What it looks like when we target rapists instead of victims

“Just because she isn’t saying no doesn’t mean she is saying yes. Sex without consent = sexual assault. Don’t Be That Guy.”

More on the Canadian ‘Don’t Be That Guy’ campaign here. (Thanks to Janette).

Hug a Christian

Awww, this makes me teary. Nice to see someone getting the difference between ‘tolerance’ and ‘reconciliation’ too. (Via tigtog).

UPDATE: And this made me chuckle.

Oops, regarding the Marin.. maybe not for real?

Helpful insights from punk rock relatives

One of Bill’s brothers has been living with us on and off lately. He is a bit punk so I kindly labeled him the kids’ Punk Rock Uncle. 

Punk Rock Uncle: Yeah, poor Lauca, these moods are pretty bad for her.

Me: Hmm and you know, Bill and I aren’t highly strung, we’re not particularly moody people so it’s been difficult for us for a long time to understand her melt-downs.

Punk Rock Uncle: Weeeeell, you were always pretty flighty.

Rosewater and other things

A bottle of rosewater.

A morning sitting on my friend’s bed with her looking through her headscarf collection.

More of Lauca’s giftwrapping wonders, this time for her father’s birthday.

Lauca’s newest doll (thrifted) meets her older dolls for a swim.

The cat on my bed.

Our nut tree.

Cormac’s painting.

Flowers for our bees.

One of the punk rock uncle‘s tattoos.

A school of fish.

Looking again at We Need to Talk About Kevin

Let’s all assume that there will be SPOILERS galore in both this post and the possible comment thread and go from there.

Image credit.

Apparently a lot has happened for me in the last (almost) seven years of being a mother. When I read Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin back all that time ago, the book causing a big stir and me, with my first baby in my arms, I was though broadly sympathetic towards her, also genuinely troubled at times by the mother character narrating the story. Last week I finally saw the film adaptation and I have to admit to finding the character Eva entirely sympathetic. Not so controversial anymore. What’s changed? This could be partly about the way Tilda Swinton played her. She’s completely fantastic in it. There’s little dialogue in the film and certainly no internal monologue, but Swinton’s expressions are so good that you can pretty much pick out the exact text from the book  that she is playing in any particular shot.

The novel is written in the first person through a series of letters written by Eva, who is coming to term with her ambivalence around motherhood and the incredible difficulties she experienced in mothering her son, Kevin, he who eventually goes on to carry out a schoolyard massacre. In the book you know exactly what Eva’s thinking, if not exactly whether her perspective is all together reliable; in the film you have to fill that in for yourself but Lynne Ramsey’s directing is incredibly skillful. (I loved the feel and look of this film but then I also loved Ramsey’s Morvern Callar).

There are so many good ‘motherhood’ scenes in this film – Eva beaten down and exhausted, driven to soothing herself by standing next to a jack hammer on a crowded street in order to drown our her colicky baby’s incessant cries; Eva, equal parts bored and defeated, desperately trying to conjure better mothering from herself for a defiant pre-schooler; and then also, Eva, increasingly isolated from her husband for failing to exhibit the maternal proficiencies he expects.

I just wanted to bundle Eva up and take her along to my feminist mothers’ group.

Only one element of the film is problematic for me and that is the casting choice for the teenage son, Kevin. All the Kevins are gloriously sullen through the various ages but Ezra Miller is a seriously handsome young man and he plays the teenage part very well but his casting tends to sexualise the older ‘Kevin’ character.Perhaps, given how charismatic Swinton is you really need to have someone equally as striking to watch on the screen with her? If I’d been in charge of casting I would also have reconsidered John C. Reilly for the husband/father, too. Reilly is a marvellous character actor but is he a believable pairing for someone as chic as Swinton? Granted he’s supposed to be a very different person to her, the all-American ‘everyman’ but I still didn’t find it worked for me. Anyway, whose asking me?

Did you see the film, did you like it? (Rachel Hills can be excused seeing as we’ve already discussed her dislike of the film).

Re-post: Asking is sexy

The other day I got caught up in this discussion with a man about rape and responsibility and it was very much like this and this so I won’t go into the specifics of our tedious conversation but I will say something about where we left off, which was around the time when he asked me what was my great feminist solution to the apparent greyness of some rapes. The rape that happens after hours and hours of flirting and innuendo; the rape that happens after foreplay; the rape that happens between committed sexual partners; the rape that happens half-way through sex; the rape that happens when the guy supposedly thought she was into it. You know, I replied, you can ask for consent first. But asking for consent, he said, is just such a mood-killer.

Apart from the fact that doing anything without consent is both illegal and immoral and this man surely doesn’t want to be doing either – and how can you argue against a tiny bit of clarification when it has the potential to stop a world of pain – consent is actually the sexy part. Without consent it isn’t even sex; it is a flat-out violation. This man assures me that he isn’t trying to rape anyone, what he is saying is that he just wants to be having hot sex and he wants to be a hot partner so he doesn’t want to kill the excitement by stopping and asking her to sign a consent form.

I don’t know why the idea has persisted that asking for consent is necessarily a clinical business – what is stilted about – more? do you want to? do you like? Because “mood-killer”? Are you kidding me? That moment when they close the space between you both and ask you to put your cards on the table – is this on or not, can I do this with you – is one of the most heart-flippingly exciting moments in all of existence. Eat those moments up because they are the episodes of your life that you will daydream about when you’re ninety years old. That anticipation – that moment when your asking is simultaneously both aggressive and submissive – it is what fuels a billion films and books. Granted it is not pleasant when you’re turned down, and for the record, it isn’t easy turning someone down either. Something is usually lost; the end of a good conversation at the very least, and sometimes even a friendship. But it is a gamble you take because you can’t bear another moment of not knowing; it is the gamble you take because when someone says ‘yes’ to you it is about the hottest feeling you’ll ever know.

Hey, remember the mining tax, Australia?

Remember how all those people insisted on the tax being watered down?

Yeah, and now Gina Rinehart is set to be the richest woman in the world.

It wasn’t called a super-fucking-profits tax for nothing.

You can relax, sexist world, a kid just being a kid is now known to be a boy

Breathe, little sexist world, breathe. It’s gonna be ok.

One of those couples doing the gender-free parenting thing has a kid who is now five years old and off to school and they’re all ready to announce that… it’s a boy!

Laxton, a UK-based web editor, and her partner, Cooper, decided to keep Sasha’s sex a secret when he was still in the womb. The birth announcement stated the gender-neutral name of their child, but skipped the big reveal. Up until recently, the couple only told a few close friends and family members that Sasha was a boy and managed to keep the rest of the world in the dark. But now that he’s starting school the secret’s out.

For years, Becks has been referring to her child, the youngest of three, as “the infant” on her personal blog. But guarding the public from her son’s gender was only part of her quest to let her kid just be a kid.

Oh god, sweet relief, the great gender binary can go on safely now.

On late term abortions

“The Way it Was”, written by Eleanor Cooney at Mother Jones about her late term abortion is highly recommended reading, via Tedra Osell:

I was hardly one of those tragically vulnerable teenagers. I suppose I was the kind of wanton female the lawmakers and wrath-of-God types look down on. There’s no doubt that I was stupid and irresponsible, and I certainly knew better than what you might have surmised from my actions. By some standards, I suppose you could say I was a slut. Those sleazy doctors left no doubt that that’s how they saw me. Some would say I got what I deserved, or that I deserved to die.

The arguments would be endless, but they would be irrelevant to the facts: From the moment I started looking for an abortion, not once did I even consider going through with the pregnancy. Not for one second. It simply was not going to happen. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was going to stop me, and it could have cost me my life. And this is what I had in common with millions and millions of women throughout time and history. When a woman does not want to be pregnant, the drive to become unpregnant can turn into a force equal to the nature that wants her to stay pregnant. And then she will look for an abortion, whether it’s legal or illegal, clean or filthy, safe or riddled with danger. This is simply a fact, whatever our opinion of it. And whether we like it or not, humans, married and unmarried, will continue to have sex—wisely, foolishly, violently, nicely, hostilely, pleasantly, dangerously, responsibly, carelessly, sordidly, exaltedly—and there will be pregnancies: wanted, unwanted, partly wanted, partly unwanted.

A society that does not accept the facts is a childish society, and a society that makes abortion illegal—and I believe that the PBAB is a calculated step in exactly that direction—is a cruel and backward society that makes being female a crime.

On the ethics of ignoring your power: The Feministe controversy

This is a brilliantly thoughtful piece by La Lubu on a way forward for Feministe (related to this). There are some tough questions here, but also, some solid suggestions on what can be done to improve big feminist sites like Feministe for the people outside of mainstream power bases.

Can you ethically ignore power bestowed upon or generated by you when it would give you the opportunity as a feminist intellectual to change things on a significant scale for others? Also, what right do people have to expect this of individuals – Jill Filopovic is tired and apparently unwell, she is also beaten down with disgust at ‘mob mentality’ Internet behaviour? (But then La Lubu‘s questioning of what one defines as inappropriate Internet behaviour and what that says about you and your privilege has given me pause for thought. I am highly sympathetic to Filopovic with regards to her reaction to ‘mob mentality’, I find myself easily horrified by pile-ons and gotchas, too, but has this allowed us to ignore more important injustices – I don’t know?).

From La Lubu:

I want to speak to you on some of the overall dynamics I’m witnessing on these recent posts and comment threads. From my perspective, there is an almost corporate-style mode of abdication of responsibility. The fact that Feministe has multiple staff bloggers will necessarily result in this default in the absence of a formal structure of consensus among the bloggers and in the absence of a mission statement. It seems to me that Feministe vacillates between being a pop-culture entertainment blog; an informative source for international news relating to women and feminism; a galvanizing instrument for political action; and a “LiveJournal”-style space for venting. Although there is a comments policy, there isn’t a declared mission statement of….goals, dreams, boundaries of any sort on what Feministe is or wants to be; nor is there a transparent description or process of how conflict within the community will be resolved. For that matter, there isn’t a definition of the community—does it refer solely to the staff bloggers, or to the commentariat as well?

This is very alienating to me as a labor unionist, as I come from a tradition that has very clear statements on who and what we are, and clear boundaries on process, policy, and conflict resolution. The stock answer in the blogosphere at large is a mercantile one—”if you don’t like what we’re selling, take your business elsewhere.” I don’t necessarily perceive this to be the attitude of Feministe, but strongly feel that the absence of a mission statement and attendant processes contributes to the hostile dynamics in the comment section.

But back to the “corporate style” as I call it, which I see very frequently in the comment section and is clearly evident in the recent threads: an ahistoricity, a blurring of boundaries during controversy or conflict, an assertion of “objectivity”, “rationality” and dismissal of emotion (particularly anger)….these are all concepts essential to the construction of whiteness as a political identity (which is to say, a means of teaching the people who are taught they are white, how to be “white”. I say this because I’ve been getting a whole lot of folks dropping by this blog lately since I was linked on Maya’s post at Alas, and I want to be crystal-clear to people unfamiliar with the term “white” as referring to anything other than light skin. I’m talking about the “whitewashing” of people of European descent; the assimilation into a “whiteness” that exists solely in opposition to people of color and other colonized persons). Even if the overt hostility of the comment section were abated, the affirmation of the ways and means of middle-class white communication are very uninviting (to say the least).

Because, this below from La Lubu also, is pretty spot on…

“The feminist blogosphere is: young, but not too young (25-35); mostly white (and of northern european extraction); middle to upper-middle class; highly educated (always degreed, usually grad school or law degree); able-bodied and healthy; non-religious (but typically with a Protestant or Jewish background); childfree by choice (also not a caretaker of an elderly or disabled adult); body size from thin to very thin; cisgender; heterosexual; conventionally feminine/pretty; fashionable; not employed in a nontraditional (>25% female participation) workforce; native English speaking (family of origin usually native English speaking also); non-indigenous and several generations removed from immigrant ancestors; raised in a nuclear family (either intact or divorced—but not “unwed” or extended family); lives in a large metropolis; favors capitalism; unmarried/unpartnered (meaning: no formal or legal ties of responsibility to a partner); never incarcerated (no family incarcerated either); and has plenty of personal contact with people in positions of actual power (gets invited to policymaking meetings/summits).”

Cross-posted at Hoyden About Town.