The Perils of Bad Titles (and poorly thought out analogies)

I take full responsibility for the kerfuffle I caused last week with my Role/Reboot latest. It was not my most sensitive or thoughtful work and I did some harm where I meant to only raise questions.

I often think that flipping pronouns is a useful way of analyzing the role that gender is playing in media coverage. We’ve looked at examples before, like coverage of Marissa Mayer or a story about a teenage heart throb’s virginity.

Last week, fed up with the excessive victim blaming that goes into coverage of high-profile sexual assault cases, like the recent piece on Hobart Williams and Smith, or Steubenville, I wrote an essay exploring what happens when we flip pronouns on the victims and imagine these cases if young men were raped instead of young women. Would we still say an 11-year-old boy “lured” men like a “spider,” as we did in Cleveland, TX? Would the “Princeton Mom” still say it’s “all on him” if a male college student was too drunk to prevent his rape? I don’t think we would, and I still think that there’s value in exploring how language can expose bias.

But, I made a few mistakes. The biggest one was the title, which I suggested and my editor confirmed: “If Straight Men Were Raped: How Pronouns Change the Conversation About Victim Blaming.*” Do you see the problem? I kind of can’t believe I missed it. Of course straight men are raped. This is not a hypothetical, fantastical suggestion; straight men are raped by other men. In fact, as was pointed out by several readers, although women are assaulted far more frequently, one of the key reasons male victims don’t come forward (i.e. one of the reasons we have so many fewer media examples to refer to), is precisely because the stigmas on male victims are unique.

I did not intend to write an essay on those particular stigmas, as I don’t feel equipped or educated enough to do so. But I also did not intend to belittle or shame straight men that have been raped, nor to downplay the equally-horrible but differently-shaped reactions that those survivors get. Here are a few responses that better articulate the issue:

“A LOT of rape of men by men is disregarded because people think he must’ve given off some sort of “gay” thing that made him seem to want it. There are different ways in which male survivors have their rapes and SAs denied, mostly via homophobia. And god help you find support if you actually are GBT or Q. Obviously we know there are serious issues with GBTQ men who are sexually assaulted. I’d bet pretty much nobody is marginalized when it comes to sexual assault more than LGBTQ populations in general.” – from Joanna Schroeder, Good Men Project

“But where you say that you are merely trying to highlight inappropriate use of gendered language around victims, I contend that you are doing to male victims the very thing you are fighting against – namely grossly distorting and dismissing the realities that we live under. In effect, you are throwing male victims under the bus in order to make a point about female victims that no one in their right mind would argue against.” – From Chris Anderson, MaleSurvivors.org

I hope that the content of the article makes clear that I believe all victims deserve respect and that no one, of any gender or sexual orientation, should be shamed, stigmatized, ostracized, or blamed, for their assault. I also hope that Chris and Joanna’s responses help illuminate some subtleties that I missed in my first pass.

 

*We changed the title later to “If Straight Men Were Raped As Often As Women….” – Better, but not great.

Related Post: “After donation regret” and other rape analogies

Related Post: Using pronoun-flipping on Serena Williams’ Steubenville comments.

Game of Thrones and “Sex” on TV

If you are all up in the guts of the Internet where TV and commentary collide, you have already read a novel and a half of haterade about last night’s episode of Game of Thrones. For long, articulate, backed-by-evidence arguments, see Margaret Lyons at NYMag and Sonia Soraiya at AV Club. 

Before I tell you why I’m pissed, let’s back up:

Mother daughter conversations about sex can are awkward enough even if one of them, ahem, doesn’t write about it on the Internet. My mom and I are what you might describe as a classic second wave/third wave duo. We agree about 85% of the time, and usually differ, if only slightly, on sex-related topics like pornography and prostitution. In short, I usually err on the side of who-am-I-to-tell-her-what-to-do-with-her-body? and my mother usually errs on the side of contributes-to-a-culture-of-oppression-and-objectification. We’re both right, obviously, and one day we’ll find the middle ground.

So anyway, last week, my mom emails to complain about “sex on TV.” She lists House of Cards and House of Lies as two prime examples of shows that only feature what she describes as “I don’t even know what to call it, but sex from what I call a degrading position.” I often approach other people’s sex lives–even fictional other people–from a to-each-her-own, doesn’t-look-fun-to-me-but-who-am-I, anything-goes-between-consenting-adults angle, wary of condemning someone else’s good time lest someone try to rain on mine.

The problem as I see it is not that this specific type of sex is what we see on TV, it’s that this is the only type of sex we see on TV. Specifically, it is the only type of sex men see on TV. They aren’t watching Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Wife, or Nashville, where sex is sometimes “animalistic” to use my mother’s word, but is also sometimes gentle, sometimes kind, sometimes romantic, sometimes spontaneous, sometimes between strangers, sometimes between lovers, and sometimes even features sex acts that most women enjoy.

But that is not what we get on TV that men watch. We get mostly rough sex. We get mostly condom-less sex. We get very little cunnilingus, very little foreplay, very few indications that female characters are enjoying themselves in the least. And while I do not in any way want to shit on the the specific kind of sex that any particular person is consensually enjoying (if that is your thing, knock yourself the fuuuuuck out), I do find it highly problematic that we get such a narrow sliver delivered to us with our HBO Go accounts and “prestige” TV.

[Spoiler Alert]

So. Game of Thrones.  In last night’s episode, after Joffrey’s gruesome wedding death, Cersei’s private moment of mourning was interrupted by Jaime, who, angry that she’d been cold-shouldering him, raped her on the floor of the temple where their dead son was displayed. As many others have said, I’m not outraged that a rape was depicted, if that’s what was intended for legitimate storytelling purposes, but I am very much outraged that some people, director included, don’t seem to think this was a rape scene.

What the fucking fuck do you think is a rape scene? To these not-a-rape-scene advocates, was that supposed to look like sex? Because it didn’t; it looked like rape. Kicking. Crying. Begging. Verbal “Nos”. Requests to stop…. Clue me in to which part of that looks like consensual sex…

And therein lies the problem. When depicted “sex” looks too much like rape, it makes some people–young people, dumb people, angry people–think that rape looks like sex. It makes them think that an initial “no” or “stop” or “I don’t want to,” will, with enough pressure, become a “fine, okay, I guess this is happening.” But that is not a yes, that is not consent. Are there non-verbal ways of giving consent? Absolutely. But “No, stop, stop, it’s not right,” as Cersei said, is not one of them.

This shit is all related. The American University Epsilon Iota emails that were released this week. Darren Sharp’s admission of “non-consensual sex”. The joke of a process that female soldiers have to endure to report assault. The fact that teenaged girls think that unwanted groping is just part of dating. The abhorrent Mixology joke about finding girls drunk enough to “smash out.”

It’s not all Game of Thrones’ fault, obviously, but as of 24 hours ago they are the latest guilty party. Rough sex and rape are not part of some gray area where we throw our hands in the air and yell “IT’S JUST SO HARD TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE.” Rough sex is something adults agree to and reinforce with positive words like “yes,” and “I like that.” Or they agree on safe words. Or they have conversations prior to getting busy about what they like and dislike. Though the play might be physically rough, they approach with a mutual respect.

Rape is where one person has sex with another person who does not want them to.

Why is this so hard?

Which is all to say, sometimes my mom is right.

Related Post: Game of Thrones vs. The Wire

Related Post: Strong Female Characters? No thanks.

Serena Part Two

I started writing yesterday about Serena Williams’ Steubenville comments through the lens of Jailbreak the Patriarchy and gendered assumptions about sexual behavior and entitlement.

Today, for Role/Reboot, I went down a slightly different. After the outcry, Serena issued an apology on her website, but it’s pretty thin. Here’s the apology I wish she had written:

Related Post: Backing off Bieber when he made dumb comments to Rolling Stone.

Related Post: Serena and “feminine figures”

Serena Part One

Do you remember the moment you found out that Martin Luther King Jr. cheated on Coretta? I do, and it felt like the history rug was being pulled right out from under me. It’s hard to find out your heroes are just regular old humans who sometimes suck a lot.

Today’s heroine-undermining is brought to you by Serena Williams, my former favorite. For some reason, in a Rolling Stone interview, she commented on the Steubenville rape case and her comments were uber upsetting:

“Do you think it was fair, what they got? They did something stupid, but I don’t know. I’m not blaming the girl, but if you’re a 16-year-old and you’re drunk like that, your parents should teach you: don’t take drinks from other people. She’s 16, why was she that drunk where she doesn’t remember? It could have been much worse. She’s lucky. Obviously I don’t know, maybe she wasn’t a virgin, but she shouldn’t have put herself in that position, unless they slipped her something, then that’s different.”

BLURGH. Tomorrow I’ll be posting something more coherent on this, but for the moment, I thought it’s worth running this through my favorite plugin, Jailbreak the Patriarchy. Jailbreak flips the pronouns and gendered words in internet content to help us realize our own gendered biases.

Jailbroken, Serena’s comment read like this:

“Do you think it was fair, what they got? They did something stupid, but I don’t know. I’m not blaming the boy, but if you’re a 16-year-old and you’re drunk like that, your parents should teach you: don’t take drinks from other people. He‘s 16, why was he that drunk where he doesn’t remember? It could have been much worse. He‘s lucky. Obviously I don’t know, maybe he wasn’t a virgin, but he shouldn’t have put himself in that position, unless they slipped him something, then that’s different.”

It makes no fucking sense, right? We don’t tell boys not to take drinks from strangers. We don’t ask why 16-year-old boys like to drink a lot (because they’re teenagers and they’re stupid and they’re testing limits, same reason 16-year-old girls like to drink). The question of male teenaged virginity is one we’re never concerned with (as we shouldn’t be…) But mostly, the whole thing reads like gibberish.

Let’s push this to the extreme, just to test our hypotheses. Imagine it was a 16-year-old boy and he was raped by two other 16-year-old boys. Would we blame alcohol or poor decision-making? No, we would be appalled. It would be a crime. But the belief that women are supposed to be used for sex, and that they are responsible for protecting their bodies from being abused leaves us too addled to think clearly.

More tomorrow. Sigh.

Related Post: Other things we’ve jailbroken…

Related Post: On street harassment and catcalling

Can We Take the Life Apart?

I’m going to retread a little territory here because it’s been on my mind and what else is a blog good for if not to document how one’s thought processes evolve over time? Call it the Chris Brown Question for contemporary relevance, but it could equally be the Roman Polanski Problem, or the Pablo Picasso Predicament. That is, how do we reconcile professional respect or appreciation (Who doesn’t like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon?) without condoning some horrifying and harmful behaviors?

I just finished Ann Patchett’s novel State of Wonder, about a team of researchers investigating ethically controversial new pharmaceuticals in the Amazon basin. A husband and wife duo have an argument about a well-regarded scientist who was also a chronic philanderer:

Nancy: “I’m not saying people don’t have affairs, even very decent people, let us be so lucky as to fall into that category. But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do. He was a great scientist, I will grant you that, and by all accounts a true charismatic, but he was also deeply unfaithful to two women and frankly that bothers me. It bothers me that the man you say you wanted to become was a lifelong philanderer.”

Alan: “We can take the life apart. We do it all the time. Picasso put out cigarettes on his girlfriends and we don’t love the paintings any less for it. Wagner was a fascist and I can hum you every bar in the opening of Die Walkure.

This argument doesn’t quite capture the Chris Brown Question because infidelity, while personally painful, is not high on my list of “bad behaviors.” Compared to, say, beating your girlfriend, raping a 13-year-old, or putting out cigarettes on humans, it’s pretty mundane. That said, the language of this passage helps articulate how I think about this stuff.

There’s the bad behavior that makes one a lousy role model (infidelity, selfishness, etc) and then there’s the Bad Behavior that makes you a shitty human (abusing people, sex crimes, etc). Does that distinction hold up? I don’t know… abuse and violence stem from someplace…and where does redemption and rehabilitation fit in? Bah. Pesky humans and their complicated psyches!

And if you’re someone in that second category, the capital-B category, can I really appreciate your art/music/writing as separate from the Bad Behavior? I don’t know.

This has not been a productive post because I have no answers. What do you think? If you stop dancing when Chris Brown comes on at the club, do you also walk by the Picasso room at the art museum?

Related Post: Can I listen to Chris Brown with a clear conscience?

Related Post: Dove, pioneer or panderer?

Guest Post: What Indian Girls Don’t Learn

It’s Friday and it’s been a long week and I’m thrilled to share with you a guest post from my dear friend Hila.  She lives and works with students in Hyderabad, India, and wrote a fascinating essay on some of the challenges specifically facing girls and teenagers:

With the media spotlight on the issue of rape, the taboo of menstruation, and the lack of women’s rights in India, I’m reminded of two unique conversations I’ve had during my time in Hyderabad, India, where I work in a low-income private school as a social enterprise fellow.

While working on a project with 8^th class students, I bonded with several girls in the class. One day, I saw a girl rushed from the classroom, flanked by friends, fear on her face and those of her peers, and girls whispering with each other and the school’s administrative assistant. A former 8^th grader myself, I figured I knew what was going on, but I decided to ask the girls anyways. “Why did she leave in the middle of the school day in a rush?” I whispered to them. At first they didn’t want to say, but then they finally told me: “Because of her function, Madam.” The girls in India call their period’s “functions.” This led to a long, enlightening discussion on menstruation.

At first these girls were in shock that I too have “a function.” It’s not only common among women in India, I explained; it’s something women all over the world have. The girls, I realized, had no idea what periods are, that it related to child-bearing, or what was happening physically to their bodies. While my progressive middle school started teaching about periods in fifth grade, these 13-year-old girls were clueless. I explained to them what menstruation is and means, and how girls in the United States manage them. They shared how their periods were painful; how they have to sit isolated in their home and not be touched; and how they have to take special baths with spices, and others who touch them while they are menstruating have to do the same. After a girl gets her period, her family hosts a party for her where pictures are taken and she wears a half-sari. One girl took me to her home, and proudly showed me the large photos and the half-sari she wore for her function ceremony. Most stressful, however, is that they have to stay home and miss school. The girl ranked first in the class, yet to start her period, is terrified of it because she doesn’t want to have to miss school.

One of the reasons these girls miss school, beyond superstitious and pain reasons, is because the nature of India’s sanitation infrastructure makes periods difficult to manage. While it’s fairly easy to find pads and some menstrual cups in India, tampons are virtually non-existent. Making matters more difficult, traditional Indian bathrooms aren’t designed for women dealing with periods. There are usually no trashcans or toilet paper, and in schools like the one I work in, where the toilet is a hole in the ground, water from a bucket is used to “flush” the contents. For my school of 530 students, approximately half of which are girls, there is only one girl’s bathroom on an upper floor with only a couple of stalls. The bathroom is so dark and dank, with a safety hazard of leftover construction pieces on the floor, that I refuse to step foot in it, too scared to see the inside of the stalls. And I’ve been to some disgusting pit stop bathrooms in India. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for these young girls to handle their periods during school hours.

A few weeks after my discussion with the girls, I had an interesting conversation with my school’s principal about a recent incident at school. The principal was watching the classroom TV monitors when she noticed a girl and boy in 10^th class touching—either consensually holding hands or leaning into each other. When she informed them that their conduct was inappropriate for the classroom, the girl, not wanting to get in trouble, immediately claimed that the boy’s approaches were unwanted, and called her mother. Her mother arrived at the school and chastised the boy in public, enough for him to cry. He was also punished by the school with daily lunch-time detention. When I asked the principal about the incident, she said that she knew that the boy and girl had an interest in each other, but the girl didn’t want to get punished by the school or her mother, so claimed otherwise. On the one hand, we should be grateful that a young woman was acknowledged, believed, and protected, as has sadly not been the case in many instances of sexual assault in India. On the other hand, this boy and girl were just being teenagers in lust, but their public display of affection is essentially forbidden in their community. Regardless of this specific situation, more troublesome is that the school cannot discuss issues of dating, sex, or sexual protection, unlike sexual education courses in many American high schools. It’s considered taboo, and many parents would not allow it, and don’t educate at home either.

Crushes are natural emotions by 10^th class—these students are 15 and 16 years old. But in India arranged marriage is still very much the norm; a marriage that is not arranged is called a “love marriage.” And a 14-year-old girl dropping out of school for marriage is all too common, and not just in rural areas. Another fellow in my program attended such a wedding for a young girl from her school. Besides what is shown in Bollywood movies—which can be surprisingly sexual and at times disturbing in their male-female dynamics—dating and sex are unspoken topics, leaving little awareness for protection and much to the imagination and naiveté. Since internet access is still uncommon in low-income communities in India, it is an unused resource for awareness and exploration. My school’s principal, an open-minded and educated Indian woman, agreed that discussions on such topics as dating, sex, and sexually-transmitted disease prevention are important, but that she was restricted by community practice and expectations.

I don’t share these stories to judge Indian culture or any parent’s decision to not share information about menstruation, sex, and dating. I decided to share these stories given their relevance to the on-going, important discussion regarding women and India. More importantly, I want to encourage more discussion about strategies for Indian youth to safely and freely learn about issues such as menstruation and sex. It’s very difficult to do, requiring immense community buy-in and trust. One beacon of hope is Voice for Girls, which is rapidly scaling across India. They teach English and girl’s empowerment through learning about topics such as menstruation and nutrition. Their program is definitely a step in the right direction towards raising awareness and knowledge for young girls and boys, whom are otherwise left in the dark about these life-changing issues.

If you’d like to read more of Hila’s writing on social entrepreneurship, gender, education, and innovation, visit her blog or follow her on Twitter. 

Related Post: Guest Post from Kim Green in Nashville on trust in unlikely places.

Related Post: Guest Post from Bryn on “sluts” and “players” in the queer world.

Sunday Scraps 90

1. HOLLYWOOD: It’s the piece everyone was talking about this week, so if you missed it, play catch-up with the Lindsay Lohan/James Deen/Bret Easton Ellis/”The Canyons” how-the-sausage-is-made essay.

2. INDEX: This is Indexed blogger/writer/drawer Jessica Hagy is interviewed for Fast Company about how she found her 3×5 sized internet niche.

3. WRITERS: The Rumpus interviews Zadie Smith about her novel NW, and why she doesn’t write autobiographically.

4. TINA + AMY: How pumped are you for tonight’s Golden Globes hosting-duo? Not enough? Get more so with NYMag’s recap of their friendship.

5. INDIA: I can’t even begin to describe how dead-on this opinion piece by Sohaila Abdulali is, so I’m just going to quote it: “Rape is horrible. But it is not horrible for all the reasons that have been drilled into the heads of Indian women. It is horrible because you are violated, you are scared, someone else takes control of your body and hurts you in the most intimate way. It is not horrible because you lose your “virtue.” It is not horrible because your father and your brother are dishonored. I reject the notion that my virtue is located in my vagina, just as I reject the notion that men’s brains are in their genitals.”

6. FRIDA: A closet full of Frida Kahlo’s personal items has been locked and guarded for 85 years and has just now been opened and explored.

Related Post: Sunday 89: Avalanches, Mr. Wright, pickpockets and Matt + Ben Forever.

Related Post: Sunday 88: Russian gymnasts, the Rockaways, origins of “doubt”, Moloch

Bright Spot?

Warning: The bright spot referenced in the title of this post will not be arriving for several paragraphs. First, you have to go some dark places with me.

I do not hold grudges well. I am also generally incapable of going to sleep upset, of keeping my feelings to myself, or otherwise letting emotions incubate for reasonable lengths of time. When I feel shitty, whether for external or internal reasons, the shittiness sits front and center in my brain. I can’t think about other things, I can’t distract myself, and I can’t just let bad vibes dissipate at their natural pace; I have to force them out.

One of the ways I do this by dumping them on someone else. I never mean to dump, it just kind of happens, and then it takes the stricken look of a coworker caught off guard for me to really realize what  a lunatic I sound like.

Take Wednesday for example. Every piece of news I consumed (and I consume a lot of news) was horrifying. Not like, oh man, the CTA is raising their prices (which does suck,) but like legitimately filling me with actual horror/fear/desperation. And once that horror snowball starts, I can never seem to stop it. It started with the story about the rape case in Cleveland, TX, where the 11-year-old was raped by 20+ boys and men. Is this story in and of itself horrifying? Yes, but it is unfortunately old and faded news. The latest development is that the defense attorney described the 11-year-old girl as a “spider” who “lured” men into her “web.”

So I stared at that for a while, frothing at the mouth, and then shifted my gaze to my email, where my daily Chicagoist updates had arrived, leading with, of course, a horrifying story about a high school coach who condoned (maybe facilitated?) heinous sexual assault on a boys soccer team under the auspices of “hazing”. Does it ever end?

And then, when it seems like it will never end, I stumble on this ad for toy computers in which the boy computer (blue, obviously) has 50 functions and the girl computer (guess what color?) has 25 functions. And this, of course, is the least horrifying thing I’ve seen so far today, but I am already so worked up that this idiotic ad, this thoughtless, sexist, horrible dumb ad, is the thing that tips me over the edge.

My friend senses my consternation, likely because I am at this point moaning into my hand and rocking back and forth (I exaggerate, only slightly), and I unleash on her an incomprehensible torrent of angst, DID YOU SEE TEXAS, CLEVLELAND RAPE CASE DEFENSE ATTORNEY SAYS SHE’S A SPIDER SHE’S A CHILD WHY WHY WHY NO ONE UNDERSTANDS WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE WORLD AND CHIAGOIST SOCCER TEAM HAZING WHAT???? EVERYONE SUCKS I HATE IT ALL COMPUTERS FOR BOYS? WHO APPROVES THIS SHIT? I AM NEVER HAVING CHILDREN. And she just stares back at me, waiting for the steam to cool. I immediately felt better. What had been bottling up all day was at least released, the pressure was gone.

And then she did a cool thing, and sent me something to brighten my otherwise gloomy day. It was the reactions of Jada and Will smith to the criticism of their daughter Willow’s hair (she recently shaved her head). Jada wrote this:

“The question is why I would LET Willow cut her hair. First the LET must be challenged. This is a world where women, girls are constantly reminded that they don’t belong to themselves; that their bodies are not their own, nor their power or self determination. I made a promise to endow my little girl with the power to always know that her body, spirit and her mind are HER domain. Willow cut her hair because her beauty, her value, her worth is not measured by the length of her hair. It’s also a statement that claims that even little girls have the RIGHT to own themselves and should not be a slave to even their mother’s deepest insecurities, hopes and desires. Even little girls should not be a slave to the preconceived ideas of what a culture believes a little girl should be.”

And I’m fist-pumping, I’m hollering, I’m jamming out in my chair like this is the best, most joyous song I have ever been privileged enough to hear. And then there’s Will:

We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that it is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself

And I’m like… Fresh Prince, I knew you had it in you. You tell ’em! And so the cloud passes, because although the world is most definitely not an okay place right now, we have allies, and the arc of the universe is long and it bends toward justice, and because some people speak up, and because we are not alone. 

Related Post: Anomie

Related Post: Defunkification

Monday Scraps 73

1. AUTHORS: Philip Roth attempts to correct a misinformed wikipedia article about his own work via the New Yorker. Hilarity sort of ensues.

2. FOOTBALL: Chris Kluwe joins the ranks of my favorite NFL players by ripping into an idiotic politician who tried to censor a pro-marriage equality NFL player (Deadspin).

3. PHOTOS: Curious about Burning Man? Me neither. The Atlantic has some photos.

4. POETRY: I’ve been sitting on this poem for a while, but it’s just too good not to share. By Kim Green of The Greenery, it’s called 25 Categories of Rape.

5. SEX: Words cannot describe how much I enjoyed this BBC piece on the illustrations and illustrators behind the famous and famously hairy Joy of Sex.

6. ELECTION: Who gets ignored in our pro-family, pro-mom, pro-America (huzzah!) electioneering? Single women, of whom there are a whole lot. Are we only important after we give birth? (via Slate)

Related Post: Sunday 72 – Olympian Zoe Smith, Katrina, Valerie Jarrett, and more.

Related Post: Sunday 71 – America Ferrera, Cosmo worldwide, former Olympic stadiums, etc.

Coping

Here are the words I can muster today: rape culture, rape apology, pseudo-science, control, misogyny, autonomy, willful misunderstanding, violence, rights, disrespect, faux apology, faux sentimentality, faux outrage, faux, faux, faux, phony, fake. Arrange them as you see fit.

Here are some words by other people that are pretty interesting.  Read when you have the time or the emotional energy to absorb them:

• Lidia Yuknavitch wrote an essay for The Rumpus about growing up in a culture of sexual violence.
• Charlotte Shane for The New Inquiry on why our insistence that rape be the “most devastating, world-rocking, soul-shattering” experience deprives women of the right to their individual reactions: “Though some feminists regard “rape equals devastation” as sacred fact, the notion that a man can ruin me with his penis strikes me as the most complete expression of vintage misogyny available.”
• Did you read MA Senator Scott Brown’s quote? “As a husband and father of two young women, I found Todd Akin’s comments about women and rape outrageous, inappropriate and wrong. There is no place in our public discourse for this type of offensive thinking. Not only should he apologize, but I believe Rep. Akin’s statement was so far out of bounds that he should resign the nomination for US Senate in Missouri.” I want to applaud, but I can’t because there are two many follow-up questions. You call yourself a Republican, Senator Brown, are you aware of the Republican Party’s official platform’s planks on abortion? Will you call for a change where it actually matters? The New Yorker has compiled seven other polite, carefully worded questions for Republicans as they feign (ahem) outrage over Akin’s comments.

And then there’s this video by Taylor Ferrera which is amazing, and is the bright spot in this week’s thundercloud of horribleness:

Some people give up. Some people write long eloquent essays. Some people link to other people’s long eloquent essays. Other people sing songs.

Related Post: The changing iconography of abortion.

Related Post: Daniel Tosh.