I’ve not posted for quite a while for a variety of reasons . . . I’ve lost my job, decided to go to law school, and generally been immersed in being very busy. What fun!

Now, part of what this means is that I missed the big WoC appropriation blow up completely. This is probably good, since I just don’t feel like I have anything useful to say that hasn’t been said better already by someone else. In the midst of all that, though, I was forwarded several wonderful blog posts written by African women, and I’ve finally got the time to write about them.

The first, and the topic of this post, is How to Beat Girls And Women by Mama Wangari of A Life Less Perfect. Everyone should read it in its entirety, of course, but it’s an autobiographical post about being beaten by her father when she was 16, how she avoided it, and the larger expectations and culture surrounding beatings.

“Please don’t beat me. I’m having my period,” and he turned abruptly away from me, dropping the belt to his side, and marched away to the end of the path to stand staring at the fence for a few dangerous moments. Then he turned and marched back to me and handed me the belt. My heart leapt.

“What you just mentioned to me,” his voice had gone low. “Never mention it to me again. Never. That’s between you and your mother. Go!”

It’s a great story, but the part that really makes it shine is her mother’s reaction, later:

A few days later I was walking home with my mum, down a steep rutted path, when out of a silence she suddenly asked, “Why did you ask Daddy not to beat you because of your period?”

“Pardon?”

“The other day, when you asked Daddy not to beat you because of your period. Did you think it would make you bleed more heavily or something? Why did you - ? What did you think would happen?”

I was puzzled. I decided to stick with pure fact.

“I wasn’t having my period,” I said.

“What? You weren’t?”

“No. I wasn’t,” I waited for her to burst out laughing and congratulate me.

“You mean you lied?” she was shocked.

“Of course!” so was I.

“But why?” she asked.

That really sort of sums it all up, doesn’t it? It’s not just that women and girls are expected to take their beatings, it’s that they’re expected to take them, and not object. The concept that she would object to being beaten is shocking and incomprehensible to her mother, because violence against women is a part of the natural order of things, like the weather. It’s just how things are.

Lying to avoid a beating is like lying to avoid a thunderstorm. It’s just not done. There’s no point. Why bother?

This, then, in a lot of ways, is one of the victories of feminism . . . the concept that, beyond women having the right not to be beaten, they, as human beings, have the right to object at all, to say, “this is wrong,” and, “no, I won’t just take it.” Abuse, institutionalized abuse, the culture of abuse, relies on maintaining the expectation that women will not say no and maintaining the expectation that objection to your own abuse is taboo.

It’s really an amazing post, and I encourage everyone to go read it.

Thank you, XKCD, for being so very, very right. This is exactly how ‘it’ works.

When I read this excellent article by Amanda Marcotte, I couldn’t help think of Mandolin’s post last October, “Children Fucking Children“.

The gist of Amanda’s article (and, in a lot of ways, Mandolin’s post before it) is that American adult attitudes towards teen sexuality are a huge part of why American teen sexuality is all fucked up. Of course, I agree with this, and I have for quite some time, but what’s nice is that Amanda has (gasp) evidence:

. . . Dutch teenagers, who have sex at the same ages as American teenagers, do better on the common indicators of sexual wellness. They change partners less frequently, they get pregnant less often, they use birth control more consistently, and they don’t contract STIs as often. The interviewers decided to measure parental attitudes about teenage sex by asking parents if they allow the romantic partners of 16- and 17-year-old children to sleep over. American parents almost universally recoiled at the idea, and Dutch parents almost universally accepted it.

From there, the interviews went into more depth, discovering that Americans and the Dutch conceptualize teenage sexuality and love much differently from each other. Dutch parents tend to accept that teenagers fall in love and generally have the expectation that teenage sex is a legitimate expression of love. Americans, meanwhile, to put it bluntly, reject the idea that teenagers can love each other.

So that’s pretty much it, isn’t it? Our contempt for teenagers is what’s doing this. Our refusal to respect their intellectual and emotional depth and to treat them accordingly.

I was 16 when I first had sex (actually, the day before my 17th birthday), and although (in retrospect) I think my mom might have been okay with my girlfriend, Tiffany, spending the night, I certainly never would have asked. I was too caught up in the prevalent social attitude that sex is something to be feared and hidden. So instead, Tiffany and I drove home from the high school at lunch to have sex, had sex after school, skipped school to have sex . . . luckily, we were both smart enough to use birth control scrupulously, but still, we acted as though sex was a hidden illicit pleasure . . . because, if you’re 17, it is. We were in love, though, and it shouldn’t have been.

And, you know, I think that perhaps the impact of parental/social/adult attitudes on teen sex works in another way as well. If adults are telling you that you’re too young to fall in love, and too young to make major life decisions (except of course, for when they’re telling you that the grade you get in Chemistry will affect your future irrevocably) and you, as a teenager, know that’s that’s untrue, well, I think it makes it that much less likely that you’ll listen to what they have to say about avoiding pregnancy, avoiding STIs, avoiding abusinve relationships, etc.

I think of it like the war on (some) drugs. If the government is telling you that pot drives you crazy and makes you think you can fly, then once you try pot and discover that that actually it just makes you hungry and kinda goofy, you probably won’t believe the government when it tells you that heroin is really the bad stuff. See, because they’ve already said that everything is really the bad stuff.

I think teen sex is like that.

The recently posted Carnival of the Godless is your source for all sorts of atheistic joy.

Visit! Comment!

This is the best thing I’ve read in probably a month, and it’s am absolute must-read for anyone who’s ever wondered about the political and theological confluence of events that became the religious right.

It’s 3 years old, but I just read it this afternoon, so it’s new to me. Also, it’s long, but I found myself entertained and interested all the way through.

It is, of course, of special interest to those among us who would like to live by Biblical principles, since there’s a fair amount of talking about just exactly what those principles are.

It’s broken up into 5 parts:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

The author, bradhicks, is awesome in several other ways as well. It’s worth poking around his LJ, especially for some of his political writing.

PS. This was originally posted at my LiveJournal page, but I decided to repost it here for the general quality of conversation.

This is absolutely shattering.

In short, the situation is that a Florida woman, in order to deal with her 13 year old daughter ‘having sex with older men’, shaves her head and forcibly pierces her genitals, so as to make sex more painful for her daughter. The problem is (or at least, one of many many problem is) that the ‘older man’ she was having sex with was her mother’s 30 year old boyfriend . . . and rather than deal with this as ‘oh god, my boyfriend committed a horrible criminal violation on my daughter,’ she apparently dealt with it as, ‘my slutty daughter is trying to take my man.’

The prosecutor, fairly reasonably (IMHO) pushed for a greater crime than child abuse, and the jury acquitted.

Or, as La Lubu put it in comments:

Shit, damn, motherfucker. Lemme see if I got this straight—

1. Boyfriend rapes 13-year old daughter.
2. Mom does not call police on boyfriend; mom blames daughter.
3. Mom has daughter’s head shaved, in the hopes that boyfriend will find daughter too ugly to fuck.
4. Boyfriend continues to rape daughter. For years.
5. Mom has friend “pierce” daughter’s genitalia, in such a way that it will make it even more painful for the daughter when mom’s boyfriend rapes her again.
6. “Piercing” gets infected.
7. Child protection finally called in.
8. Piercer goes to jail.
9. Mom put on trial for the piercing, but not for allowing the rapes? WTF, Chuck?
10. Mom acquitted.
11. Finally, an arrest warrant is put out for mom’s rapist boyfriend.

Christ, this poor girl. This makes me very angry. My fists are clenching and I am seeing red. I want to break something. As other people mention in coments, possibly the worst part is that now it’s likely that the daughter will be sent back to live with her mother.

Her mother who blamed her for her own rape. Her mother who shaved her head. Her mother who violated her. Her mother who held her down as a needle was pushed through her genitals. Her fucking mother.

A while back, in one of our discussions of Male Circumcision, I made the point that I consider nonconsensual and elective alteration of another person’s genitals is unacceptable, period, whether you’re the parent or not. As chance would have it, at the time, I compared circumcision to piercing your child’s genitals against their will. There were some people who argued that nonconsensually piercing your kid’s genitals is actually no big deal.

I wonder where those people are now, and I hope they’re ashamed.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a better post than this one by La Lubu of Feministe on why we need S-CHIP, why we need national healthcare, and why our current system is abso-fucking lutely sadistic and nonsensical.

I cried twice reading it.

Feel free to comment, but unlike a lot of posts, I’m going to be really strict on moderation on this one. If you’re saying things that can reasonably be interpreted as “It’s okay if a bunch of people die horribly because that’s how the free market works,” then your comment will be replaced with animal noises.

Really.

Don’t be a dick.

For approximately a jillion weeks now, I’ve been working on a post about why I believe BDSM can be (and is for me) feminist. For some reason, work has been slow on it . . . I’ve got so many ideas, and I’m having trouble reconciling them and laying them out in a coherent form.

Bleh.

Anyhow, one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is the origin and nature of BDSM desire, spurred in part by a number of really excellent posts over at the Let Them Eat Pro-SM Feminist Safe Spaces blog.

Of course, I’m interested in where my desires come from . . . and I want to understand BDSM desire more completely, but the more I think about it, the more I think that it’s sort of irrelevant. We get turned on by what we get turned on by, and whatever the reasons are, I don’t think that we’re necessarily able to change it.

Does that mean that we shouldn’t examine our desires? No, not at all, but . . . well . . . well, let’s just say that Trinity puts it far, far better (and snarkier!) than I ever could:

WHAT CAUSES VANILLA?

How long have you been vanilla?

Are you sure that you’re not simply too nervous to submit or dominate because past traumas make you too nervous to relate to others on a truly intimate level?

Have you ever really examined your vanilla desires?

The vast majority of sexuality depicted in the media is vanilla. Are you sure your desires now don’t stem from not seeing alternate models much in the media?

How can you experience true intimacy with someone if you’re afraid to share erotic pain with them? Aren’t you missing something?

It’s really a shame that our screwed up vanilla-normative society ruined you like that.

Oh, I’m not telling you what to DO. I’d never do that. But it’s such a shame that you HAVE to.

Oh, I’ve been involved in some vanilla things myself, but I’m better than the rest because I realize that when the SMers say we should question, they’re right! I try not to get too involved.

I’m not trying to diss those who want to create egalitarian relationships for themselves, but it’s so played out and socially normative. I’m going to go create my own communities wherein we strive to create truly hierarchical relationships. It really saddens me to see people stuck invested in the same old eroticization of sameness.

When people tell me that I’m just saying all of this because my own proclivities are sadomasochistic it makes me so SAD. Don’t they see that this is BIGGER THAN THE PERSONAL?

Even I have vanilla fantasies now and then. It’s impossible not to in a society like this one. I’m not the enemy!

;)

This is the point.

I don’t mind examining the dynamic behind polyamory or BDSM or whatever, but when it’s asked from the outside, and when the subtext is, “oh, you poor dear, have you tried to figure out how you got broken?”

Well, then . . . screw you. I’m not broken. How about you open up your life to public critique, hmm?

From Asheville Indymedia, we have the heartwarming tale of what happens when the Klan decides to march through Knoxville, TN, and are met on their march . . . by clowns. The photo with the article is awesome. Check it all out here.

A while back, in one or another of the threads, I mentioned to Amp that for certain groups and certain individuals, responding to them seriously, addressing their arguments as if they’re actual arguments, etc., is sort of counter-productive, in that it lends them credibility they wouldn’t have otherwise.
This is a lovely example of how I think we ought to to deal with folks like that.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of Safe Spaces lately.

Two things have spurred this. First, a little bit after Mandolin posted her (excellent) ‘Mandolin Replies to Seelhoff’ thread, we were chatting via IM, and she expressed dismay, wondering whether there could ever be an environment that could serve as a safe space for both radfems and transfolk. Second, Bean’s post here, in that same thread, in which she says (among other things):

I do not believe that this thread, or indeed any thread on this blog, is a safe place for me to participate, nor do I believe that there would or even could ever be any sort of productive discussion here.

After reading this, I started poking around the Intarwebs, looking for a well-done definition of what safe space is and how to build it. I haven’t yet found something useful.

The idealist in me says that it must be possible to create a space that feels safe for disparate groups of people. On the other hand, if part of the creation of a safe space is that the people within that space need to be able to speak what they feel to be true about their oppression, will that, of necessity, mean that the space is unsafe for those they feel are their oppressors?

I think that this is part of what’s going on with the whole trans/radfem debate. Many transfolk (rightly, I think) do not feel that any space where their declared (sex or) gender is up for debate can be considered a safe space. Many radfems (also, not unreasonably) do not feel that any space where they’re lambasted for engaging in radical feminist analysis can be considered a safe space.

I’m not interested so much in continuing the trans/radfem debate . . . god(dess) knows we’ve hammered that shit out ad infinitum. My concern is much more with how we go about creating a safe space for maximum inclusion, and to what degree that’s a desirable goal.

By way of another, less apocalyptically controversial example, it may be impossible to create a space that is safe both for homosexual folks and members of the religious right. And maybe that’s okay, because I don’t care whether members of the religious right generally feel safe joining a discussion. But although I may disagree with them until the sky falls, I very much do care that radical feminists feel safe.

So I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t know if there is one. What constitutes ’safe space’ anyhow?

Thoughts?

Hey, y’all.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area (the far northeastern tip). Mandolin lives in the Bay Area too. So does Cassandra (of the kick-ass Cassandra Says blog).

I’ve got an idea so crazy it just . . . might . . . work.

Let’s have a picnic and get together for Bay Area feminist bloggers/commenters and their friends. We could do it in Golden Gate park (Personally, I favor the Botanical Gardens) on some Saturday afternoon when everyone’s available.

I’ve been chatting with so many of you folks (for years in some cases) that it would be great to meet you in person and feed you potato salad!
This is a good idea! Who’s with me?

Greetings, all, I’m Myca!

Hi there.

With Ampersand stepping down from his lofty blogging throne, he’s asked me to make the leap from moderator to co-blogger, so although most of you have more or less known me for some years now, I thought an introductory post would be a good idea.

SO: I’m a long-haired, polyamorous, feminist, agnostic, Mac-using, role-playing, Gaiman-reading, left-wing, philosophy-studying, theater-attending, computer-gaming, kinky, sexually dominant, art-film loving, ren-faire participating, quirky, outdoorsy geek dreamer. And I’m a white guy.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so that type isn’t as uncommon as you’d think.

My primary interests are feminism, leftist politics in general, geek culture, civility of debate, and sexual freedom issues, so that’s mostly what I’ll be posting on, but I’m of course always interested in learning more about things I know little about, so you may see the occasional “Huh, this is confusing to me,” post too.

EDIT: Oh, hey, the blogs I regularly read:

Feministe
Pandagon
Bird Brains (The IDT Weblog).
Cassandra Says
I shame the matriarchy
let them eat pro-sm feminist safe spaces
The Washington Monthly
Philosoraptor

EDIT the second: I’m crossing out polyamorous, since I’m in a monogamous relationship sort of. *grin* Long story.