Sharron Angle UGH

Really?

Sharron Angle, the Nebraska Nevada Republican Senate candidate who recently made headlines when a radio interview was unearthed in which she opposed legal abortion even in case of rape/incest because "God has a plan" (and your assault is part of it), has caught media attention again for her advice to 13-year-old incest victims to just make lemons into lemonade.

The Huffington Post reports that, during an interview on the conservative Alan Stock Show, Angle was asked what she would say to a 13-year-old incest victim who became pregnant by her father's rape. Angle's response? She says she counsels teenagers facing "very at risk, difficult pregnancies" to just look about for alternatives, and when they do, "they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade."

I don't think "lemon situation" accurately describes the unfathomable situation of a young girl who has been raped and impregnated by her own father — a situation that would be made even worse if Angle had her way and the girl was subjected by law to forced pregnancy. Angle's flippant, clichéd comparison shows how out-of-touch she is. You can survive a traumatic situation, move on with your life, but that doesn't make child rape a "lemons into lemonade" situation. There is no "upside" to being raped as a child, especially by your own father.

"Raped by Dad? Just Turn Lemons Into Lemonade!"

Little Girls Wear Whisks

Little Girls Wear Whisks

Eve Ensler: Embrace your inner girl | Video on TED.com

Eve Ensler: Embrace your inner girl Video on TED.com

WONDERFUL, EVE!

"Shaming and Blaming"

"Shaming and Blaming" via the "this ain't living blog." Really good! My big thing was that we were always told to "sit like a lady." This meant keeping one's knees together, of course, I would like to know why now, today, at a movie theater, my husband spreads his legs wide open and invades my space while I make myself smaller and smaller. I read some analysis that said the whole concept of space - where women are encouraged to take up as little as possible, while men take up as much as they want - is actually all about power.

Girls Need Less Power?

"Leigh snapped this picture of a Toys ‘R Us catalog. He noticed that, for both microscopes and telescopes, the version coded “girl” (i.e., the pink one) is the least powerful one (600x magnification vs. 900 or 1200x and 90x vs. 250 or 525x). Coincidence?"

Girls Need Less Power?

Have a Very Feminist Christmas: Feminist Books for Kids

at the UK's Guardian

abyss2hope: Investigation Into Sexual Assaults On College Campuses

abyss2hope: Investigation Into Sexual Assaults On College Campuses

In this post, Marcella writes about the sickening shortcomings of established procedures for reporting on-campus rapes.

When I was at Gonzaga, we had several rapes happen in the dorms during the first month of school. One male student accused of rape was an eduation major who was nearly finished with his program. The rape charge would leave him unemployable as a teacher in the future, as Gonzaga was going to be required, if the rape was established as fact, to report to the Washington State education authorities; the student would then not be eligible for teacher certification.

So, the stakes were high.

The female student accusing him of rape was discouraged from contacting police. Campus policy was to do something along the lines of an arbitration. Hmm - in how many other types of crimes is the victim required to sit in a meeting room, without armed police presence, to try to "work things out" with her attacker? This approach still assumes that there was some "misunderstanding" that can possibly be sorted out - some sort of "he said, she said" that a wise third party might be able to resolve.

So, she showed up for the meeting. She did not have legal representation, as she had been told by campus authorities not to bring anyone. The young man, however, had two attorneys with him, and no one made them leave.

Not long after that, we in the Women's Studies club sponsored a "Take Back the Night" rally which included a speak-out on rape. Some of us noticed someone filming the entire speak-out, and at first everyone thought SOMEONE ELSE in our group had authorized it. Over the coming days, however, we learned that school officials had, without permission, set up a video camera to film these women speaking out about their rapes. The video then went to Robert Spitzer, priest and president of the university, who watched it, he said, to be sure the school was legally protected over anything any of the women claiming to have been raped on campus might say. The idea of this priest sitting alone in his office watching that tape wants me feel like vomiting even as I write this, several years later.

The Women's Studies department did succeed in getting shool policy for rape accusations changed after that. We also started doing things to protect women on campus, such as offering escorts for walks home across campus after dark and having many escorts available following school dances and any other organized events.

Part of the problem with reporting rape is that universities are required by the feds to maintain statistics about on-campus crime, and that information must be made available to parents of potential enrollees. Schools, of course, seek to minimize their crime stats, thus they have a strong incentive to keep rape charges quiet, away from the police, in "arbitration," etc. I don't know what the answer is to that one, I really don't.

(I just went to add tags to this post and realized I have NEVER before used "rape" as a tag in one of my posts. WHAT THE HELL?)

Suggestions for a Gay-Bashing Film?

I keep catching my daughter calling things "gay," whether in conversation or on her myspace. I can't seem to get her to stop, even though I have explained several times why it's a problem. Now I'm about to sit the little s**t down and show her something that will get her attention, a film in which violence happens to people because they are "gay."

Any suggestions for what film I might use?

Buying and Selling Women - Who Gets In Trouble?

A teenage girl in New York City is charged as a prostitute:

As her advocate points out, she could not be said to have legally consented to sex in any other context, yet prosecutors will charge her for prostitution.

Meanwhile, the Bejing Olympics promise to be a boon to prostitution and human trafficking in China:

Just a few weeks from now, on August 8, 2008, the Bejing Olympics will begin and sex-for-sale will probably be part of the festivities….

When the World Cup was held in Germany in 2006, Julie Bindel wrote an article, "Foul Play",” in the UK Guardian (30 May 2006) about the explosion in sex trafficking that would be an overlooked sideline of the event. She also pointed out that other major sporting events, like the Olympic Games, are venues for this kind of exploitation. In my dumbness and innocence, it never occurred to me to connect sports and prostitution before reading Bindel’s piece; but I have since learned that sex-for-sale is rife and common, whether it be at the Olympics or the NFL Superbowl. Inevitably, girls are trafficked in, to meet the high customer demand.

Bindel interviewed Alina, “a woman who knows something about the link between sex and sport. She escaped as traffickers tired to bring her into the UK from Athens….She had been abducted from…Moscow for the Olympic Games. When the games ended, Alina was considered ‘second-hand’ and sold on to another criminal gang who transported her to London in the hope that she would make money in a Soho brothel. ‘I was worn out, literally used up and spat out,’ she says, talking from a safe house in London. ‘During the games I saw hundreds of men, some British, who thought that a good time was watching sport, drinking and having sex. We were part of the entertainment.’”

The Olympic torch had a tough time on its journey due to protests over Tibet, a widely covered story. Animal groups have done some protesting of open-air markets where dogs are butchered live and of the bear farms where animals are milked for their bile. But, of all the ‘rights’ violations being leveled against China in order to discredit the Olympics, this particular one–trafficking, which involves all the nations of the world in a spirit of rape and degradation of women–is being ignored, as usual.

For the World Cup, British men could buy condoms at 500 branches of Superdrug with slogans emblazoned on them like ‘Lie Back and Think of England,’ and decorated with the cross of St. George....

China is the largest importer of trafficked Russian girls in Asia, with Korea being second. For the Olympics, will there be a large importing into Beijing and sale of Russians and their Chinese counterparts, along with all the other nationalities currently trafficked into the Chinese sex trade: girls from Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan?

If this is a typical Olympics, it seems a certainty. (Back during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, some male athletes insisted they be given geisha. The Japanese dressed up some pathetic prostitutes in geisha style and sent them to the men.)

Will girls be put to use to service the Olympic tourists in Beijing? Will the athletes themselves be celebrating their victories by buying sex?

via Heart at Women's Space

Yes, because under the patriarchy, every moment of every day is fine for objectifying women, even buying coffee (Occasionally, Best Friend does theme days, such as "schoolgirl" or adding glasses for a sexy "secretary" look, manager Heather Bacon said....At places such as Cowgirls, the barista is the brand."If I'm going to pay $4 for a cup of coffee" said one male customer, "I'm not going to get served by a guy.") and maid service.

In this world of misogyny mated with hyper-capitalism, being sexualized is oh-so empowering for women. Prostitution is "sex work," a free choice (and God knows, individual free choice is to be worshipped). Actresses in pornography are also sex workers, sexually liberated women making free choices (not). Even stripping as exercise is oh-so empowerfulizing. It's even possible to get a stripper pole in your hotel suite. And now, Tesco toy company in the U.K. has been offering stripper poles as toys for young girls - after all, a girl can never be too young to begin learning the joys of sexualized empowerfulment.

Seriously, I'll be post feminist in the post-patriarchy.

An Email Conversation - Contrary Teens

First, my sister passed on the following email from my thirteen year old niece (if this part makes your eyes cross, don't feel bad, just skim it; in fact, I recommend just skimming it).

I had a heated debate with Mom and Dad a few weeks ago about the ethics of robotics (I'm not sure if you remember it, Mom and Dad, but it sure got me
thinking!).

I still don't get why so many people are afraid of the advancement of robotics. Why are people unafraid of computers to the point of not even giving supercomputers a second glance(supercomputers, mind you, that can calculate PI to thousands of places, and can easily defeat the worlds leading chessmasters in the game.), but the thought of Honda's ASIMO humanoid robot terrifies them? Why the bias? One is not any more of a threat than another.

This gave me an idea. You all have heard of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics(If you feel like you don't know enough about them, see this- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics) Though these three laws are mainly just a plot device used in Asimov's robot series, they can be progammed into today's robots. (I will try not to go too technical with this explanation). Have you heard of HARDWARE(not tools like you see at home depot ;) ) and SOFTWARE? You probably have heard of software. That's the sort of thing Microsoft makes. It adds programs to an already existing basic set of programs. The already existing set of programs are very hard to alter or delete, but the software can be changed quite easily. Hardware is the physical representation of the technology(http: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/computer_hardware). Think circuit boards and wires. Things programmed into hardware are designed to not be changed. Thethings can be, but really they're the sort of things you need to leave for the computer to work as desired. It could work so that you could create a non-removable chip (like the CPU of most computers)that had ethics closely resembling the three laws, right next to the CPU. Or, it could be stored as a non-deletable .EXE(or similar file extension) file as the permanent memory of the robot. A wide variety of options are availabe to give an adavnced robot the desired ethics programming, and we can> limit A.I. to allow the enough freedom so that they don't need humans to tell them everything, but they don't put thier own personal twist on thier ethics programing(as seen in the movie I,robot.). It is possible. Robots can be advanced, and with the bonus of thier being little to no risk of the robot breaking the oh-so-important first law of robotics-or even the "0th law"-a robot cannot harm humanity, or through inaction allow humanity to come into harm. All that is limiting this from happening is humanity's unwillingness to accept that this can work, and humanity's unwillingness to give potential builders enough funding to do so.

There is one last quote I want to include form the wikipedia link I included on the three laws. this quote comes from an essay written by Isaac Asimov. "Robots are very similar to tools. The three laws cna be changed just a little and they can fit a tool's laws. 1. A tool must be safe to use. (knives have handles, swords have hilts, and grenades have pins.) 2. A tool must perform it's function correctly unless this would harm the user. 3. A tool must remain intact during it's duration unless it's destruction is required for it's use or for safety."

Think about it...
Love, A
"Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is
to find out if the polls were right?"

My reply to my sister:

How did you manage to raise a kid like this in this culture? Somehow I, radical feminist that I am, have raised a girl who wants to be a model. Help me before I finally off myself.

My cousin's reply:

Of course she wants to be a model BECAUSE you are a radical feminist! When I was that age, I said/wanted/did any and everything that contradicted my mother. She was so uncool! Happily, she is much cooler through the eyes of my adult self!

Thank heaven for wise women! Instead of seeing teenaged rebellion, I was assuming failure as a parent. Sigh.