Scapegoating by anecdote

For every one Mollie Tibbetts who’s murdered by an immigrant (whether documented or otherwise), there are…A LOT MORE nice young women murdered by American-born men.

If the goal is to minimize violent crime, sorry but targeting immigrants is focusing energy in the wrong direction. The lion’s share of criminals are here by birth.

But of course the use of Mollie Tibbetts as a poster child for border-walling isn’t about protecting women like Mollie. It’s about demonizing brown people coming from poor countries. Mollie’s family is having none of your bullshit.

Ugly is wherever you choose to see it.

Dave Futrelle has shown us some “interesting theories about why feminists are “obsessed” with rape and abortion” from an MRA, and I was expecting some fresh batch of fuckery that would get me all good and pissed off. Imagine my disappointment to find out it’s just a rehash of the old rubbish about how rapists only target pretty women, and we feminists are all ugly bitches with nothing to worry about.

(Go ahead and picture Diana Rigg as Lady Olenna reading that paragraph. “I was told you were drunk, impertinent, and thoroughly debauched.” Yes, that’s the voice that keeps going through my head.)

Seriously, though, that’s all they’re saying. We feminists are ugly bitches, and rapists only target women they find attractive, so we’ll never have to worry about getting raped and that’s why we’re all pissed off. That’s the content of the comments shown in the link. That’s the entire range of these fuzz-nuggets’ insight into the feminist psyche. It would get me plenty angry if it were anything new. By now I’ve seen so much of this attitude, my reaction is mostly boredom.

I’m jaded and cynical as fuck, but that doesn’t mean the attitude isn’t also incredibly violent.

Here’s what we need to understand:

No, wait, first off, THIS much is what you need to understand: if you ever, EVER, think it’s okay to suggest that anyone is “too ugly to be raped,” do not ever darken my virtual doorstep. We have nothing to discuss. We have nothing in common. Fuck off and never come back. I’ll ban your sorry little ass without a cursory exhalation.

That aside, it must be pointed out that if rape is a matter of who is “irresistible,” then basically everyone is irresistible to someone. Rapists target everyone from the most conventionally attractive to the least. Rapists target symmetrically flawless 20-ish blondes, they target children, they target elderly women, they target fat women, they target women who are about to faint due to starvation, they target people with serious mental illnesses and cognitive disabilities, they target pretty much everyone. Women are more frequently targeted than men, and women of color (particularly black, undocumented immigrant, and Native American) are more often victimized than white women, and generally those of lower privilege profiles have higher victimization rates than those of us who enjoy relatively high privilege, but ultimately, rapists decide what type of people they want to victimize, and they find a way. They don’t exclusively attack the ones who look like the fashion models who appear most often in the pages of Vogue and Cosmopolitan, they just…target whomever they think is least likely to be taken seriously if they have the courage to report to the police.

There is no woman in the known world who is too good-looking to be told she is too ugly to be raped.

This is what the narrative of “rapists target pretty women” does: it creates a division that has more to do with perception than risk. We are all at risk, to some extent. No matter how beautiful or how hideous, we all have to watch our backs. No matter how compliant with current beauty standards, or how divergent from what is considered desirable, we all have to worry that we either should have seen the rape coming, or that we should be grateful for the attention. We all have to worry about being victimized, and we all have to worry about being blamed.

I don’t like to use the passive voice, but it’s tricky to determine who is responsible for choosing victims and assigning blame.

No one will ever be able to convince me that I’m not a good-looking woman. I’ve received waaaay too many messages on OKCupid with little content other than to tell me I’m cute. (Speaking of which: up your game, guys. That shit gets old in a hurry.) It’s far too late for anyone to tell me otherwise.

And perhaps one might think I could sneer at these rape advocates (they’re not even apologists for rape anymore) with a sample of the shots that photographer Barbara Glaeser just posted on her blog from my session with her. Here’s one of those old, ugly, repulsive feminists who are so obsessed with rape and abortion!

Nice Guy, Mass Murderer

There was a shooting spree in Santa Barbara last night. I have gathered the following information from The Washington Post, LA Times, LAist, USA Today, and Radar Online.

Elliot Rodger, age 22, was the son of the 2nd unit director of The Hunger Games, Peter Rodger. Just two years ago, he was present on the red carpet at The Hunger Games premiere alongside his father. Elliot Rodger has been identified as the shooter who killed six and injured seven more until he was found with a bullet in his head after crashing his car into a parked vehicle. The black BMW that crashed with the shooter inside has the same license plate number as the car on Elliot Rodger’s Facebook page. With that positive identification, it’s okay to say we know who he is.

The Ally is Dead. Forget the Ally.

It would be so, so nice to live in a bubble where I can assume this shit doesn’t happen, but really, even the social justice community has a lot of cleaning to do in its own house.  Brittney Cooper tells us a story:

Two nights ago I showed up to the Brecht Forum in Brooklyn ready to have a conversation about what we mean when we say “ally, privilege, and comrade.”

I showed up to have that discussion after months of battle testing around these issues in my own crew. Over these months I’ve learned that it is far easier to be just to the people we don’t know than the people we do know.

So there I sat on a panel with a white woman and a Black man. As a Black feminist, I never quite know how political discussions will go down with either of these groups. Still I’m a fierce lover of Black people and a fierce defender of women.

Ms. Cooper’s black male co-panelist began the discussion. So far, so okay, but still in need of more honesty:

The brother shared his thoughts about the need to “liberate all Black people.” It sounded good. But since we were there to talk about allyship, I needed to know more about his gender analysis, even as I kept it real about how I’ve been feeling lately about how much brothers don’t show up for Black women, without us asking, and prodding, and vigilantly managing the entire process.

In a word, I was tired.

I shared that. Because surely, a conversation about how to be better allies to each other, is a safe space.

Emphasis mine. Surely, a panel discussion about how allies can be better, with people chosen for their supposed commitment to social justice, is a safe place for a black woman feminist to talk about how people of higher privilege profiles can be more effective in showing up to the fight for people who have to deal with more shit. Surely, Ms. Cooper should be able to say these things in this setting.

This brother was not having it. He did not plan to be challenged, did not plan to have to go deep, to interrogate his own shit. Freedom-talk should’ve been enough for me.

But I’m grown. And I know better. So I asked for more.

I got cut off, yelled at, screamed on. The moderator tried gently to intervene, to ask the brother to let me speak, to wait his turn. To model allyship. To listen.  But to no avail. The brother kept on screaming about his commitment to women, about all he had “done for us,” about how I wasn’t going to erase his contributions.

Then he raised his over 6 foot tall, large brown body out of the chair, and deliberately slung a cup of water across my lap, leaving it to splash in my face, on the table, on my clothes, and on the gadgets I brought with me.

I will make no bones about this: that man’s behavior on that panel was an act of violence. Even if he didn’t lay a finger on her, his behavior was geared to intimidate, traumatize, and humiliate. Ms. Cooper was not safe on that panel, and her male co-panelist was the reason why, and he made sure she knew it.

I waited for anyone to stand up, to sense that I felt afraid, to stop him, to let him know his actions were unacceptable. Our co-panelist moved her chair closer to me. It was oddly comforting.

I learned a lesson: everybody wants to have an ally, but no one wants to stand up for anybody.

Eventually three men held him back, restrained him, but not with ease. He left. I breathed. I let those tears that had been threatening fall.

Then an older Black gentleman did stand up. “I WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS MALIGNING OF THE BLACK MAN…” his rant began. While waiting for him to finish, I zoned out and 

Wondered what had happened here. Did this really happen here? In movement space?

There’s more. I highly recommend you follow the link and read Ms. Cooper’s post. If you read the comments, you’ll see the guy’s name.

I’m very sorry to hear that it took so long for anyone to stand up for her, but I’m also not surprised. If I’d been in that audience, I think I’d have been glued to my seat, too. It’s a “WTF, is this really happening? Seriously?” reaction. No one expects a panelist at a social justice event to behave that way.

Now let’s look at the fact that this fellow thinks he’s an ally to women. He thinks he’s an ally to black women. And he shows his allyship by screaming and throwing a cup of water at a black woman who asks him a legitimate question at a forum about allyship and privilege. (I’m not mentioning her race just for the heck of it; I find it extremely unlikely he would have reacted this way to a white woman, even if she asked him the same question.) He wasn’t even just some yahoo in the audience, he was on the panel. Someone in the Brecht Forum approved him to speak on this panel with two women. And he reacts violently when a black woman asks him to examine his commitment to social justice.

With “allies” like these, oppressors are out of a job.

 

How to Learn Insults from Romeo Rose

Oh, dear. I am always happy to see something funny, and this morning, my Twitter mentions delivered the LOLZ.

No one has ever tried to make a woman feel bad by insulting her appearance. Mr. Rose is so original and creative.

Yeah, I’m totally gonna drop everything and patiently explain my opinions to Romeo Rose until he understands.

You guys, what have I told you before? If you tell me I am ugly, I will point and laugh. If you tell me I’m beautiful, you will get a face full of yawn.

*points at Romeo Rose* BWAAAAAA-HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!

By all means, keep sending more traffic to my blog.

 

The Spaghetti-on-Wall School of Victim-Blaming

Shepard Smith of Fox News had a guest on his show, a criminal defense attorney named Joseph DiBenedetto, to do some song-and-dance about the Maryville rape case. And this is what Mr. DiBenedetto had to say about Daisy Coleman:

“There’s no denying that from the surface it appears to be some sort of cover-up,” the defense attorney said. “But when you look at the finer details, there are telltale signs of this girl actually lying. She is leaving her home at 1 a.m. in the morning and nobody forced her to drink. And what happens? She gets caught by her mom, she’s embarrassed and the easy way out here is, ‘Mom, someone took advantage of me.’”

“But what did she expect to happen at 1 a.m. in the morning after sneaking out?” he asked. “I’m not saying — assuming that these facts are accurate and this did happen — I’m not saying she deserved to be raped, but knowing the facts as we do here including what the prosecutor has set forth, this case is going nowhere and it’s going nowhere quick.”

You might notice that he’s going with two different stories here. The first is that the girl’s a liar, because she should be ashamed of sneaking out and drinking, so she tells her mother it was a rape, because in The Land Under Siege by Pubescent Sluts, reporting a star football player as a rapist is so much LESS attention-getting than admitting to your mother that you behaved like a teenager. It’s not like she got a raft of slut-shaming, victim-punishing cyber-bullying when the story came out, or anything. Yeah, she was totally covering her own ass by telling her mother she’d been raped. And we’re going to skip over the details of how her mother found her freezing outside, and found the physical evidence of sexual assault without her daughter’s explanation.

Then, in case that angle doesn’t work out, he says that even if she wasn’t lying, well, she was totally asking for it. If she’s telling the truth, then, you know, she should be ashamed of herself. Because, she snuck out and she got drunk, so the rape was inevitable.

If a creature from another dimension were listening to this guy’s account through a Babel-fish, that alien might get the impression that rape is an accident that happens to girls who aren’t sufficiently rule-abiding and cautious. DiBenedetto said all that without even once acknowledging that there were guys involved. There was an older teenage boy who was indispensably involved in Daisy’s sneaking out, her getting blackout drunk, and her appearing in a rape video on someone’s iPhone. Let’s say nothing about the actions of Matthew Barnett bringing much younger and smaller girls to his house, pressuring a 14-year-old to drink more than she could handle, and putting his cock in her while his friend got them on video, finally, leaving her inadequately dressed and semi-conscious outdoors in freezing weather. Clearly the kid has no control whatsoever over his own actions when a girl sends him a text, so he might as well not have even been there.

Let’s remember that as far as he’s concerned, his explanation doesn’t need to be coherent. He doesn’t need to worry about how it looks that he’s straddling the fence between She’s Lying and She Asked For It. He knows that plenty of people, many of whom could end up on a jury, will see Daisy Coleman as the guilty one if he just evokes the right images. Talk about the girl being less than a perfect angel, and the rapist disappears.

Family planning “advice” that works for no one.

I would like to co-sign this rebuttal by Natasha Chart on the expenses that pregnancy and childbirth tend to incur. I will especially highlight this passage here, as this is the tabula rasa of basically every abortion debate:

Lastly, though she mentioned it first, Fiano complained about my lack of discussion of personal responsibility, lamenting sarcastically that “it’s cruel to expect women to abstain from sex if they aren’t ready for a baby.” In a word, yes. That’s cruel.

Sex drive is basic to human nature. We’ve been having sex as a species for a long time—close to 200,000 years by now if you believe in the same science that gives us miracles like advanced antibiotics and level 3 neonatal intensive care units—and many of us are sick of being made to feel guilty about it.

I’m going to take it as a given that Fiano disapproves of sex outside of marriage. And I’m going to guess that when she talks about personal responsibility, it’s code for the people the forced birth movement always acts like they’re talking about exclusively: childless, unmarried teens and early 20-somethings. (Nothing gets their predominately male audience frothing like young girls having unauthorized sex, and Fiano clearly knows her audience.) This creepy voyeurism is stomach turning and is probably at least as much to blame as widespread racism for the conservative movement’s demographic death spiral.

Even as a married woman, I reject the idea that sex should always be about being ready for a baby. No matter how guilty many people feel in public when they’re shamed into mumbling their agreement about the evils of “irresponsible” sex, not all married people are always ready for a baby, even if they already have children.

To be more clear, if Fiano isn’t planning to join the Quiverfull movement, or isn’t one of the less than 20 percent of Catholics who agree with the church hierarchy on contraception, to suggest that women (not men, naturally) should abstain from sex if we don’t want babies is an extreme minority position. If she is planning to do something like that, well, there’s a reason the Duggars have a reality TV show—because most modern U.S. citizens have decided not to live like that.

Emphasis mine. I should change that clause to “precious few married people are always ready for a baby, especially if they already have children.” When anti-choicers tell us “If you don’t want a baby, then don’t have sex” as if we’re too stupid to have known already that vaginal intercourse is the cause of pregnancy, they’re proposing a system of family planning that nobody actually practices. No one really controls their reproduction by never having sex, ever, in the years when they’re not interested in creating new humans. Try telling a married new dad that not only does he have to wait for his wife to recover from childbirth before he can have sex with her again, he has to wait the next year and a half or so until she’s ready to get pregnant again. Seriously? He’ll be having none of that. The idea isn’t really for long-term abstinence to become the new birth control; the idea is for births to be uncontrolled and for women to take the blame for not putting Bayer aspirin between their knees.

Non-procreative sex isn’t just a part of life, it’s a vital part of building families. The supposedly simple formula of “no sex until you’re ready for babies” is cruel precisely because it’s unrealistic.

Queen of Peace High School: Go fuck yourselves.

Queen of Peace High School in North Arlington, NJ, has asked its female students—ONLY its female students—to take a no-cursing pledge.

I went to public schools. Our administrators and teachers had bigger fish to fry.

 

Thank you for wearing that t-shirt, you misogynist douchenugget!

If you see a dude wearing a t-shirt that includes the words, “NAME ONE GUY YOU HAVEN’T FUCKED,” that’s a good sign to get his name, but not give him your number, and warn your friends away from him.

 

Online dating gives abusers plenty of rope.

I found this…gem, of a profile, on OKCupid. Let’s see what the man has to say!

Hello, charming lady! :^)

Let’s get down to business: I’m ready to settle down, get married and start a family after much hard work to achieve financial independence and stability which had left me precious little time to find the life partner I’ve been seeking.

Yes, I meet many women, and my friends continually show me would-be eligible (?) candidates; many are truly desperate. Unfortunately so far, they’ve come saddled with distorted views of reality, stupid beliefs, and a litany of character flaws such as: fickle, close-minded, unfair, unreasonable, overly selfish, bloated ego, insatiable, emotionally unstable, or financially irresponsible.

Hence they cluelessly showed up shamelessly overloaded with baggage I don’t have nor need, such as overweight, with pets or children, debt, poor health or mental illness and/or on meds, unfit, ADD, fake (fill in the gap), professional, familial and/or inter-personal issues, over-estimating their fertility, etc. You get the point: still wonder why most of these “me, me, me, now, now, now” types end up 40-year old dried-up old maids? Duh! lol! ;^P

So I decided to give this a fair shot. Show me a quality match: also without vices such as drinking, smoking, cheating, drugs, gambling, addictions to their FB or gizmos, etc., yet sincere, sensible, no-nonsense, easy-going, and low-maintenance! Those are traits older folks tell me our current generation lacks. :^) Or need I order a tall, slender blonde Eastern-European mail-order bride? Don’t laugh: some friends did well that way… others simply say women ARE baggage that, like anything that Floats (boats), Flies (planes), or F…. (women), is better rented than bought! ;^)

[…]

I excell at sifting through scams. Unlike so many folks who think they are “educated” (read: brainwashed into being pickpocketed by political elites and their true constituents), I don’t fall for it, as I understand fully well how dysfunctional the system is, and the costs it entails for gullible folks: let them pay!

[…]

I SPEND A LOT OF TIME THINKING ABOUT…

catering to the needs and wishes of my better half if/when I have one. Also, what made modern American life so toxic to family life and marriage? They say that currently half – and decreasing – of us adults no longer live in nuclear families.

[…]

YOU SHOULD MESSAGE ME IF…

You have the confidence that you have what it takes: commitment, integrity, and readiness to discuss further.
Hope this didn’t sound like a preliminary job interview letter, lol?!
An please be tall, as in at least 5’10”, and – of course – slender: I’ve picked up enough lil’ shrimpies at bars and clubs whenever I’ve felt like it! ;^p
Thank you for reading my profile, and best luck to you! ttys(oon)!

Woe is me, I’m too short, too flabby, too drunk and too mentally interesting to have this guy’s babies!

I don’t need to sit here and tell you everything that’s awful about this guy’s attitude, do I? If it seems like he would be kind of unpleasant to live with, that’s because he’s an abusive, misogynist sack of shit who views women as fuck-toys and baby ovens rather than human beings with lives of their own.

The fabulous thing about seeing his profile is this: guys like him exist everywhere, and they pursue women in all venues, but they don’t usually walk around with the word “ABUSER” stamped on their foreheads. It’s not difficult for intelligent, discerning women to end up with horrible men in their lives because they don’t seem horrible at first. Online dating, however, gives people the chance to show just how disgusting they are before you even talk to them for the first time, and we can see, some of them gleefully accept the rope and hang themselves with it. The freedom of an online dating profile allows abusers to expose themselves as the toxic goods they are, better than if Lisbeth Salander paid them a visit with her tattoo gun in hand.