Mar

31

Obama is charismatic, but this is a bit much

Filed Under 2008 election, Democrats, media, politics, sexism, stereotypes | 9 Comments

I don’t think there are many people, with any candidate preference, who would argue that Obama is not incredibly engaging and likable. Whether you want to vote for the guy or not, let’s face it; he has charisma.

But watch the NY Times turn “Obama is charming” into “Obama makes women giggle and swoon and he’s so cute that they’ll just have to vote for him.”

Senator Barack Obama didn’t go on “The View” on Friday solely to talk about race and the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. He also wanted to address the gender issue. And if the fluttery response of the show’s five co-hosts is any harbinger, Mr. Obama will not have any trouble assuaging female voters if Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton drops out of the Democratic race for the White House.

Barbara Walters told Mr. Obama he was “sexy-looking.” Sherri Shepherd announced that she had shifted her support from Mrs. Clinton to Mr. Obama; she made Joy Behar temporarily switch seats with her during a break so she could chat up the candidate. Even Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a Republican, told Mr. Obama how moved she was by his speech to the 2004 Democratic convention.

[. . .]

Mr. Obama used body language to bridge the gender gap. The candidate who is sometimes attacked by feminists as a golden youth passing over them on his way to the old boys’ club reminded the co-hosts that he was “surrounded by women” at home.

He patted Ms. Behar’s arm and whispered so intimately into Ms. Walters’s ear that Ms. Hasselbeck accused them of “canoodling.” Mr. Obama is an effective speaker, but he is just as smooth at wordless communication: he mixed a cool and somewhat princely demeanor with warm smiles and touches.

Oh yeah, those feminists are totally bitchy Obama-haters. But when he looks at normal women with those deep brown eyes and flashes those pearly whites . . .

You know, if Obama is the nominee (and I think he will be), I have no doubt that he will indeed win many female votes. And being good looking has never hurt. But maybe his popularity with female voters will have more to do with the facts that women tend to vote Democratic, Obama is surprisingly progressive on women’s issues and John McCain, er, hates us? It’s just a hunch I have.

[Image via The Onion.]

Popularity: 13% [?]

Mar

31

It’s Not Just A Dream: Responsible Reporting on Sexual Assault

Filed Under media, rape and sexual assault, sexual exploitation and harassment, violence against women and girls | 11 Comments

I spend a lot of time writing about rape apologism and really irresponsible coverage of sexual assault in the media. I also regularly find myself asking people to write letters to editors, criticizing the common victim-blaming, women-are-liars approach to articles about rape.

And so, when responsible and honest reporting actually happens, I think that I owe it to all of you, and to the journalists out there who want to do the right thing, to point it out. So here we go: via the SAFER blog, a local Ohio newspaper called the Athens Messenger ran a story about how sexual assault is more than just penetrative rape. It’s a good article, though not very long, and you should go read the whole thing.

One in four college women will be sexually assaulted during their college years, experts say, but what many college students consider to be sexual assault is actually only a small part of what the law defines as sex offenses.

“Sexual assault occurs along a continuum of intrusion and violation ranging from unwanted sexual comments to forced sexual intercourse,” according to an Ohio University Police Department statement on sexual assault, which states that anything along that continuum violates the student code of conduct.

“When there’s no sexual contact, people don’t necessarily think of sexual assault,” said Lindsey Daniels, who is the sexual assault prevention program coordinator for Tri-County Mental Health and Counseling.

Not all sex offenses involved physical contact. Several sex offenses defined in the Ohio Revised Code, such as public indecency and voyeurism, do not involve physical contact.

The misdemeanor-level offenses like public indecency, voyeurism, and sexual imposition (any unwanted sexual touching) get reported much less than forceful sex offenses like rape, but Amanda Childress, OU’s assistant director of health promotions, said they probably happen just as often.

Well, there you go. Truth!

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Popularity: 12% [?]

Mar

29

Hey, asshole

Filed Under Republicans, WOC issues, assholes, bigotry, blogging, feminism, misogyny, race and racism, rape and sexual assault, sexism, social conservatives, violence against women and girls | 2 Comments

You want to know what was definitely not a reason for my posting about the Sharpton/NAACP debacle? So that conservative assholes could use it as fodder to apologize for the white rapists, call the victims of that crime drunk sluts with “humper’s remorse,” use Sharpton as some kind of bizarre comparison to Obama’s Reverend Wright, call both men “racist” (instead of the accurate description for Sharpton, “sexist”), and proclaim that we should “burn down” Dunbar Village. I didn’t post it so that assholes could jump merrily up and down, clapping their hands and unable to believe their luck, because even the feminists agree with their racist and misogynist remarks.

I mean, I always assumed that the whole thing might be inevitable. But it was the very opposite of the reason for my post. And it still is.

Yours is the kind of support that we do not want and do not need. I absolutely do not agree with you, and we’re sure as hell not on the same side. And I wanted to make that very, very clear.

Good? Good.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Mar

29

Updates and Things

Filed Under 2008 election, Republicans, assholes, blogging, media, objectification, politics, race and racism, random, rape and sexual assault, sex work, sexual exploitation and harassment, violence against women and girls | 5 Comments

A few stories I’ve recently blogged about have some updates:

Yesterday, I wrote about a woman who was forced to undergo a painful process of removing her nipple piercings before she could board a plan, apparently for the amusement of the male security officers. The TSA has responded to the situation:

The TSA said Friday in a statement on its Web site that the officers properly followed procedures, but that the procedures must change. In the future passengers can either allow a visual inspection of their piercings, or remove them, the agency said.

The statement stopped short of apologizing to Hamlin.

”TSA acknowledges that our procedures caused difficulty for the passenger involved and regrets the situation in which she found herself,” the agency said in a statement. ”We appreciate her raising awareness on this issue and we are changing the procedures to ensure that this does not happen again.”

Hamlin’s attorney said she accepted the TSA statement as an apology, and commended the agency for taking quick action. The policy change is ”an achievement for the protection of passengers’ civil rights while meeting the security goals of the TSA,” Gloria Allred said.

Uh huh. Well call me difficult to please (you wouldn’t be the first), but I do find it a little odd how the TSA website already said prior to this statement that “If you are selected for additional screening, you may ask to remove your body piercing in private as an alternative to a pat-down search.” A pat-down search was never offered to Hamlin, and was in fact refused to her when she made the offer herself to show her nipple piercings to the female guard in private — the same guard who had to look at her piercings anyway as Hamlin went through the excruciating process of removing them. So I think that TSA will have to try again. Changing a policy is totally different from beginning to enforce one that is already in place. It was previously indicated that Hamlin was considering suing if she did not receive an apology. I think that it will be a shame if a lawsuit doesn’t go through, and after all of the trouble, TSA gets off the hook with a slight wag of the finger.

I’ve also recently blogged about how Al Sharpton and the NAACP are supporting leniency for the Dunbar Village rapists. Now, Sharpton’s organization (NAN) and the NAACP are furiously denying, changing their stories and pointing fingers at each other. Sharpton has tried to rewrite history and is blaming the “misinformation” on the women of color bloggers who have raised awareness and interest about this issue, without noting that the information came from numerous objective and mainstream news sources. In other words, he’s not only ignoring the fact that women of color deserve rights equal to those of men of color, but is now also blaming his own disgusting mess on women of color rather than taking responsibility for his actions. Nice. Also, while reviewing the denials and backpedaling, check out this flier. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of who produced it, but according the the Dunbar Village blog, it was passed around at the NAN and NAACP join press conference on March 11. And even if they didn’t produce the fliers themselves, the fact remains that putting together an event with this type of bullshit propaganda being openly distributed isn’t exactly the best way to prove that you’re not supporting the rapists (and neither is standing on a stage with the rapists’ families).

Keep those letters coming, folks.

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Popularity: 15% [?]

Mar

28

Bad Ass Women’s Activist of the Week: When Ordinary Women Refuse to Accept Absue of Authority Edition

Filed Under assholes, bad ass women’s activist of the week, misogyny, objectification, patriarchy, rape and sexual assault, sexual exploitation and harassment, violence against women and girls | 8 Comments

Think it was bad when Southwest Airlines started kicking women off of their planes for dressing “inappropriately?” Well they’ve apparently got nothing on the Transportation Security Administration. They recently forced female traveler Mandi Hamlin to remove her nipple piercings before allowing her to board a plane — even though she offered to show her piercings to the female officer and required pliers to remove the jewelry:

Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems.

The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin’s chest, the Dallas-area resident said.

Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The agent then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said.

Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said.

She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.

“Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her,” said Hamlin’s attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties. Allred is a well-known Los Angeles lawyer who often represents high-profile claims.

Applying pliers to the torso of a mannequin that had a peach-colored bra with the rings on it, Hamlin showed reporters at the news conference how she took off the second ring.

She said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she still was wearing a belly button ring. (emphasis mine)

Best case scenario, this was sexual harassment. Absolutely nothing that Hamlin was forced to do was necessary. She was upfront and compliant. None of it made passengers more safe, and the officers knew it. It seems pretty obvious that the male agents did this for shits and giggles. They sexually humiliated and injured her, laughed about it, and then proved that this was their goal by completely ignoring her equally “dangerous” belly button ring.

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Popularity: 22% [?]

Mar

27

Significant Numbers of Irish Blame Women for Rape

Filed Under Europe, International, misogyny, patriarchy, rape and sexual assault, sex and sexuality, slut-shaming, violence against women and girls | 9 Comments

notinvitation.jpgA lot of what I’ve been writing about lately seems to fall under the category of wholly unsurprising and yet still utterly depressing. Here’s another one for the files:

Just like in the good old U.S. of A. (and Australia), a new poll shows that in Ireland, large numbers of citizens think that women are at least “partially responsible” for rape (note: this is a cached page. The Irish Examiner, which helped conduct the study and has the most comprehensive info about the results, is currently experiencing problems with his website. I’ll put the proper link in later if I notice the page is back up).

* More than 30% think a victim is some way responsible if she flirts with a man or fails to say no clearly.

* 10% of people think the victim is entirely at fault if she has had a number of sexual partners.

* 37% think a woman who flirts extensively is at least complicit, if not completely in the wrong, if she is the victim of a sex crime.

* One in three think a woman is either partly or fully to blame if she wears revealing clothes.

* 38% believe a woman must share some of the blame if she walks through a deserted area.

The results also show that defence barristers, looking to swing the deciding three members in every 12-person jury, can exploit misgivings in certain demographics about the perceived responsibility of female victims.

Dramatic differences in empathy towards victims based on age and social class are revealed. Gender, however, had little impact.

In every category, widowed, divorced and separated people took the harshest view on the role of the female victim, compared with married or cohabiting couples.

The results of the poll support the results of the ground-breaking Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report in 2002, which found 15% of the population believed a raped woman was not an innocent victim.

A few notes are necessary, here.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

Mar

26

Bush Official: Doctor’s Right to Withold Information Greater Than Patient’s Right to Receive It

Filed Under Republicans, abortion, anti-choice extremism, assholes, misogyny, patriarchy, politics, religious fanaticism, reproductive justice, social conservatives, women’s health | 53 Comments

Surprise, surprise: the Bush Administration thinks that Ob/Gyns should not only have the right to deny women basic medical care like abortion, emergency contraception or regular old birth control, but they should also be able to refuse to provide a referral to another doctor for these services.

Last Friday, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt sent a letter to the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, with a copy to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Leavitt said he was concerned about an ethics committee statement from ACOG in November stating that doctors should either be prepared to perform “standard reproductive services” or else refer those patients to someone who will.

Leavitt’s letter said he was even more concerned that the Ob/Gyn board had made adherence to that policy a requirement for certification.

Pro-life Ob/Gyns complained that that would require them to make abortion referrals, something they morally opposed. And in his letter, Leavitt said that could violate federal laws protecting health workers’ conscience rights.

But here’s the thing. Also shockingly, Leavitt is an idiot. Not only because he sent such an outrageous letter in response to such a practical guideline — essentially stating that a person actually does have a right to medical care regardless of who their doctor prays to on Sunday — but because the board in no way makes adherence to this commonsense guideline a requirement for certification. It should be a requirement, of course; I don’t really know how the hell you could certify a doctor who refuses to provide his or her patients with basic information about services he or she doesn’t like and expect an acceptable result. But the fact remains that it’s not a requirement. And so Leavitt is not only an asshole who thinks doctors should be able to withhold information, he’s also an asshole who doesn’t bother to verify information before widely disseminating it.

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Popularity: 18% [?]

Mar

25

Feminists Judge Beauty Differently

Filed Under beauty myths, feminism, media, objectification | 9 Comments

When I saw the headline Feminists More Open-Minded on Weight, I expected an article on the fat-acceptance movement (which the Times had reported on fairly recently). But no, this time, feminist open-mindedness on weight has apparently been proven!

I’ll say up front that I did not pay $30 to read the study in full, but here is the abstract:

The present study examined the effect of feminist ascription on perceptions of the physical attractiveness of women ranging in body mass index (BMI). One-hundred and twenty-nine women who self-identified as feminists and 132 who self-identified as non-feminists rated a series of 10 images of women that varied in BMI from emaciated to obese. Results showed no significant differences between feminist and non-feminists in the figure they considered to be maximally attractive. However, feminists were more likely to positively perceive a wider range of body sizes than non-feminists. These results are discussed in relation to possible protective factors against the internalisation of the thin ideal and body objectification.

Well, cool. I buy that. Actually, it makes a lot of sense to me. After all, the first step to changing your perceptions is understanding where they come from.

But based on the Times description of the study, there’s something a little weird going on here:

The photographs were of 10 women, faces concealed and wearing tight gray clothing, who ranged in body mass index from emaciated to obese.

I can only assume that this is part of the methodology, the idea being that the faces of the women could skew the results away from an assessment based merely on body size. But regardless, it does strike me as kind of fucked up to ask women to assess the “attractiveness” of other women only after their humanity has been erased. Of course, we’re asked to judge women in this way on a daily basis; women are constantly carved up and served to us as generic bodies and body parts. We see overweight women with their heads cut off from the field of vision as some form of “respect” every time there’s a story on obesity in the nightly news. We see thin women displayed sexually with their heads obscured or cropped out of the photograph for public titillation. One almost has to wonder if a few of the feminists in this study noticed the trend, got annoyed and overcompensated. After all, this premise seems to buy into the basic if false presumption that you can judge a woman’s attractiveness based on body parts that do not include her head.

And what the hell is up with the tight clothing? Obviously they were trying to not skew perceptions by dressing the larger women in looser clothing — but wouldn’t it have made sense to dress all of the women in well-fitting clothing? It seems to me that clothes showing body size and shape but not clinging to the skin would be fair to every woman, where as the tight clothes buy into a preference towards a certain body type, what with the popular idea that thin women should show off as much as possible and overweight women should wear giant sacks..

Anyway, if anyone has full access to the study, I’d be interested to learn just how much wider the feminist range of “attractive bodies” was to the non-feminist range– and whether it extended further for both over and under-weight bodies, or only one direction. Also, did the women actually identify as “non-feminists,” or did they just answer the question “are you a feminist” with a “no”? I’d say that there’s a clear difference between a woman who says “I’m not a feminist” (most women, sadly) and a woman who says “I’m a non-feminist” (Laura Schlessinger).

The Times does provide us one extra bit of detail about the results — and what a stunning conclusion it leads us to.

The study participants were asked to identify the thinnest and heaviest women they considered “physically attractive.” They were also asked to say which woman they thought was most attractive.

Feminists and nonfeminists tended to agree on which woman was the most attractive. But that woman was described by the researchers as somewhat underweight, suggesting that even feminists cannot fully avoid societal pressures to be thin.

Well I’ll be damned. Who would’ve thought that feminists were real people subject to socialization just like everyone else? Next thing you know, it’ll turn out that feminists have faked orgasms, worn lipstick, changed their last names upon marriage and been all human and everything.

UPDATE: Feminist Advatar answers many of my questions in the comments.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Mar

24

Al Sharpton and the NAACP Support Dunbar Village Rapists

Filed Under WOC issues, action alert, activism, assholes, feminism, misogyny, patriarchy, race and racism, rape and sexual assault, violence against women and girls | 21 Comments

This is important.

Do you remember the Dunbar Village rape case? I’m not sure how you could forget; this is the case where a woman was gang raped by 10 men in her own home for over three hours, forced to have sex with her own 12-year-old son and survived an attempt to light both of them on fire. In an update that is a couple of weeks old but I’m just hearing from now via Document the Silence, Al Sharpton and the NAACP are taking to the streets to defend the four arrested rapists. This is despite conclusive DNA evidence and apparent photographic evidence that the rapists took on their cell phones during the attack.

Please, please, please read the call to action from Rev. Dr. Renita J. Weems, which is pasted in full after the jump. Please take time to undertake the requested actions and to pass this story along.

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Popularity: 32% [?]

Mar

24

The Oppression Olympics Continue

Filed Under 2008 election, Democrats, assholes, bigotry, gender, politics, race and racism, sexism | 8 Comments

UPDATE: The Washington Post happens to have an interesting article today on this very subject. It’s actually more intelligent than you might expect, though be forewarned that some of the quotes are really obnoxious and precisely what I rail against here.

—

I can’t say that Geraldine Ferraro should have quit while she was ahead, because I’m rather unconvinced that at any point she was ahead. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt for her to stop making things worse on herself (and despite the fact that she is no longer a part of the campaign, Hillary Clinton, too). In addition to complaining that the simple acknowledgment of her remarks about Obama being racist is in fact racist against white people, she is now apparently very offended that her name came up in Obama’s speech about race.

The former New York congresswoman and Democratic vice presidential nominee got the race debate going a few weeks ago with her comments in a California newspaper that Obama had gotten to where he was — on the verge of knocking off Ferraro’s favored candidate, Hillary Clinton — because he is a black man.

Today, she surfaced again in the same paper, the Daily Breeze in Torrance, to say that she objected vehemently to Obama’s linkage in his speech between her comments and the inflammatory excerpts of sermons by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s longtime pastor.

“To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable,” Ferraro told the paper. “He gave a very good speech on race relations, but he did not address the fact that this man is up there spewing hatred.”

Overall, Ferraro said, she thought the speech was “excellent,” but she lamented that Obama did not go further in condemning Wright. She surmised that Obama was limited in that regard because he did not want to offend black voters, which she called the base of Obama’s support.

“I think they got as far as they could go politically,” she said. “They’re looking at their base. Their base is African Americans. They’re looking at that and they’re trying to walk a very thin line. They don’t want to offend the African Americans, and this is the way he did it.”

Yeah, here’s the thing: he was defending you, asshole.

Do I think it’s a mistake that Ferraro’s name came up? Of course not, it was a deliberate move to point out that if anyone in this campaign can be accused of racism, it’s not the Obama campaign. However, the fact remains that he defended her and in fact criticized the “dismissal” of her comments by referring to them as “racist.”

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Popularity: 15% [?]

Mar

23

Offensive Remark of the Week: White People Just Don’t Get Enough Credit for Stopping the Whole Lynching Thing Edition

Filed Under 2008 election, Republicans, assholes, bigotry, discrimination, media, offensive remark of the week, politics, race and racism, social conservatives | 29 Comments

Clearly, it should go without saying that Pat Buchanan is a fucking nut. Really, I try to ignore these types more than anything. I just don’t have the time to follow the disgraceful career of every racist, misogynist, homophobic, nationalist, religious fanatic puppet of the Republican party.

But this time . . . oh, this time. Buchanan has written a column as a response to Barack Obama’s recent speech on racism in America (all emphasis in quoted text is mine). And as far as I can tell, Buchanan’s feelings are really hurt because Obama didn’t take the time to personally thank him for the fact that slavery ended and rich white dudes like himself only continue to demand slightly more subtle forms of oppression. It’s a good point; for everything else he’s said, I don’t remember Buchanan ever remarking (in public) “that slavery thing was a pretty sweet ride — why don’t we bring that back?” Why the hell aren’t all those uppity black folks sending him thank you cards?

Really, read the whole thing; it’s a fucking doozy.

The “white community,” said Barack, must start “acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination — and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past — are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds … .”

And what deeds must we perform to heal ourselves and our country?

The “white community” must invest more money in black schools and communities, enforce civil rights laws, ensure fairness in the criminal justice system and provide this generation of blacks with “ladders of opportunity” that were “unavailable” to Barack’s and the Rev. Wright’s generations.

What is wrong with Barack’s prognosis and Barack’s cure?

Only this. It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, “everybody but the rioters themselves.”

Was “white racism” really responsible for those black men looting auto dealerships and liquor stories, and burning down their own communities, as Otto Kerner said — that liberal icon until the feds put him away for bribery.

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.

Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.

Aww. Buchanan feels he isn’t being listened to and has to remind the entire world that he presumably has a white penis. I’d feel so terribly bad for him if a single word of it was true. But please, wait, because that’s the intro. It gets about ten times worse.

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Popularity: 18% [?]

Mar

22

The Computer Has Arrived!

Filed Under blog news, blogging | 5 Comments

It’s much prettier, quieter, faster and best of all, it actually works! What more could a person want?

Cara Before:



Cara After:



Popularity: 13% [?]

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