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.

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.

Spare us the ‘People’s Prostitute’ routine…

I know that this piece is over a year old, but it incensed and upset me yesterday when I read it.

The background to this is that five prostitutes were murdered in the south of England in 2006. (The case is currently being heard in the local crown court in Ipswich, and here is a link to comprehensive coverage of the case if you’re interested.) This piece in the Daily Mail Bigot was written by a particularly charming gentleman called Richard Littlejohn. The full text of the piece is posted below.

Let’s get the caveat out of the way from the off. The five women murdered in Ipswich were tragic, lost souls who met a grisly end. I sincerely hope whoever killed them is caught, charged and convicted.

No one with a shred of humanity would wish upon them their ghastly lives and horrible deaths. But Mother Teresa, they weren’t.

And I know this might sound frightfully callous in the current hysterical, emotional climate, but we’re not all guilty.

We do not share in the responsibility for either their grubby little existences or their murders. Society isn’t to blame.

It might not be fashionable, or even acceptable in some quarters, to say so, but in their chosen field of “work’=”, death by strangulation is an occupational hazard.

That doesn’t make it justifiable homicide, but in the scheme of things the deaths of these five women is no great loss.

They weren’t going to discover a cure for cancer or embark on missionary work in Darfur. The only kind of missionary position they undertook was in the back seat of a car.

Of course their friends and families are grieving. That’s what friends and families do. But they should also be asking themselves if there was anything they could have done to prevent what happened.

If you discovered your daughter had gone on the game to feed her heroin habit, wouldn’t you move heaven and earth to get her off it?

Frankly, I’m tired of the lame excuses about how they all fell victim to ruthless pimps who plied them with drugs. These women were on the streets because they wanted to be.

We are all capable of free will. At any time, one or all of them could have sought help from the police, or the church, or a charity, or a government agency specifically established to deal with heroin addicts. They chose not to.

The tortuous twistings of the sisterhood over the past week have been a joy to behold. The 30-yearold Spare Rib T-shirts have been brought out of mothballs and we’ve been treated to the All Men Are Bastards/Rapists/Murderers mantra from assorted Glendas who ought to be old enough to know better.

We’ve heard the well-rehearsed arguments for legalised and regulated prostitution, as if we were living under the Taliban. The fact is, we’ve already got de facto legal brothels on every High Street.

They’re call saunas or massage parlours.

As I remarked when the Labour MP Joe Ashton was once caught in a Siamese “sauna” in Northampton, he must have been the only man in Britain ever to go to a massage parlour for a massage. It doesn’t get much more glamorous than that.

These five women were on the streets because even the filthiest, most disreputable back-alley “sauna” above a kebab shop wouldn’t give them house room.

The men who used them were either too mean to fork out whatever a massage parlour charges, or simply weren’t fussy. Some men are actually turned on by disgusting, drug-addled street whores. Where there’s demand, there’ll always be supply.

This wasn’t a case of women going on the game to put bread on the table, or to look after their “babies”. That’s what the welfare state is for. They did it for drugs.

The gormless Guardianistas simply refuse to confront this blindingly obvious reality. They would rather deify celebrity druggies such as Kate Moss and Will Self than face the truth that hard drugs wreck lives.

What I find most objectionable about all this is the attempt to make us all feel responsible for the murders. There is a nasty whiff of Lady Di about the enforced mood of mourning, with even the Old Bill coming across like hand-wringing archbishops.

At Ipswich Town’s home game on Saturday, there was a minute’s silence. We were supposed to believe that this was a true reflection of the community’s sympathy.

I don’t buy it. Most people went along with it in the spirit of emotional correctness and through fear of getting their heads kicked in if they didn’t.

There was only one thing missing, but don’t bet against it.

When Blair gets back from saving the Middle East, don’t be surprised if he turns up at the funeral of one of these unfortunate women to deliver a lip-trembling, tear-stained eulogy: “She was the People’s Prostitute”.

Now, Littlejohn is a notorious little prick, we all know, but let’s have a look (under the jump) at what he’s really saying.

Geography of a woman (apparently)

This is the fifth or sixth time I’ve received this ‘joke’ email in as many months. I finally started objecting to its senders, although I’ll admit that I let the first few pass.

The misogyny of this just jumps out at you. Add to this racism and ageism and we have the perfect triumvirate of offence. This ticks all the boxes; it’s revolting. I wish people would just think before they send things like this around, and realise that they’re achieving nothing more than the perpetuation of contempt towards women.

So very frustrating.

GEOGRAPHY OF A WOMAN:

Between 18 and 20 a woman is like Africa, half discovered, half wild, naturally beautiful with fertile deltas.

Between 21 and 30 a woman is like America, well-developed and open to trade especially for someone with cash.

Between 31 and 35 she is like India, very hot, relaxed and convinced of her own beauty.

Between 36 and 40 a woman is like France, gently ageing but still a warm and desirable place to visit.

Between 41 and 50 she is like Yugoslavia, lost the war – haunted by past mistakes. Massive reconstruction is now necessary.

Between 51 and 60, she is like Russia, very wide and borders are un-patrolled. The frigid climate keeps people away.

Between 61 and 70, a woman is like Mongolia, with a glorious and all conquering past but alas, no future.

After 70, they become Afghanistan. Almost everyone knows where it is, but no one wants to go there.

GEOGRAPHY OF A MAN:

Between 15 and 70 a man is like Iran – ruled by a dick.

SEND THIS TO A SMART WOMAN WHO NEEDS A LAUGH AND TO MEN YOU THINK CAN HANDLE IT.

If there was mood meter here, it would read: very, very annoyed.