News Round-up

I need to stop doing this to myself. And yet, here I am, drunk and naked and reading the news.

First, enjoy this. For those of you not about to read a super long and super hateful blog post, excerpts:

Rape is simply sex (I am talking about ‘husband-rape’ here, for those who deliberately seek to misunderstand me). Women enjoy sex, so this type of ‘rape’ cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal. To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting that force feeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence. A woman would be more inconvenienced by having her handbag snatched … Again, for those who are seeking to cause trouble by deliberately misunderstanding me: yes, violent rape by a stranger in the street is a terrible crime, but I am not talking about that — I am talking about ‘husband-rape’.

Okay, but it’s just a blog, right? I mean, the internet is full of hate and stupid and ragging on tits.

No, this is not just the internets waving its dick at you. This is your politician! Written by the British National Party’s London leader, Nick Eriksen. According to Salon:

After these comments surfaced, the British National Party decided to remove Eriksen as its second-place candidate. But there’s also bad news: The party’s other senior officials have come to his defense and it’s unclear whether he will also be sacked as the party’s London leader. BNP deputy leader Simon Darby says the bad press Eriksen received over his boiling-mad blog post is part of a smear campaign that took his comments “completely out of context.

I really think “context” these days is being used as a euphemism for “we aren’t sure where the line is these days.” Which, okay, I understand. You have my sympathy, gentlemen. We do live in confusing times. Look at our own country, where in the space of 40 years women have become almost 50% of the workforce, have acquired reproductive rights, kinda, and the long-coveted right to wear pants. And yet, the first serious female candidate for Presidency (no offense, Shirley) is happily called a bitch, a whore, ugly, too emotional or not emotional enough, oh, and also she has hair.

(If you think this is unfair warbling on my part, see if you can google up a single reference to a public figure calling Obama a nigger, or discussing his hair, or calling him . Or, hey, remember that speech that got everybody so wet? Can you imagine what would happen if Clinton made a speech about sexism in America? Once we all stopped talking about her thighs, that is).

Confusing, isn’t it? I mean, let me get this straight. We’re not allowed to rape our wives but we are allowed to call women whores because they’re, like, I don’t know, ugly and stuff? Of course his quotes were taken out of context. That is a completely reasonable defense. I mean, look around you. What reason would he have had to think that the current social context is against assault of women? What reason indeed.

Just in case you think we’re better off on our side of the pond, there’s this. Made by a feminist activist, this T-shirt illustrates an open safe, with a small handwritten note inside that reads, “I was raped.” A lot of people are uncomfortable with the shirt. Well, I’d argue that’s the point. But I understand the concern that by putting a heavy message like this on an easy-to-acquire t-shirt, it will get cheapened as frat boys don it because they are willfully ignorant of the definition of “joke.” Still and all, I think that makes a relevant and crucial point as well, that our major concern (after TMI, which is sort of a luxury that only men and the 5 in 6 women who haven’t been raped have and think they deserve to keep) is that this will be co-opted and made something funny. Hee-larious, even. There could be interesting and intense conversations that might be sparked by a woman un-ironically wearing this shirt, but more importantly, we’ll learn a lot about how safe we are in public spaces by the reaction to somebody wearing it because they think it’s a hoot. Personally, I’d like to know if the people in my neighborhood would laugh, jeer, or pick a fight with somebody who wears a T-shirt like this. I’d like to know because I live here and sometimes walk outside at night, and it’s worthwhile to me to know who in a 30 foot radius thinks rape is funny.

Still and all, I think this is all moot wondering. Things like this don’t tend to get very popular, and maintain a very “preaching to the choir” kind of status. The point of this T-shirt seems more to provoke a reaction among people who will never see or wear it or know somebody who will, but will read about it in a paper and have a very strong opinion about how inappropriate it is, in one way or another. And the opinion here is really the point. When somebody comes out and pokes our sexism with a big stick, we vomit out gems like this:

It’s tempting to imagine a wearer of the “I Was Raped” shirt in cleavage-revealing low-rider jeans and a visible thong, or perhaps a pair of sweatpants with “JUICY” stamped on the ass, while she drains a Jager shot and shouts “Woo!”

Sorry, say again? Why is that tempting? Oh, I interrupted your midnight fantasy. Please do go on.

My T-shirt of Charlton Heston kissing a chimp (a still from Planet of the Apes) isn’t helping raise awareness about bestiality or white slavery.

So before you think I’ve started trolling Freepers to mine this gold, here’s the full comment. Taken from Salon.com. Which, if you didn’t know, is pretty fucking liberal. With friends like this, right? Can’t blame anybody for saying shit out of context, these days.

Wrapping up, a few more interesting news items.

Salon provides a link to an article about countries that depend on oil production and their correlation with patriarchal political and legal systems. The main difference here is that countries relying on mining oil and other minerals have an economy based in labor that is typically exclusive to men, whereas countries with a more agricultural bent opens the workforce to women, which is the first step to gender parity as it allows the possibility of economic independence, spaced and planned families, education, and, to put it quite bluntly, going outside sometimes. Interesting in its own right, but especially because it gives a more compelling, traceable, and less virulently knee-jerk racist response to women’s inequality in Middle Eastern countries. That is, it’s not because they’re Muslim darkies, people. It’s because they have completely unsustainable economies. And, if I may say so, Christian crackers aren’t a whole heap better. To illustrate:

Back on the home front, Mississippi is busy being illiterate and oppressive. I’m not making a crass generalization about the South here. The Mississippi House recently passed a bill that was originally about penalizing false reports of child abuse, but has since been amended to add a lot of restrictions on abortion. Also, this bill would require girls who get abortions under 14 to have fetal tissue preserved and tested for paternity. Why? Well, don’t ask the representatives, because they didn’t read the bill, and generally refuse to do so on principle. If it’s against abortion, that’s good enough for them.

And lastly, on another WordPress blog, we have this:

entering “abortion” as a search term in the POPLINE database now returns zero results because of a move by the database personnel to block that search. For background, POPLINE is “the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues.” The librarian who noted the problem inquired about it, and was informed that it wasn’t a simple technical glitch; the response she received was, “We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a [US] federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.” f you’re not familiar with “stop words,” they are typically words like “a,” “an,” and “the” that are omitted automatically from the search, because they is assumed to have no added value or meaning. Suffice it to say, it’s quite unusual for a word with “real” meaning to be a stop word, especially one so relevant to the resource being searched.

I would love to gather up some more links for you, but it’s late and I have to be up early and it was retarded for me to start reading the news this late, my god. I’m not even drunk anymore. But in case this sounds egregious to you, in case you are surprised, google “global gag rule.” If you have never heard of that, you are in for a brand new country.