“Rape jokes are not jokes. Woman-hating jokes are not jokes.”

some simple advice:

Listen. The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He’s telling you how he sees it.

The guy who says, “bros before hos”, is asking you to make a pact.

The Pact. The social structure that allows the predators to hide in plain sight, to sit at the bar at the same table with everyone, take a target home, rape her, and stay in the same social circle because she can’t or won’t tell anyone, or because nobody does anything if she does. The pact to make excuses, to look for mitigation, to patch things over — to believe that what happens to our friends — what our friends do to our friends — is not (using Whoopi Goldberg’s pathetic apologetics) “rape-rape”.

Change the culture… [W]e need to change the environment that the rapist operates in. Choose not to be part of a rape-supportive environment. Rape jokes are not jokes. Woman-hating jokes are not jokes. These guys are telling you what they think. When you laugh along to get their approval, you give them yours. You tell them that the social license to operate is in force; that you’ll go along with the pact to turn your eyes away from the evidence; to make excuses for them; to assume it’s a mistake, of the first time, or a confusing situation. You’re telling them that they’re at low risk.

from … Rape, In Theory And Practice @ yes means yes!

a new favorite blog!

Barnyard Chorus
– an excellent Singaporean feminist and generally progressive group blog whose whole concept and approach i really love; from their “About us”:

Barnyard Chorus are a bunch of very concerned livestock members of the public that have a lot to say about the running of the world by our human and feral counterparts. And although through our writing we may not strike you as cuddly cute, we are actually quite friendly and amenable to letting you pet us for a minute, in exchange for a nominal treat.
Send your offer to peasant barnyard engineer, Farmer Plant’alot–let us think about it before we have our people call your people

:)

it’s interesting that Singapore is currently working for legislation against marital rape, which is something we have only recently started to take seriously in Romania, as in many European states, actually – through the removal of the line in the penal code that absolved a rapist if he married the victim and the addition in the definition of aggravated rape of a line about “victims who are family members” – and which indeed is still missing in many countries (see also 2008 UNIFEM report, figure 5.3), and a problem including in the U.S., in spite of spousal rape being criminalized in all 50 states. anyway, i like the Barnyard Chorus because it’s very active(-ist) and current and informative, but also well written, thoughtful, diverse, and, yeah, funny.

on “the danger of the single story”

“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to disposess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower and humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that dignity.
[…] When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a ‘kind of paradise.'”

(via flip flopping joy: “The danger of a single story”)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

a racist, classist “pro-education” campaign

“Minister Kocáb disgusted with Slovak Roma advertising” (via h.)

Prague, Oct 8 (CTK) – Czech Human Rights and Ethnic Minorities Minister Michael Kocab considers the method of advertising education used by Romany workers from Slovakia cynical and calculating, his spokeswoman Lejla Abbasova told CTK Thursday.

Workers from Slovakia, mainly Romanies, who repaired communications in Prague centre on Wednesday wore yellow T-shirts with the inscription “I should have studied harder!, thus becoming walking advertisements for education.

The inscription also mentioned the web address www.skoly.cz that participates in the event with the Underline communication agency.

[…] Kocab said such advertising was deepening a degrading stereotype of an uneducated Romany.

According to Pravo, the workers allegedly got cigarettes, beer and sausages as a reward for the participation in the advertising campaign.

They allegedly agreed to wear the advertising T-shirts voluntarily, Pravo writes.

However, the www.romea.cz server, which also informed about the event, said that the workers refused to put on the T-shirts Thursday. The server described the event as offending.
Continue reading

excellent interview: judith halberstam

JH: I think it is queer theory and feminist theory that is needed. It is very hard to get these perspectives into public discourse. That is the problem. So you have this guy going around shooting people feeling ignored or that something was denied him, and it is hard to insert a political discourse that is not just like “this was just a one crazy dude who went off”, but getting a more considered analysis of why male rage takes this form. That is a feminist question. Why is it a feminist question? Because no other political subject probably would ask that question in that form: Why does male rage take this form? Female rage takes a form of maybe child abuse, sometimes, maybe self-mutilation, maybe anorexia, maybe schizophrenia. It does not take the form of a woman picking up a machine gun and blowing people away. It really does not. We are hard pressed to think of such an event anywhere. So it seems like one of the distinguished features of the ones performing these acts of mass slaughter is maleness. And there I would say a feminist analysis is necessary, and almost impossible to get in the public sphere, because feminism is an afterthought, or considered to be a historical artifact at this point.

read the whole thing: Trikster: “The eccentric archive: An interview with Judith Halberstam” (via)

–> Judith Halberstam