karnythia:

blackamazon:

karnythia:

blackamazon:

karnythia:

blackamazon:

it’s not like tumblr recently exploded in a firestorm because it took half of black female tumblr, most of POC/white folk with sense tumblr, and a few random folks with decency

doing their best impression of the Uru-khai 

to get people to back off from victim shaming and using a young black woman’s VIOLENT ASSAULT and subsequent responses to OTEHR ASSAULT 

as a flag for civility

because in defending her self WITHOUT RESOURCES she became a ” bad victim”?

and sure as hell , the attackers weren’t just as prone to post up half nekkid titty as they were to ASSUME there was a way that black women HAD to respond because they had ingrained sociological assumptions about what resources ( even just interpersonal , academic, and cultural ) to respond.

And it’s not like those assumptions factor into why that baby and that baby and this child and ME IN MY OWN SKIN and the woman from the rez , the undocumented

ARE SELECTED AS VICTIMS IN THE FIRST PLACE?

No relation what so ever

I have so much side eye for any discourse around rape culture that doesn’t address race, child victims, or who is most likely to have support in the aftermath. I might need to really interrogate my degree plan &  what classes I need to take so no one doubts my credentials to say shit I already know.

Rape is about power right? SO why come they always forget to look at the powerless?

I got an answer that no one’s going to like, namely that they okay with us being victims as long as we’re a buffer for them against the violence. It’s freedom they’re after, but not particularly ours.

So you have freakish mind reading powers or you stole onto my computer to see the damn near five  pay brain dump i have on the ” buffer: effect

I keep looking at who gets support & when, and who gets attacked for fighting back & who does that attacking & I just…they need to figure out a way to save themselves that doesn’t hinge on us. We’re not here for that & we’re not going to be here for that no matter what they want to claim is a sign of solidarity.

Well y’all are just here writing the story of my life.

liquornspice:

quixotess:

liquornspice:

vanillaandlavender:

microaggressions:

I opened my mouth for a strep test. I didn’t gag. The doctor said, “Oh! Your husband must LOVE you!” Then I gagged. “Oh, maybe not,” he said. I’m 23, 2011, Minnesota, urgent care. Made me feel ashamed, angry, disgusted.

I would have thrown up all over his face

Oh hey, sexual misconduct and abuse by medical professionals. Something new and totally not systemic and horrible. /sarcasm.

I read some of the reblogs and many people seem to be under the impression that, “Haha! Funny joke! Life is a Judd Apatow film and this is totes not a big deal!”

Except it kind of is, especially when you realize it’s not just one, isolated, incident. Or one, single, doctor. Nope.

All of a sudden I’m remembering all the TV episodes I’ve seen (House, Law & Order, etc) where a woman in a hospital screams/cries/throws a fit b/c a doctor tries to give her a pelvic exam, or even just touch her on the arm or whatever. And it’s a huge serious moment because that’s when we realize that she has been Raped. Recently! By someone else who is never a doctor. Because that is the only reason that someone would freak out when a doctor (or nurse etc) tries to touch them or give them a pelvic exam. It’s never a story about abusive doctors.

Yeah. It reminds me of how thankful I am that mainstream Feminism is so on top of this shit and supportive of people framing medical abuse and assault as capital R rape. Oh wait… O_____________________O

Can’t even go into it because this shit hits close to home and I will lose it but FOR REAL. People were reblogging this talking about wanting to laugh.

FUCK

THAT

FOREVER.

Rarely if ever see this get talked about in feminism, you’re right, but no I’m not shocked to know that this happened to someone.

Also, I know that people are trying to be supportive with “I would have punched the doctor”, etc. but as someone who has survived some shit, I get that you are trying to show support and absolutely thank you for that, but most of the time knowing what someone else would have done isn’t helpful. I feel like a jerk for this because I know people mean well. But real life doesn’t work like hypothetical situations, and you don’t always think on your feet, and I may be Xena in my daydreams but in real life I dissociate in a snap and freeze.

It’s just something to think about for people who want to support survivors of any kind of abuse or assault—whatever that person did to respond, it was as much of the right thing to do as they could do in a fucked up situation that they shouldn’t have been put in in the first place. And leave it at that, because there’s nothing they can do to change how they responded. Help them not stay in the past and what they could have done differently.

(via blackraincloud)

shortformblog:

It’s official. It’s over.

What’s really important here, from the article:

France’s Socialists on Tuesday lauded the move to drop the attempted rape case, but few expect Strauss-Kahn to jump back into politics very soon.

French Socialist Party chief Martine Aubry called it “an immense relief” that the prosecutors are abandoning the case.

“We were all waiting for this … for him to finally be able to get out of this nightmare,” she said on France-Info radio.

His Socialist Party has scrambled for a new candidate who could unseat President Nicolas Sarkozy in April-May elections.

(via shortformblog)

feministsuperpowers:

Click through and then on the PDF link for a pretty spot on zine.

Good zine that we distro sometimes.

(via hoaxzine)

Somehow, I do not believe the outrage would be comparable if this were a white woman, although this rampant rape culture shows its white victims no love either. Yes, Rihanna may simply be a good celebrity target, but it is utterly disturbing the manner in which any portraits that offer complicated, three dimensional representations of Black women are now unceremoniously banned from the air. These days, Black women and our experiences of rape and sexual violence are forced into invisibility when they don’t fit mainstream, pristine narratives of how to cope. Whether it be Rihanna’s teenaged fans, immigrants working as hotel maids all over this country, eleven year old Latina girls in Texas, or the Black girl next door to you,  women of color are deemed deviant even for voicing our narratives of rape and sexual assault, especially when our stories insinuate that we are morally complex human beings. That is unfortunate, dangerous, and frankly infuriating.

Rihanna is apparently considering re-shooting the offending scenes: namely the rape and the shooting. That’s unfortunate, because it makes more sense to me that we would be interested as a society in pursuing actual alternative endings for young women that don’t involve rape and brutalization in the first place, rather than creating “nicer,” “more palatable” endings in video land.

Luckily I live under a rock and only know about this backlash from reading feminist blogs. I was so happy and excited to watch the “Man Down” video and for once see something I related to in a music video (not that I’ve killed a rapist…but I mean the part about being justifiably furious and refusing to feel ashamed for being assaulted). I grew up in underground hip-hop, and have mixed feelings toward mainstream hip-hop, but hip-hop is so deeply important to me that sexist shit in it is very very alienating to me. (Like female gender role-based Kanye songs once pushed me over the brink into a panic attack. Deeply alienating.)

This video really resonated with me. I want it to resonate with lots of young people who would otherwise feel alienated in the same ways by most hip-hop that they still care about. I want it to be empowering in a really necessary way for other young assault survivors.

shortformblog:

IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn denied bail: Strauss-Kahn, 62, accused of attempting to rape a hotel maid and forcing her to perform oral sex on him, will continue to sit in a jail cell in New York. Prosecutors said that they are investigating reports that this was not the first such incident involving Strauss-Kahn, who many once considered a major challenger to Nicolas Sarkozy in France’s next Presidential election. Yeah, that’s pretty much over. source

Always disappointed in what you can get away with repeatedly while still popular enough to endure the scrutiny of electoral politics.

petrushkab:

I`m sick in bed, and pissed off, and thought it would be an appropriate time to repost these questions.

Rape Culture Questions

My friends Bill, Weronika and myself got together last winter and wrote up these questions for the consideration of our “community”. Folks in Guelph were dealing with a lot of issues of sexual assault/reinforcing rape culture like many anarchist scenes often do, and we wanted to get people thinking about these things. They were written from an anarchist/radical perspective, but can be applied broadly. They’re a bit like a continuation of the consent questions from the support zine, among others (Click here to read the consent questions).

Obviously there are no “right or wrong” answers to these, but this is stuff we all need to be challenging ourselves, and our friends about. We need to be having more active discussions, and hopefully this is a way to spur those discussions.

I’ll likely be putting these in zine format sometime soon, so if you’ve got any criticisms, concerns, suggestions or anything else, let me know!

——————————————————————————————————————

1.
How do you define consent?
Does consent need to be verbal?
Do you believe your friends are capable of crossing someone’s boundaries?
Do you believe you are capable of crossing someone else’s boundaries? 
How do you define rape?
How do you define sexual assault?
Have you ever not believed a survivor or been reluctant to believe them? If yes, why?

2.
How do you define ‘rape culture’?
What are behaviours that can perpetuate a culture of rape besides the act itself? 
How do concepts like rape culture relate to other systems of power? 
How does rape culture relate to anarchism?
How does it relate to living in a community? 

3.
Is it appropriate to establish hierarchies of oppressive behaviour (ie. Rape= very oppressive, calling a survivor a liar=not very oppressive)?
 What are the advantages or disadvantages of these hierarchies?
Whose interests do they serve?
How do communities respond to those who defend oppressive behaviour?
How does defending oppressive behaviour fit into a hierarchy of oppressive behaviour?

4.
What does the word “survivor” mean to you?
What are the advantages/limitations of this word?
What does the term “support” mean to you?
How does your personal relationship with a survivor affect how you support them?
Do you need a personal relationship with a survivor to support them?
Is it possible to support a survivor without communicating with them?
Have you ever felt reluctant to communicate with a survivor about their experiences? If yes, why? 
How much information do you need about a survivor’s experience to support them and/or hold a perpetrator accountable? How do you go about getting this information?
How does the way you support a survivor affect the way other people support a survivor?
What would you risk to support a survivor?
What would make you hesitate to support a survivor?
Would you hesitate to support a survivor if it caused you discomfort and/or social awkwardness?
In what ways can your own needs serve or contradict those of a survivor?

5.
What does the word “perpetrator” mean to you?
What are the advantages/limitations of this word?
What does “accountability” mean to you?
Who defines what it means to be accountable?
How does your personal relationship with someone affect how you hold them accountable?
How does your personal relationship with a survivor affect how you hold someone accountable?
Do you need a personal relationship with a survivor to hold a perpetrator accountable?
Do you need a personal relationship with a perpetrator to hold them accountable?
How does the way you hold a perpetrator accountable affect the way other people hold them accountable?
How are your own needs served by choosing to hold a perpetrator accountable or not choosing to hold them accountable?
How does power (both systemic power and other forms of power, ie. How long someone’s been in the community, popularity, roles as organizers, band members etc.) affect accountability?
Consider the power you hold in your community. What are the ways you use this power to leverage accountability?
What are the ways you use power to undermine accountability?
What role do anarchists usually play in power struggles (ie. Rich versus Poor, Police versus the community, settlers versus indigenous, etc.)? 
In instances of power struggles between a survivor and perpetrator, do anarchists play the same role? If not, why not?
What would you risk to call someone out?

6.
Take a moment to consider our spaces (both the more permanent spaces like our homes, and the more temporary spaces we create such as events, actions, social places).  How do we use these spaces to confront rape culture?
Do we confront rape culture differently in different spaces?
How do we make space for survivors?
What pushes survivors out of spaces?
When perpetrators use our space, how does this affect how survivors use our space?
How does having perpetrators in our space affect support for survivors, whether survivors are in that space or not?

7.
 How is our organizing affected by rape culture?
How does our organizing acknowledge and confront rape culture?
Does our day to day organizing confront rape culture outside of crisis situations?
Why do we often wait until our organizing is disrupted before acknowledging situations as a community issue? Whose interests does this serve?

8.
What is your own history of abuse/assault, and what privileges are you afforded/not afforded by larger systems of power? (Don’t answer this one out loud!)
In what ways is ‘survivor’ an oppressed identity?
What are the privileges of not being a survivor?
How does privilege or the lack thereof affect someone’s role in a rape culture? How does it affect how they give support?
In general, who do you see taking on support roles in your community?  Does the answer confirm or contradict the answer to the previous question (how does privilege or lack thereof affect how someone gives support?).
Within a rape culture, what does solidarity mean?

9.
Take a moment to consider how communities respond to oppressive behaviour (both radical communities and otherwise).  In this respect, how do radical communities differ from the more dominant culture?
Who in the community defines this response?
How are communities affected when people respond to oppressive behaviour by referring to it as “a personal matter” between the people directly involved?
How are communities affected when people refer to oppressive behaviour and its consequences as “drama”?
How do your reactions to oppressive behaviour reinforce the justice system?
Do you need evidence?
Do you need to “hear both sides of the story”?
Do your answers to the previous two questions contradict or reinforce your ideas of consent?
How do your reactions to oppressive behaviour reinforce prison culture?
How do you hold perpetrators accountable if you reject prison culture?
How does a community’s response to a specific instance of oppressive behaviour affect how it can respond to other instances of oppressive behaviour?
Are there things a community needs to respond appropriately to oppressive behaviour? If yes, what are the community needs and the potential barriers to those things?

10.
What does the term silencing mean to you?
What might keep a survivor from asking for things they need or want?
How, as a community, do we reinforce those things? How do we undermine them?
Do the answers to these questions make you reconsider how you answered the question ‘who defines the response to oppressive behaviour’?

11.
What does the term ‘survivor autonomy’ mean to you?
Are there limitations to survivor autonomy? If so, what are they?
Are there ways to disagree with a survivor’s response without undermining their support or silencing them?
What are the things that inform whether you ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ with a survivors response?
What is the purpose of voicing your agreement or disagreement? Whose interest does it serve?

Looks amazing! I love asking questions like this instead of ranting or lecturing.

I was really nervous about the chapter I’d be reading with my kids from this young adult book we’re working on. The chapter is about a girl whose boyfriend pushed her boundaries while they were kissing and then hit her hard enough to leave a bruise under her eye. I won’t give details of the story because it might be triggering to some people and also aren’t really necessary. I was nervous because I thought I would have to argue with some of the kids about why what he did was wrong, or how he had no right to feel entitled to her body. Like, clutching my bottle of Ativan nervous.

But they all got it with no arguing—every single kid—and they were outraged, even the boys that like to act tough and say macho things. Those boys were actually the angriest about the boy in the story and how disrespectful he was.

When I looked back through their worksheets I saw a lot of them made the connection between lack of consent and rape, like they recognized that if the boy didn’t care about consent in a kissing context, that he might take that another step further too. Mostly they focused on the boy hitting her, though, and it was an easier action to discuss.

Two of the boys I was working with, we got to talking about the girl and her relationship with her older sister who’d had a string of abusive boyfriends and the example the older sister sets, and I confided that when I was their age I had a boyfriend like that and am an older sister too, and that shit’s complicated, and they were amazing and respectful and awesome.

After work today I waited for the bus by myself for a little while in the dark. It’s in a pretty isolated area, still in the city, with pretty much no people passing by. But it’s never scared me to be there alone. When I got on the bus, I was the only passenger until a few stops down. The driver (male) was asking me wasn’t I nervous waiting there by myself. I kinda shrugged. I don’t have another good option right now: I need to fix some things on my bike, but the roads near my school are too dangerous to bike to work once it’s dark anyway, so I’m waiting til the days are a little longer. I can’t afford a car. I can’t afford any aspect of a car. I don’t even have a driver’s license; driving makes me so anxious I can’t think enough to make snap decisions. And isn’t that the purpose of having public buses in the first place? What’s the point, if the bus driver is telling me I shouldn’t be there?

So then he starts asking me didn’t I hear there’s a serial rapist, and I shrugged again and said yeah. I had an exhausting day, felt totally defeated, and didn’t have the energy to ask did he mean The Boyfriend, the serial assaulter that gets one tentacle cut off and sent to jail or ostracized from a community, only to still have millions more. I didn’t ask if he thought I might be uncomfortable not about waiting by myself in the dark for public transportation the way I’ve done since I was 14, but about being alone on a bus with a man who controlled my ability to exit, who wanted to talk endlessly about rapists and my vulnerability.

He told me I should be carrying mace. I shrugged again. I didn’t have the energy to ask if that should have included while going on dates in high school. I didn’t bother asking what he was doing to stop sexual assaulters, beyond warning individual women about how they should be afraid to go to and from work alone. I just didn’t even know what else to do, and was so tired of talking to people who didn’t want to hear me, so I gave up, closed my eyes, and waited for his mini-lecture to stop when more people got on the bus.

tabularasae:

A close friend of mine who’s victim of a sexual assault created an event on facbeook for the signing of the petition in defense of Planned Parenthood, and there are these two asshole—I can’t think of any other word to describe them—who won’t stop harassing her, degrading her, and ridiculing the fight for women’s rights. They’re so hellbent on defending their male-privilege that they can’t even realize that the oppressive nature of their claims—some of which are ““im saying its obv that some fucked up shit happend to u if u act like such a feminist bitch,” and, “ men are terrible and will hurt you because this is lifetime”—and to their misogynistic, sexist, fucking oppressive discriminatory language and behavior, all I can say to them is a big FUCK YOU. I can’t even pretend to come at this from an intellectual approach, looking for ways to effectively engage in interlocution; I’m so past that. They’re degrading and mocking my friend, who to this day suffers with the psychological ramifications of her sexual assault, and they’re fucking proving with each laughable attempt at humor how pervasive and tolerable sexism is. A victim of sexual assault shouldn’t have to go through this on his or her own; a woman shouldn’t have to fight sexism on her own. This climate, this culture, is so thick with hate and oppression that I can’t even muster up any want to pay attention to grammar or be respectful. And for me, a male, who doesn’t have to deal with this ridiculous disregard for common decency and respect against my gender, I can’t even begin to understand what it’s like to truly face the brunt of this kind of discrimination—how truly painful and numbing it must feel to be at the end of such a fucking inhumane and oppressive regime of one gender against another, of one culture against one gender. GOD. And people try to say that sexism doesn’t exist, that there’s no need to push for gender equality, that feminism is “outdated;” to all of you ignorant pricks: go crawl in a whole and oppress each other, because women, abuse victims, humane and sensible people don’t need this bullshit. 

Sometimes being cordial doesn’t work, and you gotta start flinging the fuck-yous. Dudes around here made some rape jokes a couple years ago, and I got one dude’s address and mailed him some consent zines along with a note from my halfway made up girl gang that he needs to watch his back if he wants to laugh about sexual assault. Never heard any such jokes again, didn’t waste time with cordiality. I don’t have the energy.

stfukyriarchy:

Who would be willing to fault the enslaved woman who aborted her fetus because she didn’t want that child to be a slave?  Who would be willing to fault the enslaved woman who aborted her fetus because she physically could not bear the burden of labor and pregnancy?  Who would be willing to fault the enslaved woman who aborted her fetus as a punishment to the man who raped her, barely fed her, barely clothed her, denied her religion, denied her liberty, and whipped her when she worked too slowly, made a mistake, or attempted to flee?  Who would be willing to fault the enslaved woman who aborted her fetus to protect her life and to save the evils of her life from those of her child?  To include the history of enslaved women in the history of slavery and then compare that history to abortion is not easy.

When conservative anti-choice advocates make that comparison, they actively erase the enslaved woman from that past, from her own history. This is similar to their larger approach on the issue: erasing women from the discussion.

…

The realities of [womens’] lives – sexual, economic, emotional, etc. – are glossed over as unimportant in the larger discussion of whether fetuses should be forcefully carried to term even when women think or know it is better that they are not.  The problem is not that women have abortions, it is that women are not even considered.  They are not agents in the anti-choice rhetoric except as either “locations” or murderers.  They are either inhumane vessels or inhumane killers. 

Wonderfully said

Brilliant. I had a little gasp while reading this.

(via stfukyriarchy-deactivated201112)

!! TRIGGER WARNING: mentions of sexual assault but without details

A bill to limit federal funding of abortions is redefining rape and incest, writes Nick Baumann at Mother Jones magazine.

Federal funding is only allowed to pay for abortions in the case of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is endangered. But a new bill with 173 co-sponsors would further limit federally funded exceptions, only allowing Medicaid to pay for abortions in the case of “forcible rape.”

Forcible rape has no formal definition under federal law, Baumann notes, but legal experts and abortion advocates told him that the new wording would most likely prevent Medicaid from paying for abortions for victims of statutory rapes not involving the use of force. Baumann’s sources also told him that the revised wording might also disallow funding of abortions in cases where perpetrators used date-rape drugs on their victims, or targeted mentally incapacitated women. …

Oh, no thanks World, I’ll just stay in bed forever.