I’ve sometimes heard pro-choicers claim that second-trimester abortions only happen in cases of a threat to the physical health of the mother, or in cases of a non-viable infant.

That’s not always true. In some cases, the fetus is disabled but viable (there’s been some discussion of this on “Alas,” for example in this post). In other cases, the woman may have needed months to save up the money and put together the resources (transportation, days off, etc) required to have an abortion; this is particularly the case in states where pro-forced-childbirth forces have successfully put limitations on abortion access.

And sometimes, some woman are simply ignorant of how their bodies work, and may not even realize they’re pregnant until they’re in the second trimester… or until it’s for all practical purposes too late to get an abortion.

What puts this in my mind today is this must-read post by Angry Black Bitch. ABB isn’t talking about why second-term abortions happen, but I still think it’s relevant. Here’s a sample:

Go read the whole, it’s worth your time.

I try to see the best in everyone, including folks who are pro-criminalization on abortion. But their policies don’t make sense if what they want to do is reduce abortion. No one whose primary goal is reducing abortion should be opposed to sex education, or to contraception.

But it’s a perfectly sensible policy if what they want to do is make sure that women can’t have sex without having children.

Curtsy: Brutal Women.

From Hugo’s blog:

It sounds like a good thing to do. I hate that we live in a world in which the screening is undoubtably necessary.

As Maia noted in an earlier post, The OC Rapists have been sentenced to six years each in prison - although in practice, they could all be on the streets again in just two years.

As most “Alas” readers know, the three boys videotaped themselves gang-raping their classmate Jane Doe over and over (including rape with a pool cue and a lit cigarette), and then spent years legally harassing and smearing Jane Doe in every way they could. Pinko Feminist Hellcat, who has done extraordinary work covering this case, has posted a must-read review of the harassment the victim was subjected to. The extent of the harassment and game-playing is unbeleivable, and evil. It wasn’t just the predictable “she’s a slut” attacks during the trial, but also paying jurors from the first trial to try and change the minds of jurors from the retrail (is that legal?), and recruiting several of Jane Doe’s “friends” to tell stories about her which were later proved to be lies. When Jane Doe moved to a new school, under an assumed name, to try and start over, the defense’s private detectives stood in the parking lot of her new school screaming her real name at her. Everyone has a right to a defense in court, but what happened to Jane Doe wasn’t a legitimate defense; it was revenge against an uppity girl for refusing to stay in her place.

So, about that sentencing:

From the LA Times:

21 months. From Jane Doe’s statement:

One of the defendant’s attorneys, Al Stokke, responded to this by saying that the rape wasn’t so bad, since Jane Doe was unconscious at the time. “She couldn’t have felt it happen. She only knows it happened because of the videotape.”

I don’t think 21 months is enough. I don’t think six years would be enough. I’m not even sure what “enough” would be.

Despite the videotape, it took four years and two trials (the first jury hung 11-1 in favor of “not guilty”) to achieve a conviction. And it’s only because of the unbelievable, stunning determination of Jane Doe that the conviction happened; nearly anyone else would have folded and stopped pursuing charges under the onslaught of the defense harassment. Certainly, if Jane Doe had decided to give up, who could possibly have blamed her, under the circumstances?

The problem is not only that rape convictions are difficult to get in a system of “innocent until proven guilty.” The problem is not only with the rules of evidence and legal procedure. The problem is that, regardless of the level of evidence, rape convictions are too difficult to get in a society in which a defense attorney can claim that raping an unconscious woman with a snapple bottle and a lit cigarette is harmless and still anticipate being taken seriously by the judge.

Changing the laws is important work, and I admire the feminists who have led reforms of sexual assault laws for the last three decades. But study after study has shown that reforming rape law hasn’t led to more convictions, or to a greater likelihood of conviction. Changing the law isn’t going to bring about more rape convictions, because the law isn’t a computer program; it’s a guidebook for how various human beings involved in the system should act. And humans have agency, and can choose to “bend” the law.

Two years is nowhere near enough, but it is almost a miracle that the OC rapists are being punished at all. Even faced with overwhelming evidence, and even with a prosecutor willing to pursue the case, the defense still went far beyond the bounds of decency in attacking the victim. The judge refused to reign in the defense. The first jury was one vote away from finding the videotaped rapists “not guilty.”

Consider as well, that Jane Doe’s case could easily have been classified by “unfounded” - or simply let drop entirely - if the cops who initially took up the case (after someone turned in the videotape, mistaking it for a videotape of sex with a corpse) had taken the perspective of the boys. Or the case could have wound up with a prosecutor who would have decided that the odds of a guilty verdict were too low, or who decided this was just a case of a drunk slutty girl and boys being boys.

As all this illustrates, at every step of the way, in our system, there are actors who can bend the law to prevent rapists from being punished - especially if those rapists are rich, fresh-faced, white boys. Even in a case where the evidence seems overwhelming, some of these actors will try to find ways to let rapists off - and in many cases, they’ll succeed. As long as human actors implement the law, legal reforms will be very limited in their effect.

Real reductions of rape - and increases in the likelihood of convictions - may be accompanied by legal reforms, but they won’t be caused by legal reforms. It’s only by a massive alternation in how our society thinks of rape at every level - so that “boys will be boys” and “the slut defense” is understood by the average person, the average judge, and the average juror as not merely wrong but also repugnant - that real change will happen.

There was a bill before New Zealand parliament that would give an employer the right to fire an employee for any reason at all within the first 90 days of employment. It got voted through to the next stage because of support from the Maori party. Now I’m assuming very few readers care enough about New Zealand politics to want all the background. But the co-leader of the Maori party is Pita Sharples, and his speech was extremely stupid. Here’s an extract:

I come to this House today, desperately aware of the need of people in my constituency, in my electorate, particularly in South Auckland, to be able to walk in the door to a job. However, we are also committed to protecting
Workers’ Rights - so that workers’ rights are not impinged on, workers are not abused, do not suffer from exploitation.

These are heavy issues, and our caucus has grappled with the challenge inherent. What takes precedence? The Right to Work or the Workers’ Rights?

[…]

The impact of systemic bias, of institutional racism, the plight of the jobless are still issues of significance for this nation - and we must have the courage and strength to consider options.

We therefore will vote on principle, wanting there to be room for discussion, but also always aware of the juggling act to protect Workers’ Rights alongside the Right to Work.

There is no juggling act needed to protect Workers’ Rights and the Right to Work. One of workers’ rights is the right to work, and the only way to protect that right is actually protecting it. For example, if you tightened the law on fixed-term contracts, that would be protecting the right to work. If you said that people had to be employed directly, and people couldn’t use temp companies and sub-contractors, that’d protect the right to work. Even a tiny bill like the Employment Relation Amendment Bill, currently before parliament, would protect the right to work (it would enact the protection parliament already tried to give vulnerable workers, but failed due to general incompetence and a ridiculously conservative appeals court).

This bill does not protect the right to work, it attacks it, because it gives employers the ability to arbitrarily deny workers’ right to work within the first 90 days of employment.

Also posted on my blog

That was an actual headline in the Domion Post today. The story goes like this:

Callister said the most significant finding of his research was a 10 per cent increase in the past two decades in highly educated women marrying men with fewer qualifications and, in many cases, lower-paid jobs.

This had happened largely because of a lack of eligible partners of equal educational or economic status, he said.

In many cases women are marrying men with lower paid jobs? They must be truly, truly desperate.

Also posted at my blog

Like a lot of people I’d been following the Haidl gang rape trial at Pinko Feminist Hellcat (brief summary: three extremely rich young men filmed themselves repeatedly raping a young woman who has passed out. When they were charged with rape they attempt to destroy her even more. They manage to get one hung jury, but then they get convicted. But you should really read everything Sheezlebub says about the case). Those men have just been sentanced to six years in prison.

Today Sheezlebub has the statement Jane Doe (her name is suppressed, not that that stopped the rapists from making sure everyone knew who she was) made to the court. It’s awful and harrowing, but it’s also the statement of an survivor.

I think Amanda from Pandagon said it best:

They called Jane Doe “trash”, followed her around, smeared her name all over town and otherwise let it be known how most of society feels about women who speak out against sexual assault. Well, I’m going to adamantly disagree.

Jane Doe is a hero.

She got these pigs off the street so they don’t do it to someone else. She put up with a lot for that sliver of a hope that her pursuit of justice would mean something. And something so small, really”“to be free. To be able to have friends you can visit. To be able to go to a party, like a man can, without fear of being brutally raped. To be considered human.

She’s right, and Louise Nicholas is also a hero.

In our school hall we used to have a quilt which said Me aro koe ki te hä o Hine-ahu-one, which was translated as: Pay Heed to the Dignity of Women. I’d like to pay heed to the dignity to all women who have survived rape and sexual abuse.

Also posted on my blog

I went to hear Robert Fisk talk tonight. He was incredible, so articulate, so intelligent, and he talked about the hard bits about the life that he had choosen (and told us not to be sorry for him). I couldn’t possibly summarise the talk as the whole. But there are two bits I want to quote, because I really liked them. I’ve but them in blockquotes, but of course I’m doing it from memory.

Someone asked how he dealt with anger he answered:

I write a column every week and my editor prints it without leaving anything else. I believe in reporting victims not generals. I don’t give equal space for those whose arms are blown off and those who are blowing arms off people.

The next question was if anything had changed for the better in the Middle East in the last 30 years:

Things have changed, but they may not be the things you want. The difference is that Arabs aren’t afraid anymore. It used to be that when Israel attacked Lebanon everyone fled to Beirut. Now when Israel attacks Lebanon carloads of young men from Beirut get into their cars and head to the border. Now I abhor violence, loathe it, but we have to realise we are living in a violent world. People are fighting back, rather than being afraid.

I have friends who support resistance to imperialism no matter who is doing it and how. I don’t share that view, before I could actually support a resistence movement I would have to know how they treated their own people, and what they were trying to do. But I actually don’t think that my support matters that much, because the right to self-defence is so fundamental that they’ll do it whether or not someone in Wellington agrees with what they’re doing or not.

Also posted at my blog.

I saw a headline for this story on this evening’s news and had to wait for the full story. A rape awareness campaign aimed at men? A rape awareness campaign that tells men it’s rape if she doesn’t explicitly consent? Sounds like a feminist’s dream come true.

Well, sort of. The first interview in the story was with a man (his identity concealed) who “thought he was having consensual sex” and found himself charged with rape. Was I hoping too much when I thought an item about teaching men not to rape wouldn’t lean on the angle that some poor men get unfairly accused?

The second interview was with a rape victim (identified by name and with her face shown) who hadn’t gone to court because it was her word against her rapist’s. She said that “you can’t stop rape with just a few posters”.

The posters, the campaign, are a promising first step. But oh, what a tiny step towards such a big problem.

NOTE: This comments thread is reserved for feminist, pro-feminist, and feminist-friendly posters only. If you suspect you wouldn’t fit into Amp’s conception of “feminist, pro-feminist, or feminist-friendly,” then please don’t contribute to the comments following this post.

A couple of months back there was interesting discussion about sexism and wikipedia I never did get round to replying then, but I was thinking about and so I thought I’d write about it now.

It started when m from scribblepad compared the definition of ‘women’ with the definition of ‘men’ on wikipedia and pointed out that the differences were sexist. She got a whole bunch of replies that critised her for attacking open source (I got all this from Feministe which had a nice post on the issue). She responded

I understand there are several people out there who seem to think challenging wikipedia amounts to challenging open source, something that shouldn’t (according to them) be allowed at any cost. one, it isn’t about “wikipedia versus feminism” or “wikipedia the last stand of free source”. Nobody can force that kind of trade off, and even if they do, as much as I support free source, damned if ill continue to do so when the project abuses me.

I wasn’t at all surprised. I expect wikipedia to be sexist, racist, and supporting the existing class structures. I expect the same of indymedia, and any other ‘free’ space.

I’ll explain what I mean a little more by talking about something that happened to me a few years back. I protest quite often (I have a personal goal of protesting outside every embassy in Wellington). One day I was happily protesting and someone took a photo. It was the best photo of the day, so I became the face of the demo. Someone posted my picture with an article onto an Australian indymedia site. The comments went like this:

1. “The bird in the red has big tits I’d like to suck them”
2. “Fucken Leso give her some fucken meat”.
3. Some long diatribe on how we shouldn’t objectify women because it distracts us from the class struggle
4. A reasonably long post about how much the writer liked our protest and how he should do something like that where he lived, and then he ended it with “PS they’re not that big”

There were no further comments. The original article was hidden, but no-one, including the person who hid it, or the person who forwarded a link to me, made any further comment on the way they were talking about my body.

I was on the fringes of the local indymedia collective at the time, and wrote to the e-mail list talking about this post, and the concerns I had about indymedia in general. A couple of people responded, and the one I remember was from a man who asked why I hadn’t posted a response, as that was the whole point of open communication.

So to recap: a photo of me was taken at demo, this led four men to make a series of comments about my body, including rape threats, some of which came from men who were supposed to be comrades. No one spoke a word against it, including people who thought it was wrong. When I raised an objection in a slightly safer space I was told I was the one who was supposed to do something about this.

Our society is sexist and misogynist. What this means is that if we create a supposedly free space for communication it’ll replicate the sexist and misogynist patterns found in mainstream society, unless we take conscious action to change those sexist and misogynist patterns. The same is true for all other power structures in our society, they will all be replicated in the free space.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that those who want to build a new world need to give up on open communication spaces as a tool (I am writing this on the internet), but that if we’re going to use them we need to set up structures to challenge those power systems we’re fighting against.

Also posted at my blog.

I kind of wish I wasn’t writing a blog right now. I think if I wasn’t writing a blog I’d pay less attention to the news media, and I probably would have taken an “I can’t cope with knowing this” position on the Louise Nicholas case. As it is I’ve been reading the papers, and listening to morning report and checkpoint on-line (talking of which, Radio New Zealand’s headline for the story is: “Alleged rape victim Louise Nicholas breaks down in court” - fuck off radio New Zealand).

I feel almost invasive writing about it, at this point. They cleared the court while she gave evidence today, but the newspapers are reporting her testimony as if they’re enjoying the salacious side of it.

What I’m scared of is the cross-examination. There are three defendants, and each of their lawyers will be able to try and rip her apart, one after another, with 20 people from the media, and the men who raped her watching. I’m sure I’ll write more about this in the next few days.

I just wish I could offer some form of support to Louise Nicholas. By giving testimony, even though she’s going to be treated like shit, then she may be able to show that even the powerful are not immune.

Also posted at my blog.

Pro-life feminists exist - although the ones I respect are committed to reducing abortion by changing society so that women are much less likely to choose abortion, rather than by calling for forced childbirth for pregnant women. The “reducing demand” approach is, imo, perfectly compatible with feminism.

Unfortunately, most self-identified pro-life feminists are indistinguishable from their non-feminist counterparts. For example,: Nathan Sheets, posting on the “feminists for life” community, discusses the intact D&X abortion procedure (also known as “partial birth” abortion):

Contrary to what Nathan thinks, a woman’s body changes throughout pregnancy to prepare her to give birth. A woman in her ninth month of pregnancy, whose body has fully adjusted for giving birth, can safely deliver an intact baby head - usually. (Even at nine months, childbirth is still dangerous for a significant number of mothers.)

But late-term abortions don’t take place at nine months; virtually all of them take place before the 24th week. At that point, it’s simply not safe for the woman to deliver something as large as an intact fetal head, because her body hasn’t prepared for it. Which is why doctors compress the fetus’ head before delivery.

Even when the fetus is already dead (which is not uncommon with intact d&x abortions), a doctor performing an intact d&x will still compress the fetal head. Not to do so vastly increases the chance of the mother being injured, and would be medically irresponsible.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Nathan’s ignorance - or Nathan’s demonizing of women who have abortions as death-loving harpies - is all that unusual among the pro-forced-childbirth crowd, whether or not they self-identify as “feminist.”

(I originally wrote this as a reply to post on the feminists for life livejournal. But it turns out they don’t let non-members post, so I’m posting it here instead.)

Continuing with last week’s “rain accessories” theme…
Read the rest of this entry »

Did anyone else watch the first episode of Big Love? It gives new meaning to “boring.” Hell, it gives new meaning to “gnawing my own arm off suddenly seems appealing.” As Elkins, who repaid sins of her past lives by being in the room while I watched Big Love, said: It’s as if the writers thought that a controversial premise is all that’s required to carry a show.

The show did pass the Mo Movie Measure - there was a scene in which the main character’s daughter and a female co-worker discussed church activities. The scene took place over halfway through the show, however, so viewers may have dozed off before seeing it. And the main character’s cliche psychotic mother was played with scene-stealing energy by Grace Zabriskie (also terrific as Susan Ross’ mother on Seinfeld). And the script acknowledged of the creepy girl-exploiting side of polygamy, with a 14 year old girl (looked younger than that to me) married to Harry Dean Stanton.

But that’s just not enough. I think the overwhelming blandness may be an attempt to present polygamy “objectively,” rather than taking a stand, but when you stand nowhere you get nowhere. Bottom line: I can’t believe they put off broadcasting the new season of Deadwood in favor of this crap.

Other TV notes (spoilers ahead):

* The season premiere of The Sopranos was terrific. Most brutal hanging scene I’ve ever seen on TV, beating even the hanging in the first episode of Deadwood. Isn’t it sad that’s the first thing it occurs to me to mention? Loved the scene with the contractor - apparently even being a mafia boss’ wife doesn’t get you good contracting help.

* The season ender of Battlestar Gallactica was damned good, plus they shook the hell out of their premise, so I suppose I’ll have to forgive them for that hideous episode about the black market a few weeks back. Whatsisname - the guy who played Al on Quantum Leap - had the best scene. I’m really looking forward to next season, when I trust Doctor Baltar, Number Six, Number Six’s hallucination of Baltar, and Baltar’s hallucination of Number Six will all have a long scene together.

* New West Wing was okay. Boo, hiss for inter-office romance - I imagine the writers, seated around a table, saying “what is the most predictable subplot we could possibly inflict on the final episodes? Anyone? Anyone?” - but hooray for seeing more smart, capable female characters on this show than on any other four shows combined. On the down side, Janine Garafalo’s character seems to have been written out. And they still haven’t found a way to write a big song number into the script for Kristin Chenoweth, which is probably good from a “not turning the show into totally incomprehensible nonsense” perspective, but also bad because, you know, she’s Kristin fuckin’ Chenoweth.

* I thought the David Carridine casting was funny on Medium. This is one of the best-written shows on TV, but there’s a certain quality of… desperation to it, isn’t there? Sometimes it feels like they’re casting about for something new to do. When it works, it works great - I don’t think there’s another show on TV so willing to break formula - but after a while the newtwistoftheweek becomes a formula in its own right. Disadvantage of the show being so completely episodic, rather than having longer-running plot arcs.

* We’re just now watching season four of Oz. What I’m learning: The way to get to a beautiful, capable female doctor’s heart is to first murder her husband, and then murder her rapist because she’s your property, dammit, not the rapist’s. That’ll get her to fall in love with you, because if there’s anything capable, accomplished women of color everywhere dream of, it’s having a sociopath white man stalking you. I’m at a loss to imagine what the hell the writers were thinking.

* Speaking of shows which use female prison doctors as rape bait whenever the plot needs a crash cart, Prison Break returns next week.

* This isn’t recent, but did anyone catch the episode of Bones which was anti-plastic surgery, since it’s a bad idea for people to be obsessed with surface beauty rather than inner substance? And yet, if the producers were really interested in substance over beauty, would they have cast David Boreanaz in a lead? I doubt it. Nor do I think an actress in her 20s would have been the first choice to play a super-experienced forensic scientist, in a less surface-obsessed world.

UPDATE: Zuzu isn’t quite as down on Big Love as I am, but that’s really damning with faint praise. Feministing hated it, too.

Today the trial for Clinton Rickards, Bradley Shipton and Robert Schollum began. They are all police officers (Clint Rickards is now an Assistant Police Commissioner) at the time they raped Louise Nicholas.

Until now the charges they faced had been suppressed:

The three men face a total of 20 charges relating to a period between 1985 and 1986 when the complainant was 18-years-old.

They are accused of indecent assault, rape and unlawful sexual connection and the charges include two counts of indecent assault using a baton.

I expect I’ll be blogging a lot about the trial (and its media coverage), over the next three weeks or so.

Right now the only thing I can think to do is to link to Flea’s letter to her sons, and ask everyone to please read it, and work for a world where it’s not necessary.

Also posted at my blog.

That’s the title of a campaign from the Engineers (just for a tiny bit of context they’re affiliated to the Labour party and are the most right-wing private sector union). Increases in productivity over and above increases in wages is just increasing the amount the bosses get from the workers’ labour.

From the press release:

The EPMU will support employers who develop genuine productivity initiatives.

Because the union’s job is to support employers, but only those who are genuinely trying to get more money out of workers.

The nearest I have come to a Marxist conversion came during a discussion about productivity in the union movement. Marxist economics made so much sense right then (which is strange because 90% of the conversations I’ve had about Marxist economics have been about the fact that they ignore unpaid labour).

Also posted at my blog

At The Y Files, Cathy Young writes:

It’s my impression that most democrats and lefties realize that being smart is not an absolute guarantee against needing help at retirement. Even smart people can be hurt by bad investments, bad decisions or bad luck. The delusion that poverty is primarily caused by stupidity is the province of smug libertarians (see: Murray, Charles), not Democrats.

That said, I think it’s also the case that stupid people are more likely to wind up poor than smart people, all else held equal. So what? Stupid people don’t have less of a need to eat in retirement. Saying “smart people will all successfully plan for retirement,” even if it were true (and it’s not), would still be no answer to the question of what to do about elder poverty.

I’m not sure what “workplace diversity measures” means. Is it just affirmative action, or is Cathy also referring to laws making it illegal to fire people, or refuse to hire them, based solely on their race? I disagree with her either way.

The flaw in Cathy’s thinking - and in the thinking of most libertarians - is that she mistakenly writes as if the government were the only possible threat to freedom. In fact, the government is only one of many threats to freedom.

“Freedom,” as libertarians use the word, never seems to mean anything other than freedom from government intrusion. Real freedom, however, means having a wide range of attractive options. When someone’s options are eliminated by the marketplace, by illness, or by lack of available assistance, that is as real a threat to their freedom as government intrusion.

When a black person has their economic opportunities reduced by widespread racism in the marketplace, that is a more significant threat to their freedom than when the daughter of a wealthy person has to pay estate taxes.

When someone too old to find work has no money, that is a far more significant threat to their freedom than high marginal income tax rates are for the freedom of well-off people.

The inability of libertarians to understand this is why they don’t understand that a poor, untaxed person who has nowhere to sleep but under a bridge, is in fact less free than a well-off person faced with the tyranny of reasonable government regulations or even the horror of progressive tax rates.

Edited to add: Okay, that last paragraph was unfair - possibly even as unfair as “Democrats seem to believe that Americans aren’t smart enough to manage their retirement….” is. I don’t mean to say that libertarians are heartless, or that they don’t understand at all that poverty can limit freedom. But I do think that libertarians massively overestimate the tyrannical effects of mild government regulation and taxes, and massively underestimate how constraining of freedom discrimination and the marketplace can be.

There was an article in today’s Sunday Star Times Sunday magazine that was interesting and not completely misogynist. I almost died of shock (for non-New Zealanders Sunday’s speciality is that it no longer calls it’s ‘beauty’ section ‘beauty’ or even ‘health’, but maintenance. I’ve no idea what you’re supposed to be maintaining with blue eye-shadow).

The article was looking at rates of depression in parents, and particularly among mothers. What I really liked about the article is that it showed how depressing and isolating the work of child rearing can be in our society, and that saying that the work is hard wasn’t an attempt to devalue it.

Too often feminists are blamed for devaluing the work of raising children. All they said was that society didn’t value the work, and that the way child-rearing was done was extremely isolating and hard.

Unfortuantely it’s as true now as it was then. I like a lot of Betty Freidan’s analysis in The Feminine Mystique, but disagree with her conclusions. While increased access to childcare, and the opportunity to do paid employment has helped some children, it doesn’t solve the problem. Those who stay out of the paid workforce are still isolated, and those who work outside the home are still doing all the unpaid work they would before, only with less time.

Earlier last century children were seen as a duty, now they’re seen as a luxury, I think we could do better. I don’t often imagine the world that I’m trying create, maybe I don’t do it enough. But I do know how raising children would be resourced (and I’m not talking about money, because I think a first step to the world I’m talking about would be ending capitalism).

I believe that all the resources required to raise children should be provided collectively, not individually by the parents. Raising children should be recognised as important work, and whether it’s done collectively or individually, it should be seen as a contribution to society as important as any other. At the same time anyone in a parental role should be able to do other work that they enjoy, or are good at, or see as important, and in then their children would be looked after collectively.

This is why I find arguments about staying at home vs. working very frustrating. Neither individual choice is going to make a slightest bit of difference, and it’s stupid to fight over the limited resources available when what we actually need to do is smash the whole pie (or something).

Also posted on my blog

I have a series called Sunday Protest blogging (well I call it that, but this is only the second time I’ve actually managed it - although that’s more Sundays’ fault than mine). I realised that I was spending all my time writing about what made me angry, and very little about what gave me hope. Since I believe that any hope for building a new world must come through collective action, protest blogging is a way of sharing that hope (a fuller explanation is available here.

Anyway because it’s late and I’m tired if I’m going to make this a series again I’m going to have to write about something I know, and The Tour is the obvious choice.

It’s weird to think that I’m writing for an audience that don’t know what that means - who could read ‘Sunday Protest Blogging: 1981′ and not know what it was I’m going to write about. I say this not because I expect you to be fully read on recent New Zealand history, but to try and explain what a big deal those protests were.

Rugby is a big deal in New Zealand, imagine a combination of the myth-making of baseball and the masculinity proving of Gridiron and it’s probably not even close. Rugby’s also a big deal in South Africa - we had a coloniser in common. Our rugby team (the All Blacks) would tour South Africa, and then every so often South Africa’s rugby team (Springboks) would return the favour. Apartheid didn’t need to get in the way of a good game of rugby between friends.

But by the 1970s sporting contact with South Africa had become a real political issue, both in New Zealand and outside it. The ANC had called for sporting boycotts on South Africa, and most other countries were honouring this boycott. New Zealand? Not so much, or at least the not the government or the sporting codes - and in 1981 the Springboks were scheduled to come to New Zealand.

Now the Prime Minister of the day was Rob Muldoon, this was how I described him in my top 10 worst New Zealanders list:

It feels a little bit cheap - he is, after all, the easy shot. But I loathe and detest him with such a fiery passion, that I once kicked the “opened by Prime Minister Robert Muldoon” plaque at the National Library (I’d been doing some research about abortion legislation - you’d kick him too). You could hate him for being anti-abortion on Monday, attacking the DPB on Tuesday, wage and price freezes on Wednesday, Health & Education cuts on Thursday, Dawn Raids on Friday, Bastion Point on Saturday and extending the powers of the SIS on Sunday. And that’s without even getting into the tour.

I know it’s easy to make fun of him (after all I grew up thinking his first name was ‘piggy’); I know that there is a concerted effort to use his policies as an excuse for what the following Labour government did. That doesn’t make him any less awful.

There was an organised anti-tour movement with a long history, the most well established group was Halt All Racist Tours (’HART’), and as it became clear that the Springboks might be visiting they began mobilising. The first big day of action was May 1 1981, and it was huge. Wellington had 15,000 people one the streets, Auckland 25,000 - these are not big cities (it’d take 24 years for anything like that to happen again, even now every large protest is called ‘the biggest protest since the tour’). In Palmerston North there were 5,000 people marching - that’s 1 in 12 people who live there. It wasn’t just in the cities and big towns, in many small towns there were 55 people protesting in Taumaranui, and 15 in Te Awamutu (really, really, small towns).

These massive protests weren’t enough, and the tour was going to go ahead. Over that 56 days the main centres had protests at least twice a week, and then there were .

I’m only going to talk about what happened in Hamilton. Hamilton is a cow-town (well cow-city) not too far from Auckland. It wasn’t a test, the Springboks were playing the provincial side, but it was a big deal. It was also going to be the first rugby game broadcast live to South Africa in a very long time (however long the boycott had been in operation).

It didn’t happen.

There was a 5,000 strong demonstration, 350 of these people managed to breach the fence and get onto the field and the police could not move them. They arrested about 50 people one by one, but they realised they weren’t going to be able to get everyone, so they called off the game. The 300 people left then ran for their lives as the people had hoped to see a game of rugby basically rioted.

I wish I had been able to find a photo, 350 people packed together looks small on a rugby field - the most distinguishing feature is this massive cross (there was a lot of church support for the anti-apartheid movement), but they did it.

I wish I could tell so many more stories and really give an idea of how huge a movement this was how much work it was for how many people. How much I love that it’s part of my history. I didn’t attend any of the protests myself, we hadn’t moved to New Zealand yet, but we did go on protests against the All Blacks going to South Africa, and I remember the chants:

1 - 2 - 3 -4
We Don’t Want Your Racist Tour

There’s a lot more I could say, I’ve painted a picture too bright, too exciting, to be the whole truth. It was much easier for New Zealanders to protest racism in South Africa than in New Zealand, and in terms of anti-racist work not as much came from the tour as you’d might hope. But they got those people together, they stopped that match, and that gives me hope.

I always enjoy Ampersand’s link threads, but when I see the word ‘Buffy’ I start making squeals of geeker joy (that’s supposed to be a quote from Ted, but it may not be accurate). So I was really interested in Emma’s Raping the Slayer, which analyses the portrayal of sexual violence on Buffy. The only thing more fun than watching Buffy is talking about your feminist analysis of Buffy (one day I might write a very long post about my theory on the portrayal of teenage girl’s sexuality on Buffy, but you’re spared that - for now). I disagreed with some of the smaller points she was making, for instance, I may being over-defensive on behalf of my secret-TV-Boyfriend, but I just don’t think this is true:

Joss has always been clear that he resents some feminist analyses of it, and what he sees as an imposition of subtext.

But generally I really liked her analysis, particularly when it came to Spike’s attempted rape of Buffy in Seeing Red, and the complete lack of follow-up in season 7. There were two things that most disturbed me about that plot-line, the first was that it was All About Spike. They wrote a rape plot that was all about the rapist and his quest for redemption, to the extent that the attempted rape had almost no affect on Buffy, and certainly none that was important to the plot.

The other was that getting a soul is a plot there is no real world equivalent for. This meant they could weasel out of the real world implications of what they were saying. While they were basically telling the story of a rapist who went away and came back a better person who could earn trust.

I like to believe that people can change, I’m not going to reject the possibility that once you’ve tried to rape someone there’s no chance of you becoming a person who values women’s autonomy. I wouldn’t necessarily reject a fictional story that tried to talk about that possibility. But no-one who ever tried to rape a friend of mine could be anything but a rapist to me. If Spike had wandered off somewhere else entirely and played out his story of redemption there (preferably somewhere that wasn’t on my TV screen), then maybe I could have stomached it. But the idea that you can achieve redemption and forgiveness from the person you tried to rape, is not a story I have any interest in.

That isn’t actually what I wanted to talk about. On the comments of Emma’s post someone brought up a planned Firefly episode, that I’d wanted to talk about for a while. The original source is here:

[Tim Minear, asked about eps of Firefly they didn’t get to make] hemmed and hawed and said, “Should I tell you this?… Oh well, what’s he going to do, fire me?” The original show was darker and this story was more in keeping with that tone.

It opens with Mal and Inara fighting (as they do). Mal tells her she pretends to be a lady and wants everyone to bow before her and kiss her hand but she’s just a whore. Then the Reavers attack and take Inara. While trying to get her back they learn that she had something that would make anyone who had sex with her die.

When they finally track down and board the ship they find all of the Reavers dead and Inara shaking and traumatized. They take her back to the ship and Zoe guards her room. Mal tries to get in to see her and Zoe tells him he’s the last person Inara needs to see. He pushes past her, kneels before Inara and kisses her hand.

I’d never heard of a plot like that before, so I didn’t have a feminist analysis at first, just a general feeling of disgust.

My most immediate feeling of repulsion was definitely at the execution of the idea. I have written about the Mal/Inara relationship before, and I’m not a fan, this just underscored all the reasons why. The most basic reason was that he did not respect the work that she did, and that seemed to me a really shitty basis for a relationship. This plotline seems to be about her earning his respect for what she does by using it to do something that he does respect (fighting). That she has to be violated and traumatised to earn his respect is so gross and repulsive, that I imagine I would never be able to watch the show again after seeing that episode. The fact that he ignores her wishes, underscores how little he actually cares about her.

But what I do find interesting is the wider question. What do other feminist think of a piece of flabotinum that means women can kill their rapists through having sex? It’s not something I’d ever come accross before (although for all I know it could be a common idea in some genre I’m unfamiliar with). One of the things it reminded me of was the rape condom - but as a fictional device I think it needs to be analysed completely differently. I was particularly uncomfortable that this idea came from two men. When men write about rape, I always wonder why. What are they getting from it? What are they trying to say? But I’m not convinced that a woman could write a feminist story about it either. Because ultimately it’s about suffering oppression in order to get revenge.

Also posted on my blog.

Another link farm! As always, feel free to post about anything - including links to your own stuff - in the comments.

Blog Against Sexism Day
Congratulations to Vegankid for the huge success of the first annual “Blog Against Sexism Day.” (I badly regret not participating - I wanted to, but I was feeling too sick to do anything but lie like a lump in front of the TV. Oh, well, there’s always next year…). Vegankid has a list of some favorite BASD posts, and so does Andrea at the official shrub.com blog. (Edited to add: And Angry For A Reason has a round-up, too!) Check ‘em out.

Transending Gender: The Fourth Carnival of Bent Attractions!

Andrea at Shrub.com: How To Be a Real Nice Guy

Digby on Senator Napoli’s “Sodomized Virgin Exception”

New to the Blogroll: Feminist Law Professors Blog
A lot of the links below were taken from this blog…

Alice Ristrophe: A Feminist Critique of the Prison Rape Elimination Act

Ann Bartow Fisks The Times on Plastic Surgery For Butts

Spittle & Ink: South Dakota’s Abortion Application Form

The Well-Timed Period Catches The NIH Lying About The Morning-After Pill

Echidne: Misogynists in My Study

Ann Bartow: Rewriting Judy Bloom to modernize tampon technology

Amanda at Pandagon: Rewriting Judy Bloom to modernize tampon technology

Bitch PhD: Have Working Mothers Reached The Limit On Hours In A Day?
Bitch PhD comments on a recent Times article which suggested “that women may have already hit a wall in the amount of work that they can pack into a week.” See also this post at Workplace Prof Blog.

Hugo Schwyzer: Women Nowadays Are Expected To Remain Virginal Three Times As Long

Hugo Schwyzer: Reply to Anti-Feminists Attacks on Feminist Guys’ Masculinity

Vegankid: Don’t Kid Yourself

The Debate Link on “Judeo-Christian”
David discusses his annoyance at people who say “Judeo-Christian” when they really mean “Christian, but I want to sound more inclusive than I’m actually being.” I quite agree.

The Boston Globe: My Late-Term Abortion

Freakonomics: For Children Over Two, Car Seats Are No Safer Than Seatbelts

Political Animal: Why We Should Argue For Single Payer Health Care Instead Of Incremental Steps

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells: The Health Care Crisis And What To Do About It

Jill at Feministe: Fat-phobes go after Redbook

Washington Post: Moms At War
Good article in the Washington Post calling for a truce between working moms and stay-at-home moms.