their experiences of ‘sexual objectification’ are the same as those experienced by women.

The first time I experienced this feeling was when Laura Bates was on the radio talking about Everyday Sexism about two years ago. Men fell over themselves to ring in to say that actually once they were shouted at by a group of women and they were very scared very intimidated very upset very distressed etc. I’m sure they were. Jeremy Vine for one seemed extremely bewildered by the whole experience.

But notice a pattern: If a woman doesn’t want <insert thing here> to happen to her, she shouldn’t <insert thing here> (just to reiterate please do not I repeat DO NOT insert your thing here.)

So if I don’t want to get raped, I shouldn’t get drunk. Because if I don’t want my car to get stolen I shouldn’t leave the keys lying around should I/ similar analogy comparing human beings with thoughts and feelings to material objects. If I don’t want someone to hack into my private photos, I should never take photos of myself naked. If I don’t want to get shouted at in the street, I shouldn’t wear certain clothes. All very foolproof gameplans of course, because if you obey these rules bad things will never happen ever OBVIOUSLY.

But aside from the fact that is obviously bullshit, it all operates around the understanding that the onus is on the woman to alter the way she lives her life in order to accommodate the invasive behaviour of men.

Again, when people say that women should take cat-calling as a compliment, they are again trying to force women to live by terms other than their own. ‘NO, that was not a prelude to rape, it was just a compliment OK? YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL.’ (…’I mean I was intimidating you in public by reinforcing the fact that you are seen by men as an interchangeable sexual object but hey let’s not talk about that.’)

Power dynamics, eh people? If a man shouts at a woman in the street, he is reminding her that she is widely seen as a sexual object without a voice or an opinion. If a man shouts at a woman in the street, he is able to make her feel intimidated, uncomfortable, dehumanised, embarrassed, and possibly under threat of sexual violence. If a man gets shouted at by a woman in the street – which, naturally, will be far less often since he is the one who holds most of the power – I’m not sure he genuinely feels that he could be about to get raped or in some sort of physical danger. I’m not sure that he would feel that expressing his reservations about such behaviour would open him up to further abuse.

I see women cat-called on a daily basis. Sometimes I even get cat-called myself, even though I have ‘MAN-HATING WILLY DESTROYER’ tattooed on my forehead. I’ve never seen a man get cat-called – I’m not saying it never happens, but let’s face it, men are not subjected to the fear of sexual violence on a daily basis are they now.

I suppose the last argument left is that old chestnut, the freedom of speech one.

Man: HEY NICE TITS!!!! What, I’m just expressing my freedom of speech?
Woman: Please fuck off sexually aggressive entitled misogynist arsehole. What, I’m just expressing my freedom of speech?

P.S. If you must watch the male alternative to 10 hours walking around New York, watch this one instead.

Martha Coakley

Tuesday is election day and there are plenty of exciting women candidates running in the midterms. Here are 10 women to watch (and vote for). For a complete list of the women on ballots Tuesday, click here.

Georgia: Non-profit leader Michelle Nunn is running for Senate against conservative candidate and businessman David Perdue. Georgia is considered a key state in the race to control the Senate.

Kentucky: Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes is running for the U.S. Senate against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Supporters are confident that if anyone can oust McConnell, it’s Grimes.

Massachusetts: Martha Coakley is running for Governor. Currently the Attorney General, she would be the first to hold the office if elected.

New Hampshire: Jean Shaheen is the only woman in the country’s history to be elected both governor and U.S. Senator. Shaheen is running for relection to the Senate against former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown.

North Carolina: Senator Kay Hagan is running for reelection against a well-funded opponent, House speaker Thom Tillis. She has a strong track record supporting and protecting women.

Ohio: State Senator Nina Turner is running for Secretary of State and if elected she’d be the first African American elected to statewide office in Ohio.

Rhode Island: Gina Raimondo, currently the General Treasurer of Rhode Island, is running for Governor and would be the first women elected if she wins.

Texas: State Senator Wendy Davis, best known for her 13-hour filibuster against anti-choice legislation, is running for Governor.

Wendy Davis

State Senator Leticia Van de Putte is running for Lieutenant Governor on the ticket with Wendy Davis, a Texas first to have two women top the ticket. Van de Putte has been a strong advocate for women.

The post 10 Women to Watch, And Vote For, in Tuesday’s Midterm Elections appeared first on Hello Ladies.

Today is the anniversary of the 34th American presidential election.  The year was 1920; it was the first presidential election in which women were allowed their own votes.  This seems like a good day to post a memento from the political battle over women’s suffrage, the right to vote and run for political office.

The fight for  took decades and women were on both sides of the issue.  The document below is a copy of an argument against women’s suffrage — Some Reasons Why We Oppose Votes for Women – printed in 1894.  The National Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage was led by Josephine Dodge.  (Open and click “full size” to read.)

Alice Duer Miller was on the other side of the fight.  In 1915, she wrote and circulated a satirical response titled Why We Oppose Votes for Men.  Drawing on parallel logic, she made a case for why it was men, not women, who shouldn’t be voting. (Click for a larger copy.)

It helps to have a sense of humor.

Happy anniversary of the first gender inclusive American presidential election everyone.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Ready? Here goes:

In a situation where you had domination by one country and its allies, or its satellites rather, the search for global solutions often turned into an attempt to impose their own universal recipes.

We all know what “one country” Putin has in mind, right? His ideology is pretty simple: it’s unfair that there should be a single global power (the US) that pushes its own recipes (democracy, human rights “Western values,” gay marriage, separation of church and state) on everybody. So it’s only fair, Putin says, that there should be another world power who would promote the exact opposite to create a more balanced system.

The profound cynicism of this position lies in the attempt to convince the world that Putin’s assault on democracy and human rights in Russia and neighboring countries is only done for the benefit of the planet.

“Don’t you see what I’m doing, you dummies?” he says. “I’m killing Ukrainians, rigging elections, and bashing gays (to name just a few favorite pursuits) to benefit you! So that our shared planet is a more objective and just place!”

I knew before starting to read the speech that our dear friend Mr. Snowden would make an appearance and serve a useful purpose. And so he did, even earlier in the speech than I thought:

It is not for nothing that ‘big brother’ is spending billions of dollars on keeping the whole world, including its own closest allies, under surveillance.

Obviously, I’m no longer naive enough to think that this will in any way influence Snowden’s fans to abandon their hero-worship.

Boo!  Spooky three-headed chihuahua features for this week’s Open Thread. Please natter/chatter/vent/rant on anything* you like over this weekend and throughout the week.

Three-Headed Chihuahua! by Pets Adviser, on Flickr

So, what have you been up to? What would you rather be up to? What’s been awesome/awful?
Reading? Watching? Making? Meeting?
What has [insert awesome inspiration/fave fansquee/guilty pleasure/dastardly ne'er-do-well/threat to all civilised life on the planet du jour] been up to?

* Netiquette footnotes:
* There is no off-topic on the Weekly Open Thread, but consider whether your comment would be on-topic on any recent thread and thus better belongs there.
* If your comment touches on topics known to generally result in thread-jacking, you will be expected to take the discussion to #spillover instead of overshadowing the social/circuit-breaking aspects of this thread.

• Open Thread with Scratching Badgers by tigtog September 26, 2014
• Weekly Open Thread with Parkour Plumbers by tigtog September 13, 2013
• Open Thread with Meerkat Pile by tigtog August 1, 2014
• Open Thread with Hoof Bump by tigtog October 4, 2014
• Open Thread with Wookie Griffon by tigtog September 12, 2014

As we learned during the last election, sometimes there’s nothing like a recording of a closed-door event with supporters to reveal what politicians really think. In a private event at the all-male Hibernian Society of Charleston, Senator Lindsey Graham, who is considering a presidential run, told the audience:

“I’m trying to help you with your tax status. I’m sorry the government’s so fucked up. If I get to be president, white men in male-only clubs are going to do great in my presidency.”

And the crowd laughed and laughed. Graham confirmed his comments to CNN, but, in a predictable move, says he was just joking around–he’s folksy like that, ya know?–and making fun of the society’s all-male membership. As Melissa asks, what exactly is the punchline then?

Because it’s hard to make a joke about something that is just straight-up true. We know that the GOP’s policies benefit white men above everyone else, and it’s been clear for awhile that Senator Graham personally seems to have a problem with powerful women of color–not to mention a belief that fetuses should have more rights than people.

Here’s the audio clip–with some bonus jokes about Baptists.

Maya Dusenbery is an Executive Director of Feministing.

Yesterday’s killing was the 39th school shooting in the U.S. this year.  Most of those got little press coverage. Unless someone is actually killed, a shooting might not even get coverage in the local news.

Yesterday’s did.

Why would an apparently happy kid shoot several classmates? That seems to be the question that’s getting the attention of the press and perhaps the public. “Struggling to Find Motive,” said one typical headline. That’s the way we think about school shootings these days.

It’s unlikely that any of the motives that turn up will be all that strange. Fryberg may have been upset by a racial comment someone had made the day before or by a break-up with a girl. He may have had other conflicts with other kids. Nothing unusual there.

But “why” is not the question that first occurs to me. What I always ask is how a 14-year old kid can get his hands on a .40 Beretta handgun (or whatever the weaponry in the shooting of the week is).  For Fryberg it  was easy. The pistol belonged to his father. Nothing strange there either.  Thirty million homes in the US, maybe forty million, are stocked with guns.

Do European countries have school shootings like this? Surely kids in Europe get upset about break-ups; surely they must have conflicts with their classmates; and surely, some of them may become irrationally upset by these setbacks.  So surely there must have been school shootings in Europe too.

I went to Wikipedia and looked for school shootings since 1980 (here and here).  I eliminated shootings by adults (e.g., Lanza in Sandy Hook, Brevik in Norway). I also deleted in-school suicides even though these were done with guns and were terrifying to the other students. I’m sure my numbers are not perfectly accurate, and the population estimate in the graph below  is based on current numbers; I didn’t bother to find an average over the last 35 years. Still the differences are so large that I’m sure they are not due to technical problems in the data.

Does the U.S. have a much greater proportion of kids who are mentally unstable? Do our schools have more bullying? Are European kids more capable in dealing with conflicts? Are they more stable after break-ups? Do they spend less time with violent video games? Do their schools have more programs to identify and counsel the potentially violent?  I’m not familiar with the data on these, but I would guess that the answer is no and that our kids are no more screwed up than kids in Europe. Or if there are differences, they are not large enough to explain the difference in the body count.

No, the important difference seems to be the guns.  But guns have become the elephant in the room that nobody talks about.  Even asking about access to guns seems unAmerican these days.  Thanks to the successful efforts of the NRA and their representatives in government, guns have become a taken-for-granted part of the landscape. Asking how a 14-year old got a handgun is like asking how he got a bicycle to ride to school.

When the elephant’s presence is too massive not be noticed – for example, when the elephant kills several people –  the elephant’s spokesmen rush in to tell us that “No, this is not the time to talk about the elephant.”  And so we talk about video games and psychological screening and parents and everything else, until the next multiple killing. But of course that too is not the time to talk about elephants.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Meerkats feature for this week’s Open Thread. Please natter/chatter/vent/rant on anything* you like over this weekend and throughout the week.

By Ashleigh Thompson (originally posted to Flickr as Meerkats) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

So, what have you been up to? What would you rather be up to? What’s been awesome/awful?
Reading? Watching? Making? Meeting?
What has [insert awesome inspiration/fave fansquee/guilty pleasure/dastardly ne'er-do-well/threat to all civilised life on the planet du jour] been up to?

* Netiquette footnotes:
* There is no off-topic on the Weekly Open Thread, but consider whether your comment would be on-topic on any recent thread and thus better belongs there.
* If your comment touches on topics known to generally result in thread-jacking, you will be expected to take the discussion to #spillover instead of overshadowing the social/circuit-breaking aspects of this thread.

• Open Thread with Meerkat Pile by tigtog August 1, 2014
• Open Thread with Scratching Badgers by tigtog September 26, 2014
• Weekly Open Thread with Parkour Plumbers by tigtog September 13, 2013
• Open Thread with Hoof Bump by tigtog October 4, 2014
• Open Thread with Wookie Griffon by tigtog September 12, 2014

Senator Brown

Senate candidate Scott Brown, campaigned at a UNH tailgate party last weekend where some students yelled misogynistic comments about Brown’s current and former opposition: New Hampshire Senator Jean Shaheen and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. Brown did not address the comments.

The Seacoast Online ran a headline today asking, “What’s a candidate to do when supporters behave badly?” The answer is simple: denounce the behavior.

A spokesperson for Brown issued a statement saying. “As the video clearly shows, he didn’t hear these comments and certainly does not condone this language.” Maybe he didn’t hear it, but clearly his campaign is aware of the comments now. Brown is trying to convince voters he supports women. Speaking out against what transpired at the tailgate would be an opportunity to prove it.

Of course, I didn’t expect to hear from Brown on the issue. He didn’t speak up after a 2010 rally in Massachusetts when someone made a horrible suggestion about his former opponent Martha Coakley. Actions, Senator Brown, not words. That’s what wins a woman’s vote.

http://www.seacoastonline.com/article/20141013/NEWS/141019682/0/SEARCH?template=printart

The post Scott Brown Misses Another Opportunity appeared first on Hello Ladies.

The graph below represents the share of the income growth that went to the richest 10% of Americans in ten different economic recoveries.  The chart comes from economist Pavlina Tcherneva.

It’s quite clear from the far right blue and red columns that the top 10% have captured 100% of the income gains in the most recent economic “recovery,” while the bottom 90% have seen a decline in incomes even post-recession.

It’s also quite clear that the economic benefits of recoveries haven’t always gone to the rich, but that they have done so increasingly so over time. None of this is inevitable; change our economic policies, change the numbers.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)