Sweethearts make better mommas

I always naively think that the British Times is above your common-level misogyny, but it seems I’m wrong again. A piece today on Sandra Bullock’s legal battle to secure her husband’s custody of his daughter is misogyny-laden from start to finish. You see, Bullock is ‘America’s Sweetheart’. The mother of said daughter is a porn star. Ergo, Bullock would be a good mother, and the porn star – the whore, the slut – must be a bad mother. Dammit, the Times author didn’t even try to cover up his blatant bias. Observe:

America’s sweetheart, the actress Sandra Bullock, is being dragged into an unpleasant legal battle to prove that she is a better parent than her husband’s former wife, the star of more than 100 pornographic movies.

…

His ex-wife Janine Lindemulder, 40, star of such video titles as Mrs Behavin’, Sleeping Booty and Dyke Diner, disagrees. She has just been released from a six-month prison sentence for tax evasion.

…

The tattooed blonde remains in a halfway house in Los Angeles until the end of this year when she can seek custody of her daughter.

Now, it has to be noted that the rest of the piece does not paint Bullock’s husband in a favourable light, but none of what he has done previously (even leaving his seven-month pregnant wife) means that he could possibly be a bad parent. You see, boys will be boys! But women who enjoy sex, who have sex because it’s their choice to do so, or who are involved in the sex industry are, de facto, bad people. You didn’t hear it here first.

South African rape survey (BBC)

I don’t think there is one word I could add to this story to make its message any plainer or any more disturbing. These are the cruel realities of life in South Africa.

Some key statements:

• One in four South African men questioned in a survey said they had raped someone and nearly half admitted having attacked more than one victim.
• … practices such as gang rape were common because they were considered a form of male bonding.
• A recent trade union report said a child was being raped in South Africa every three minutes with the vast majority of those cases going unreported.

What?! How long has this been going on, and why has there been no outrage about this before? And why?!

The researcher suggested that:

“… it’s partly rooted in our incredibly disturbed past and the way that South African men over the centuries have been socialised into forms of masculinity that are predicated on the idea of being strong and tough and the use of force to assert dominance and control over women, as well as other men.

Really? Can this adequately be attributed to a patriarchal society and the on-going prevalence of negative attitudes towards women, or do these statistics require a phenomenon all of their own? I can certainly see her point, but this theory still doesn’t explain these staggering statistics when men all over the world have been socialised into those very same forms of masculinity. (And I question, by the way, what a ‘form of masculinity’ is in the first place.) No, there’s something much more sinister afoot here, and I wish I understood what it was. But more than that, and infinitely more importantly, I wish that somebody, somewhere was doing something about it. The responses in this piece indicate to me a complacency about these crimes and an acceptance that this is just how things are in South Africa. I cannot get my head around this at all. And I’m fucking disgusted.

Full piece behind the cut.

Doctor Woefully Awful

It’s not often I break out the old blog these days, although I certainly have a few things in mind that I want to blog about. Let’s start with Saturday night’s Doctor Who. Oh dear God, yes, let’s start there.

I was excited for Doctor Who’s return at the weekend for, with all its faults, it’s a damn good show. And the good outweighs the bad. There’s been lots of coverage, of course, about the new Doctor and about David Tennant’s departure from the role, but I’m rather more interested in changes in the writing team. Now, all due credit to Russell T Davies (RTD) for resurrecting Who after its 15 year break, but my respect for him largely ends there. RTD cannot write. He’s the head writer of a major television production, and he just cannot write. Something isn’t right. Yes, many will argue that if he’s given the time to think through his stories, and he takes the time to scribe coherent ideas, he’ll manage to come up with the goods. But I disagree. I’ve seldom enjoyed an episode penned by RTD, and Saturday night was no exception. Let’s summarise what happened. We had a wooden companion who we were presumably supposed to like, a handful of vacant and pointless characters who served no purpose other than filling out the numbers, and a sloppy story premise which involved – as it always does in RTD’s episodes – the end of the world. Again. Groan. The first ten minutes were wholly derivative of Midnight (another RTD story), while the remaining 50 were a mix of unimpressive special effects and RTD’s trademark ‘cryptic’ prophecies. There was little discernible story arc and there was even less to engage the viewer and make them care. So the world was going to end again or something. Isn’t it always Russell? The whole thing was just embarrassing. I was bored out of my mind.

One poor episode I could forgive, of course – God knows we’re used to them by now with RTD – but my concern is for David Tennant. He’s been the best Doctor, in my opinion (and he’s had some hard acts to follow) and I feel bad for him that this – this inconsequential, lazy rubbish – will be how he finishes out his days in Who. Tennant acts his little socks off every single time he’s on camera, and he himself must feel dejected that he has this nonsense to work with. I look forward to Steven Moffat taking over the writing team shortly, for he is very talented and he never fails to please, but it will be too late for David Tennant, alas. He’s just going to have to put up with these horrendous stories in the meantime and hope that his fans know that he’s better than them. This fan certainly does.

All dem Oirish sing lovely so dey do

Some people are horribly naive. And they clearly have no idea that they’re being offensive. Take Rose McGowan for example.

Hollywood actress Rose McGowan has said she would have joined the IRA if she lived in Belfast during the Troubles.

McGowan stars in Fifty Dead Men Walking, an adaptation of IRA informer Martin McGartland’s autobiography.

“My heart just broke for the cause,” she told a news conference ahead of the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Ach, her wee heart just broke for the cause (so it did). She ‘would have joined the IRA’ had she lived in Belfast during the Troubles (so she would). Well ain’t that just lovely!

Has this woman ever read a newspaper in her life? Has she any idea what ‘the cause’ was even about? Did she ever even set foot on Irish soil during the Troubles she romanticises so much? What does she think we Catholics in Northern Ireland were doing? Sitting around, signing our Irish tunes, drinking our cups of tea, and smacking the odd Protestant around the head? For ‘the cause’. No, we were hearing every single day of yet another bombing or shooting, we were being stopped by the army every time we left our homes, we were checking under our cars for bombs, we were being evacuated from our homes and schools, and we were wondering when the hell it was all going to end. And if it would end before one of our loved ones got killed. That’s what it was like in Northern Ireland, Miss McGowan. That’s what ‘the cause’ meant to most of us. And the Republican terrorists were no better or worse than the Loyalist terrorists. So why don’t you just take your ridiculous romantic Hollywood notions of the cute wee Oirish and their sweet wee passions and grow the fuck up.

[Lazy blogging] McCain

From popbitch:

For anyone that didn’t know. John McCain was at the bottom of his military class at Annapolis, but still got to pilot a fighter plane due to his father’s connections. He is the son and the grandson of admirals. He finished 894 [out] of 899 in his graduating class. Despite crashing five aircraft, John McCain was never disciplined. And son-of-single-mother Obama is, of course, the privileged elitist.

Well of course. *rolls eyes*

Celebrity building spawnage

This has been on my mind ever since the newest celebrity babies (the Jolie-Pitt/ Pitt-Jolie twins) joined our sorry world. Children as accessories, then. I’m thinking of the adoptees from third-world countries, in the main.* I’m also thinking of the likes of the following (from popbitch of all places).

We thought in the West the days of child slavery were, thankfully, over. Yet for many of the children of celebrities, a life born into slavery even from the first weeks of life, beckons.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt waited barely three weeks before turning their twins into cash cows, putting them to work in front of the cameras for a multi-million pound fee. No matter that the fee was for a good cause, it was their children who had to earn it.

OK! magazine’s repost to Hello’s Brangelina exclusive this week was to bring out its big guns, in the shape of Jordan. Her daughter, Princess, got to celebrate her first birthday by helping her “uncle” Richard Desmond sell copies of his magazine. Jordan’s willingness to tell the world that her one-year old daughter never wears the same things twice and has a hundred pairs of shoes ensured OK! had as many column inches as Hello.

And in LA, the Beckhams’ continuing quest for even more fame saw David pick up an award at the Teen Choice Awards. And helping make sure he got the most coverage from the event, his three boys, in matching outfits (and haircuts just like their Dad, to ram the point home) also had to get up on stage and act up, like performing monkeys.

Surely as concerned, right-thinking citizens we should support the work of the anti-child slavery movement by shunning these harsh taskmasters?

Children there, building celebrity cred since 1998. And you all thought it was about shoes and handbags. Well it’s not. It’s about dressing your children up in finery that costs a small fortune, parading them in front of cameras looking cute and just that little bit precocious, and selling pictures of them to whoever bids the highest. It has a sort of pimping feel to it, frankly.

—-

* Imma gonna save them there little brown babies from sure peril for what would they do without us selfless and beautiful Americans! I don’t want an ugly one, mind. Or a fat one. Or one with eyes too far apart. Or one with too much hair. Or one with too little hair. Or one with strange eyes. Or one that’s too big. Or one that’s ugly. Have I mentioned that already?

Repost of another entitled ‘Rape trafficking interlude with Peridot Ash’

I want to pass this informative (and difficult) piece along. It’s one of those issues of which everyone should be aware. Most of us know about the trafficking of women for prostitution, but the problem of trafficking for the specific purposes of rape is a lesser known fact.

From iblamethepatriarchy.

Rare is the blamer who is unfamiliar with the concept of human sex trafficking: rape-o-preneurs lure indigent overseas women to the US, lying to them about the real nature of the “work” they’ll be doing, enslaving them under repellent conditions, and pocketing the filthy lucre.

Peridot Ash, writing in 2007 at Friction, A Sex Worker’s Weblog, points out that the supply of prostituted women already here is sufficient to fulfill the demand, so why go to the trouble of importing them? Two reasons.

One [reason] is obvious, to keep all the money they make off these slaves. The other, a point which most documentaries and news reports about trafficking don’t dare touch, is that there is a demand for RAPE that needs to met.

Face it. It’s not just the rare sicko. There’s a whole market for rape that these kinds of traffickers cater to. The traffickers lie to the women about what work they’ll be doing abroad. Because the customers WANT women who aren’t willing, who will struggle against them while they force them to do things and beat them. They get off on that and they’ll pay somebody to let them do it in a place that’s safe for them.

Trafficked sex slaves, young onions, are the murky far end of the rape continuum, the one that proceeds from the pornulation of mainstream media, escalates into your boyfriend going, “Come on, just a little longer, I’m almost there,” devolves into the mainstream with the winky, nudgy, boys-will-be-boys attitude toward street harassment, and climaxes with the date assault you are reluctant to report because you didn’t say “no” loud enough. For the joyrapist who’s keepin it real, there are prostituted women he can pay to assault. This shit is all rape, but the rapists are protected by long-standing patriarchal tradition.

I allude to the tradition that women are toilets.

Nobody knows how many women are illegally trafficked into the US to be sold as rape victims. A 2007 WaPo article chronicles the “outrage” echoing throughout the land when lavishly funded anti-trafficking initiatives failed to find them in sufficiently garish numbers. The Bush administration paid out 28 million bucks to save an estimated 14,500 to 17,500 annual sex slaves, but no sex slaves were to be found. $125,000 granted to a Dallas nonprofit only turned up 3 victims, goddammit. That’s $41,000 per perma-raped woman. Unacceptable!

Given my intimacy with the creepy manifestations of patriarchy, I find it hard to believe that in the whole Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, only 3 trafficked women existed in 2007. The more likely scenario is that, given the subterranean nature of rape culture, traffickers weren’t exactly leaping to their feet, waving tattered lingerie in the air, and yelling, “Here we are, Serpico!” One suspects that slavers might take steps to avoid detection, and that they’d keep their victims so marginalized that they’d fall resoundingly through the cracks that our misogynist social order so conveniently maintains for just that purpose.

But even if the number of victims has been, for whatever reason, exaggerated, what of it? Trafficked sex slaves, real or imagined, form a significant chunk of our mainstream pornulated domination narrative. TV crime dramas can’t keep their mitts off the idea. Just last night I watched a popular cable TV show called “Burn Notice” (advertised on the USA network as “pure and simple fun”) which featured an underground dungeonful of Russian hotties in torn underwear fleeing for their lives while the smirking rockstar hero shot a bunch of people up. DudeAmerica can’t resist hot young prostituted Russians! And clearly, they can’t resist the idea that there exists, in some bounteous, sexy netherworld, hordes of kidnaped foreign sluts just waiting to be abused in the dank subumbra of their beloved rape culture.

It gives me difficulty breathing.

Repost of another entitled ‘The Audacity of Bodily Autonomy’

I’m still all out of my own eloquence and inspiration for posting, so I’m going to utilise someone else’s again. This is a post from someone who has no end of eloquence. She’s right on the button.

Surgeon sued for giving anesthetized patient temporary tattoo. The tattoo was not at all medical in nature. She had surgery for a herniated disc and the next morning discovered a rose tattoo had been placed on her abdomen below her panty line. The doctor doesn’t deny doing it. In fact he claims he does this with all his patients to lift their spirits after surgery. Now, the really interesting (and disturbing) thing about this situation is how people have reacted to this woman’s decision to sue. The comments on this article are just the tip of the iceberg. Many people seem to be outraged by this woman being willing to sue this doctor for marking her (however temporarily) in her pelvic area without her permission.

We’ve all gone the rounds about the politics of choice as it applies to reproduction. But the idea that women’s bodies are public property doesn’t stop there. Catcalling, comments on weight, comments on hair or makeup from strangers are all just symptoms of a larger societal delusion that women’s bodies are a commodity first. Somehow we’ve gotten stuck in this idea that a woman’s valuing of her body as a part of her self comes second because her first role is to belong to the world at large. Women who refuse to accept that paradigm and insist on being recognized as people first whether it be by yelling back at catcallers, refusing to let strangers touch them, or filing suit when they feel they’ve been violated are then castigated for having the temerity to think that they can dictate what happens to their bodies. Apparently we’re just supposed accept these ‘lesser’ intrusions and not take steps to reclaim that sense of safety because nice girls know their place and don’t delude themselves that they have a right to feel safe and comfortable.

Well, I’m with the women who yell back, who walk away, who press charges and file lawsuits. Because it is past time we got past this idea that being nice = being a willing victim that never complains. I don’t want to live in a reality where people think marking an unconscious woman without her permission is a-okay because it’s temporary, or he didn’t mean any harm, or there’s no proof that he ‘actually molested her’ so she shouldn’t seek legal recourse. I know I’m talking crazy, but wouldn’t be nice to live in a world where women were viewed as people first? Where people didn’t blame the victim, but instead celebrated her willingness to fight back?

Well said.

The comments on the original piece are, well, typical.

The women of Britain are disgusting, apparently

Misogyny is alive and well. As if we ever thought otherwise.

From the Daily Mail:

Young British women leave behind their inhibitions as well as their worries when they go on their summer holiday, a survey shows.

One-third of those questioned admitted having slept with at least two men during the same holiday.

One in six has had a fling with three or more men, according to the poll of 2,000 women with an average age of 25.

A quarter of women cheat while away without their partner, although only one in ten is found out.

But boys are as tempted to stray as girls, with the same proportion of men admitting to holiday infidelity.

More than half of the women said it was best to be single during the summer months.

Four out of five has had a fling with a fellow holidaymaker.

In general, the women said they were more sexually active while holidaying.

On average, they have three holidays a year during which they have sex three times a day.

Their attitude to safe sex also appears to relax while away.

Only six out of ten said they packed condoms for their trip, with almost half admitting they do not worry about catching a sexually transmitted disease on holiday.

Despite being away, British women still seek home comforts when it comes to holiday romance.

Englishmen are regarded as the most romantic by those questioned in the survey for More magazine.

Almost half the women had been sexually harassed on holiday, a third had been mugged or had their belongings stolen and 12 per cent said their accommodation had been broken into.

Chantelle Horton, deputy editor of More, said: ?For most young women, a holiday is like a fortnight of Saturdays, so if they are single they will want to party as much as possible. ‘There is still some concern about women being too relaxed about STIs when on holiday, but the attitude is a lot better than it used to be.’

Of course, the focus is all on women and we’re supposed to believe that men behave like little angels on holiday. Not to mention that it is none of anyone’s business who has sex with who on holiday or any other time. But such logical boundaries are of no use to the women-haters. I wouldn’t expect anything else from Daily Bigot readers, but it’s the comments which I find most appalling.

After the jump.

Who cares what you think?

No shocks to hear of this sort of thing from the world’s favourite mass murderer, George W Bush.

From: “Bill Hangley, Jr.”
Subject: His Gift To Us
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 19:05:38 -0400

So when the President was here on July 4, I had the opportunity to shake his hand. I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea or not but I did it anyway, and said to him, “Mr President, I hope you only serve four years. I’m very disappointed in your work so far.”

He kept smiling and shaking my hand but answered, “who cares what you think?” His face stayed photo-op perfect but his eyes gave me a look that said, if we’d been drinking in some frathouse in Texas, he’d've happily answered, “let’s take it outside.” A nasty little gleam. But he was (fortunately) constrained by Presidential propriety.

But that was the end of it, until I turned away and started scribbling the quote down in my notepad, so as to remember The Gift forever. When he saw me do that he got excited and craned his neck over the rubberneckers to shout at me, “who are you with? Who are you with?” People started looking so he made a joke: “make sure you get it right.” But he kept at it: “Who do you write for?” I told him I wasn’t “with” anybody and pointed to one of his staff people, who knows me a little, and said, “ask him, he’ll tell you.” Then I split.

Half an hour later, my boss (who had helped organize the event we were at) came up to me and said, “did you really tell the President that he was doing a ‘lousy fucking job’?” No way, I said, I was very polite, I just told him what I thought. Fortunately, he believed me. He wasn’t happy with me, but he believed me.

But anyway, if you ever wondered if the Prez really was kind of a jerk, I’m here to tell you, he is, and I got The Gift to prove it. I’m thinking of making up t-shirts so we can share The Gift with everyone:

“Who cares what you think?”

- President George W. Bush, July 4, 2001

Link (via Graham Linehan).