This is a useful compendium of Trump’s bad actions, by Keith Olbermann. Mind you, the first item on the list is a dud, because it’s “he attacked the pope.” Verbally, I presume, and I think the pope richly deserves verbal attack. But after that it’s a good list. I’ve been wanting a master-collection, and this is one.

Trump is a guy…

Who lied about why he wouldn’t release his taxes, because he was being audited and proved himself a liar by saying he would release his taxes if Hillary Clinton released her e-mails; who lied about how much money his father gave him or helped him get, coming out of college; who lied about sending his private jet to ferry stranded U.S. servicemen; who lied about talking to the Attorney General of Florida, who declined to investigate Trump University after she was given acampaign donation; who lied about his business in Russia; who lied about meeting Russian president Putin; who lied about offering child care to his employees, when it was child care for his hotel guests; who lied about “some people” wanting a moment of silence for the murderer of five Dallas policemen; who lied about seeing thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11; who lied about 9/11 hijackers sending their wives and girlfriends home to Saudi Arabia.

…

The Republican Party has actually nominated for president a man who has proposed that Russia or China should enact a Watergate-like hacking of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails; who has proposed banningMuslims from entering the country, then said it was only a suggestion, then proposed it again; whose running mate has proposed banning members of other religions; who has proposed open racial profiling; who has proposed banning people from “terror nations,” saying, “Look it up, they have a list”; who has proposed “ideological certification” for immigrants; who has proposed worse than waterboarding while praising how Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-unhandled protest and terrorism; who has proposed that American civilians be tried by military commissions at Gitmo; who has proposed killing the families of terrorists or suspected terrorists.

A man who has proposed teaching mandatory patriotism in schools; proposed that his supporters appoint themselves as election-day voting monitors; proposed making American protection of fellow NATO members C-O-D; whose campaign proposed purging the governmentof all Obama appointees; proposed avoiding government debt byprinting more money; proposed reducing national debt by paying lessthan we agreed to; proposed forestalling newfinancial regulations by executive order—and then in the same speech proposed eliminating…someexecutive orders.

There’s much much more.

H/t Dave Richards

Sarah Ditum wrote in the New Statesman today about being genderqueer as a child. No I’m just kidding, she wrote about being a child who thought her favorite cartoon character was a girl.

My reasoning went like this: I am the most important person in the world and a girl, therefore the most important person in my favourite cartoon must also be a girl. And many happy games of Muskehounds were played by me, in my dungarees, oblivious to the unlikelihood of a children’s cartoon having a female lead in the first place, let alone giving that female lead the lovely Juliette as a romantic interest.

Then she realized her mistake, and grew up to be a feminist. I recognize that trajectory. A lot of us do.

But it could all have gone another way. On Radio 4’s iPM this week, the mother of a 10-year-old called Leo explained that one of the reasons she knew her female child must be either a boy or non-binary was that Leo’s fictional idols were always male: Peter Pan, Iron Man, Wolverine.

Another piece of evidence was that Leo prefers pirates over princesses as a birthday party theme. And then there were the Barbies that Leo never played with. All of this, according to Leo’s mum, showed that Leo couldn’t really be a girl but must instead be either “male mind who happened to be born in a female body” or (in the family’s current favoured explanation) “a non-binary mind who happened to be born in a female body.”

Yeah well guess what, we’re all non-binary minds who happen to be born in either a female or a male body.

(Don’t any of these credulous parents remember their own childhoods? Were they all so tranquilly “cis” that these failures to match the stereotypes simply never happened at all? Not a single yearning glance at pirate adventures or tea sets?)

Accounts of trans children consistently return to these stereotypes. Long hair or short hair. Trousers or frocks. Blue or pink. Children’s preferences are filtered through an adult rubric of gender and used to decide what sex they “really” are, despite the fact that we should know by now that sex is nothing more or less than our bodies. Our sex is a fundamental fact of who we are and how we are treated, but its ultimate truth is not decided by where we fall between the rigidly maintained domains of pink and blue. And thank goodness, because as much as I liked being a cartoon dog, I’m glad I know I’m a female human.

And a female human, furthermore, who doesn’t have to comply with the stupid stereotypes, and knows she doesn’t have to.

Laurie Penny said no that’s all wrong on Twitter.

@NewStatesman @sarahditum this is a reductive interpretation of what it means to be genderqueer/non-binary. Yes, lots of reporting is sexist

the more interesting question is why cis writers feel such a need to deny the experience of trans/NB people.

What I want to know is how Laurie Penny thinks she knows what “the experience of trans/NB people” is, and how she thinks she knows it is experience as opposed to just new words people have decided to use. What is experience and what is a label?

Sarah starts off with her own experience, which is valid. But it doesn’t invalidate other experiences.

I consider myself a genderqueer woman. I was never a tomboy growing up. One of my sisters was. She’s cis.

Penny naïvely takes those labels to be transparent and reliable, when they could be just different words to describe exactly what Sarah is talking about. What does she mean by “a genderqueer woman” and what makes her so sure it’s different from “a female human”? How does she know her sister is “cis” and that that word accurately describes anything?

I’d like to know, but I doubt I’ll ever find out.

Jesus explains to Mo about cultural appropriation.

The Patreon is here.

Speaking of Trump and Trump Junior and racism and the alt right and Pepe the frog…ok we weren’t actually speaking of Pepe, but I was reading about Pepe in another article about Trump Junior, and I learned just the other day about Pepe’s status as a meme for the alt-right…so speaking of that, here’s a meme from an Australian political campaign:

Comforting, isn’t it.

The Times reports that Trump Junior is a nasty man just like his darling papa.

Donald Trump Jr. is facing intense backlash on social media after he posted a message on Twitter Monday night that compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles sprinkled with a few that “would kill you.”

“This image says it all. Let’s end the politically correct agenda that doesn’t put America first,” the post said.

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/778016283342307328

The image doesn’t “say it all” of course. Quite the contrary – the image says nothing. It’s the language above the image that says what Trump means.

It says that three toxic Skittles in a bowl of sixty or so make it dangerous to sample the Skittles. Analogously, just a few killers or jihadists in a larger group of refugees make it dangerous to let them in.

But you can say that about anything. There are a few potential killers anywhere you care to look, but we go on living in cities anyway. Risks are everywhere, but we take them anyway, because to avoid all of them means paralysis. People pointed out that singling out Syrian refugees looks just a tad racist.

Social media users shared images of displaced residents in the region. President Obama’s chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, invoked Omran Daqneesh, the bloodstained, dust-coated boy who was shown sitting in an ambulance after an airstrike and who became a symbol of the suffering in Aleppo, Syria.

The post also spurred a strong response from Wrigley, the owner of Skittles: “Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don’t feel it’s an appropriate analogy. We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing,” the company said in a statement.

Skittles are candy, refugees are people, and the Trumps are dangerous racist hate-mongers.

In Ireland, four former sex workers tell their stories.

Ne’cole Daniels

I was taught from the tender age of seven that my worth was between my legs. How I knew this was that I was raped repeatedly by a family member at the age of seven.

It was only reinforced by my mother, who was a prostitute, that my value was between my legs. As long as I had a vagina, I should never be broke. I believed this.

So when I was poached at the age of 15 by yet another family member, I had already been groomed. I lied to myself and stayed in the life until my own daughter was sexually assaulted.

What I know now is that coming from my dysfunctional family home, I didn’t choose this life, this life chose me.

As a frontline service provider, I witness first-hand the damages of the sex-trade – the damage that is caused to women who are bought and sold.

Bridget Perrier

I was lured and debased into prostitution at the age of 12 from a group home. I remained enslaved for 10 years in prostitution. I was paraded like cattle in front of men who were able to purchase me. And the acts that they did to me was something that no little girl should ever have to endure.

Because of the men, I cannot have children normally because of trauma to my cervix. To this day I still have nightmares, and sometimes I sleep with the lights on. I feel damaged and not worthy.

I was traded in legal establishments, street corners and strip bars. The scariest thing that ever happened to me was being held captive for 43 hours and raped and tortured repeatedly at the age of 14 by a sexual predator who preyed on exploited girls.

My first pimp was a woman who owned an illegal brothel. I was groomed to say I was her daughter’s friend if the police ever asked. My second pimp made me prostitute for money. He was supposed to be my bodyguard, but that turned out to be one big lie. They are both still out there, doing the same things to other little girls.

I believe prostitution is not a choice. It’s lack of choice that keeps women and girls enslaved. Most of us were children who were forgotten, neglected, abused, and not protected.

A huge majority of women and children in prostitution have experienced pimp violence. This is far from the pretty picture that is often painted. We have been afraid, raped, beaten, sold and discarded.

It’s not just another job.

Elizabeth Warren questioning self-enriching Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf.

Elizabeth Warren takes on Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf.

Facing off with the CEO whose massive bank appropriated customers’ information to create millions of bogus accounts Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., had sharp questions for Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf. Warren also said Stumpf made millions of dollars in the “scam,” telling him, “You should resign … and you should be criminally investigated.”

As we’ve reported before, Wells Fargo is paying $185 million in penalties for acts that date to at least to 2011. The firm says it fired some 5,300 employees who were found to have created false accounts as it sought to increase “cross-selling” — building the number of accounts each customer holds.

Employees at the bottom of the hierarchy, that is – not senior management.

Warren began her questioning by citing Wells Fargo’s Vision and Values Statement, particularly its suggestion, “If you want to find out how strong a company’s ethics are, don’t listen to what its people say, watch what they do.”

“So, let’s do that,” Warren said. She then accused Stumpf of failing to hold himself or any other senior executives accountable for the company’s actions. “It’s gutless leadership,” she said, noting that Stumpf is not resigning, returning any of his earnings or firing any senior executives.

Warren moved on to the subject of cross-selling — calling it a particular focus of Stumpf’s tenure as CEO, citing his goal of eight accounts per customer and saying that cross-selling was “one of the main reasons that Wells has become the most valuable bank in the world.”

The senator asked Stumpf, “Cross-selling is all about pumping up Wells’ stock price, isn’t it?”

“No,” the executive answered. “Cross-selling is shorthand for deepening relationships,” he continued — before Warren cut him off.

She then produced 12 transcripts of Wells Fargo earnings calls Stumpf participated in from 2012 to 2014 — “the three full years in which we know this scam was going on,” Warren said.

“In all 12 of these calls, you personally cited Wells Fargo’s success at cross-selling retail accounts as one of the main reasons to buy more stock in the company,” Warren told Stumpf. She went on to quote him from the transcripts, as he touted the company’s record growth to more than six accounts per household.

When Warren asked Stumpf — who made $19.3 million in annual compensation(including a performance bonus of $12.5 million) in 2015, how much his stock holdings at Wells Fargo had gained during the period in question, the executive said that the information was all in the public record.

Warren then produced the information herself, saying that Stumpf held an average of 6.75 million shares in the company in that time frame — and that the share price had risen by about $30, “which comes out to more than $200 million in gains, all for you personally, and thanks in part to those cross-sell numbers that you talked about on every one of those calls.”

Here’s what Warren said toward the end of her allotted time to question Stumpf:

“Here’s what really gets me about this, Mr. Stumpf. If one of your tellers took a handful of $20 bills out of the crash drawer, they’d probably be looking at criminal charges for theft. They could end up in prison.

“But you squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket.

“And when it all blew up, you kept your job, you kept your multi-multimillion-dollar bonuses, and you went on television to blame thousands of $12-an-hour employees who were just trying to meet cross-sell quotas that made you rich.

“This is about accountability. You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission. This just isn’t right.”

Speaking of pole dancing, and the laughable claims that it’s not sexual at all oh no no no it’s about fitness – a few months ago a UK morning chat show had three little girls on to demonstrate their pole dancing skills. That’s attractive. If there’s disagreement over whether X activity is sexual or not, the thing to do is get some little girls to do it on tv, so that we can all decide.

Here’s ITV’s not at all sexual photo of one tiny dancer:

Obviously not sexual at all in any way. People who think otherwise are perverts.

The question posed by the show was “Are pole dancing lessons too sexual for children?”.

On the show, eight-year-old Tilly-May and Timea and 11-year-old Mia danced in skimpy outfits.

Sarah Ditum in the Independent says how Dennis Parsons got it wrong:

Lewis Pierre, who killed Daria Pionko in Leeds last year, did not do so as a result of extended immersion into radical feminism. In fact, he killed her next to a “managed zone” where all laws governing prostitution were suspended. If the allegedly protective message “sex work is work” could percolate anywhere, surely it would be there. Or think about the men who leave detailed reviews on Punternet addressing women’s teeth, breasts, ability to submit to unwanted penetration while feigning delight and skill in suppressing their gag reflex: these cruel appraisals derive from the same entitlement and dehumanisation that enables these men to buy out women’s consent in the first place.

Without stigma, there could be no prostitution. Before you can pay to have sex with someone, you have to believe that there’s a kind of person it’s OK to pay to have sex with: someone whose desire to have sex with you is an irrelevance to be purchased away, someone whose pleasure in sex is immaterial so long as they can perform whatever gets the purchaser going. Prostitution isn’t work, it’s abuse, which is why the sex trade needs trafficking, pimping and poverty to supply enough ready bodies to service demand. It’s time to take all the stigma that Parsons identified and direct it at those who drive the vicious market in penetration: it’s the punters who deserve it.

Another good place to direct stigma is at the foundational idea that women are the class who are required to be sexually / aesthetically pleasing to the other class, men, and that they therefore are subject to strict evaluation and grading on those criteria at all times, and to punishment ranging from anger and contempt to violence and death for scoring badly.

A writer named Suki Kim also wrote about her reactions to Lionel Shriver’s talk. She at least had the decency to hear the talk first. The most striking thing about her piece, to me, is her definition of cultural appropriation.

Shriver—a thin middle-aged woman with spectacles and brown hair—began her speech by describing herself as a “renowned iconoclast.” She declared that she would not, in fact, be exploring the theme of “community and belonging,” but would instead discuss the issue of “fiction and identity politics.” In a diatribe that has since become notorious, she proceeded to enumerate the various ways in which cultural appropriation—the idea that white artists and communities have stolen elements of minority cultures in ways that are oppressive—was harmful to people everywhere.

Cultural appropriation is the idea that white artists and communities have stolen elements of minority cultures in ways that are oppressive.

Stolen.

Here’s the thing: it’s not possible to steal elements of a culture except in the case of actual physical artifacts, like the Elgin Marbles. There certainly has been plenty of that kind of stealing, but Shriver was definitely not saying that invaders and imperialists should help themselves to other people’s statues and paintings without leave or payment. The kind of accusations of cultural appropriation she was talking about have to do with intangibles, and you can’t steal those. You can’t steal them, and you shouldn’t try to keep other people from sharing in them. You should credit them, certainly; you shouldn’t pretend they’re your invention when they’re not; but you should admire them, take an interest in them, tell others about them.

Updating to add for the benefit of Silentbob who missed the point: You can’t steal intangibles because they don’t go away when you share in them. You can do other kinds of things to intangibles – like degrade them, make them less valuable, make fun of them, spoil them for others, take the shine of them – but you can’t steal them. If I copy a dance or a way of cooking from India or Peru, the dance and way of cooking are still there.

Peter Walker shared an article in the Oregonian by Maxine Bernstein and introduced it with this:

I believe Linda Beck is one of many essential Malheur National Wildlife Refuge employees who are resigning or transferring due to the occupation– a huge loss, nearly impossible to replace. Ryan Bundy’s “nice to meet you” comment in court today is jarring. In January, when he hadn’t met Beck and knew nothing about the important work she does, Ryan Bundy said “She’s not here working for the people… She’s part of what’s destroying America.”

“Nice to meet you.”

Now Bernstein’s reporting on the trial:

Fish biologist Linda Beck, an eight-year employee at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, said she returned to her office after the occupation of the federal wildlife sanctuary and found her office in the refuge headquarters a mess.

“I would describe it as completed trashed,” Beck testified Monday.

Beck said her usually slightly cluttered office was “very disorganized” with “piles of stuff” and belongings that were not hers strewn about.

Her testimony came on the start of the second week of trial in the federal conspiracy case against Ammon Bundy and six co-defendants charged with federal conspiracy. The trial stems from the 41-day occupation of the refuge in Harney County.

Beck identified her desk and belongings in the refuge headquarters, as prosecutors presented multiple photos to jurors of the Bundy brothers and co-defendant Shawna Cox using Beck’s office as their own.

One photo showed Ryan Bundy leaning up against Beck’s desk as brother Ammon Bundy sat in her desk swivel chair with arms folded. In another, Ammon Bundy had propped his hat on boot warmers in Beck’s office, as he kneeled on the floor beside the desk praying, with Shawna Cox also on her knees, her head and arms resting on another chair.

I posted a lot of photos of that kind at the time. I paid close attention to the way these heavily-armed bullies helped themselves to our wildlife refuge and did what they could to damage it and hinder its employees in doing their work.

Beck identified a shelf in her office that she described as “My Wall of Death,” which held a collection of bones that she has saved. It included bones of a bat, a blanched fish head, a pelican bill and a stuffed raven.

She testified that the stuffed raven was gone when she returned to the office in February. “And it meant a lot to me …,” Beck said, intending to explain but the prosecutor cut her off, “That’s OK.”

“Just the facts, Ma’am,” I guess.

Goddy godbotherers lying for god again. Nicholas Senz at the Federalist kvetching about “religious liberty” again. Today the grievance is a report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights which includes the accurate observation that

“The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia or any form of intolerance,” said Chairman Julian Castro. He added, “today, as in past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality. In our nation’s past religion has been used to justify slavery and later, Jim Crow laws.”

Yes, and?

And it’s time to obfuscate, deny and lie, that’s what.

Archbishop William Lori, archbishop of Baltimore and chair of the U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, responded with no minced words, “shocked” at the claims being made.

Oh look what Senz did there, the sneak – he concealed the fact that he meant chair of the US Catholic bishops’ committee. He concealed that he meant Catholic archbishop of Baltimore. It’s as if Catholicism were the state religion here, but it isn’t. Lori isn’t some universal archbishop or some American archbishop – he’s a specifically Catholic one. He’s not a bishop of all of us, he’s just a bishop in his particular sect. Catholic bishops don’t have any jurisdiction over us. They’d like to, but they don’t.

The thought that religious institutions are inherently bigoted is absurd, he said. “Can we imagine the civil rights movement without Rev. Martin Luther King, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel?” he asked.

That too is dishonest. It’s misleading. It implies that Juan Castro said religious institutions are inherently bigoted, but that’s not what he said at all.

And then we get to the real whopper.

“We do not seek to impose our morality on anyone, but neither can we sacrifice it in our own lives and work,” he said.

Isn’t lying a sin? I know cruelty isn’t, but isn’t lying? It’s certainly one of the Ten Don’ts.

Like hell they don’t seek to impose their morality on anyone. They do seek to impose it on everyone, via buying up all the hospitals and hospital networks, and ordering them to obey the bishops’ terrible Ethical and Religious Directives. It’s on that basis that they order Catholic hospitals not to perform abortions even when the woman will die without one.

I stopped reading at that sentence, because I can only take so many goddy lies at one time.

The comments on Meghan Murphy’s pole dancing piece are a sight to behold. So much denial, so much fury, so much how dare you.

One:

It’s sad that there are people out there that think like this. You’re following a very strange line of reasoning in this article. To me (and probably many others) the line of reasoning is this: “Because men find this sexy, you shouldn’t do it.” The problem with that is that men will fetishize just about anything. As a woman, you shouldn’t have to alter your life, thoughts, or actions because of what men are thinking, (which is how I view feminism).

Except the line of reasoning is not “you shouldn’t do it.” It’s that you shouldn’t pretend it’s feminist to do it. And saying “you shouldn’t have to alter your life, thoughts, or actions because of what men are thinking” while praising pole dancing is absurd, since pole dancing is so obviously shaped by what men want to look at. Women aren’t inspired to turn themselves upside down with their legs pointing in opposite directions just at random, you know.

Another:

After reading this article I felt the need to comment and educate you, Meghan Murphy on a few things. You call yourself a feminist and yet you are against the idea of allowing women to make their own decision to attend a pole dance fitness class. Women are consciously making a decision to attend fitness classes, regardless of their reasoning, because women want to. Is that not what feminism is about? Allowing women the right to be equal?

Except that’s not what she said. See above.

Another:

Oh love please get off your tight prudish arse and do a slut drop and Drop the high and mighty attitude. Don’t hate on something you’ve never tried.

Feminism at its finest!

This dissent from the “true” mother piece is much harsher than mine. Also funnier.

In these moments I am reminded how easily our worth as individuals, along with the bonds we form with our loved ones, can wither before the relentless gaze of society. That is the prison not only for transgender women and mothers but, I increasingly realize, for all women and mothers.

What did you think you were getting into before you transitioned? What did you think women’s lives were like? If you were always a woman, and were socialised as a girl, how could you not know it?

My version was just: It’s interesting that she’s only now realizing that women are subject to social scrutiny and devaluation.

See how tactful I can be?

Reductively, man is person and woman is body. This is the predicament of all womanhood, made visible in larger relief under the magnifying glass of transgender womanhood. The man does and the woman is done, the man fucks and the woman is fucked. Women have a shelf life both as mothers and as lovers. Our worth is tied to our bodies, our ability to become pregnant and be pleasing objects with virginal orifices for the male member to penetrate and to possess. If our bodies are determined to be inadequate by the arduous metrics imposed on them, we are regarded as worthless sacks of flesh, not women and certainly not mothers.

This is what we call running a nice warm bath of someone else’s oppression and then getting into it for a wank, all the while making out that it’s worse for you. Well, that’s what I call it. Call me old fashioned etc.

Oh, that’s genius. That’s exactly what it is.

You, as a male, as a person, are able to tell the non-people, the non-men , that their bodies are in no way connected to their motherhood and their womanhood.  Could it be that, essentially, transwomen make more authentic mothers? Mothers not tied to the messy, nasty, biological business of growing and birthing children (“there was a womb in my heart that carried all three of my children; my soul was pregnant with them though my body could not be”).  Mothers of greater purity, children springing forth from their minds like Athena from the skull of Zeus?  It’s an old, old story, this narrative of the messy, foul, female body versus the clean male intellect. Transwomen are better, cleaner women than women, are more woman than women:

[trans] womanhood resides solely in who we are as persons, not in the set of physical attributes conventionally expected of our gender […] Therefore, granting transgender women their womanhood is tantamount to granting women personhood. It means affirming that women are not walking and talking composites of ovaries, uteruses, and vaginas, but something more intangible and cerebral.

There’s a word for this, and it is nothing to do with occupying the fault line of this gender gulag, whatever the fuck that abysmally mixed metaphor is supposed to mean. That word is misogyny.

This, I believe, explains the ferocity of society’s attempt to invalidate transgender womanhood. To acknowledge our existence as women is to disentangle the woman-body complex on which patriarchy is built. It challenges the notion that men and masculinity have sole proprietorship of personhood, relegating women and the feminine to the carceral condition of being nothing but bodies.

Only a misogynist man could hear women demanding their right to name their female bodies and experiences as exclusively theirs, demanding their right to safe and private women-only spaces, and erase their agency and needs by attributing them to patriarchal oppression.

She’s right you know.

Meghan Murphy points out that pole dancing is what it is and not something else.

Until last week she hadn’t realized that pole dancers dislike feminism but also want to be in its clubhouse.

I was aware that pole dancing classes were now being offered to women and girls as young as eight, normalized by those who ran “pole fitness” businesses as a neutral form exercise, despite the fact that this activity is marketed almost solely to females and exercise gear includes what are commonly known as “stripper heels” (even when the “polers” are young girls). But I was not aware of the awkward lingo, the fact that there was a “pole community,” or the fact that “polers” wished to be included in the feminist movement, despite their apparent distaste for it.

But on Monday, all this came hurtling to light when [the London Abused Women’s Centre aka] LAWC withdrew from London’s annual Take Back the Night (TBTN) after the Women’s Events Committee (the body responsible for organizing TBTN in London, ON) announced they were considering including a “pole fitness demonstration” in the event. Behind closed doors, LAWC had already explained to the committee that they did not feel pole-dancing was a good fit for TBTN, but some members of the committee claimed they wanted to “stay relevant to younger feminists” and felt this was a way to do it, according to Megan Walker, executive director at LAWC.

Stay relevant to younger feminists by throwing out the feminism part – let’s not do that. Feminism too is what it is and not something else. It’s not there to make life comfortable for consumers of pornified women. It’s not there to tell women that their main job in life is to be sexy. It’s not there to pretend that fuck-me shoes and pole dancing are forms of exercise just as running and weight-lifting are.

Take Back the Night is a protest against violence against women, and porn is deeply entangled with violence against women. “Reclaiming” pole dancing as empowering does nothing to change that, and in fact probably encourages it.

TBTN has always taken a holistic approach to violence against women. Rather than plucking various issues and incidences from their context, feminists made the undeniable connections between objectification, male power, rape culture, and domestic abuse visible. So when the Women’s Events Committee proposed a “pole fitness” demonstration (to be put on by The Pole House), LAWC immediately objected. Despite internal disagreement, the committee went ahead andput their proposal to social media (in a notably biased way, arguing that pole dancing is an “empowering” form of exercise and a way for women to “reclaim their bodies”), publicly denigratingand marginalizing LAWC’s position in the process. This was the last straw for LAWC. In a Facebook post, they stated:

“Pole fitness emerged from pole dancing in strip clubs — where women, whether there by ‘choice’ or not, are sexually objectified by men. They are leered at and groped at by men who view them as objects for their own sexual gratification. Women and girls are also sex-trafficked into strip clubs and other areas of the sex trade. Pole fitness cannot be separated from this history and context.”

“Polers” responded by claiming that their practice is empowering because women “choose” it, no one has “forced or tricked” them into doing it, and because is it an “expression of female sexuality.”

Doing things that men find sexy is not “an expression of female sexuality” – it’s an expression of female submission to male sexuality. Women do things that men find sexy to please men, not to “express” their own sexuality. As Meghan puts it –

Beyond that, it’s worth asking ourselves why all these practices presented today as “expressions of female sexuality” (from burlesque, to pole-dancing, to the sexy selfies young women post on Instagram) are rooted so firmly in male-centered ideas about what “sexy” means. Why does our so-called “sexual empowerment” look so very similar to the pornified imagery men have long imposed on women? Just because we are choosing to accommodate now, of our own free will, doesn’t change the message — it just means we’ve internalized it.

Why indeed. That pornified imagery isn’t women’s sexuality, it’s men’s. That doesn’t mean women shouldn’t do it, but it damn well does mean they shouldn’t pretend there’s anything feminist about it.

Jeff Sharlet recommends a new book:

There is no book published in the last ten years, including any of my own, that brings me more pleasure and pride: THE FIXERS, by Julia Rabig, available now on Amazon. Julie is my wife, but also my favorite historian. I might be biased, so here are some comments from top scholars in her field:

“Narrative history at its finest”; “One of those myth-shattering books — one that compels a rethinking of black political economy, urban crises, and recent America itself.” — Devin Fergus, Ohio State

“Beautifully written”; “a must-read for historians of poverty, urban politics, race, and the history of capitalism.” — Annelise Orleck, Dartmouth College

MYTH-SHATTERING! “A must-read.” That’s big stuff, from people who know. What I know is writing. Here’s how THE FIXERS begins:

“Later, Gustav Heningburg would claim that ‘he didn’t have a plan’ when he strode onto the tarmac of the Newark, New Jersey airport in 1970 to shut the place down. Maybe he would stand in front of a plane. Airport managers would panic; flights would be delayed. Passengers in Terminal B would stare through the glass at him. They’d ask who he was and what this was all about. And somehow–Heningburg hadn’t thought this part through either–they would find out: it was about jobs. And jobs were about freedom, about the struggle for civil rights, about the so-called long, hot summers, and about the age of black political power he believed would soon be coming.”

Julie’s publisher, University of Chicago Press, is one of the very best, but every book needs a little help from its friends. So if you’re Julie’s friend — or mine, and you care about history, jobs, urban politics, or civil rights — please help spread the word. Share this post, write your own. THE FIXERS speaks very intensely to our present moment, and, as Annelise Orleck says, it’s beautifully written, but no scholarly book is for everyone. That’s why it’s all the more important to help it find the readers it deserves.