Guest post: It’s more than the messages you hear

Oct 21st, 2015 11:52 am | By

Originally a comment by iknlast on Without having to go back.

It’s more than the media. It’s more than the messages you hear. The messages we get are all around us, often unnoticed in any real way, subtle.

My father refusing to teach me how to start the lawnmower. His paying for my brother’s college on terms that were much more generous than mine.

Being kept in the dining room on Christmas with the women while the men went into the living room and talked about interesting things. Being the last one served. Being asked to make the coffee at the meeting.

Many of the messages aren’t “girls wear nail polish” “girls wear high heels”. They are subtle; the people delivering them may not realize they are delivering them. The people receiving them may not realize they are receiving them.

It is in the way my major professor in my doctorate talked to me in a fatherly manner, like a pat on the head, while being good buddies with his male students.

It’s in the way my boss peed off the end of the boat the first time they took me out for training (marking his territory?). It’s in the way that another boss asked me, the person with the highest level of education in the entire business, to water the plants.

It’s the way that my current boss has looked at a building in which all but two of the employees are women – and appointed the two males as building captains. It’s in the way that my seniority is ignored at work, and everyone turns to the male who has been there half as long as I have when they want someone with authority (we have equal authority; I just rarely have the opportunity to use mine). These are messages that are often unseen, but have a huge impact.



Change the venue

Oct 21st, 2015 11:27 am | By

Newsweek Pakistan reports:

The death toll from last month’s haj stampede has topped 2,000, according to tallies given by foreign officials, making it the deadliest disaster in the pilgrimage’s history by far.

Saudi Arabia has yet to provide an updated death toll after saying 769 people died in the tragedy near Mecca, home of Islam’s holiest sites. But figures given by more than 30 governments around the world show that at least 2,097 foreign pilgrims have died.

That’s so horrific. It wasn’t an earthquake or a flood or a mudslide, it was just way too many people in one place, trying to carry out a “religious obligation” that dates from a time when Islam was a local religion and the locality was sparsely populated. It was just way too many people, crowding and pressing and suffocating each other, to the tune of over two thousand human beings.

The loss of life in the Sept. 24 disaster far exceeds the 1,426 pilgrims who died in the haj’s worst previous incident—a tunnel stampede in July 1990.

Here is a breakdown of the dead from foreign governments:

Iran: 464 dead

Nigeria: 199 dead

Mali: 198 dead

Egypt: 182 dead

Bangladesh: 137

Indonesia: 129 dead

India: 116 dead

Pakistan: 89 dead

Cameroon: 76 dead

Niger: 72 dead

Senegal: 62 dead

And so on, in descending order.

You know what would be good? Merciful, helpful, compassionate, while still being religiously obedient? If all the top clerics put their heads together and issued a Ruling that now that there are so many Muslims, the hajj is a pilgrimage to the Most Important Mosque in one’s country or region. Period; end of discussion.



If gender is social rather than natural

Oct 20th, 2015 12:21 pm | By

If gender is social rather than natural, change and variability are always possible. Hence continuities also require a social explanation. One important continuity is the hierarchical relationship between women and men, which has persisted despite many changes in the meaning of femininity and masculinity and in the social activities of women and men. While male dominance can and does change in form and degree, it seems that gender hierarchy can coexist with a wide variety of beliefs about gender and with different divisions of labour between women and men. Gender thus denotes a hierarchical relationship between women and men, not merely differences between them. If gender is understood to be social, this hierarchical relationship needs to be explained as a product of social arrangements.

–Introduction to Gender: a Sociological Reader, edited by Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott, p 6



The woman whose life he took is forgotten

Oct 20th, 2015 11:38 am | By

Remember when the interim director of the Berkeley Astronomy department said: ““Of course, this is hardest for Geoff in this moment”?

Now it’s Oscar Pistorius who is “in need of healing.”

[A] justice system serves society with a split purpose. There’s punishment of the perpetrator and an element of rehabilitation (which has been vigorously stressed in this case – the terms of his house arrest include community service).  And there’s also the strong social message that the justice system serves: through its sentencing, it makes a comment on the seriousness of the crime and how profoundly it will be perceived. This is the sticking point.

Judge Thokozile Masipa had to deal with the facts in front of her, and mete out a sentence as appropriate. But the parole board decision to release Pistorius from prison today measures the life of a woman, violently taken, in just a few short months behind bars. The value of South African women’s lives is set at an all-time low.

When the homepage of a major South African news site carries a story saying that Pistorius is ‘broken and in need of healing’, we, as women, are told that the perpetrator of the most violent of crimes is actually the victim, in need of comfort and protection, while the woman whose life he took is forgotten, edited out the story, just another statistic in a justice system that served her poorly.

We must make sure the world remembers: #HerNameWasReevaSteenkamp. And it is her life, not her killer’s, which it’s important to include in our ongoing conversation about global rates of violence against women.

And our ongoing conversation about whether or not women even matter.



Total aesthetic hegemony

Oct 20th, 2015 10:33 am | By

So now North America is wholly ruled by Absurdly Gorgeous Men.

I feel as if I should be indignant about this, because what does Absurdly Gorgeous have to do with governing or administration? Nothing. (Diplomacy though? Different story? In which case maybe not nothing at all to do with governing? Persuasion is a necessary skill in governing, and charisma is part of persuasion. We ugly people are not useful in that way, fairness or no fairness.)

Maybe I’ll be indignant about it next week or sometime, but right now I’m just amused.

Presidente Enrique Peña Nieto. Fotografía oficial.jpg

Image result for obama wiki commons

Image result for justin trudeau wiki commons

Hottie McHotterson 1, 2, 3.



Without having to go back

Oct 19th, 2015 5:22 pm | By

Another thing about that CisPrivilege Check List – item 22.3.1 again:

I was trained into whatever gender was appropriate for me, and so I am prepared to live in my current gender, without having to go back and learn vital skills I was not taught when I was young.

That’s privilege because trans people don’t have that: they were not trained into their “appropriate” gender, so they are not prepared to live in their current gender without going back to learn vital skills.

But isn’t it supposed to be trans-exclusionary for women to point out that trans women who grew up as boys don’t have the experience of being the lesser, the subordinate, the inferior, the feeble, the not very bright sex? And that that’s why sometimes feminist women want to be able to talk to each other about having grown up being the lesser, the subordinate, the inferior, the feeble, the not very bright sex?

Trans women have always been women, we’re told. To say otherwise is transphobic, isn’t it? Isn’t that too what we’re told?

I’m not sure all of this has been carefully thought through.

H/t Mr FP.



Who needs data?

Oct 19th, 2015 4:32 pm | By

Noah Smith of Bloomberg View reports on this defunding of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The BLS is one of the most important economic data-gathering agencies in the U.S.

Employment numbers? Inflation statistics? Those all come from surveys run by the BLS.

Unfortunately, the Republican-controlled Congress is allowing the bureau to wither on the vine, and there are signs it will get worse. During the past five years, funding has stagnated as inflation has risen, meaning that in real terms the agency’s budget has fallen by 10 percent. Now the Senate is proposing to cut funding by about 4 percent more, in real terms, this year.

This is a dangerous game. The rewards from cutting BLS funding are minuscule. The proposed cut will save only $13 million a year, or about 0.002 percent of the federal discretionary budget. For comparison, this is about equivalent to the average household saving roughly $1 a year. It is nothing, nada. Not even a drop in the bucket.

It’s meaningless for the federal budget, but damaging to the BLS budget.

But these tiny funding cuts are already having a huge effect on the agency’s ability to tell us what’s going on with the economy. In 2014, the BLS was forced to cut back on one of its major programs, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. It almost had to slash another program that gathers data on imports and exports.

Cutting these and other BLS surveys would be like blinding ourselves intentionally. It is because of BLS programs that we know whether the economy is stagnant or recovering, whether the trade deficit is shrinking or growing, whether Americans are getting jobs or losing them.

How else are we supposed to know those things? Guessing? Looking out the window? Swapping stories? Going to church?

[T]he BLS reductions are part of two dismaying trends in our legislative priorities — cuts to research funding, and a disregard for the importance of social science. In the case of the BLS, it would be a mistake to further hobble an agency that does so much to aid our very understanding of the economy around us.

Don’t worry, God will provide.



Tyrants cut off information

Oct 19th, 2015 4:22 pm | By

Robert Reich on Facebook:

The first thing tyrants do is close schools. The second thing they do is burn books. The third thing is cut off information. Right-wing Republicans are on the way to doing all three: State legislatures continue to cut school budgets; local Republicans are reducing budgets for libraries. Congressional Republicans are now cutting off information — slashing the budgets of the most important sources we have for collecting data on what’s really happening to jobs, wages, and the economy: the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Because of such cuts, the BLS can no longer collect data on mass layoffs or how Americans are using their time; the cuts may also make employment data less reliable.

Republicans don’t want Americans to know the truth. That way they can hoodwink us even more. But a free society needs good information no less than it needs citizens sufficiently educated to use that information to make informed decisions – such as voting Republicans out of office.

No labor statistics for you, peasants.



The bed of roses isn’t

Oct 19th, 2015 11:30 am | By

A blogger drew up a Cis Privilege Checklist in 2007. I took a look. I was unsurprised to find that I disagreed with much of it. Some of it I don’t agree is really privilege, but that doesn’t matter much. The part that does matter, I think, is the radical simplification and absolutism about what “cis” people experience. It’s another version of that yes or no thing I made such a point of refusing last summer. It’s profoundly wrong.

Like –

6. Clothing works for me, more or less.

  1. I am a size and shape for which clothes I feel comfortable wearing are commonly made
  2. There are clothes designed with bodies like mine in mind.
  3. If I am unable to find clothing that fits me well, I will still feel safe, and recognizable as my gender
  4. If I have a restriction on what clothing I will buy (e.g. vegan, allergy, non sweatshop), I can expect that specialty stores will have them in my size/shape.

No. Not at all. That’s never been my experience of clothes. It doesn’t worry me much now but that’s because I’ve been able to arrange my life so that I don’t have to show up in a workplace every day looking normal. And people can and do feel unsafe for a million reasons that have nothing to do with clothes – and for plenty of reasons that do have to do with clothes but have nothing to do with being “cis.”

9. Perception/acceptance of my gender is generally independent of:

  1. Anything mentioned in 8.*
  2. My clothing choices, how my clothing fits
  3. My adherence to traditional roles of my gender (both “too much” and “too little”)
  4. Holding sexist, sex-negative, or rape-culture beliefs
  5. Holding feminist or sex-positive beliefs
  6. My sexual choices/desires
    1. With whom? (gender, number)
    2. Frequency
    3. Circumstance (marriage, love, one-night-stand)
    4. What (e.g. penetrating/enveloping, fetishes, dominance)
  7. Being assertive, aggressive, or passive
  8. Being in a position of power
  9. Being intellectual or not
  10. My dietary habits
  11. My weight
  12. My height
  13. My occupation
  14. My musical taste
  15. My hairstyle
  16. My hobbies
  17. Wanting gendered things/actions labeled “immature” or “childish”
  18. Whether or not I have had a specific medical procedure

No, no, no, no, no. Not at all. Perception and acceptance of everyone’s gender is far from independent of all those things except the last one. It’s true that most cis people mostly don’t have to clarify what sex they are, but it’s not true that they’re all always free of criticism for how well or badly they fulfill their duties to their gender. I get that it’s far sharper and more intrusive and often more dangerous for trans people; I don’t dispute that. But the fact that it’s worse for trans people does not mean that it’s non-existent for cis people.

16. Commonly used terminology that differentiates my gender from other genders/sexes implies that I am normal, and that I have unquestionable right to the gender/sex I identify with. The implications these terms make about my gender, my body, my sex, my biology, and my past are all acceptable to me.

No. Absolutely not.

22. My gender is acknowledged universally, immediately, and without hesitation

  1. My birth certificate, drivers’ license, social security card, etc are correct from the moment I get them.
  2. I have no need to establish that I am a different gender than someone already thinks I am.
  3. I lived my childhood in a gender that felt appropriate for me at the time, and still does. I lived my childhood in the gender that I want to have lived it in.
    1. I was trained into whatever gender was appropriate for me, and so I am prepared to live in my current gender, without having to go back and learn vital skills I was not taught when I was young.
    2. I experienced puberty, and being an immature girl/boy, at a time in my life when there were allowances for puberty and immaturity.
  4. My preferences for my gender have been honored my whole life, by my doctor, my parents, my teachers, my professors, my relatives, my classmates, my bosses, etc., except before I was able to state preferences, when I was forced to adopt the gender which I now inhabit.

Oh, no, no, no, no. 1 is ok, 2 is ok-ish, but after that, it’s complete nonsense. No, my gender did not “feel appropriate for me at the time” and no it doesn’t still. Every time I turn the damn tv on I’m made aware that I’m not “a woman” as the world of tv-makers understands women. That idea of what “a woman” is has never, ever, ever “felt appropriate” to me. Aha! says the alert privilege-spotter – so you’re trans then, you just won’t admit it. No, I’m not – I’m not “a man” either. Ok then you’re non-binary.

But in that sense maybe everybody is non-binary. Or the vast majority of people. Or well over half. Or half, or a substantial fraction. We don’t know. But it’s complete bullshit to claim that everyone who isn’t trans is described by that list under 22. It’s a mistake to think that everyone who doesn’t have your particular complication or difficulty or disadvantage is therefore wallowing in bliss and perfection. Life isn’t like that, and most people aren’t like that.



An engineering project

Oct 19th, 2015 10:10 am | By

The Indian “spiritual” site Speaking Tree warns of bad Vastu.

India has the Himalayas in its North, which – Vastu experts say – goes against Vastu. It is the reason that poverty remains an unending issue in our country.

Huh. So, could they move them to the south?

Facebook readers are not convinced.



But she still got drenched

Oct 18th, 2015 6:02 pm | By

Now here’s a story of cis privilege. Girls in Nepal are banished when they are menstruating; they have to sleep outside in skimpy sheds without walls. What about during monsoon season? Well they get wet, of course.

Where do these ideas come from?

Ancient Hindu scriptures say women are highly infectious during their periods, that “all her body is so weak that viruses come out of her mouth and her limbs,” says Mukunda Aryal, who has studied Hindu culture for 40 years.

In Hinduism, there was once a king of the gods, who reigned above others. This god, called Indra, committed a horrible sin. And to atone for it, he created menstruation.

You what? He committed a sin, and to atone for it, he created menstruation? What the hell is the logic of that? Let alone the fairness? He created a sin, so girls and women have to have obnoxious cramping in their lower abdomens every month, and have a lot of gross clumpy blood (that is, endometrial tissue) to deal with? In what sense is it atonement to create an unpleasant inconvenient uncomfortable situation for other people?

The NPR reporters, Jane Greenhalgh and Michaeleen Doucleff, visit one menstrual shed.

It’s about a ten minute walk. It’s starting to get dark, and she doesn’t have a flashlight. “I’m scared mostly of snakes and of men,” she says through translator, Pragya Lamsal of WaterAid. Kamala has heard stories of girls being sexually assaulted when they’re alone in their sheds.

Her shed is shocking. It looks more like a cage — with wooden bars crisscrossed over the top and sides. It’s monsoon season and the rain is torrential. Kamala has a piece of plastic to drape across the top of her shed but she still got drenched.

Kamala was 11 when she first started her period and she remembers being terrified when she first slept outside. The shed is small, barely big enough for her to lie down and sometimes she shares it with 2 or 3 or more girls and so for most of the night they squat.

“I don’t feel good about practicing this,” Kamala says.

The Supreme Court of Nepal outlawed the practice in 2005 so it’s illegal to force women into these sheds, but many villagers in the remote west continue to do it.

Oh well, it’s only girls and women.



Maiduguri

Oct 18th, 2015 5:36 pm | By

In case anyone thought things weren’t so bad in Nigeria lately…

Suicide bombers blow up a mosque in Maiduguri.

At least 39 people have died after multiple explosions in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri, an emergency official says.

Three female suicide bombers, thought to be aged between 11 and 15, struck on Friday morning, an official with the National Emergency Management Agency told BBC Hausa.

Aged between 11 and 15! Girls! Murderous men sending little girls out to explode themselves and others while the murderous men stay safe.

It follows bomb attacks on a mosque on Thursday, which killed at least 32.

Maiduguri is often targeted by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram.

Boko Haram hasn’t yet bragged about doing it.

More than 100 people were killed in three explosions last month in the city, which is considered the birthplace of Boko Haram.

In Thursday’s attack, officials say the first suicide bomber blew himself up inside the mosque, with a second bomber detonating explosives as people rushed to help those injured in the initial blast.

The explosions caused parts of the mosque to collapse, leading to further injuries.

Blew herself up, that apparently should be. And notice the familiar cruelty of timing the second bombing to get the people who rush to help.

Anyway – no, things are still shit in Nigeria.



Three questions

Oct 18th, 2015 5:09 pm | By

Watch Peter Tatchell ask panelists at an iERA debate to say whether or not they condemn the death penalty for blasphemy, amputation, and stoning for adultery, and the panelists refuse to reply.

That’s one time when a yes or no question is not out of place.



It all depends on when you start the clock

Oct 18th, 2015 10:11 am | By

Katy Murphy and Thomas Peele at Inside Bay Area ask if the “swift” departure of Geoff Marcy signals “a profound shift in how society reacts and responds to sexual harassment and abuse on campus and in corporate boardrooms?”

No, it doesn’t, because it wasn’t “swift” at all. It took years. See astrokatey on Twitter:

Katey the Astronomer ‏@astrokatey Oct 16
@dalcantonjd 3 years to compile stories. 3 to find ppl willing to come forward. Hours of phone convos about strategy. It succeeded.

Three stinkin’ years, and all that hard work. This is no swift departure.

Back to Murphy and Peele:

But in a flash last week, the white-hot glare of social media revealed the darker side of the UC Berkeley professor, a titan in the field who sexually harassed aspiring female scientists. And just as notably, it exposed how many of his colleagues and institutions appeared to know about his behavior — but were either too intimidated or indifferent to stop him.

After years of inaction, it took just five days for an international firestorm to force Marcy to resign from his prestigious posts at UC Berkeley and the $100 million Breakthrough Listen project to study extraterrestrial intelligence.

But that’s just it – there were years of inaction. It took years plus five days.

The question many are asking now is: Is Marcy’s undoing simply a rare example of the stars aligning? Or does his swift departure signal a profound shift in how society reacts and responds to sexual harassment and abuse on campus and in corporate boardrooms?

No. No, it doesn’t. Not at all, any more than Mark Oppenheimer’s reporting on Michael Shermer or the string of accusations against Bill Cosby did. All this tells us is that eventually, if enough people are willing to put in a lot of work and take a lot of risk, maybe one harasser will feel compelled to resign…at age 61, when most of his harassing days are in his past.

What’s so extraordinary about Marcy’s case is that once it made headlines “so many people across the board were able to publicly say, ‘I know this guy is in the running to be a Nobel laureate, and I don’t think he should be in our field,’ ” said Robin Nelson, an assistant professor of anthropology at New York’s Skidmore College and who published a study last year on sexual harassment in academia.

I don’t see anything extraordinary in that at all. Once it made headlines, it was dead easy to say that. Once it made headlines it was safe to say that. Once it made headlines it was even popular to say that.

Nelson said she senses a groundswell of changing attitudes over sexual harassment behind the digital expressions of moral outrage over #GeoffMarcy. Ever-greater numbers of women in the workforce, growing activism against campus sexual assault and high-profile exposés of rape and harassment in the military have shined a bright light on similar issues, Nelson said.

Meh. It’s not as if this is a new issue.

Two women said in interviews last week with this newspaper they tried to report Marcy for similar behavior when he taught at San Francisco State University in the mid-1990s. Both were sickened to see that he was found to have harmed other students at Berkeley — yet allowed to keep his position.

Preet Dalziel, who now lives in Walnut Creek and teaches at a Bay Area high school, said she worked for Marcy as a graduate student; he was also her master’s thesis adviser. At first, Dalziel said, she tried to ignore off-color comments and back rubs he would give to other students. But one day, as they were looking at code on his office computer, she said, he touched her breast.

So she tried to report him – and was shut down. A classmate made the same attempt and got the same response. Dalziel had wanted to work at NASA, but after that experience she felt discouraged, and pessimistic about getting a reference from Marcy, so she left the field. Geoff Marcy stomped out her dream because he wanted to grab her tit. Nice guy.

She said she hopes the outcry over UC Berkeley’s response forces universities to take their students’ complaints more seriously.

“It just kind of hurts me because it’s not right,” she said. “I don’t want professors to feel that they can get away with this stuff because they have tenure or they did something great.”

Yes but you see that’s exactly it – the stars can get away with it because nobody wants to lose the stars. Nobody wants to alienate the Bill Cosby, the Michael Shermer, the Geoff Marcy.

At the UC Santa Cruz Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics’ “Evening with the Stars,” celebrating the university’s 50th anniversary in August, Marcy was “the star,” lecturing on behalf of his alma mater at the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. As for the brilliant professor’s darker side?

“We didn’t know,” said Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, chair of UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Yet others, like Harvard astronomy professor John Asher Johnson, who was one of Marcy’s key assistants at Berkeley, revealed on a blog post last week that his “inappropriate actions toward and around women in astronomy is one of the biggest ‘open secrets’ in astrophysics.”

So, is it plausible that no one at UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics had a clue? No, it’s not.

Maybe the department chair is relying on a lawyerly meaning of “know” – they didn’t know for sure; they knew of allegations but they didn’t know for sure they were true. That of course is entirely plausible…but since the lawyerly meaning is not the only one in play, it’s not altogether honest.

Marcy enjoyed “considerable power” in the field, Johnson wrote. “Underground networks of women pass information about Geoff to junior scientists in an attempt to keep them safe. Sometimes it works. Other times it hasn’t, and cognizant members of the community receive additional emails, phone calls and Facebook messages from new victims.”

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said when she attended UC Santa Cruz in 2005 she was told as she pursued her career to “stay away” from Marcy. She’s passed the same advice to others.

So people at UC Santa Cruz warned her in 2005, but the chair in 2015 said they didn’t know. Didn’t know what? That Marcy was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Or that women were warned to stay away from Marcy if they didn’t want to be groped?

Deniability can be so helpful to department chairs and studio executives.

The “current academic hierarchical structure ensures that predators like him have significant safety once they enter the higher ranks,” said Prescod-Weinstein, the MIT postdoctoral fellow. “It is very easy for professors to get away with racist and sexist behavior — and they do — because junior researchers don’t have the power to push back.”

Alex Zalkin, a San Diego lawyer representing three former Berkeley students suing the university over the way it handled sexual assault allegations they filed, said the light punishment Marcy received is indicative of campus culture that gives predators a pass.

“There is an institutional problem,” he said, that is similar to what his clients faced in trying to force investigations. The women, he said, “aren’t surprised” about how Marcy was treated. “I am not optimistic anything will change.”

I’m not either. I’d like to be, but I’m not. Universities aren’t going to become eager to get rid of their stars overnight.

But Nelson, the Skidmore College professor, said Marcy’s remarkable downfall could send a bigger message to powerful men everywhere.

“What this story kind of tells us,” she said, “is if you get caught and this catches up with you, your career will end in a week.”

But only if you get caught, and the catching takes literally years – so your career will end “in a week” plus 30-odd years.



We are conditioned to put the needs of others before ourselves

Oct 17th, 2015 5:39 pm | By

This from rubyfruitz at Sisterhood is Powerful a year ago is of interest:

It doesn’t matter what kind of politics a feminist has, unless she is fully accommodating to men (in the shape of anti-feminist, queer gobbledygook and other woman-haters) she will be attacked. Attempts will be made to silence her through a systematic campaign of hatred and intimidation.

There has been a recent bout of attempts to stop individual feminists from speaking at events. The chosen method is to call someone ‘phobic’. You can put any word you want in front of it. It doesn’t have to be a real word, you can just make it up. In circulation, we currently have: biphobic, transphobic, whorephobic, lesbians who are somehow ‘homophobic’ (will leave you to work that one out, I can’t) etc.

Deborah Cameron does a thorough, good, job of explaining that the constant use of something-phobia is meaningless because it implies oppression is driven by a psychological problem; a condition which gives rise to hatred. Although sometimes oppression is about hatred, it is always about power. A radical feminist analysis always involves where the power lies and why it is being used.

The trouble with libertarian feminist analysis is that it’s clueless about power and coercion.

Structural oppression, as it relates to sexuality, is about the way compulsory heterosexuality is imposed on women, from birth. The purpose is to enforce male domination. It’s nothing to do with someone’s feelings, about bisexual jokes or assumptions made about bisexual people. Any other analysis is bullshit individualism and has a libertarian agenda. That has no part to play in feminism – feminism is about the liberation of women, as a caste. It’s not humanism, it’s not about all other oppressions. It’s an unrelenting fight for women’s freedom.

That’s not to say that, as feminist activists, we should not take into account other oppressions; we may share other oppressions and we may be fighting other injustices alongside our feminism. However, losing focus on the liberation of women within feminism leads to humanist murkiness where women’s concerns, as always, is everyone else but our own caste.

That. It amazes me more every day the way women who consider themselves feminists are falling all over themselves to attack feminism, along with everyone else who is attacking feminism. It amazes me more every day the way women who consider themselves feminists are buying into claims that feminist women are “talking over” trans people, and that feminist women have all the privilege relative to trans people. The masochism and self-silencing of it is stunning to watch.

We are conditioned to put the needs of others before ourselves. Queer ‘phobic’ smoke-screens play right into that. Women, especially ‘feminists’ who have liberal notions of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ for everyone, end up fighting for the wrong team and against their own liberation. The reason liberal feminists lose focus is because they don’t recognise the importance of power in a political context. Power is more than the power of one individual. Power is about which group of people (men as a caste) control what social, financial and other resources and why. I really don’t know why we have to keep repeating this to brainwashed women on the left. But we do.

Maybe it’s the threats.

Never has this been more obvious than the recent spat of ‘feminist’ university societies targeting individual feminists. They have worked with male supremacists (whether visibly and consciously so or not) to silence both long-standing and newly emerging feminists. Having a critique, or, even better, a political analysis about why women’s liberation leads to gender abolition, is enough to get labelled one phobia or another. The mere use of the word ‘phobia’ gets ‘feminists’, and their anti-feminist allies, worked up into a frenzy and demand no-platforming of women who have something to say about male violence. It doesn’t even make logical sense half the time.

It’s surely the witch hunts of centuries past, all over again. The lack of analysis is very telling. Julie Bindel was simply called ‘vile’ by the NUS. Very mature. Over and over students admitted they had not read her work but something-something-‘phobia’. Caroline Criado-Perez has recently received the vague accusation of being a ‘damaging and exclusionary figure’ followed by an unsubstantiated but emotive ‘we urge you to distance yourself’.

And if you don’t? We will try very hard to destroy you.

Am I right to see a hint of a threat there? – ‘distance yourself, single-out and ostracise this individual or we will cause trouble’. It’s a threat feminists are beginning to get used to. It comes from MPAs (Male Privileged Agitators) and queer folk alike.

And from people who consider themselves feminists – don’t forget that part.

The mission to train feminists into being submissive, obedient, silent women goes like this: Don’t ever allow yourself to be called ‘phobic’ or else bad things will happen to you. Not to women. To you, personally. You will suffer and be punished if you express radical politics. When you’re challenging, for example, the billion dollar sex industry, you may be called ‘whorephobic’ (sic) and accused of hating prostituted women. And, if that happens, it’s not just a word with ‘phobia’ at the end, it has the power to set a stream of hatred and no-platforming your way.

And what does that do? Why, it silences feminists. Own goal!

Our ‘choices’ are limited. We keep quiet, we go anonymous and hope we’re not doxxed (by anti-feminists or ‘feminists’ who knows?) or we speak our mind under our real name knowing that years of intimidation and harassment lie ahead. The pattern of thinking for the Obedient Woman goes something like this: ‘We avoid any kind of ‘phobia’ (sic) at any costs – but see those women over there? They’re bigots and should be silenced. I am, of course, a good ally of yours, how could you think I am not? Hey you over there! BIGOT! TRANSPHOBE!”.

Witch!



Market day

Oct 17th, 2015 4:48 pm | By

This probably belongs in the Withdrawing Room, but I feel like giving it some space. (I think soon I’ll make a page for Patreon patrons that will be about frivolities and other random things.)

There’s this conversation on Facebook about farmers’ markets, and we were told about the St Jacobs Farmers’ Market, which looks killer. It has a soup vendor! Who creates wonderful new soup recipes (and the soup itself).

And there are Mennonites.

woman cooking breakfast sandwich

And crafts, and all the good things.

colourful Tupperware on shelves

It put me in mind of the Oxford Covered Market, which has been around for centuries. So I found it – and of course it has a Facebook page too.

It’s a lovely place, the Covered Market.

 



She neither chooses nor identifies with this status

Oct 17th, 2015 11:33 am | By

Glosswitch talked about the “pregnant people” issue back in February.

Last week I wrote an article on the discrimination suffered by pregnant women and new mothers. In doing so I wished to stress that such discrimination is rooted not in the nature of pregnancy itself, but in the low status accorded to women as a class. If the rules changed overnight and people of higher status – men – got pregnant, we would treat the whole process very differently. Instead, we live in a world where 800 women die every single day from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. This isn’t because pregnancy happens; it’s because it only happens to people who don’t matter. These people we call “women.”

Exactly. The fact that it’s women it happens to is crucial, so dropping the word “women” from the discussion is a truly terrible idea.

I am not prepared to compromise on what gender is and how it relates to the exploitation of female bodies if what I’m writing about is pregnancy discrimination (if what I was writing about was favourite sandwich fillings I might take a different approach). I’m well aware that it’s considered polite (at least if you’re a woman) to add some little qualification that undermines one’s whole argument by prioritising gender as brainsex over gender as a murderous hierarchy, but if we’re talking about actual death tolls, I’m not doing it. So that’s it. Much as I’d love to join in [with] the superficial halo polishing I’m out.

Once the murderous hierarchy no longer exists – then it will be another story. But that won’t be on the watch of “third wave” feminism, or “hundredth wave” either.

“Pregnant woman” is not an identity. It is a social reality. A pregnant woman’s ever-contracting rights – whether she can choose to end this pregnancy, whether she will risk imprisonment for drinking too much, whether she will lose her job, whether she will be murdered by her partner – can only be seen through the filter of her inferior social status: that of woman. She neither chooses nor identifies with this status and it matters that the restrictions it places on her and others be fully acknowledged. Hundreds of women died today because of the way in which pregnancy intersects with their political and social status as women. The term “pregnant people” denies them the specificity of their deaths and masks the cause.

What gender-neutral pregnancy campaigning has achieved is wholly negative, making it impossible to articulate why there exists a class of people who are not granted full sovereignty over what lies beneath their own skin.  It has located the abortion debate (which should not be a debate at all) back where conservatives want it: on the status of the foetus, not that of the gravida. It has allowed the misogynist left to consolidate their definition of woman as “passive fantasy girl with tits” as opposed to “person with independent physical functions, emotions and needs.” Above all, it has created the illusion of an opt-out to being placed in the inferior sex class. Well, there isn’t, at least not until you can be bothered to challenge the fundamental idea that half the human race is inferior (oh, but that’s so much harder than messing about with words!).

It’s a lot less fun, too.



A London street in 2015

Oct 17th, 2015 11:05 am | By

A tweet:

Giles Dilnot @reporterboy
Amazed. That’s quite a sign for a London street in 2015.

Embedded image permalink

Description: a demonstration, with one person in the foreground holding a sign that reads:

THIEVING MURDERING “ISRAELIS” GO HOME TO POLAND, GERMANY, USA



People everywhere need to hear about Jesus

Oct 17th, 2015 10:38 am | By

It sounds like a sweet idea for schools – have children fill a box with toys and essential items and the Christmas Box charity will send it to a child who is living in poverty. But. There’s more to it.

Emma Williams at Humanist Life reports:

Operation Christmas Child is run by Samaritan’s Purse, a huge and zealous organisation led by Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham. Not only is the organisation openly homophobic, it seeks to proselytise in a manner that most people, including liberal Christians, find unacceptable. As a humanist, I am naturally disquieted by the idea of people performing evangelical work with the intended purpose of conversion; but I am positively offended when this work is performed at the expense of vulnerable children in desperate situations across the globe.

It’s a bit like prostitution that way. “Choices” made in circumstances of dire poverty are not really choices at all.

Many UK representatives hotly defend Operation Christmas Child and claim to have seen no evidence of evangelism or of the accusation that the boxes are distributed with ‘strings attached’. These people are either disingenuous or incredibly naïve. A cursory glance at the charity’s own website provides a wealth of evidence that the explicit, stated purpose of Operation Christmas Child is to convert the child who receives the gift and to encourage them to convert their families. The mission statement says that ‘every gift-filled shoe box is a powerful tool for evangelism and discipleship – transforming the lives of children around the world through the Good News of Jesus Christ’. As one of the representatives in India puts it in this promotional film, ‘children become the harvesters’ for Jesus.  Religious literature is distributed, often in the children’s own language, and this is the charity’s own description of how it is used:

‘Through The Greatest Journey discipleship programme, boys and girls can become faithful followers of Jesus Christ. Samaritan’s Purse developed The Greatest Journey as a dynamic, interactive Bible study for use in countries around the world where Operation Christmas Child distributes gift-filled shoeboxes. Wherever possible, children receiving shoeboxes are invited to enrol on The Greatest Journey; 2.8 million children have enrolled on this programme since the curriculum was first developed in 2008.’

Some of the evangelical literature sent with shoeboxes to impoverished children

The evangelism is carefully hidden in the UK version of this project.

One of the reasons why so many people in the UK are completely oblivious to the extreme agenda of Samaritan’s Purse is that it is deliberately not promoted here, to the extent that many earnest and well-meaning volunteers remain blissfully unaware of its sinister nature. This is an excerpt from one of the organisation’s own statements about their UK-based operation, and it implies that there may well be practices that even those who work for the charity in the UK are completely unaware of:

‘Please be assured that the commitment of Samaritan’s Purse to evangelism is as strong as ever. … However, there is a difference in the way the boxes are processed in the UK for overseas shipment. The UK program removes all religious items … and forwards any Christian literature to our National Leadership Teams working in countries where shoebox gifts are distributed, so the Christian literature can be used with children. … The Gospel is also presented locally as part of the distribution of the gifts, and wherever possible, children are offered a Gospel storybook written in their own language called The Greatest Gift of All. Many children are also invited to enrol in a 10-lesson follow-up Bible study program, and upon completion receive a New Testament as a graduation gift.’

In the USA, where evangelism is broadly accepted and commonplace in many parts of the country, the evangelical message is better understood both by donors and by volunteers. In this country, most volunteers and participants in the scheme cling to the notion that if they haven’t seen it then it doesn’t go on. Do not be fooled – it does.

Tell all your friends.



Pretend humanism

Oct 17th, 2015 10:01 am | By

Merrill Miller at The Humanist:

Recently, certain individuals have appropriated the term “humanism” in an attempt to legitimize their anti-women, anti-feminist message. Masquerading as “activists” for men’s rights, these people do not concern themselves with serious problems faced by men in the United States today such as the disproportionately high incarceration rates for Black men or the shocking percentage of workplace injuries that lead to fatalities for male workers. Instead, they spout regressive, sexist views on the Internet that blame feminism and women for society’s ills while promoting a version of masculinity that applauds men who can coerce women into dating and having sex with them.

It’s a popular catch-phrase for anti-feminists – “I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist.” (It was depressing to see that Meryl Streep said it the other day.) It’s another “All Lives Matter.” Rights for all; yes indeed, good plan; the fact remains that women are a subordinate class in relation to men, and that has not been fully overturned yet, to put it mildly.

One Facebook group, Humanists United Against Feminism, claims that the majority of women who reported being raped are making false accusations to gain attention, even though research shows that only 2 to 8 percent of reported rapes are false accusations—comparable with the rates of false reporting for other crimes. Another Facebook group, Exposing Feminism, dismisses feminism as “female superiority nonsense,” contrary to the definition of feminism, which is “the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities” and “the theory of political, economic and social equality of the sexes.” Yet another, A Voice for Men: Humanist Counter-Theory, blames women for rape and for the gender wage gap, a pay discrepancy shown by research from many reputable organizations to be the result of societal perceptions of women workers and not the result of individual women’s choices.

It’s not real humanism, it’s fake humanism, mask humanism, gotcha humanism.

While these groups may at first seem ridiculous, humanists should not dismiss them completely, largely because they are attempting to claim the term “humanism” to promote their anti-women agendas. Humanists should also be concerned because, even though there are individuals in the Men’s Rights Movement who identify as religious, many also identify as atheists, agnostics or nonreligious. While atheists and humanists are often quick to rightly criticize the sexism of the religious right, the vitriol spewed towards women by nonreligious men’s rights activists (MRAs) should also be a wake-up call to combat sexism within the secular community.

That’s been obvious for at least the past more-than-four years, but whatever.

Humanists—real humanists who actively promote human rights for all and equality for women—must be vigilant in defining what the humanist philosophy really is—as well as what it is not. Humanism is most certainly inclusive of feminism, and the American Humanist Association’s Feminist Caucus is an example of individuals of all genders and gender identities who identify as both humanists and feminists working toward women’s equality. The American Humanist Association will continue to defend women’s rights, especially from frequent attacks by the religious right to prevent access to necessary reproductive healthcare such as sexual education, contraception, and abortion. But threats to women’s rights are now also coming from people who claim to be humanists, though the views they hold run contrary to the humanist philosophy. Humanists must not let MRAs dictate the conversations surrounding humanism and feminism. Instead, we must continue our longstanding tradition of working toward women’s equality and affirming solidarity with the feminist movement.

Sounds good to me.

Don’t read the comments.