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.

Only men can do feminism

If you’re looking for some giggles today (and Lord knows I am), and know anything at all about feminism/ the feminist movement, read this Onion piece.

After decades spent battling gender discrimination and inequality in the workplace, the feminist movement underwent a high-level shake-up last month, when 53-year-old management consultant Peter “Buck” McGowan took over as new chief of the worldwide initiative for women’s rights.

…

“You can’t waste time pussyfooting around with protests and getting all emotional about a bunch of irrelevant details,” McGowan said. “If you want to enjoy equal rights, you have to have a real man-to-man chat with the people in charge until you can hammer out some more equitable custody laws.”

Sometimes satire doesn’t get it right, but this time it’s just bang on.

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.

TfTd

I always listen to Radio 4 in the mornings on my way to work. I’m in that demographic now, don’t you know. I’m nearly always leaving as ‘Thought for the Day‘ begins. For those of you unfamiliar with Thought for the Day it is, as the link says, ‘reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news’. I think it would be more accurately described as patronising and sanctimonious reflections from God-bothers full of their own self-importance, but anyway. I find it insufferable.

This morning the Reverend Doctor Middle Class and Vaguely Disgruntled was doing his piece. He started off by recounting a tale of how he tried to help a young lady with her suitcase onto the bus. She declined his offer, and brushed his hand away when he offered again. This reaction, he blamed, on women’s constant quest for equality. If it wasn’t for the equality gained so far, he implied, women wouldn’t think twice about accepting help from a man. He tried to redeem himself, of course, by talking then about the disparities in earnings of men and women – and in doing so ‘approved’ of our pesky feminism – and then came back to the quandary of women not allowing men to help them when they clearly need it.

Seriously, Reverend Doctor Middle Class and Vaguely Disgruntled? Really? If I give you the benefit of the doubt for a moment, and believe that you genuinely thought that telling a story about a woman ‘in need’ would be a good introduction to a discussion about equal pay rights, I have to tell you that you’re a little naive. I know a lot of women – and I’m one myself – and I’m pretty sure that most of us don’t spend our time declining offers of help from men because we’re obsessed with equality. If you really need to know, I rather think that we women feel that it’s intrusive to be approached by strange men offering help (or anything else), that it can often be intimidating to be approached in such a manner, and that we decline because we feel uncomfortable and we would rather not have you near us or our suitcases. Is that unfortunate? Of course it is. In an ideal world, we would all be helping each other carry our butterflies and rainbows around; in a realistic world, we react as we do because we’re conditioned to do so by what we see around us. It’s got nothing to do with equality, or its lack.

But I’m not going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I think that for all your talk of equal pay for the sexes and of narrowing the employment gap, you think we women have got too much equality already. You gave your game away when you mentioned that ungrateful young woman twice in three minutes. You’re thinking, I’m sure, that she should have been happy to take help from you, the Big Man, instead of trying to assert her independence when she was so clearly in need. But the world, thankfully, doesn’t work your way any more. Perhaps the next time you pipe up on Thought for the Day, you’ll remember that it’s not all about you, and that women don’t spend  their waking moments trying to figure out how to get their equality points higher at the expense of people like you.

Repost of another entitled ‘Shall we talk about privilege’

I struggle with my privilege, mostly because I know that I’ve got bucketfuls of it. I’m western, white, straight, middle-class, able-bodied, and educated. The only area I don’t have privilege in is my gender (although I am cisgendered). But I’m not doing too badly, overall. I’m not ashamed of my privilege, but I am conscious of it. Most of my ‘qualities’ afford me a much easier life than others who do not have those ‘qualities’. I suppose, if I’m honest, that makes me uncomfortable. I am aware of my privilege, and I do own it, but I’m not convinced that that’s enough. I was born with this privilege, and I will have it forever. I don’t want to contribute a system of inequality because of it, but I know I do. The privileged always do, whether they are aware of it or not. Simply by benefiting from privilege, we are contributing to a society which embraces it.

I really troubles me.

This blogger says it much better:

Hey you in the back row with the unacknowledged privilege, I am talking to you. That’s right, I am pointing my long black finger at you. It is time to listen up and learn. Privilege is an extremely loaded word. Many will not acknowledge it, preferring instead to focus on their good deeds. Privilege can come in many forms, you can have race, class, gender, western, cis, ability, etc, and it is important to recognize each and every single one of them, they are a part of your being and can not be halted at will any more than you can stop breathing.

I am black, western, straight, middle class, educated, and able bodied, all of these factors combined create who I am and colour how I view the world. Had I been born elsewhere, and were illiterate and poor all of the comfort that I view as everyday occurrences would not exist in my life. If I am hungry I walk into my kitchen. I can kiss my unhusband in public and know that the stares we receive are because of our racial differences, and not because of our sexuality. My education ensures that I will have a good chance at achieving and maintaining good paying employment, and it further empowers me to discuss ideas, concepts and ideologies from a detached academic point of view. This is who I am, and I own all of it.

Owning privilege is not about feeling ashamed, it is about acknowledging the benefits that one receives without having to work for them. It is about realizing that people born to different circumstances will not receive these benefits as a consequence of our skewed understanding of worth and value. It is further about realizing that no matter how many good and charitable works I perform, my body will always exist with privilege. No matter how often I donate my time to food banks or homeless shelters, I cannot undo the class privilege into which I was born. No matter how valiantly I advocate for fair trade, and an end to things like the western fuelled wars in Africa, I cannot undue the damage that my government has done in my name. As sickened as I am about the systemic inequalities that plague humanity, I am privileged and I own it.

It is not acceptable to say, I am not racist, sexist, homophobic etc and therefore any accusation of privilege is misplaced. These privileges are encoded to the body before birth simply because of the society we are all born into. We do not live outside of socialization we are the product of it.

To become defensive and immediately stammer, oh no not me, is a clear indicator of denial. It is this very state of denial that allows privilege to maintain its insidious grip on society. One cannot actively fight against interlocking isms while continuing to deny the effect that they personally have on you. How are you to convince anyone that inequality is systemic, if you as an individual continue to benefit without acknowledgement? It is dishonest and begins ally work from a false groundwork. It’s like saying I’m not racist because my best friend as a kid was black. People see that kind of commentary for exactly what it is.

Understanding and owning privilege does not mean that you must live a life of shame or guilt, it does however mean that you owe a debt that must be repaid. For each advantage that you are given, you must at some point attempt to mitigate some of your unearned privilege. This will never absolve you of said privilege but over time, if enough people equally dedicate themselves to mitigation it will lessen privilege through the changing of ideas of what it means to exist as a specific body.

We spend far too much time saying oh no not me, or feeling shame for things that are out of our control. A dear friend once told me that she felt ashamed and guilty because of slavery. I was actually dumbstruck for a moment before I responded, “you have never personally enslaved anyone, the issue is not history, the issue is how you continue to be advantaged because of history.” This is central to the point that I am trying to make. No one individual can bear the sins of the world, but each individual continually recreates these sins by failure to acknowledge the degree to which we are socialized to accept that certain bodies are somehow less than. There is no righteous person, only righteous thoughts, deed and emotions.

[Source]

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.

Parents ’sold 12-year-old child into prostitution’

The mother faced that charge because she… had also aided in the rape of the girl by another man.

This is one of the the most horrific sentences I’ve ever read. A mother helps a man rape her 12 year old daughter. I don’t know what to say. The extent of human evil knows no bounds.

A point from the piece, though, which illustrates the reluctance of the media to use the words which are needed to explain the reality of cases such as this:

The court heard the girl was aged 12 and 13 years at the time she had sex with various men during an eight months period in 2004.

No, this girl did not have sex with multiple men. That implies that the child consented to sex with men, when that was not the case at all. She was a child whose parents sold her into prostitution. She didn’t consent – she was raped, repeatedly, by multiple men. That’s what happened and that’s how it should be reported. Why does the media always try to neutralise events like this by using conciliatory and less upsetting language? It does rape victims a disservice, and it gives rapists excuses to minimise their offences.

Full piece:

A COUPLE who sold their daughter into prostitution using the internet to advertise her services should spend twice as long in jail, a court has heard.

In what was described as the “most horrific case of child prostitution in Australian history”, the girl’s mother was jailed for 13 years and her father for 10 years.

The court heard the girl was aged 12 and 13 years at the time she had sex with various men during an eight months period in 2004.

The Gold Coast couple pleaded guilty to more than 60 offences including maintaining a sexual relationship with a child and prostitution in the District Court at Southport, in January.

But after time served on remand and parole recommendations the mother will be eligible for release on March 10, 2010, and the father last month. He has not applied for parole pending the appeal.

The Attorney General, Kerry Shine, went to the Court of Appeal today seeking to alter the sentences so they carry a serious violent offence classification which would mean both would serve 80 percent of their sentences – the mother 10 years four months and the father eight years.

However, Michael Copley, for Mr Shine, said it was an unusual appeal because the sentencing judge had given the highest sentences for the prostitution offences and not that of maintaining a sexual relationship wth a child.

He said prostitution was not a serious violent offence under Queensland laws but maintaining a sexual relationship with a child was one.

Mr Copley admitted it was a curious maintaining charge because neither parent was accused of carnal knowldge of the girl.

The mother faced that charge because she had posed the child for advertising photographs used on the internet and had also aided in the rape of the girl by another man.

The father had helped pose the child for the photographs and had lived off her earnings.

The Court of Appeal reserved its judgment.

Link to piece

Johnny Vegas sexually assaults young woman on stage

[Edit 10th May: I've since learned that the claims made in the Guardian piece I've linked to below are possibly unfounded. The piece itself has been removed from the Guardian website. I've not had time, however, to investigate this myself.]

[Edit 11th May: According to Chortle, Vegas began legal proceedings against the Guardian, and that is why the original article was removed. I shall update this post if I hear more.]

I just saw this on Feministing and have copied the piece from the Guardian blogs. Here is the link to the full piece and comments.

Along with hundreds of others I watched a set during which Johnny Vegas, without any discernible artistic or comedic merit, gratuitously groped a young woman on stage. Judging from some of the furious postings on the internet that followed the gig, I was not the only person asking if he had crossed a line.

Vegas stepped on stage to cheers and immediately announced that he had no material, and that he was there mostly to get laid. There followed a short meandering ramble (mainly about lap dancers) before he turned his attention to the audience – and to one young woman in particular in the front row who, he announced, he wanted to be “inside”. Anyone who has seen Vegas live knows to expect the unexpected, and you take a front row seat at your peril. He can appear deliriously and uncontrollably drunk and casually offensive, and he isn’t afraid of injecting a dose of tension by involving members of the audience in his erratic act. But something backfired this time.

The woman he focused on was about 18 or 19 and was very obviously unnerved by his attention. I saw her expression clearly – I was in the front row too, just three seats along. Vegas insisted that she allow herself to be carried on to the stage by six members of the audience – he called them “pall bearers”. She must pretend to be dead, he said, and he would bring her back to life with an onstage kiss. He warned her that there probably would be tongues. As James Williams, writing on the NOTBBC forum after the gig, put it, “Honestly, you couldn’t have found a nervier or more passive girl if you’d scoured all of London – she was like a rabbit in the headlights, but she was giggling and clearly somewhat enjoying the attention, so it just sort of went ahead without so much as a yes or no from her.” As she was carried on stage, Vegas repeatedly goaded one of the pallbearers to “finger” the girl.

Once she was on stage, Vegas told her to lie very still. She couldn’t stop her nervous giggling; he threatened to kick her in the ribs. It didn’t come across to me as a joke – and near to where I was sitting, no one was laughing. Eventually Vegas crouched down beside the nervous girl and started stroking her breasts while repeatedly saying, “don’t fucking move”. Then he ran his hand up her leg and began pulling her skirt up. Every time he looked up to address the audience, she would reach down and pull her skirt back down, but he kept pulling it back up. According to Williams, who had a different view of the stage from me, Vegas ended up “fingering her through her clothes for a second or two”. What I heard was an audible sharp intake of breath from the audience as they realised that the woman was getting much more than the kiss Vegas had told her to expect.

There was an air of menace from the outset, made worse by the fact that Vegas clearly had no idea where he was going with his act. The more the young woman was groped, the more anxious one of the “pallbearers” looked. Then Vegas straddled the young woman, pinning her to the floor, and kissing her for quite a while. Most disturbing, perhaps was that around half the audience seemed to find this really funny. Vegas asked if the curtain could be brought down; when it wasn’t, Simon Munnery, the comedian who had been on stage before him, came on stage and used his coat to screen the pair from the audience.

I’m shocked. And more a little upset. One of my questions is whether or not the woman would be able to prosecute. It seems to me that Vegas committed a chargeable offence, and that there would be no shortage of witnesses. I also wonder if any of the audience reported what happened.

Some of the comments to the Guardian piece are, thankfully, denouncing of Vegas’ actions; while some (see EricConway’s for example) are typically defensive of him. Throw some victim-blaming and ‘youse are all hysterical wimmines’ responses into the mixer, and we have our usual gamut of opinions. I imagine it’s the same on many sites which wrote about this incident.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find anything online about the woman’s take on what happened to her, and it feels very obvious that her perspective is missing. If anyone else manages to find anything on this, I would appreciate seeing it.