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Demographics, WOO

Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 by Sady
I know! I am crazy with the numbers lately! This is because I have no idea how statistics are compiled, and therefore see in numbers a certain reassuring purity that rhetoric cannot provide. I mean, I’m sure they are just as skewed as everything else, but I would prefer it if you did not tell me about that. (Also, given the fact that I mistook Indiana for Illinois at one point on election night – I know, and I really do know where they are, I just saw a longish pointy contextless state from afar and I went for it – I am kind of thinking that “shapes” might not be my thing.) So, anyway, this article is very useful when you are thinking about the intersectionality of oppressions, and ladies in general, and the power of your vote.

Because it turns out that women’s votes are totally important in choosing who the president will be! This is true all the time, but this year everybody seems to be like “wow, women, I guess they vote – maybe we should actively strive to represent their interests?” Speaking as someone who actually wrote a letter to Obama’s campaign – yeah, I know, I’m so sure he read it – telling him that the Democratic party was historically the party which most honored the values of feminism, and that I felt more open and earnest statements about his commitment to women’s issues could only help him to win, let me just say this: great, thanks for showing up, dudes. You’re late.

So, men were split 49 to 49 percent between Obama and McCain, whereas women favored Obama over McCain by 53 to 47 percent, meaning that we were crucial to establishing his lead and facilitating his victory. (To the one or two of my lady friends who did not vote: I have another number for you. EIGHTY-EIGHT. It is the number of years that women have had a constitutional right to vote in this country. Also, SEVENTY. That is the number of years that women organized and protested – and were arrested, beaten, tortured and jailed – in order to secure that right. We’ve been full citizens of this country for less than a century. You cannot tell me you are tired of it already.) In a spectacularly duh-making statement, MSNBC points out that “women make up not only more of the general population, but also more of adult voters.”

Here’s the bummer: only forty-six percent of white women voted for Obama. My fellow white ladies, that is gross. What was it that did the rest of you in? Was it the fact that you might get to pay for your own rape kits? The promise that, if your pregnancy threatened your life, you would get to die rather than be forced to have a safe and legal abortion? Was it the thrilling prospect of having a misogynist wife-abuser – who does not think you deserve equal pay or insurance coverage for birth control – as your President? Or was it, you know, THE RACISM? Anyway, various reports seem to show that in communities of color, Obama was the leading candidate, and that women of color voted for Obama in even higher percentages than men of color did. So, thanks; the rest of us apparently need to get our shit together for 2012.

All of this is merely prologue, though, for now I must introduce to you the single most annoying voter demographic of all time: the Unmarried Woman.

Analysts expected Tuesday’s crowds to include record numbers of single women voters, who could help fuel a “marriage gap” that could be more significant than a gender gap, or the difference between how men and women support the same candidate. The Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund registered 900,000 new unmarried female voters, according to Page Gardner, the advocacy agency’s president.

“There’s something about being on your own as a woman in this country that is politically significant,” Gardner said. “Unmarried women are at the razor’s edge of the economic crisis.”

Can we please, for the love of God, stop defining women as either “married” or “single”? I’m not single right now, nor am I married. “Single” and “married” are two ends of a spectrum, and there are about nine million kinds of relationships in between those two points, none of which is any more or less legitimate than any other. This concept works to make lesbian voters invisible, and it also delegitimizes domestic partnerships between men and women – not to mention the fact that I have never in my life heard people talk about the political differences between married and unmarried men. I think marriage is sweet and lovely and nice, and I think everybody should be able to have one, if that’s what they want. However, I also think that we give unwarranted legitimacy to marriages as opposed to other partnerships, and that according women different values depending on whether or not they are married is heterosexist, sexist, and just plain obnoxious.

— AMAZING TRUE STORY TIME —

I once worked at a very small tea shop with two other waitresses. We worked our shifts alone. At that time, I had been living with a partner for about four years. On Mother’s Day, the woman who was supposed to to work the five-hour morning shift called in “sick.” She was married, with kids. I volunteered to cover her shift, even though it was my day off. An hour before that shift ended, I received a call from the tea shop’s owner. The woman who was supposed to work the five-hour evening shift could not come in; her husband, whom she had known for a grand total of two years, had purchased theater tickets. I would need to work the evening shift, too.

“Is there any way you can require her to come in?” I asked. “I don’t mind covering for [Married Lady #1] if she’s sick, but this was my day off, and [my partner] and I had plans. I don’t see why [Married Lady #2’s] plans should be more important than mine, especially if she’s announcing them at the last minute.”

“You don’t understand,” my boss said. “They have to spend time with their husbands.”

And that is the story of how I ended up working a ten-hour shift on my day off because I was not married.

— THE END —

So, yes: I think the “married/alone, SO ALONE” distinction, and the baggage that comes with it, has got to go away. However, I would also like to point something out:

At least 70 percent of unmarried women with and without children supported Obama, a margin of more than 2-to-1.

That’s right, all you Democratic married ladies and men whose marital status is apparently irrelevant to your politics. PRAISE ME. For my people have brought you victory!

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The Last Time I Will Ever Have This Argument

Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 by Sady
If there is one thing we, as a people, have learned from the election, it is this: women be shopping. Oh, and that conventionally attractive women are stupid sluts.

Oh, and also that competent, intelligent women who do not apologize for speaking in an authoritative manner are ugly bitches who should shut the fuck up already and get to cleaning.

So, yeah, it was totally Sarah Palin’s fault that McCain lost. Remember how she was solely responsible for choosing all of the mendacious and negative ads that caused McCain to lose the respect of a huge portion of the voting public? And how she had those three debates with Obama, and performed incredibly poorly at all of them? And how she “suspended” her campaign in a gimmick that all but the most gullible people recognized as a shallow attention-grabbing move unbefitting a serious and credible candidate? Oh, yeah, and there was that time that she said “the fundamentals of the economy were strong” right before the economy blew the fuck up in all of our faces. That really hurt the campaign.

To be fair, though, it’s also completely Hillary’s fault that Obama lost. Her refusal to leave the race after she won on Super Tuesday and had been projected to win it all for quite some time was so totally divisive. The fact that she endorsed him when he won and gave a speech on his behalf at the DNC was just super nasty and bitchy and totally showed her bitterness and unwillingness to recognize the legitimacy of his campaign. Let’s be honest here: Hillary Clinton campaigning for something she had been projected to win as if she actually wanted to win it, and only dropping out after it became clear that she could not win it, was completely the reason that the Democratic party was divided against itself and Obama did not win by a huge margin.

So, clearly, we don’t have a President now, which totally sucks. You know who ruined it for the two men in question? Fucking women. When men are elected, it is completely due to their own merits, and the reason that no woman has ever been elected to the Presidency or the Vice-Presidency of the United States is that no woman has ever been good enough. But, even though women aren’t smart or powerful enough to serve in those offices, they do have the magical power of completely derailing campaigns run by otherwise blameless men. We’ve come a long damn way.

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Upon Learning that Michael Crichton Died…

Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 by Sady

… reasonable people everywhere were faced with one important question: will it be possible to clone him and turn him into a theme park exhibit?


What? Too soon?

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What It Looks Like

Posted on Wednesday, November 5, 2008 by Sady
So, yes, I burst into tears last night, but now I want to tell you why.

A few days ago I wrote this:

Most people do not belong to the (incredibly small) demographic of white, straight, middle-class men at which most “mainstream” media is targeted; most of us will, at least once per day, be smacked in the face with a message that tells us we are unimportant or inferior, and most of us learn to shrug those messages off.

I was thinking about the election when I wrote that. I was thinking about the election, and I was thinking about the most basic and most urgent task that I engage in every single day: looking at that white/straight/middle class/male narrative of America – the atmosphere through which I move, every day, absorbing its countless messages that only those people truly belong in this country or this world, that only they matter, that only they can ever be imagined when we say the word “American” or even “person” – and understanding that for what it is, and talking back to it. I don’t do this because I want to; I do it because I have to, in order to believe that I belong in this world.

There were two men who shaped the course of my education: Sekou Sundiata and Gary Lemons. Sundiata taught me to write. He insisted that I learn the necessary discipline and technique, while acknowledging that writing was – or should be – only one facet of a greater engagement with the world. He told me that your message is your instrument: it doesn’t matter how beautiful that instrument is if you can’t play it. Lemons shaped the nature of my political engagement. On the day I met him he stood in front of the classroom and told us about his childhood: his father’s violence, his mother’s pain, and how he learned to internalize racism, which told him he was worth nothing, and sexism, which told him that black women were worth even less. He spoke of political engagement as a life-saving action, a recovery, which allowed him to overcome the ugliest aspects of his own socialization and work to heal the same wounds in others. I do not engage with this theory because it is intellectually interesting, he said, I do it because without it I would be insane or dead.

I knew that it was true. It was true for him, and it was true for me. I was falling apart that year. I was living with the memory of my father’s violence, and my mother’s pain. I was coping with the ways that I had swallowed the misogyny embodied in that family dynamic whole, and had treated myself – or allowed others to treat me – as a piece of meat or a garbage dump because of my gender. I was coping with my departure from the very white, very racist community I had grown up in, and was uncovering unconscious prejudices and attitudes of entitlement in myself to which I had never consciously admitted – and I had never had to admit them, because within that very white, very racist community, they were simply normal.

You want to talk about hope: I will tell you about Gary Lemons and Sekou Sundiata. I do this theory because without it I would be insane or dead; your message is your instrument, so learn to play it. These men were never easy on me, or on any of their students. They called me out, over and over again, for sloppiness in my work, for errors in my arguments, and for exhibiting a privileged, entitled white middle-class feminism which reified the system I claimed to be working against. I owe them more than I can express.

Lemons, who had been openly critical of the school’s student diversity and faculty hiring policies, was fired a year after I met him; he had served at the college for more than a decade. Sekou Sundiata died last year.

So, yes, directly after Obama’s victory speech, I excused myself from the room, and I went out onto the sidewalk, and I cried, harder than I have cried in years. It was not about the Democrats winning, or about me getting what I wanted, which was a Democratic win. It was about the fact that people have given their lives to this work, and many have suffered for it, and many have died, and some may have believed, as they died, that it was worthless. Many have developed, as I have, an ugly cynicism – we push for things that we don’t honestly believe can be achieved, so that, when we lose, we don’t mourn. We just say, what more would you expect from this country? I want you to believe me that, when I cried last night, I was grieving. I was also feeling that cynicism lift from me. I was realizing that it had been so, so, so heavy.

The narrative is wrong. It has always been wrong. “People” and “Americans” and “America” do not look like forty-three white married men of means. They look like this:


Yes, evil still exists. No, electing Barack Obama did not magically solve racism or end the dominance of the master narrative. Yes, we have a lot of work to do. You know, last night, this kid showed up to the party:

He is still going to grow up in a world where his success and his comfort are prized more than those of others, because of his gender and his race. He will still see that people who look like him occupy the most respected and powerful positions far more often than people who do not. He will still be taught in schools where the intellectual and artistic accomplishments of people who look like him are considered “canonical” or “foundational” or simply “great” works, with no identity-based qualifier, whereas the contributions of people who do not are typically described as “great works by women” or “great works by African-Americans” or what have you, rhetorically and conceptually separated from pure (white, male, straight) “greatness.” He will still be encouraged to consider his successes as entirely his own, without taking into account the privileges and support networks that people who look like him necessarily inherit, which have made his success not only possible but likely. He will still live in a world where it is unlikely for him to gain the critical apparatus necessary to understand his own privilege, or the empathy necessary to join others in dismantling the institutions and assumptions which make it possible. He is still, most likely, going to make things harder for the rest of us, without entirely knowing what he is doing, or why.

I know this. I know this because I am a white, straight, college-educated, middle-class professional, and I am constantly extended privileges that I do not deserve, and I am constantly encouraged to simply embrace those privileges as my birthright. It is easy, safe and comfortable for privileged people like me – and lots of people are privileged, like me – to affirm and reinforce the structures of oppression; it is painful, dangerous, and difficult for us to resist them. But I believe that, in order for last night’s victory to happen, millions of people had to vote against their own privilege. They had to defy that master narrative for long enough to cast their votes. I hope that we are able to continue this; I hope that we continue to reach past the politics of pure self-interest. I hope that boy is going to be able to carry this moment with him, and to serve its spirit. He is going to need good teachers.

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Vote Yes on Michelle Obama

Posted on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 by Sady

Happy Voting Day! How was your experience? No matter how good it was, it can’t compare to the experience that these folks had: 
That is because they have the Most Amazing Marriage of All Time. 
I will be honest with you: I’ve liked Barack Obama since 2004. After his speech at the DNC that year, I, like many people, believed that he had the capacity to be a major figure in American politics – maybe even President. He had good politics, a clear vision, and a capacity for energizing people that I thought would be extremely valuable. I did not love Barack Obama, however, until I found out that he was married to Michelle. 
I know, I know: for most of this country’s history, the most prominent political position available to women has been that of Lady Who Is Married to the Dude In Charge, and that is lame. Still, I think you can tell a lot about a person’s character by who that person chooses to partner with and how they relate to each other, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. You can definitely tell a lot about a man’s relationship to feminism by watching how he relates to the women around him. John McCain called his wife a cunt; John McCain put air quotes around “women’s health.” These two incidents are not unrelated. As a feminist, I respected Barack Obama more, and was happier to support him, after learning about his relationship with Michelle, and with their daughters. 
Because Michelle Obama scares people. She’s opinionated. She’s accomplished. She’s politically engaged. She’s funny – and not in a broad, crowd-pleasing way, but in a deadpan, sarcastic way that can be cutting. She is most likely smarter than you. She’s also a black woman, and she exists within a cultural context where all of these qualities are feared, demonized and suppressed in women (we’re called “bitches”) and black people (they’re called “bitter” or “angry”) and especially in black women (for God’s sake, the Angela Davis thing). To fall in love with a woman like Michelle Obama, you have to fall in love, not only with these qualities, but with the sheer strength it must take for her to own them and wear them on her sleeve when every day, everywhere, everyone around her is pressuring her to shut up. You have to be one hell of a man to do that, or to earn that woman’s love and respect. You have to be her equal. 
Which is a tough job, because look at how awesome this woman is: 

Of the Iowa State Fair’s corn dogs and candied apples, obligingly gushed over by hopeful First Ladies every four years: “Stuff on a stick.” Here’s Obama, talking to me in her motorcade halfway between Sheboygan, Wisconsin and Green Bay about Obama Girl, the young woman who professed her crush on Obama’s husband all over the internet: “That was a little weird, because, you know… I just assumed, you know, there’s no way anybody’s gonna hear about that. And one day Sasha comes home, and she’s like, ‘Daddy has a girlfriend. It’s you, Mommy.’ And it’s, like, ‘Oh, shhhhhhhhh — yeah.'” Curse word averted, barely.

Traditionally, candidates’ wives – including this year’s alternate model, the hollow-eyed corpse of Betty Draper – speak of their husbands in reverential platitudes, rhapsodizing about their roles as perfectly submissive helpmeets to the Great Men and painting their relationships in sugary pastel tones that would ring false even if they hadn’t been repeated a million times in other elections. Here is how Michelle Obama describes her position on her husband’s campaign: 

Obama has been open about the value of her ability to speak to black audiences in cadences that reflect their experience, but she makes clear her distaste for the notion that she is a niche tool, wielded by her husband’s campaign to woo black voters solely on the basis of their shared racial identity… “I mean, I’ve been to every early state,” she told me… “I was ‘deployed’ to Iowa,” she said, making air quotes with her fingers. “I was ‘deployed’ to New Hampshire.”

So, Michelle Obama: invested in the campaign, committed to involving communities of color in the electoral process (her thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” was about being assimilated into an overwhelmingly white establishment through education while being aware that, within that environment, she was treated as “black first and a student second” due to continuing institutional racism – BECAUSE SHE’S BRILLIANT) and not about to let herself be described as a passive tool of her husband’s agenda or a person who can be exploited by the Democratic party on the basis of her race. 
So much for the helpmeet theory! How about their relationship? Surely she’s deferential to the mighty Barack Obama: 

“We would have this running debate throughout our relationship about whether marriage was necessary,” Obama told me. “It was sort of a bone of contention, because I was, like, ‘Look, buddy, I’m not one of these types who’ll just hang out forever.’ You know, that’s just not who I am. He was, like” – she broke into a wishy-washy voice – “‘Marriage, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s really how you feel.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, right.'”

So, let’s pause for a moment. You are in a relationship with a really great guy, who you really like, and you end up having one of those Commitment Discussions, in which he takes the inevitable “but it doesn’t meeeean anything, it’s just a piece of paaaaaper” route, pursued by dudes all over the world since approximately forever. You know damn well it means something, because if it didn’t, he wouldn’t be freaking out about it. Still, you really, really like this guy – you wouldn’t be having this discussion if you didn’t – and breaking up with him would hurt like hell, but then again, so would staying in a relationship where the other person always has one foot out the door. Then AGAIN, his argument is insanely well-framed and persuasive, because he is BARACK FREAKING OBAMA FOR GOD’S SAKE, and can you even imagine having a Relationship Discussion with Barack Obama? By the end of it, you’d be sobbing with joy and chanting, “yes! I! Can! Take! Out! The garbage! You! Are! Tired!” So you look this man in the eye, and you say, with resounding conviction, “whatever, dude – get on the train before it leaves the station.” 
How awesome is that? Please rate your answers on a scale from “one” to “Michelle Obama.” 
Anyway, we all know how that turned out: 
And: 
And: 
AUGHHH GOD THE BEAUTY IT BURNS MY EYESSSSSS. 
So, long story short, he’s probably going to be President. He deserves it. He deserves her, too. Which is saying something. 
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I Hath Some Fury: Criticism and the Boy’s Club

Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 by Sady

One thing you can do, if you are bored, is to read the AV Club article entitled “Hell hath no fury: 22 films about vengeful women.” While you are reading it, you might want to count the implications of and synonyms for sexist dog-whistles such as “irrational,” “overreaction,” “crazy,” and “selfish.” It turns out there are quite a few!

When you’ve finished reading that article, you can ask yourself how often they frame male revenge in the same light (as an emotional, irrational, selfish, out of control – dare we say hysterical? – response) or whether this piece will be complemented by a list of 22 narratives about vengeful men. This, by the way, would be an easy list to compile, since huge chunks of literature and culture, from Hamlet and The Count of Monte Cristo to Memento and Star Wars, are predicated on men avenging something or other. Then again, revenge and aggression (and especially violent actions taken in the name of “defending one’s honor”) are assumed to be intrinsic to masculinity, whereas the same actions taken by women are assumed to be freakish, out-of-control, and frightening.

Finally, you can ask yourself why all the “vengeful women” films on the list are specifically about women revenging themselves on men – Heathers didn’t even make the list, for example – and why six out of the eight writers who compiled the list were men (which is fairly reflective of the AV Club’s overall gender balance). You may ask yourself what this says about how much men fear women’s anger, and how they tell themselves stories about female anger which make women out to be far greater monsters than the men who anger them in the first place. Or, you may just roll your eyes.

If you really want to get depressed, you can think about this article within the context of the AV Club as a whole, including that awful recent attempt to defend the rape-exploitation flick Irreversible. (Plot summary: a woman refuses to have anal sex with her boyfriend; that same woman is anally raped by a different man in a graphic nine-minute-long scene. The rapist is a gay man – yeah, I KNOW – so the boyfriend tracks him to his gay club of choice and beats his face in with a fire extinguisher. Is there any way to read this movie as not fundamentally based in straight male sexual anxiety and corresponding hatred of women and queers? No. But that won’t stop the AV Club from trying to find one!) There was also that cringe-inducing Fight Club article by the same writer (Scott Tobias) in which he proclaimed that Fight Club was “the quintessential Generation X film,” just before asserting that it was “by men, for men, and about men.”

Now, I agree that Fight Club is very specifically by, for, and about dudes, but let’s do the math here. Women comprise roughly 51% of the population, so Fight Club is the quintessential movie of a generation – for slightly less than half of that generation. Actually, since Fight Club is entirely focused on heterosexual men, it’s only “for” the straight portion of that male 49%; since it’s an explicitly white movie, and “Generation X” as commonly conceptualized is a pretty white thing anyway, that makes the target group even smaller; since it’s specifically about middle-class alienation, that makes the number smaller yet again. So, Fight Club is the quintessential movie of its generation, if you belong to the most privileged group within that generation, which is vastly outnumbered by all of those people who do not belong to it and are marginalized by that group’s privilege.

Why are we celebrating that, again?

(Oh, and: did Scott Tobias play any role in writing that “Hell hath no fury” article? The answer will not surprise you.)

If you are someone who visits the AV Club frequently, as I am, you may be used to gritting your teeth a little when you read it – because the commenters use Amelie Gillette’s anti-Joe-Francis piece to ask if there are any “hipster” equivalents to Girls Gone Wild (in response, someone else bemoans the fact that only “ugly” girls have good taste in music), or because every post concerning a moderately attractive woman elicits at least 5,000 comments about “getting a boner” or “jacking it,” or because this post managed to stay up for about thirty seconds before the rape jokes started. Or, perhaps, because even Nathan Rabin – the most talented writer on the site, the guy whose work got me reading the AV Club in the first place – took the occasion, in a recent piece, to write this:

The book’s thin veneer of feminist outrage becomes even more ludicrous in light of the disquieting fact that most of the filthy whores in the book subsequently sued Dove Audio, the makers of the You’ll Never Make Love In This Town Again book-on-tape, for sexual harassment. Oh, the mixed messages!

Yes. That’s right. Even Rabin, the single best writer on the staff – who might well be one of the best contemporary critics, period – will, if given the opportunity, opine that women who are openly and assertively sexual with some men must be sexually available to all men, and that they have no right to decline sexual service to anyone or to seek legal protection when their boundaries are violated in an unlawful manner. Basically, he will turn into Aaron P. Taylor right before your eyes.

This isn’t misogyny; it’s not that simple, or that conscious. The men who comprise the majority of the AV Club’s writing staff (along with the men who have similar jobs at other publications; let’s be honest, pop criticism is a male-dominated field) don’t frame their work specifically in the context of white, straight, male, middle-to-upper-class experience because they hate people who do not belong to that group, or even because they consciously believe that group to be more important than others. They do it because that’s how privilege works. Privilege causes ignorance of the lived realities of non-privileged individuals, and a corresponding insensitivity to them; it grants the privileged individual the luxury of assuming that his own viewpoints and experiences are “authoritative” and “universal.”

That is the tragedy: that no matter how smart or talented a specific man may be, he will always be working within a system that rewards him for not taking his own privilege into account, and that therefore deprives him of the full use of his intellect or talent. I believe that Nathan Rabin is smarter than the paragraph I just quoted. (As for Scott Tobias – I’m not so sure.) I just don’t think Rabin’s editors or peers will call him out on that paragraph in a way that allows him to learn from his mistakes. If they do, one hopes that he’ll be thankful; however, in my experience, that’s not usually how those conversations go.

Then, too, there is the fact that most people do not belong to the (incredibly small) demographic of white, straight, middle-class men at which most “mainstream” media is targeted; most of us will, at least once per day, be smacked in the face with a message that tells us we are unimportant or inferior, and most of us learn to shrug those messages off, because it would simply be too taxing to deconstruct, examine, and respond to every single one. Every once in a while, however, it becomes impossible not to react. None of the attitudes that I’ve described here are unique to the AV Club. However, it’s especially hurtful to find them at the AV Club, because, in all other respects, it’s a great site. These people are professional critics – good critics, who have a keen eye for the lazy, worn-out, stupid, and trite – and yet they can’t see how lazy, stupid, and antiquated it is to privilege white, straight, middle-class, male experiences and attitudes above all others, either in art or in one’s critical response to it. If they’re not smart enough to see through the bullshit, what are the odds for everyone else?

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Behold Ye Now the Merrye Comedie of Aaron P. Taylor & his Men

Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 by Sady

CHORUS:
Two households, unalike in dignity
In Tiger Beatdown, where we lay our scene
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny;
Dude’s based his whole damn world view on his peen.

SOME POSTER (hereinafter named “Mercdouchio”):
Wow! you really twisted his words around… Don’t forget that the dancing woman started this. She approached HIM and had the audacity to ram her ass in his groin. According to his article, he was dancing alone and she came up to him.

CHORUS:
From woman’s boldness springs all misery;
To dance and not to fuck is trickery!

MERCDOUCHIO:
Secondly, he is not a rapist, he walked away from the situation. He just thought that OTHER men might not be so forgiving.

CHORUS:
He doth forgive! He shall not now thee rape,
Though thou hast made his peen into a jape!

MERCDOUCHIO:
Wow! what a crime, lets lock up Aaron, for thinking that some guy has the POTENTIAL to harm another woman by misreading the flagrant flirtatious behavior (IMHO also extremely classless).

CHORUS:
To rape is sin, yet shows it no less class
Than letting Aaron Taylor touch thine ass?
Methinks Some Poster doth protest too much
That ladies make men rapists by their touch.

MERCDOUCHIO:
Aaron clearly does not approve of rape in any way, and you twisting his words to serve a tired argument (women aren’t responsible for their behavior), is damaging to telling women that this COULD happen.

CHORUS:
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is a post on Aaron Taylor’s site!
See what course of appeasement now he takes
For women raped, who call his words a blight.

AARON P. TAYLOR:
What I’m saying is, women need to stop always playing the victim role – i.e. the “OMG, I was doing absolutely NOTHING to bring this incident upon me“ role – and start taking responsibility for their actions, actions that can – sometimes – contribute to a guy wanting to sex her without her consent… to all the rape victims who have commented on the article and verbally bashed me for being insensitive to what they went through: please take heed that I am NOT doing that. I am fully aware that there are women (and men – nobody ever brings up the fact that men get raped, too) out there who get raped and didn’t wear a skimpy outfit, or tease a guy, or give a guy any impression that she wanted to have sex with him… Maybe I’m wrong for thinking that a woman might actually be SMART and INTELLIGENT enough to take responsibility for her actions, or realize that, while men SHOULD be smart enough back off when she says no, not all men are going to do so after she’s been giving them signals all night that indicate she’ll kiss or have sex with them.

CHORUS:
Pro-rape? Is not a rapist’s conscience served
By saying that some rape is undeserved
But only that which doth befall the “smart?”
Thou hast a dick; now grow thyself a heart.
Is not a woman’s body hers to give
Or to withhold, as long as she shall live?
There never is a story of more woe
Than this, of men who cannot hark to “no.”

Exeunt Dancing Woman, the Sexist, assorted Jezebels, the Sister of Shakespeare, Various Gentlefolk of Comment, Mercdouchio, Aaron P. Taylor, and the Beater of Tigers, who is Bored.

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Douche (Noun): Something a Reasonable Woman Wouldn’t Put in Her Vagina

Posted on Saturday, November 1, 2008 by Sady

Some men aspire to be famous douches; others are happy to toil in douche obscurity until the light of internet fame shines upon them. Then, there are men who arise, in the space of a moment, to the heights of douchery – men like young Ian Sloane, of Wheaton College, who inquires: 

I have a question, addressed to any academic (or social) studiers of women at Wheaton; When will the woman stop playing into the traditional gender role, submitting to a hot and steamy smooch on the lips while griping about male dominance in relationships out of the corner of her mouth?

Ha ha, yeah, when will we? (Also: the traditional gender role… OF KISSING? Since when does a woman “submit” to kissing? I thought we liked to smooch!) In answer to your question, Ian, we will probably stop griping around the time dudes stop saying things like this: 

In a surprisingly musical moment of clarity, I realized all women are prostitutes.

Now, keep in mind that Ian Sloane does not mean “prostitute” in the sense of “a person who is paid a pre-negotiated fee in exchange for facilitating the orgasms of his or her client.” He means it in the sense that dudes who say things like this tend to mean it – to denote any woman who has expectations of the dude she is dating, no matter how small those expectations are, and no matter what she gives him. Women: they want things! Things like “anniversary gifts!” And “free car rides!” And “ridiculous time commitments!” Relationships today, they are crazy, Ian Sloane says – mostly because they involve women: 

In spite of all the hooplah about the modern independent woman, ladies these days are trying to have the best of both worlds by assuming dominant roles but still requiring regular affirmations of love and commitment.

Women are asking for affirmations of love and commitment? THOSE DIRTY WHORES. When will they realize that the best way to date Ian Sloane is to not want to go out on dates with him? 
But wait: I don’t want to go out on a date with Ian Sloane. In fact, I’ve been not going out on dates with Ian Sloane for years. Ever since I’ve been old enough to date, I’ve not been having dates with Ian Sloane. Does this mean we’ve been together all along? 
I mean, it’s the perfect relationship! He’s never bought me a gift, I’ve never been in his car, I’ve never asked him to spend any time with me, and I can safely say that I will never want him to demonstrate any love or commitment to me! I’ve never even met him. This raises so many questions: have I been cheating on Ian? What does this mean for my prior commitments? It’s clear now that this is my major relationship. Perhaps I should become a nun, or an anchorite, retreating into lifelong isolation so that I can enjoy the absence that is perfect intimacy.  
As for all the other women who are not dating Ian: don’t worry ladies, I’m not jealous. There’s more than enough of his lovelessness to go around. 
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And the Lord Said: Thou Shalt Not Meet Thine Dates on the Facebook…

Posted on Friday, October 31, 2008 by Sady

… nor shalt thou convene with them in the bars, nor in their apartments, nor go unto them on All Hallow’s Eve and eat of the roast chicken prepared there. (Guess what I’m doing tonight? PARTY.) 

This is a pretty obscure commandment, actually, but Melissa McEwan points out that at least one Hell House is dedicated to preaching it: 

A girl makes friends with a guy on Facebook. They decide to go out on a date. When they meet, the guy brutally rapes her. A demon emerges from the shadows, sneering, and tells her she deserved it. She shouldn’t have agreed to meet someone from one of those sinful online communities.

 

Here I thought I was being safe! I sure have learned a lot this week. For those keeping track, here are some places you should never show interest in boys, lest you get a deserved molestering: 
  • Clubs
  • Bars
  • Any location outside of your apartment
  • Your apartment
  • The Internet
  • Planet Earth
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OMG my BFF Aaron P. Taylor!

Posted on Friday, October 31, 2008 by Sady

You know: Aaron P. Taylor, who did not rape you (although he totally could have, and he thinks you deserved it), is a very sensitive guy. Aaron P. Taylor is an artist who did not rape you; an iconoclast who did not rape you; a thinker of thoughts about raping you (OR NOT), which he selflessly shares with the world. So imagine how hurt Aaron P. Taylor was when his silly little blog post about “How Not To Get a ‘Deserved’ Raping” got folks all in a huff! I mean, all of these mean Internet people – Jezebel, Shakesville, the Washington City Paper – kept linking to Aaron P. Taylor, and saying mean things about Aaron P. Taylor, and even (gasp!) commenting on Aaron P. Taylor’s blog.

Look, Aaron P. Taylor is going to say this ONE TIME, so you all better listen up:

It’s stupid for any woman to believe that she can go through life teasing guy after guy after guy after guy, and not think that at least ONE of them might take what she thinks is a “joking” lil’ tease routine too seriously, to the point where he thinks she’s still “joking” when she says she really doesn’t want sex. If you’re constantly putting yourself in positions or situations where there’s a possibility of something like that happening, it’s only a matter of time before it might eventually happen.

See? Aaron P. Taylor thinks that women who get raped are stupid and bring it upon themselves! Why are people so upset about that? Aaron P. Taylor can’t imagine!

Anyway, it’s really rough on Aaron P. Taylor when you blog about him. So stop it, OK? Especially you two:

I wasn’t going to even do a rebuttal to this post… but then I found out that other blog sites have been re-posting this article and saying negative things about me personally. (To read some of these sites, you can click http://news.mensactivism.org/node/10802, or http://tigerbeatdown.blogspot.com/2008/10/andrew-p-taylor-did-not-rape-you-he.html [this one is pretty sarcastic, but kinda funny].)

Wha… wait a second. Did Aaron P. Taylor just say that I’m funny? Oh, my god, you guys, does this mean that we are destined to be friends… or possibly more? I can imagine running with Aaron P. Taylor through a field of daisies, holding his hand, sharing a cone of ice cream with him… I’d run my fingers through Aaron P. Taylor’s pencil-thin douche beard and gaze tenderly into Aaron P. Taylor’s non-lazy eye… and all the while, Aaron P. Taylor would be not raping me, unless I accidentally turned him on, in which case he’d pretty much have to… Aaron P. Taylor: imagine me and you! And you, and me! No matter how you toss the dice, it’s meant to be!

IIIIII CAN’T SEE ME [BEING VIOLENTLY RAPED BY] NOBODY BUT [AARON P. TAYLOR] FOR ALL MY LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFE!!!!

Ha ha ha, oh, we have fun, don’t we? But wait: did I just made a joke about sex with Aaron P. Taylor? Because we all know that “joking” about sex with Aaron P. Taylor means that Aaron P. Taylor will later think you are “joking” when you decline to actually have sex with Aaron P. Taylor. So that means…

OH MY GOD HE’S COMING RUN RUN LOCK ALL THE DOORS AAAAAAAHHHHHH.

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