And the Hits Just Keep on Coming

Reproductive rights are non-negotiable. Reproductive rights are non-negotiable. REPRODUCTIVE. RIGHTS. ARE. NON. NEGOTIABLE.

What's that? Oh no, I'm not talking to the Republican Party. I'm not even talking to the Txxxp administration. Believe it or not, I'm actually talking to the Democratic Party leadership.

Just yesterday, the Democratic campaign chief, Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) indicated that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) will continue to fund Democratic candidates who oppose abortions, stating that "There is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates....As we look at candidates across the country, you need to make sure you have candidates that fit the district, that can win in these districts across America.” In other words, they seem to think that licking the boots of the Republicans and the alt-right will help them win back the House in 2018.

I'm here to say that, if they think making reproductive rights a negotiable bargaining chip will help them gain more votes, they are delusional. They will lose more votes from women, LGBTQ people, etc. than they will gain from old, white, male Republicans, as we do not take kindly to having our rights reclassified as being non-essential when they become inconvenient to the Democrats' success rate.

It is not a coincidence that the all-male Democratic leadership does not consider reproductive rights to be essential--not just to the party platform, but to women! Apparently we can just drop the issue for the moment and we can pick it up again when the time is right, sweetie. If you need any proof that the current Democratic leadership doesn't give a fuck about women, think about this: anti-abortion politicians, whether Republican or Democrat, will vote for anti-abortion legislation. The Democratic Party leadership is not stupid--they know this. However, even with that knowledge in mind, instead of doubling down on reproductive rights and continuing to press it as a non-negotiable issue after the presidential election, they have instead decided that our right to bodily autonomy, our right to decide if and when we have children, is worth sacrificing for votes.

The Democratic party, as it stands right now, does not give a fuck about women. It does not give a fuck about LGBTQ people. It does not give a fuck about anyone who needs reproductive healthcare services, abortion or not. It does not give a fuck if they vote in anti-abortion politicians who will continue to strip us of our reproductive rights until they disappear, as long as they get the votes they want. We really need to think about what will happen if there comes a future when candidates from both major political parties, the parties that tend to win elections, are anti-abortion.

Do you want the Handmaid's Tale? Because this is how you get the Handmaid's Tale. And it's clear that, with men in charge, we can't have basic human rights in ANY party.

Call to Action: Day 4 of the Resistance

The Women's March, which had representation in all seven continents, took place on Saturday, January 21st, to the tune of 3.67 million marchers on the low end and 4.6 million on the high end of estimations. More than one out of every 100 Americans took to the streets to voice their outrage at this incoming administration and voice their determination to fight and resist at every turn. Many people, Drumpf included, voiced their confusion about the necessity of this march. They argued that women already have all the rights and privileges that they could possibly need. What was the point of this march, really?

A bill was recently introduced to the House of Representatives on Tuesday, January 17th. A full four days prior to the march, and yet nobody knew about its existence until yesterday and today. Even now, most people you inform of the existence of this bill are surprised to know that it's there. This bill, titled H.R.586, posits that "human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilization." This is why women marched. This is EXACTLY why. Because from the moment Drumpf set foot into the Oval Office, we knew that he and his administration would start decimating reproductive rights as we know them. This bill sets a dangerous precedent for our country, on a number of levels, and needs to be voted down.

If this bill passes into law, it will make abortion access, and very likely contraception, a thing of the past. With life defined as beginning at fertilization, abortion will be criminalized and defined as murder (even though, interestingly enough, when you ask pro-lifers what the punishment should be for women who have abortions, they usually cannot, or will not, give an answer). The "pro-lifers" who believe that contraception terminates pregnancies, some of whom are our political representatives, will look to deny women access to birth control using the language of H.R. 586 as their justification--seeing as "alternative facts" are perfectly acceptable now, the legitimate fact that contraception does not actually terminate pregnancies will not matter. Women's bodily autonomy will be a distant memory, and all the bloodshed from pre-Roe v. Wade will return to our doorsteps, back alleys, and hospital ERs in very short order. This bill will also set a dangerous precedent for women who have wanted pregnancies and are facing a miscarriage, fetal anomaly, or other medical issue that requires an abortion (early or late term). What's to stop Congress from forcing women to carry non-viable pregnancies to term, even if it kills them? What's to stop Congress from criminalizing miscarriages and imprisoning women for something along the lines of "suspected abortion?" What's to stop Congress from ultimately using The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale? 

The reality is that bills like these, laws like these, do not "save babies." They kill women. Women like Savita Halappanavar, who died after being refused a life-saving abortion during a miscarriage. Women like all those who died prior to the Roe v. Wade decision--approximately 5,000 women ANNUALLY in the United States--bleeding to death in back-alley abortion clinics and dying of sepsis in hospital emergency rooms from DIY abortions gone wrong. Women who poisoned themselves with whatever they had in their medicine and/or kitchen cabinets rather than go through with an unwanted pregnancy. As I wrote in a previous post, women will have abortions, bills and laws notwithstanding, whether they are safe or not. Whether they are done by a professional or a back-alley "doctor" or the woman herself. These politicians know this. They know. They know that women who do not want to be pregnant will do whatever they have to do in order to no longer be pregnant. They know that women who do not have access to safe, legal abortions generally end up injured or dead. 

But, as I also mentioned in that same previous post, it was never about protecting women's health. Our political representatives who claim to be "pro-life" are fully prepared to ignore (or even condone) the fully preventable deaths of actual living, breathing women, fully prepared to step over the corpses of women in the streets, in order to prove how "pro-life" they are. The fact of the matter is, we have laws in this country that state that we cannot be forced to donate organs, blood, or any other living tissue to another human being, EVEN AFTER WE ARE DEAD, unless our express consent has been given. And yet, somehow, it's perfectly acceptable to force women to give up their bodily autonomy for approximately 40 weeks--from the moment she becomes pregnant, her body is no longer hers. She becomes a mere vessel for the fetus. In many states where abortion access is practically nonexistent, pregnant women literally have fewer rights than corpses do. To say that this is unacceptable is the understatement of the century.

For those of you who have read up to this point, for those of you who are beyond angry, I'm issuing a call to action and I want you to do three things:

1. Contact your House representative and tell them to vote NO on H.R. 586
2. Contact your Senators and tell them to vote NO on H.R. 586
3. Read this short story titled "ILU-486". Bookmark it. Read it every day that you feel like you can't fight anymore, because this could very well be our reality if we don't fight back NOW.

How is This Not Terrorism? The Oxy-Moron of "Pro-Life" Violence.

[TW for gun violence]

When I first read about the shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, my stomach sank. It fucking terrifies and enrages me that women (and men) run the risk of having their lives ended by a "pro-life" gun, simply for working at, going to, or merely being in the vicinity of a Planned Parenthood clinic. It fucking enrages me that women have to fear for their lives because some people believe that, somehow, shooting and killing women is better than allowing women to have freedom of choice when it comes to their own reproductive organs.

As I read further, I became even more enraged. I read how the police asked people not to make assumptions about the shooter's motives, even though the only place he attacked was the Planned Parenthood clinic. I read how there was a five-hour standoff while three bodies lay lifeless somewhere in the vicinity of the AK-47 he used to take their lives. I read how the attack was labeled as a "shootout" and a "standoff," as if this were a spaghetti Western and not a real life-or-death situation.

What I didn't read was the word "terrorism" anywhere in the news coverage, even though this was clearly a situation in which someone was using deadly force and grievous bodily harm, and the threat of such, in order to scare people into not using their legal right to reproductive health care. What I didn't read was how the police shot the gunman on sight, even though he, as noted in this article, "previously had been firing at police who entered the facility." What I didn't read was an instant condemnation of the inherent violence of white men, because the person who committed this act of terrorism (referred to in the media as a "shooting") was, indeed, a white man.

Part of the reason for this is because he committed an act of violence against women. The majority of patients of Planned Parenthood are women, and it's not a coincidence that Planned Parenthood clinics are the target of this much violence. The people who are arguing that Planned Parenthood should be defunded/shut down/what-have-you are arguing so not because they want to "save babies," but because they want to punish women for having sex that they deem unacceptable. The only proof you need of that is any argument featuring a "pro-lifer." Read far enough down the thread, and you'll find the truth--"save the babies" almost instantaneously becomes a self-righteous "if you don't want to get pregnant, keep your legs closed" the second they find themselves backed into a corner. They want to punish women for having sex of which they don't approve, namely sex purely for the purposes of recreation rather than procreation, and we're pretty much OK with that.

The other reason this act of terrorism will not be labeled as such is because the person who committed the act is a white man. If this person had been a black man, he would have been dead the moment he opened fire on the clinic (especially on the police) and the media would be condemning the inherent violence of black men before his body had even had the chance to go cold. If this person had been of Middle-Eastern descent, this act of terrorism would have been called such and then, of course, the conversation would go back to how we can't accept Syrian refugees in this country because LOOK AT ALL THE TERRORISTS. But because this person was a white man, we will instantly give him the benefit of the doubt. We will give him the benefit of a five-hour standoff, even though he's already killed three people and fired his gun at police. We will refuse to label this shooting as an act of terrorism, because terrorism is a word we reserve for acts of violence committed by those who "appear" Muslim, whether or not they actually are. We will blame the mental health system, we will call him a "lone wolf." We will do anything and everything BUT call him what he is--a motherfucking terrorist. And all because he is a white man who committed an act of violence against women.

White men are committing act after act of horrific mass violence, over and over and over and over and over and over and nobody seems to care enough to do anything about it, or even to call it what it is. For the "pro-life" man who pulled the trigger, I'm sure he felt that what he did was simply an act of retaliation, a way to punish the women who didn't listen to him when he told them what to do with their bodies. And that's really what it boils down to--he, and every other man who's attacked Planned Parenthood clinics, is punishing women who dared exercise their right to bodily autonomy, even though he expressly told them not to. When we women find ourselves staring down the barrel of a gun as punishment for exercising our right to freedom of reproductive choice, we have to ask ourselves--how is this not terrorism?

A Feminist Review/Critique of “Jurassic World” (SPOILER ALERT (obviously))

[CN: violence] [MAJOR SPOILER ALERT THROUGHOUT]

I went to see Jurassic World with my boyfriend yesterday for my birthday, and I enjoyed the movie immensely, or at least all the action sequences with the dinosaurs (which is really the main focus of the movie if you’re watching it right). However, while it did make a valiant effort, Jurassic World was nowhere near perfect when it came to how they used the female characters throughout the film. 

I want to start off by listing what I did like. I was happy to see four main female characters in the movie (Claire, the mom of the two boys (Claire's sister), the woman in the control room, and Claire’s assistant). In a movie franchise that has historically had only one token female character, that was pretty cool. I was also happy to see a woman FINALLY be a fucking bad-ass heroine in a Jurassic Park movie instead of just a screaming damsel in distress. Seriously, when Claire released the T-Rex to go fight the Indominus Rex? I could barely stay in my seat. The last thing I liked, and this is going to sound weird, is that they finally had the ovaries to kill off a female character (Claire’s assistant). This was the first movie where they included a woman in the dinosaur kill count, and I thought that was pretty awesome.

That’s pretty much where my pom-pom pumping ends.

The female characters just barely pass the Bechdel test—there are only two scenes where two women talk to each other, one of which is Claire and her assistant talking about the two boys she’s supposed to be watching, and the other is Claire and her sister also talking about the two boys, so technically they’re still talking about men. The woman in the control room never speaks to another woman, and you never see two female characters talking to each other about anything particularly relevant or important, which really disappointed me because 1) there could have been some great scenes between the woman in the control room and Claire, and 2) women do actually talk about things other than men and kids and, somehow, Jurassic World, which proposes a scenario where dinosaurs are literally attacking and eating people, managed to keep the women in the movie talking to each other about just those two things.
 

The next thing that really bugged me was how they portrayed Claire’s character. Anyone who’s watched any TV shows or movies (or even read any mainstream books) that depict career-oriented women know that these “career-driven” women are portrayed as selfish and cold-hearted (and I’m putting this mildly), and it’s either heavily implied or outright stated that they are the way they are because they don’t have and/or want a (specifically male) partner and/or kids. In other words, their lack of desire for a man in their life and/or lack of maternal instinct and desire for kids is what makes them bad people. This movie was no different. For example, Claire is portrayed as being so entrenched in her work that she doesn’t know how old her nephews are (which is brought up at least twice as a “seriously, you’re a woman and you don’t know how old your nephews are?” moment). When she meets up with the hero, it’s almost instantaneously brought up that they dated at one point and that she was the reason they stopped dating (of course) because of her “overly controlling nature,” even though Owen (the hero) is equally controlling, if not more so, when it comes to the dinosaurs and how to interact with them, yet nobody bats an eyelash at that, nor does anyone bring up the hypocrisy of Owen criticizing Claire for being so controlling when he's absolutely no better. At another point in the movie, when Claire is talking to her sister on the phone and it’s revealed that she’s decided to work instead of hang out with her nephews, having hoisted them onto her assistant, her sister says that she’ll understand when she has kids. Claire responds with an emphatic “if,” to which the sister replies with an even more emphatic “when.” By the end of the movie, after the chaos has finally been quelled, we find her staring longingly at a mother reuniting with her daughter before she walks off into the sunset with the hunky hero, further perpetuating the stereotype that women who don’t want a (male) partner or kids will always change their minds eventually.

OK, so there’s nothing wrong with portraying a woman with a career as selfish and cold-hearted, per se. There are plenty of women out there who are exactly that way. However, when it’s the ONLY DEPICTION of career-driven women we get in the mass media, that’s a huge problem. It’s also a problem when it’s only women who get this treatment. As I mentioned in the last paragraph, Owen the Hero's controlling nature when it comes to the velociraptors is accepted without question, and Vincent D’Onofrio’s character, Hoskins, was equally obsessed with his work, but the movie doesn’t ever question him, either (apart from wondering how good an idea it is to create an army of trained velociraptors). Nobody asks either male character if he knows how old his nephews are, nobody tells them “You’ll understand when you have kids,” and the film never asks them to reconcile their work lives with their personal lives (or give up the former for the latter). It really wouldn’t have been that hard to portray Claire as having changed her mind about her relationship with her nephews without implying that she suddenly wanted to be with the hero and have kids of her own. It also wouldn’t have been that hard to portray Claire as having realized that she can be a workaholic but still want to be around her family, even if that family didn’t pop out from her own body.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie. The action sequences were intense and there were amazing twists, and there were some pretty bad-ass feminist moments, but I think that the movie could have done more to upend the common stereotypes that are tacked onto women in the media—if they can create a world where dinosaurs exist, they can also create a world where women can have a career and no partner or kids and not be total assholes.

Not All Men? Shut the Fuck Up.

[TW for misogyny, gun violence, rape culture, rape apologia, victim-blaming, slut-shaming, suicide]

I've been feeling many things since the UCSB attack this past week--sadness and hopelessness definitely come to mind. However, today I'm angry. I'm angry because, instead of talking about the ways that violent misogyny is killing women and what we can do to stop it, we're fighting yet another onslaught of men who are desperate for attention.

"NOT ALL MEN!" they cry. Except we know what they really mean. What they really mean to say is "NOT ME!"

I'm sure most of the people reading my blog know this, but 1 in 6 women will be raped or otherwise sexually assaulted in her lifetime. Many believe that this statistic is highly under-representative of the actual number. As I mentioned in a previous post, every rapist commits an average of ten rapes, so the logical conclusion is that 1 out of 60 men is a rapist. There are 7 billion people on the planet, give or take, at the moment--assuming that the population is about 50/50 among men and women, out of 3.5 million men, about 58,333 men in this world are rapists. They will rape an average of 10 women each--that's 583,330 rape victims. And that's a modest estimate. 

What the men of this world forget is that women are taught all our lives that we are sexual objects and potential victims. We are a commodity to be bought and sold, and if we are ever the victim of an attack, including murder, we must have done something to cause the attack. According to RAINN, there are 237,868 rapes each year in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of women will be attacked this year, and it will almost always be blamed on the victims. Almost no one will think to blame the rapists. There are articles and blogs and comments ALL OVER THE INTERNET blaming the women that Elliot Rodger mentions in his manifesto for the murders that occurred at UCSB, arguing that they should have put out so that this wouldn't have happened.

At this point in time, we need men to stand up with us and fight violent misogyny. We need men to combat the patriarchal culture that bred the Elliot Rodgers of the world, that made it OK for men to kill women (or drive them to suicide) when they don't give them what they want (and sometimes even when they do).

But instead, they're choosing, yet again, to make the conversation all about men.

Before you start screaming NOT ALL MEN, take some time to think about why you're assuming that the women who are speaking think all men are misogynists, rapists, and murderers.

Read the #YesAllWomen hashtag on Twitter. Really digest their stories. Realize that there are thousands upon thousands of stories. Realize that EVERY SINGLE WOMAN YOU KNOW has dealt with harassment, assault, or rape in one way or another at some point in her life. Read through MRA websites that promote the assault, rape, and murder of women. Read the news stories detailing murder after murder, rape after rape, and then go read the misogynist comments applauding the murderers and rapists.

Then think about why women might think that way.

Then think about how you're contributing to that.

Realize that, instead of using your privilege and your voice to speak up for women, you're choosing to use it to make the conversation about you. 

Food Shaming and Why This Shit Needs to Stop

[TW for disordered eating, food shaming]

For those of you who don't know what food shaming is, my definition is it's when someone judges you for the food you are eating and comments on it in an attempt to make you feel ashamed of your choices. When faced with the subject of food, a lot of people do something we feminists call "concern trolling," which is when you shame someone for something under the guise of actual, genuine concern for their well-being. This happens with food all. The. Time. People decide that it's OK to tell others (particularly women) what not to eat because it will make them unhealthy, when what they're really trying to say is that they shouldn't eat that because it might (GASP!) make them fat (which, if you know anything about anything, fat =/= unhealthy). Bottom line, what someone eats, how much they eat, when they eat it, how often, etc., is nobody's fucking business except the person whose mouth the food is going into.

Food shaming ties directly into the dieting industry, which targets women specifically and relies on women feeling bad about themselves, their bodies, and their food choices in order to survive; it's more than obvious from the advertisements that we see on a regular basis. For example, there is the recent pushing of the Special K Challenge that challenges women to replace two meals a day with Special K products, asks women to think about what they will gain when they lose (weight, obviously), and whose incredibly problematic and dangerously unhealthy nature Jezebel covered in a fantastic article. There is the onslaught of ads for Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, etc., that actively shame women both for their food choices and for (possibly) being fat. There are phone apps that encourage people to count calories and essentially take stock of everything they eat, which is a documented symptom of certain eating disorders. This is not to say that all people who count calories have an eating disorder, but promoting counting calories as an everyday activity can very easily lead people to develop one, especially when you consider the continuous assault of messages that are telling us to stay thin, no matter what the cost.

This is an issue that is particularly upsetting for me because I have dealt with disordered eating as a direct result of food shaming. (This is actually the first time I'm talking about this so candidly.)

When I was a kid, I absorbed the messages that the media was telling me. I was supposed to be small, delicate, proper. I was supposed to count calories and watch my weight, lest I take up too much space. If I had the choice between a steak and a salad, I was always to choose the salad, no matter how much I wanted the steak. Despite the fact that the average human being needs to consume 2000 calories to survive, calories were the enemy and the goal was to consume as few of them as possible. This was "for my own good" and "for my health." I also absorbed the indirect messages that my mother was sending me through her constant dieting and self-shaming. I listened to my dad tell me stories of when she used to diet until she was nearly a skeleton. I watched her weight fluctuate between the holidays and the summertime. I watched her mentally punish herself for eating things she liked. I watched her deny herself foods that I knew she loved and sacrifice simple treats all for the sake of a thinner figure. Right this very moment, she is on yet another diet and she's already talking about her weight loss plan for when she puts on a few "extra" pounds during the holiday season. I want to be clear: I don't blame her for doing these things, because this is the result of those same media messages as well as the messages she learned from her mother, who likely learned those messages from the same places.

As a result of these messages, I learned that eating was not something you did to survive. It was not a necessity to continue living. Eating was something you succumbed to when you were at your weakest. As a result of these messages, I developed a fear of eating in front of other people because I was afraid of what they might think of me. I don't know that what I had was an eating disorder, but it was definitely disordered eating (if that makes sense). To put this in perspective, right now I weigh 125 pounds, give or take. In high school, at the same height, I weighed only 98 pounds because I was so afraid of people thinking I was a slob for eating that I simply stopped eating in public and restricted my food in private. I skipped lunch nearly every day and ate very minimally at home. It took me many years to become comfortable with just the idea of eating to survive, and many years after that before I became comfortable with the idea of eating what I wanted without judging myself or caring what other people thought.

Then, just tonight, at a point in my life where I'm finally comfortable with my body (and its arbitrary, socially constructed "flaws") and no longer shame myself simply for eating or for having a snack when I feel like it--where a simple bag of potato chips no longer sends me into a spiral of guilt and panic--my dad made a comment about a snack that I decided I wanted, and for a split second I went right back to that "I must never eat again" mindset.

It's awful. And it's exactly why this shit needs to stop. Because my story is not the only story out there.

Not even close.

Schrödinger's Rapist and What He Has to do With That Guy at the Bar Hitting on Me

[TW: rape, rape culture, misogyny, sexual violence, denial of autonomy, privileged bullshit]

I posted the above graphic on Facebook a few days ago. Social networks being what they are, I wound up receiving comments from an ex-boyfriend that went a little something like this (my ex was responding to a comment from my aunt stating "Sadly, what they're respecting is the other man's PROPERTY!"):

"I've said I have a girlfriend before, am I her property? Cause I thought it was a polite way of saying, "Nothing personal, maybe some signals were misread. I actually am in a happy relationship and not looking elsewhere."...but that's just me. It's true that traditionally men make the advances, but my point is most will accept a "no" when they see one and it doesn't have to be a matter of possession."
  
This is a perfect example of male privilege: being able to reject an unwanted advance (or perhaps even multiple unwanted advances) without any kind of negative backlash or retaliatory action taken against him, and then being able to proclaim widely that "most men will accept a no when they see one" (read: a "no" by itself, without any sort of buffers such as "I have a boyfriend/husband" involved) when that is simply not the case. I'm glad that he has never had to go through the truly terrifying experience of someone refusing to take no for an answer in the context of an unwanted romantic and/or sexual advance, but the fact of the matter is that I, and most women on this planet, have.

There's a very big difference between a man saying he has a girlfriend and a woman saying she has a boyfriend in order to get out of a situation where there's an interested party and the other person is not interested. There is a power dynamic involved where women, unfortunately, have the shit end of the stick. If we say "no" by itself, we're labeled frigid bitches, and there have been many cases when women have been attacked (verbally and/or physically) for doing so. We say "no, because I have a boyfriend" because many men only respect other men, not women's autonomy and our right to say no to unwanted advances, and because we know we are less likely to be attacked if we use the excuse that there's a man in our lives (the implication, of course, being that the man in our lives will defend us physically, if necessary). We also don't know which men will respond nicely and which men will respond with violence to a simple "No thank you, I'm not interested."

This is where the concept of Schrödinger's Rapist comes into play (which you can read more about in this blog post on Shapely Prose). The fact of the matter is, women have been consciously and subconsciously trained through our social interactions with others, the way we are portrayed in the media, etc., to categorize any unwanted advances as potentially dangerous. We have to be afraid for our safety because the truth is that we don't know which men will not accept a no when they see one. Statistics state that 1 out of 6 women will be raped in her lifetime (and that's only including the ones that are reported: so many more aren't). I found out in the aforementioned blog post that when looking specifically at rapes where the man is the perpetrator and the woman is the victim (which accounts for most rapes), if you take into account that every rapist commits an average of ten rapes, that means that at least one out of every sixty men is a rapist. To put this into perspective, I graduated from Curtis High School in a class of about 700 people (give or take). Assuming the class was 50/50 men and women, that means there were about 350 men in my graduating class. Statistically speaking, 6 of them were rapists. And I have no way of knowing which ones they were. 

Over the course of their lives, between the six of them, they will rape at least sixty women.

These statistics are fucking scary by themselves. Combine that with the fact that women are told that we shouldn't have the right to say no, that a no can eventually turn into a yes if the guy tries hard enough, that a no is just a woman playing "hard to get" and she really means yes, etc., it becomes fucking terrifying. My ex may not believe this is true, but there is an element of possession in all of those examples, a belief that women "belong" to men and don't get the option of just saying "no thank you" and leaving the scene without a struggle. This is evidenced by the high number of rapes in this country - clearly a woman's no isn't really taken seriously.

When women are approached on the street by a male stranger, there's a 1.67% chance that he will be a rapist.  We have no way of knowing whether or not he is that 1.67%. We have no way of knowing whether or not tonight will be the night we become one of the 1 out of 6 women who will be raped in her lifetime.

There's a reason women instinctively use the "I have a boyfriend/husband" excuse.

Why the MRA (Men's Rights Activist) Movement is Dangerous for Women

[Serious TW for MRA related content, forced pregnancy, abortion, rape apologia, rape culture, victim-blaming, slut-shaming, denial of autonomy, misogyny, patriarchy...pretty much if you can think of it, it's probably in here]

For those of you who don't know what the MRA movement is, the unofficial definition that I've come up with is that it's a bunch of over-privileged men who are throwing a temper tantrum because women have realized that they're not doormats, and so they're rolling on the ground, kicking their feet, and holding their breath until we women shut the fuck up and go back to being barefoot and pregnant. They seem to believe that women have it incredibly fucking awesome (because misogyny, slut-shaming, victim-blaming, etc. totally don't exist anymore), and they basically think that the feminist movement is a bunch of bullshit and is no longer necessary because, hey, women have it incredibly fucking awesome!

One of the incredibly dangerous aspects of the MRA movement is the father's rights movement, which believes in preventing women from having an abortion without the father's consent, arguing that it is discriminatory for men not to have the ability to participate in a decision to terminate a pregnancy. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term is tantamount to physical, emotional, and psychological torture. Furthermore, forcing a woman to obtain consent from the father in order to have an abortion not only perpetuates the infantilization of women, wherein women are believed to be so fucking stupid that we can't make decisions on our own without the help of a man, as well as the patriarchal belief that women shouldn't be allowed to make decisions without a man's consent, but it also puts abused women in serious danger. Can you imagine what it would be like for a woman who has been abused to tell her abuser that she's pregnant and wants to abort? Can you imagine what the consequences would be for her? There are a few things that could happen, but the most likely scenarios include her being forced to endure the pregnancy and keep the child against her will, thereby tying herself to her abuser in one way or another for the remainder of her life (which might not be for very long, statistically speaking), or her attempting to abort the fetus herself, which can result in serious injury (including sepsis, a perforated uterus or intestines, etc.) and even death.

Another very dangerous aspect of the MRA movement is their stance on rape. MRAs believe that there is an epidemic of false rape accusations sweeping the globe, and these are the men you will find, after a high-profile male has been accused of rape, screaming that the woman just wanted money/fame/etc., she wasn't actually raped, she just has "buyer's remorse," etc. These men are also the same men you will find concern-trolling and stating, for women's benefit of course, that if women just dressed modestly, didn't drink, didn't go out at night, didn't go out alone, didn't go out at all, etc., we wouldn't have to worry about being raped. I've explained this before, but if rape had anything to do with any of that, women who dress modestly, don't drink, only go out during the day, only go out in groups, never go out at all, would never be raped. And yet, with a statistic of 1 in 6 women being raped in her lifetime, this happens ALL THE FUCKING TIME. I don't think I have to explain why this MRA viewpoint is dangerous to women, but just for shits and giggles, the reason this is dangerous is not only because of the obvious, which is that it perpetuates rape culture, slut-shames and blames the victim, and prevents rape victims from coming forward and pressing charges, but also because they fully believe that because of a few false accusations, all accusations of rape must automatically be assumed to be false. This is clearly more than problematic for women who are raped.

In relation to the previous paragraph, many MRAs believe that it is discriminatory to name accused rapists while providing the accuser with anonymity. Clearly, they have never experienced what it's like to come forward with a charge of rape, only to be told that they're obviously lying because of their clothing, their past sexual behaviors, their level of sobriety at the time, the time they were outside, etc. In other words, they've never experienced the same vitriol that they throw at rape victims all the time. They also clearly have no idea of the kinds of repercussions that a rape victim faces from not only her attacker, but from the friends of her attacker, etc. It's not uncommon for rape victims to have threats of further sexual violence and death thrown at them for daring to come forward with the charges. Not only this, but some MRAs actually question the criminal status of marital rape, and when having sex outside of marriage, they have suggested the signing of a "consensual sex contract" by partners before sexual intercourse in order to protect men from accusations of rape. So, in other words, according to MRAs, women who get married to men cannot possibly be raped because men are entitled to sex with their wives, even if it's forced, and when having sex outside of marriage, instead of obtaining enthusiastic, clear consent from their partners and only performing the sexual acts that said partner has consented to, they place a ridiculous burden on their partners in the form of this ridiculous contract, which doesn't actually prevent the man from raping his sex partner; it only prevents him from being accused.

I only have one question when it comes to this contract: what's going to prevent the man from raping his partner and then using the contract as evidence that he didn't rape her?

If there are any MRAs reading this right now, I hope your eyes have been opened a bit, and I hope you realize that there is no supposed War on Men. There is, however, an increasing demand that you men take responsibility for your words, actions, behaviors, etc., particularly those that perpetuate misogyny, rape culture and the patriarchy. There is a VERY big difference between a "War on Men" and asking men to take responsibility for their actions, and if there is a conflation of the two in your mind, if you equate the cessation of the continued subjugation of women with a "War on Men," you have serious fucking problems.

Pro-Life = Anti-Woman: A Rant

[TW for forced pregnancy, misogyny, slut-shaming, pro-life bullshit]

I am getting SO SICK AND TIRED of people emotionally blackmailing women into carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. The physical and emotional toll is bad enough when the pregnancy IS wanted, but fuck it, women are just breeding machines anyway, what's the difference if the woman didn't want to continue the pregnancy and have a life of her own? All women are good for is popping out babies. And let's face it, if you're gonna be a slut and open your legs, you deserve to be punished with nine months of pregnancy, the agony of childbirth, and the emotional toll of raising a child or putting it up for adoption. It's not like it takes any REAL effort to raise a child, nor does it have ANY effect on you whatsoever when you give that child up for adoption and sit there for the rest of your life wondering how they are.

Yep.

How about this: if you don't want an abortion, DON'T FUCKING GET ONE. And for all the people who are gonna come out of the woodwork and be like OH YOUR MOTHER CHOSE LIFE, OTHERWISE YOU WOULDN'T BE HERE HURR DURR, the point is she CHOSE. SHE HAD A CHOICE. And if she had decided to end her pregnancy, I wouldn't be conscious to know that she did it, ergo I wouldn't care. And not for nothing, this whole pro-life thing has nothing to do with saving babies and preventing abortions. If that were true, the pro-lifers would be all over birth control, which is proven to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and therefore prevent abortions. But, you know, that would involve giving women choices and rights.

And we just can't have that, can we?

The Goddess and What She Has to Do With Feminism

[TW for misogyny, patriarchy, erasure of identity]

As many people are well aware of, I am an out and proud Pagan as well as a feminist. These two paths, while seemingly unrelated on first glance, actually have quite a bit to do with one another. When I was first starting out on the Pagan path, part of what drew me to it was the fact that there was a Divine Feminine as well as a Divine Masculine (which in the mainstream religions is all that there is). I wasn't yet consciously a feminist, but even as a child, the idea of being represented by an omniscient, omnipresent, all-controlling male deity didn't sit well with me. I often found myself asking myself (and anyone around me who would listen) why it was that if we were all supposedly created in God's image, then how could it be possible that there was only a male deity? There would have to be a female deity as well, because clearly women exist! As I learned more and more about Paganism, I became intimately acquainted with the triple goddess, this ultimate representation of all things feminine, and all seemed right with the world.

And then I became a feminist.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Paganism and/or the triple Goddess concept, the basic gist of it is that there is one female deity with three different forms: Maiden, Mother and Crone (think of this as the Pagan version of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit). The Maiden personifies youth, purity, innocence, etc., the Mother personifies fertility, sexuality, the cycle of creation, etc., and the Crone personifies wisdom, endings and death. The triple Goddess in all her forms is also represented as being nurturing, caring, passive: all qualities that are traditionally identified as feminine. When I first started out on the Pagan path, I had no qualms about or issues with the triple Goddess, but as I got more involved with feminism, I realized just how restrictive this concept of the Goddess can be, especially considering that most Wiccans and Pagans look to the Goddess as a representation of all women.

The fact that the Goddess is given the traditionally feminine qualities that supposedly "belong" to all women helps perpetuate the stereotype that this is how all women are "supposed" to be; I mean, if the Divine Feminine is just that, feminine, then shouldn't all women emulate that femininity? Shouldn't all women seek to be nurturing, passive, dainty, etc.? It is also pretty observable that most, if not all, artistic portrayals of the Goddess are devoted to conventionally beautiful women; even the Crone aspect of the Goddess is often simply the Mother archetype with silver hair and maybe some crow's feet around her eyes. I have yet to see an artistic portrayal of the Goddess that features a woman who might not be considered conventionally beautiful; a Mother with a pear-shaped figure rather than an hourglass, a Crone with sagging arms and cellulite and varicose veins on her legs, a Maiden with what amounts to an explosion of acne covering her face. According to the popular Pagan song, "We all come from the Goddess," and yet from what I've seen of the portrayals of her, apparently only conventionally beautiful women come from the Goddess; the rest of us are fucked.

Ultimately, the triple Goddess concept restricts a woman's life cycle to three roles; innocent youth, fertile adult and old woman. Obviously, most of us will fit into these three roles at one point or another in our lives, but women are so much more than just youth, fertility and age rolled into one body. We are artists, dancers, students, teachers, academics, lovers, thinkers, creators, doers, actors, therapists, warriors, champions, destroyers, healers, deconstructers, lushes, partiers. We are all of that and more, and we simply cannot fit every single woman, every single aspect of our womanhood, into only three roles. Many people have tried, of course; for example, any act of creativity, of personal fulfillment, is often neatly filed under the Mother category. Any goddess of fertility or creativity is filed under the Mother category and left there. The logic is that motherhood doesn't necessarily mean giving birth to a child and raising it (e.g. you could "mother" a pet or someone else's children) and that fertility doesn't just apply to the creation of new life; it also applies to the creation of everything else.

I agree with this, to a point. While I agree with the sentiment that nurturing and fertility should not be restricted to the act of procreation, I also don't feel that these other acts of creation should simply be filed under the role of Mother and forgotten. In my opinion, it oversimplifies the varying goddesses of the different pantheons, as well as each and every act of creation and fulfillment, and forces women to embrace the role of Mother, regardless of whether or not she agrees with that role. It also erases transgendered women in that physical fertility, while often argued as not being the be all and end all of the Mother aspect, is often touted as the ultimate sign of embodying that aspect of the Goddess. Evidence comes in the form of the fact that, despite many people's insistence that fertility is not cemented to procreation when it comes to the Goddess, I have never seen a depiction of the Mother archetype where she was anything other than heavily pregnant. I have never seen a version of the Mother archetype in which she was taking care of animals, painting a picture, writing a thesis, etc. In other words, the archetype of the pregnant Mother overshadows and erases the copious other roles that women fill each and every day, and for the women who do not feel comfortable identifying with the Mother aspect, they are forced to either identify with the Maiden aspect or the Crone aspect, which many women also do not identify with. For example, at this point in my life, I would technically fall under the Mother aspect of the triple Goddess, but that is not a role I identify with. I would identify more with a Goddess of academia...perhaps Athena? Or a Goddess of kicking ass...Sekhmet or Artemis, maybe? Try filing Kali the Destroyer under one of those three aspects and see what happens!

Once upon a time, I belonged to a Pagan forum where I was told by a fellow Pagan woman that I would never truly know the love of the Goddess because I had not had children of my own nor planned on having any. She then went on to say that I would die alone and unhappy, so I really didn't put much stock into the rest of what she had said either, but she did help to demonstrate how some Pagan women, many of whom come to Paganism as a middle-finger to the patriarchy and who would normally never adhere to the patriarchal demand that all women must become mothers, will readily follow and perpetuate that exact same stereotype as long as it's packaged neatly in a female/Goddess figure. It's much easier to recognize sexist tropes when they come from a recognizable source, but when that same stereotype enters into your belief system, one that you believe is an affront to the horribly sexist system you left behind, it's much harder to identify.

Honestly, in my opinion, the concept of the triple Goddess is vastly outdated. Obviously not every Pagan will agree with me on this, and I don't expect them to, nor do I demand that they do; the beauty of Paganism is that you have the freedom to believe whatever fulfills your spiritual needs. It is simply my personal belief that there are just too many differences between women (and men) for there to be one deity (even one with three aspects) to cover them all. Does this mean I look down upon mothers? Not in the least. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for a woman who wanted me desperately. Does this mean I look down upon the triple Goddess? Not in the least. Just because my understanding of the triple Goddess goes one way doesn't mean I hold a grudge against her. Does this mean I look down upon women who will continue to honor the triple Goddess in their Pagan practice? Not in the least. Just because my personal understanding of the triple Goddess goes one way doesn't mean that every woman on the planet is going to understand her in the same way, nor would I expect them to do so. Every woman's experience on this planet is going to be different, ergo their understandings of divinity and Paganism in general are going to be different as well. I simply believe that we should honor all forms of the Goddess, the warrior Goddesses and the academic Goddesses and the artistic Goddesses, etc., on equal footing with the mother Goddesses.

My personal vision of the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine is that they are created from the collective unconscious of every single woman and man (cisgender and transgender) on the planet. In my vision, the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine do not encompass women and men, respectively; they encompass whoever feels drawn to them. In other words, an effeminate man who identifies more with the Divine Feminine is just as much a part of the Divine Feminine as any woman could be, and a masculine woman who identifies more with the Divine Masculine is just as much a part of the Divine Masculine as any man could be. A genderqueer person with no specific gender identity is welcome in both the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine without question, while a person who identifies with both genders is accepted just as readily. In my mind, the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine are comparable to those ripples of oil that you sometimes see in puddles. With every drop of rain that hits those puddles, with every footfall, that oil swirls and changes; so, too, do the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine, and with each person that makes hir way into existence, they change ever-so-slightly in order to meet the needs of the people seeking them out.