Category Archives: Feminism

What Is In The Drinking Water Of The Southwest?

Strange, horrible things are afoot in our beloved Southwest States.  Politicians are attempting to pass some really poorly written bills or they are trying their best to keep women and atheists down.

First up, New Mexico.  There, a Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would make it illegal for a woman who was raped to get an abortion.  That is, sadly, not surprising.  Stuff like this bill are happening more and more.  What is surprising is the reasoning.  You see, having an abortion would be tampering with evidence.  There’s no other way for the state to know a woman was raped unless she can bring the baby to term apparently.  The representative in question, Cathrynn Brown, claims that the bill is actually meant to deter sex offenders.  Because no rapist wants to have to take care of a rape-baby I guess.  I’m sure they’re totally able to think that far into the future.  She’s doing this to bring men to justice!  This is SO going to protect women!  Look at you women being all protected and stuff!

Next, we have Arizona.  Ah, Arizona, the new place for crazy.  A bill was proposed there by a Republican law maker that would require every graduating high schooler to recite an oath before getting their diploma.  Here’s the oath:

I, _______, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge these duties; So help me God.

Yeah, that’s right, under this bill high schoolers will be required to swear an oath to god in order to graduate.  Eff you, atheists!  You probably don’t believe in the Constitution anyway.  As Hemant Mehta mentions in the above link:

It’s bad enough the Republicans are demanding loyalty of the kind normally reserved for members of Congress and beyond — but there’s also no way I would say those last four words, and the current text of the legislation does not allow for any alternatives.

In other words, if this bill were to become a law, atheists would either not be allowed to graduate… or they would be forced to lie so they could graduate. Neither option is acceptable.

Amazing.

Men Are Trained To Hate Women

You wouldn’t think of Cracked.com as a source for good social issues reporting, but they often do a heck of a better job than most news sites.  Add 5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women to the mix.

Obviously, it’s a little generalized, but I think this summary is well within the bell curve of an average man’s relationship to women:

So where you see a world in which males dominate the boards of the Fortune 500, and own Congress, and sit at the head of all but a handful of the world’s nations, men see themselves as utterly helpless. Because all of those powerful people only became powerful because they heard that women like power.

This is really the heart of it, right here. This is why no amount of male domination will ever be enough, why no level of control or privilege or female submission will ever satisfy us. We can put you under a burqa, we can force you out of the workplace — it won’t matter. You’re still all we think about, and that gives you power over us. And we resent you for it.

And I Think To Myself What A Horrible World

It is really hard, as a winner of the genetic lottery, to wrap your mind around how much tougher it still is to be a woman in society today.  Instead of simply teaching men not to rape, we have an entire industry teaching women on how to not get raped.  If they do get raped, they then often get blamed for being raped.  After all, there is this whole industry dedicated to rape prevention and they didn’t follow the rules.  Ergo it must be the woman’s fault.  Women are taught by society that they have to be sexy and then society blames them for being too sexy.  This would fuck up the sturdiest of women as certainly as war fucks up the sturdiest of soldiers.

All that is bad enough.  But then you have stories like this.  An Indian woman was literally raped to death by six attackers.  If it can be considered good news, her father has demanded that her name be known in the hopes that other women may find courage to come out if they have been raped.  Her name was Jyoti Singh Pandey.  Everywhere, there is a stigma associated with being raped.  In India, with its caste system, it is worse than most places.  Her family is very brave in releasing her name.  I hope her father is right and something good does come of this.

And then you have stories where someone brags for 12 minutes on camera about a girl that was gang raped at a party.  I find this one even more abhorrent than poor Jyoti’s.  Why?  Because this one has countless accomplices who will never be charged with any crime.  Not only was there assuredly countless witnesses to the gang rape(s) of this poor teenage girl that haven’t come forward, but it looks like there were attempts by authorities to minimize the fallout because of the involvement of a local high school football team.  You can follow the link in the above story for all the gory details.  Be warned they are pretty horrific.  If the allegations are true, police knew and did nothing.  Prosecutors knew and did nothing.  Coaches knew and did nothing.  Students knew and did nothing.  I can only forgive the students.

Society enables monsters like those above.  Chances are YOU enable monsters like those.  Chances are you know someone like them.  Chances are you know you know someone like them.  Call a woman a whore, you enable them.  Criticize a woman for dressing too sexily, you enable them.  If a woman says no and you push her to change her mind, you enable them.  Think it’s ok to get a woman drunk enough to have sex with you, you enable them.

There’s the old quote, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”  I disagree.  If you do nothing, you were never a good person.

Paranoia Runs Deep

Continuing with my “Grown Men Playing Dungeons and Dragons” theme, there is another strange psychology at play here in the United States.  That is the belief of just about every group, no matter how large, that they are an oppressed minority.

Many Christians think they are an oppressed minority.  Here’s future Senator of South Carolina Tim Scott talking about how Christians are the most oppressed group in the country:

 

I have news for you, Christians who think you are being oppressed, being prevented from pushing your views onto others through government is not oppression.  Yes, you’ve gotten away with it for many years without much blowback.  That’s normal when a vast majority controls just about everything.  What you’re seeing is not you being oppressed.  It’s minorities finally sticking up for their rights to not be bullied through government.  You are simply finally not being allowed to get away with things that have been always been unconstitutional.  You still control every branch of government in every state.  You still outnumber every other religious denomination by a very large margin.  So quit acting like the spoiled kid that always got his way until someone finally confronted him about his behavior.

The next vastly oppressed minority is men.  That’s right, men.  Who are we being oppressed by?  Women, apparently.  Not just any women, though.  Feminists!  I won’t link to any of the websites, but look up Men’s Rights Activists if you’re interested in mucking through some real slime.  Seriously, it’s some of the most vile crap you will find on the interwebs.  On the plus side, their web sites make for great logical fallacy bingo games.

Another incredibly oppressed minority in the United States is white men.  I know this because Mitt Romney lost the presidential election:

 

Poor white men.  They only control 82% of the Senate and a similar amount in the House while only representing 33% of the population.  It’s so difficult to be a white male these days!

All of the above scenarios are really about not recognizing privilege.  Christians have it.  Males are up to their heads in it.  White males are swimming in an ocean of it.  The oppression these groups feel is merely their privilege taken away from them.  Slowly, but surely, the level of privilege in this country is being evened.  We have a long way to go, but like the wind eroding a mountain, our progress can not be stopped.

Department Of Very Bad Optics

Say you’re a business that is against abortion.  You want to advertise such to the world.  Pretty bad marketing idea if you want to keep customers, but more power to you.  What do you do, though, if you’re a dry cleaner who is against abortion?  Put your anti-abortion message on a coat hanger of course!

Wowey-wow-wow-wow.  Cluelessness, thy name is Springdale Dry Cleaners.

This reminds me of Something Positive’s debut comic.

What’s Pissing Me Off Now?

It’s time once again to play everyone’s favorite game: What’s pissing me off now?

This time, it’s the House of Representatives that is pissing me off.  Specifically and not surprisingly, the Republicans in the House of Representatives.  Even more specifically, Eric Cantor (R-VAginas don’t matter).

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) expires at the end of this year and the Senate passed an updated version of the act that also protects immigrants, LBGTs, and Native Americans.  Sounds completely uncontroversial, right?

Not to Eric Cantor!  You see, right now, if a Native American woman is raped by a non-Native on Native soil, the Natives have no jurisdiction to prosecute the non-Native.  The jurisdiction falls to the Federal Government.  The Federal Government has close to zero capacity to prosecute such crimes.  The result being that rapists can basically rape with impunity.  The VAWA was updated to give tribal courts the power to prosecute rapes that happen on tribal lands.

Eric Cantor seems to think that if we give tribal courts the ability to protect Native American women from being raped by white men it could open the flood gates of letting Native Americans prosecute white boys for other crimes that they commit on Native lands.  Because of that hypothetical problem, Eric Cantor is perfectly fine with Native American women being raped and their rapists getting away with it.

And that’s what’s pissing me off now.