Guest post by Josh Spokes.

I have some thoughts on femininity, women, and my relationship to these as a gay man. For months I’ve stewed on this topic wondering how to express it. This may or may not be an elegant exposition. It’s also full of “I” statements, which is tedious and unfortunate. I know no other way to make it clear my subject is my own impressions, not generalizing statements about what other people ought to do or be motivated by.

Caveats:

1. As a man I’m never going to grok what it is to live as a woman. Please know that nothing I write is meant to suggest or imply that.

2. This is not a cookie-seeking project; I’m not going for Best Man Feminist merit badges.

Violence against and denigration of women has always been viscerally emotional for me. It affects me in nearly the same way that my horror of homophobia and anti-gay violence does. Misogyny so upsets me that I worry I sometimes look like that guy who’s SUPER INTO FEMINISM in a way that’s annoying or invites skepticism.

Conversely, I trust women and feel emotional connections to them far more easily than I ever will with most men. (Those of you men who are my friends or lovers don’t need to get anxious about this, ‘kay? I love you and trust you, but you are an exception). Given a choice during an end of the world scenario, I’d choose to survive the apocalypse with all women before I’d even think of wanting men around. I’m completely serious about that. It has been that way since I can remember being a person with thoughts. Men have always been a danger to be carefully watched, tiptoed around, and never to be behind one’s back. Yes, one of the obvious roots of this was growing up in a house with a wife/child beater and rapist.

But that is not nearly all of it. From the point of sentience I gravitated toward things “for girls.” Girls’ games. Fashion. Jewelry, make-up. Female-driven literature. Girl heroines in stories were far more likely to make me think, “I get that, I so understand that” than the boy heroes I was supposed to like. Grumpy, cynical Harriet the Spy? When I say I identified with her, it’s not strong enough. I really got her.

My fantasy game-playing always had me as a female character. I was Nellie Oleson on Little House on the Prairie. Or Malificent from Sleeping Beauty. Or a witch. Or a genie. Yes, there was a decided bias toward villainous and magical characters. At the time I thought it was just because they were so obviously fabulous and had better clothes, which is true. Looking back I suspect it was an unconscious identification with a character who was smart, passionate, but constricted by a society that characterized everything interesting about her as a threat to be neutralized.

I was tormented with the idea that I was born a mistake. That I was “supposed to be a girl.” There was literally no framework for me to understand gender in any other way. I didn’t think I wanted to be a girl (although I still don’t know exactly what that meant), but I was sure I wasn’t right and something was seriously broken.

Though I came out as a gay man at a very young age and used bravado as an effective tactic, I was haunted for a long time by the belief that there was something ontologically wrong with me.

This is the toxicity of gender.

As you guessed, I was read as an effeminate boy, starting before I went to kindergarten. You can fill in the many instances of gender policing and attempts to circumscribe my activities.

The price was ostracization, vicious bullying, beatings, whisper campaigns, teachers with barely a passing interest in sticking up for me because what did I expect being such a little queen. Almost all of it from men and boys. The sexual threats implied in the violence were clear, even if they were never spoken. I knew from the beginning that men had slotted me into the category of bitch, that which is slapped around, used, degraded, and raped if too uppity. In short, I read as “girl/woman” in this misogynistic system. In some ways, even a bit worse, because I willingly liked “girl things.” Didn’t even have the sense to be ashamed of it.

Girls and women were usually safe havens for me. With rare exceptions, I wasn’t afraid of girls. I didn’t fear they’d hold me down and laugh while beating the shit out of me. I didn’t fear they’d drag me into a public space to mock and degrade me, confident that their peers would support them or say nothing. Which EVERY macho boy got away with EVERY time with NO consequences. They were right to be utterly confident. They were usually socially rewarded for their bullying, including by teachers.

All this is not an exercise in “working out demons” or any navel-gazing bullshit like that. It’s meant to explain the conclusion I came to recently about my motivations. While I’m not and never will be a woman, I do think I have a closer grasp of what that experience can be like than the average man. Certainly more so than the average straight man. Does this seem reasonable?

This is why feminism matters so much to me. This is why I get shouty and screamy and angry and over the top at the ceaseless misogyny and degradation of women that goes on everywhere, all the time. Because I feel it. Not the way women do, but closer to that than most men will grasp. It’s also me, my kind—-anyone not working overtime to disavow any feminine-coded interests—who is meant to be frightened and put in place by this behavior.

When the women I know and love describe what they go through, it hits me in the gut in a way ordinary empathetic identification doesn’t explain.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

And this is part of the unsavory mix:

Emery Emery @emeryemeryii May 20
Excited that @michaelshermer has been added to the #TAM2015 lineup. Never give in to unsubstantiated slander.

“Never give in to unsubstantiated slander” here must mean ignore multiple accounts by women of various forms of skeevy behavior, including non-consensual sex. It must mean ignore corroboration by witnesses. It must mean ignore what James Randi said himself. It must mean ignore all of that as “unsubstantiated,” in order to include the subject of all those accounts. Ignore what all those women say, because they don’t count; only the Important Thought-Leader Men count.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

In Duggar-world, girls and women “tempt” men and boys, and “defraud” them with their sexual allure. In the real world…girls and women “tempt” men and boys, because they’re sluts and boys just wanna have fun.

Amanda Marcotte has the story.

20 middle and high school aged boys have been accused of participating in an electronic “trading card” ring involving nude photos of female students. Reading the coverage of it, it becomes immediately clear how these boys got their overblown sense of entitlement: Their parents and community have rushed forward to support the boys for their invasion of privacy —and have demanded, instead, that the girls be criminalized for being such alluring little temptresses.

One mother, eager to shift the blame, told the local news station, “The girls are just as responsible as the boys,” and that “The girls know that the boys trade them and it’s kind of a game that the girls want to be involved in.” She did not offer evidence of this supposed consent. Instead, she seems to be hiding behind the old boys-will-be-boys canard and implying that being sexual with one person means losing your right to decline sexual contact with others.

The Duggars, James Randi, the parents in New Jersey – it’s all the same old shit. Boys just can’t help using photos of naked girls as trading cards, because they’re boys, and they were drunk, and hey at least they weren’t violent.

This, of course, is what feminists refer to as “rape culture,” where male entitlement to women’s bodies is normalized while women’s ownership over their own bodies is shamed.

Marcotte goes on to say that the goal shouldn’t be to punish the boys harshly, but to intervene to make it clear to them that consent is all-important – and that this can be done.

As Irin Carmon reported for Salon in 2013, unlike adult sex offenders who often have ingrained and hard-to-fix personality issues, juvenile sex offenders are surprisingly easy to rehabilitate. More than 95 percent of juvenile sex offenders who get caught don’t reoffend. It’s not exactly a boys-will-be-boys problem, but it is true that a lot of young men who do this are simply experimenting with the social messages they get that glamorize non-consent and treat sexual aggression and misogyny as “manly”—and most will reject those messages in adulthood, especially if they receive early interventions.

The consequences don’t need to be severe to be a deterrent. Mild punishments, combined with consent education, can accomplish the goal of preventing the crime without provoking fears of “ruining” the lives of boys who cross the line.

Now while we’re at it can we somehow intervene in the culture as a whole, to kill with fire that message that sexual aggression and misogyny are “manly” and rebellious and funny and cool?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oh look, there’s another one.

Emily Skaja ‏@emily_skaja
Official Statue of Mansplaining. Class of 1950 Lecture Hall, Purdue.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

No doubt you’ve all seen this by now –

Cathy de la Cruz ‏@SadDiego
A friend spotted this in Texas: #Mansplaining The Statue.

But look closely if you haven’t already. It’s not just that he’s looming, it’s not just that he has her pinned, it’s not just that he’s talking and she’s gazing upward wondering why he won’t stop – it’s that she’s radically out of proportion to him. She’s from another species, or rather, a different set of dolls. You know how when you were a kid you had dolls that were different sizes? And sometimes when you wanted to have a large cast you would make them interact despite the size disparity? It’s like that. She is weirdly, grotesquely smaller than he is.

Never mind. I’m sure their children will be fine.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More on that how we got here subject. From last month, Emily Badger on how Baltimore got to be the way it is. It wasn’t accidental; it wasn’t just people making choices in accordance with good libertarian principle; it was systematic and deliberate and done by one set of people to another set of people who had less power.

Just a few years ago, Wells Fargo agreed to pay millions of dollars to Baltimore and its residents to settle a landmark lawsuit brought by the city claiming the bank unfairly steered minorities who wanted to own homes into subprime mortgages. Before that, there was the crack epidemic of the 1990s and the rise of mass incarceration and the decline of good industrial jobs in the 1980s.

And before that? From 1951 to 1971, 80 to 90 percent of the 25,000 families displaced in Baltimore to build new highways, schools and housing projects were black. Their neighborhoods, already disinvested and deemed dispensable, were sliced into pieces, the parks where their children played bulldozed.

And before that — now if we go way back — there was redlining, the earlier corollary to subprime lending in which banks refused to lend at all in neighborhoods that federally backed officials had identified as having “undesirable racial concentrations.”

No buying a house for you. That’s what you get for being so damn undesirable.

It’s an irony, a fundamental urban inequality, created over the years by active decisions and government policies that have undermined the same people and sapped them of their ability to rebuild, that have again and again dismantled the same communities, each time making them socially, economically, and politically weaker.

That link goes to an article by Richard Rothstein, the great source on all this.

These cycles are not unique to Baltimore, which is also why the unrest in Baltimore this week feels more like a movement that’s bound to spread than the mere outburst of a few “thugs.” These cycles have gained such momentum that the difference in life expectancy between the wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods is 13 years in Atlanta, and  16 years in Chicago, and 20 years in Richmond.

Not unique at all. I read Rothstein on Ferguson and I can see Seattle, and presumably every other big city in the country.

We don’t acknowledge that we created slums and perpetuated poverty. We don’t acknowledge that people who are poor were denied the chance to build wealth. And we don’t acknowledge that the problems we attribute to poor neighborhoods reflect generations of decisions made by people who have never lived there.

It would be nice if there were more efforts to undo all that, rather than just shoving more and more people into prisons.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

India has been suppressing free speech since Modi was elected.

Human rights activists have called on India to reform or repeal laws that threaten free expression in the world’s largest democracy and muzzle charities such as environmental group Greenpeace.

Some laws are not only silencing marginal voices but are also fuelling graft, a report by PEN International, a London-based group of writers promoting freedom of speech, and the International Human Rights Program at the University of Toronto said.

Win-win – shut down weirdos and make sure the money keeps flowing.

Other laws in India such as those on blasphemy, obscenity and sedition have allowed groups or individuals to silence one another, said the report.

For example, Aseem Trivedi, a prominent anti-corruption campaigner, was arrested in Mumbai in 2012 under sedition laws after a complaint was lodged against him for publishing a series of cartoons that satirised India’s national symbols.

Remember the attack on Wendy Doniger’s book? India doesn’t have a great record on this.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

From Reporters Without Borders:

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) supports the launch of the online cartoon magazine Black and White: Strokes of Resistance (B&W) by the Indian cartoonist Aseem Trivedi and hails his campaign for the release of the jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, which is highlighted in the first issue.

In January this year, Trivedi announced he planned to launch a magazine of cartoons in tribute to Charlie Hebdo. His first campaign is in support of Badawi…

What a good project.

Trivedi is waging his fight for freedom of expression and information in a country where it is highly dangerous to criticise Islam. The subject of religion remains sensitive for journalists and bloggers.Some religious groups come out with threats and aggressive condemnations, which their members then attempt to carry out arbitrarily while the authorities turn a blind eye.

The number of journalists killed has declined considerably, but self-censorship and the prevailing climate of insecurity and impunity are a cause for concern. The launch of Black & White is a breath of hope and a message to all enemies of freedom, which must be passed on.

After a break of two years, Trivedi resumed cartooning in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo killings, in the belief that the attack made his art more powerful.

“My aim is to use cartooning as a tool of activism,” he told Reporters Without Borders. “Through B&W, I want to campaign for the issues related to free speech, justice, equality and other human rights through my art.”

That’s a truly outstanding idea.

“In the first issue, I’m highlighting the case of Raif Badawi. I’ve published the first 25 cartoons from ’A Cartoon Against Every Lash’, a series of 50 cartoons in support of Raif. I see Raif as a new symbol of free speech, facing a lot of torture and injustice for his freedom of expression.

“He is a real crusader, as he is fighting in the hardest circumstances. And it’s our responsibility to help him in this fight of freedom. We couldn’t do anything to save the victims of Charlie Hebdo attack. But we can help Raif, surviving through the injustice.“

Reporters Without Borders launched a petition for Badawi’s release that was handed in to the Saudi embassy in Paris on 15 January. So far it has gathered more than 45,000 signatures. RSF has also organized a series of pro-Badawi demonstrations outside the Saudi embassy in Paris since January.

Click here to see the first issue of Black and White: http://www.bandw.in/p/home.html

Click here to visit Aseem Trivedi’s website: http://www.aseemtrivedi.in/p/index.html

Thank you Reporters Without Borders and thank you Aseem Trivedi.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Another cardinal shares his wisdom with us.

A leading Vatican cardinal has given an interview in which he says parents should not allow their children to have contact with gay people who engage in ‘wrong, evil’ and ‘intrinsically disordered’ relationships.

This is how religion fucks people up. They obsess over completely wrong, empty, arbitrary, meaningless categories of “wrong” while ignoring or protecting or promoting actual harms. There just isn’t anything “wrong” or “evil” or “intrinsically disordered” about same-sex relationships. There just isn’t. There never has been. It’s a made-up thing.

Also? I know I’ve said this a million times – but the cardinal is a high-up in an organization that has been protecting people who rape children for many decades – probably its entire history, in fact.

It also has a recent history of stealing unmarried women’s babies to sell, and lying to the women about what happened to those babies. There’s “evil” if you like.

Cardinal Raymond Burke’s comments come during Pope Francis’ Synod of the Family in Rome, in which senior catholic figures have gathered from around the world to discuss family issues, including same-sex marriage.

Why? What business is it of theirs? What do they know about it?

Now, Burke – the former Archbishop of St Louis who now has the title of Cardinal Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura – has indicated that he feels children should be kept away from gay couples.

Playing the role of ecclesiastical agony uncle, Burke was asked by the website LifeSiteNews, ‘How should Catholic parents deal with a difficult situation like this? When planning a Christmas family gathering with grandchildren present, parents are asked by their son, who is in a homosexual relationship, if he can come and bring home with him his homosexual partner.’

‘This is a very delicate question, made more delicate by the aggressiveness of the homosexual agenda,’ replied Burke.

Ah yes, so unlike the mild timidity of the Catholic agenda. All the Catholic church wants is to tell everyone to obey its stupid arbitrary life-hating rules.

‘If homosexual relationships are intrinsically disordered, which indeed they are … then what would it mean to grandchildren to have present at a family gathering a family member who is living [in] a disordered relationship with another person?

‘If it were another kind of relationship – something that was profoundly disordered and harmful – we wouldn’t expose our children to that relationship, to the direct experience of it.

Stupid, ignorant, empty-of-meaning garbage.

‘And neither should we do it in the context of a family member who not only suffers from same-sex attraction, but who has chosen to live out that attraction, to act upon it, committing acts which are always and everywhere wrong, evil.’

Even worse. Bordering on genocidal. The stuff he says is evil, not the people he says it about or their relationships or their sexual activities.

He might be a decent human being if he weren’t a Catholic cardinal.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Jesus and Mo on kicking the hornets’ nest.

The Patreon.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Mick Hartley shares the Times’s reporting on Tom Holland’s talk at the Hay Festival on Tuesday:

Historian Tom Holland gave the inaugural Christopher Hitchens Lecture at the Hay Festival yesterday. From the Times (£):

The taboo of not speaking about the prophet Muhammad has to be broken to deradicalise jihadists, an acclaimed author, historian and film-maker said yesterday.

Tom Holland, who produced Islam: the Untold Story for Channel 4, said that the “moral perfection” of Muhammad had to be questioned and that to do so required non-Muslims to break the “unspoken blasphemy taboo that has taken hold in the West”.

Holland, who was giving the inaugural Christopher Hitchens Lecture at the Hay Festival, said that in the past 30 years the “one thing that people seem to have learnt is that to question the moral perfection of Muhammad is akin to poking a hornets’ nest with a stick”.

Muslims seem to take more offence at insults to Muhammad than at insults directed at God, he said.

Holland said that this silence from non-Muslims allowed Islamic State to draw inspiration from the Prophet’s example, despite Muhammad’s actions remaining largely unexamined.

It’s a very very dangerous idea – possibly the worst idea humans could collectively have. It short-circuits careful thinking about ethical issues, and that’s the very thing we must not do.

He added that the “sanction for what they do is within the various biographies and traditions associated with the Prophet . . . when beheading an infidel seems to have been enshrined within what every jihadi aspires to do, it is surely not irrelevant that Muhammad owned a sword that can be translated as the ‘cleaver of vertebrae’.

“Not examining these claims [about Muhammad] leaves free those who want to put the most hostile spin on it. Jihadists cannot possibly be deradicalised unless the prophet is deradicalised as well,” he said.

Holland said that it was dangerous of politicians to argue that atrocities committed by Muslims were nothing to do with Islam. He said the British government’s deradicalisation policy was based on this. “Jihadists see themselves as models of righteous behaviour doing God’s will. They see themselves as following the example of Muhammad,” he said. “The Koran is absolutely explicit about this, ‘In the messenger of God you have a beautiful example, an example to follow’.”

It’s almost as if “the messenger of God” wrote those words himself…

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Bangladesh has banned an Islamist group.

The Ministry of Home Affairs said Monday that the Ansarullah Bangla Team had been banned in response to a request by the police because it has threatened and killed bloggers, writers and activists. Junior Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said the decision was warranted under Bangladesh’s antiterrorism law. Since February, three bloggers who criticized radical Islam have been killed, including Avijit Roy,42, an American citizen of Bangladeshi origin.

And as the horse disappears over the horizon, the blot on the barn door slides firmly home.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Vatican’s “secretary of state” is sad about the Irish vote.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin says the church needs to do a better job of forcing its warped and antiquated views on every human being.

“The Church must take account of this reality, but in the sense of reinforcing its commitment to evangelization,” he said.

“I think that you cannot just talk of a defeat for Christian principles, but of a defeat for humanity.

“The family remains at the centre and we have to do everything to defend it and promote it.”

Where to begin.

This “family” bullshit is very modern; the Catholic church has certainly not put “the family” at the center throughout its history; on the contrary. “It is better to marry than to burn” is not what you’d call a hearty endorsement of family life.

And then, if the family is so very central, why is the entirety of the core church hierarchy officially anti-family? Mandatory celibacy also is not a robust endorsement of family life.

And then, equal marriage promotes families and family life, it doesn’t dent or destroy them.

In Italy, the government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is preparing to present legislation that would allow civil unions between gay couples.

The Irish referendum has also boosted calls in Germany, which allow same-sex civil unions, to go further and legalise same-sex marriage.

Pressure has started to grow in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which opposes any change.

“One would think that what the Catholic Irish can do, we can do too,” CDU parliamentarian Jens Spahn told the German Die Welt newspaper.

Suck it up, Cardinal Parolin.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Samantha Field at Defeating the Dragons explains how Josh Duggar is getting away with it.

The biggest reason why Josh will get away with sexually assaulting five girls is purity culture. If you’re a regular reader that connection should be apparent right now, as I’ve frequently talked about how my belief in “purity”kept me from talking about my rape for years.

Everything about this situation was not just mishandled, it was covered up. On purpose. That makes any mandatory reporter that knew about this a criminal (at the minimum, the church leadership and the original police officer, who did not file a report), and it makes Jim Bob and Michelle, in the words of Jesus, hypocrites and vipers. White-washed tombs, full of dead men’s bones and rotting corpses.

However, Jim Bob and Michelle and the church leadership and the police were able to cover this up because of the culture his victims belong to. They have been taught since they extremely young that women are capable of tempting the most holy man to sin, that women can provoke men into raping them, that if something bad happened they must always look for their part in the blame.

They’re the perps, not Josh Duggar. Simply having a female body makes them perpetrators of sexual abuse. Slutty women destroy good Christian men by Tempting them (or in Duggarspeak by “defrauding” them). The only thing women are good for is spawning children.

That is the only framework that Josh’s victims had to process their assaults. Like me, they were forced by the only things they knew to evaluate how they could be responsible for what Josh did to them. It was their responsibility to repent of “immodesty” or any “sensuousness” they may have displayed, however innocently. Then, because they contributed to their own assault, they don’t have the ability to pursue justice. They were duty-bound to “forgive” their abuser because, after all, it was their fault, too.

If his victims were to come forward, to make police reports within the limited three-year window they had to get justice, they would have been dragged through a nightmare the likes of which we can’t even begin to imagine. It is extremely likely that every single last person they knew– their family, their church– would have turned their backs and rejected them. They would hear sermons preached about them about the “spirit of bitterness” and how it can destroy a young woman. They would have been sternly reminded that Christians handle problems among themselves and don’t involve the courts.

“Bitterness” – why is that such a popular insult for women? Atheists use it just as much as fanatical Christians – it’s a favorite trope that feminists are all “bitter” because they’re so ugly and witch-like. Do people have women confused with sugar? Do they think it’s our job to be constantly and permanently sweet?

Purity culture silences victims, Field concludes.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

And yet, there are people even more horrible than the Duggars – people who consider the Duggars “liberal.” Ahahahahahahaha I know, I know. Suzanne Calulu writes about some at Vyckie’s blog.

by Zsuzanna Anderson from her blog Are They All Yours? – My Thoughts on the Duggars

Editor’s note: Zsu’s solution? Kill all pedophiles. No therapy, no prison time, just execute them. What would Jesus say about that? Zsuzsanna’s husband is Pastor Steven L. Anderson, you know, that nice man that called for all homosexuals to be killed last year so that AIDS would be wiped out.

We have for years held and publicly stated that the Duggars are liberal and worldly, even as they are known for being “fundamentalists”. Maybe their beliefs are, but what they are publicly willing to take a stand for is weak and anemic. Example: Never answering whether or not they spank their children, which they obviously did, while telling the world over and over again about their positive approach of praising good behavior. Deceptive at best.

Oh those wicked liberals, pretending they don’t spank their children. Whereas I, wicked liberal that I am, think the problem is that the Duggars hide how awful they are – not that they hide how godly and righteous they are.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)