Props to Feministing for this link!

Now, the government is going to fund emergency rape kits for any adult victims of sexual assault, regardless of whether they wish to file a police report at that time.  The kits can be done anonymously, and any evidence gathered will be kept and stored in a separate folder in case the victim wants to press charges at a later time.  Needless to say, this is encouraging news, and this policy will certainly make it easier for victims of sexual assault to receive justice–on their terms:

“Sometimes the issue of actually having to make a report to police can be a barrier to victims, and this will allow that barrier to cease, to allow the victim to think about it before deciding whether to talk to police,” said Carey Goryl, executive director of the International Association of Forensic Nurses.

                You’ve all probably read Feministing’s post on the anti-female genital mutilation ad depicting a victim as a sex toy. I was immediately reminded of another well-meaning but horribly offensive campaign to raise awareness for the genocide in Sudan. MTV has launched an on-line game, “Darfur is Dying,” in which players take on the role of a Sudanese refugee who has to complete tasks like “Forage for Water” while avoiding animated Janjaweed militants.

                I find it hard to believe the game’s creators had anything but the best intentions in mind, but the idea of turning an ongoing genocide into a game undercuts the gravity of the situation. Can you imagine if a survivor were to come across the game, to see cartoonish rendrings of “refugees” playing out the struggle for their lives in a game for fun?

                Everything that can be ought to be done to avert both tragedies; but I cannot but help these two campaigns do more harm than good.  

Laura Neuman, a rape victim, is fighting to expand this country’s DNA database.  Specifically, she wants anyone arrested for a violent crime to have their DNA put into the database.  Had this been done earlier, the rapist that attacked her–and quite possibly at least 20 other women–would have been discovered and charged much sooner.

This sounds like a good idea–making sure that rapists and murderers are more likely to be caught within a reasonable amount of time makes sense.

However, there are also many individuals and groups–including people from the ACLU–who object to the automatic “DNA fingerprinting” of all people arrested for violent crimes.  They argue that collecting DNA samples is much more invasive than actual fingerprinting, and that storing so many people’s DNA will lead to abuses and serious mistakes that might lead to innocent people being arrested for crimes they did not commit.  Furthermore, if anyone who is simply arrested for–not charged with–committing a crime, racism will almost certainly play a role here, since police are more likely to arrest a person of color than a white person.

So, what do you guys think?  I believe very strongly in privacy, but I also believe that people who commit violent crimes need to be caught–rehabilitated if possible, and off the streets if they cannot be rehabilitated.  And, if there are safeguards to ensure that DNA alone will not be enough to convict a person, I don’t really think an expanded database will lead to a potential for abuse and wrongful conviction.

In any case, I have the utmost respect for Neuman, and I think that we need to listen carefully to what she has to say, and, if not put into practice an automatic DNA fingerprinting at each arrest, at least make the system more efficient so that serial rapists are stopped.

Finally, I am returned to the fiber-optic embrace of the Internet!

I apologize, mostly to my co-bloggers, for the delay in postings. All Mothers Day, I was paraded before various neighbors and relatives to prove I had, in fact, survived four months in Milwaukee. Saturday and Friday before, I spent the next two days either in transit, or packing and unpacking baggage material and emotional of my sister and myself. It was a long, infuriating, unproductive trip that provided me only one incidence of liberal guilt to contemplate.

On Saturday, we were moving my sister out of her second-story dorm room.

My father was about to attempt the navigation of two crates of books, a boxed printer, and a bag of laundry onto a thirty-inch high rolling dolly down a flight of stairs. I tried to warn him, but relapsed into passive-aggression, and merely said that avoiding wheeling luggage equal to one’s own bodyweight down stairs was a good rule of thumb.  

Father proceeded anyway. The luggage, of course, was upset, and took ten minutes of shuffling through a stairwell to recover, and so was I. For I then remembered reading that the phrase “rule of thumb” originated in an Elizabethan law permitting a husband to beat his wife with a rod no wider than his own thumb.

Since becoming involved with campus feminist groups, I’ve become painfully aware of the pervasiveness of sexually violent language used in civil, casual conversation. “Fuck”, “screw,” “nail,” “suck[ing] [it]” all illustrate violent sexual action, and are ubiquitous in their usage. Many self-described feminists I’ve spoken to admit to still using them out of sheer habit, and may or may not feel guilt as a consequence. I’ve all but expunged “screwed,” and try to use grammatically incoherent constructions of “fuck” under extreme duress. But still, I occasionally find myself horrified by things blurted out, the connotations of which only occurring to me after their utterance. Some weeks ago in a class discussion I found myself broadcasting the phrase “lie down and take it.” The sexual connotations occurred to me for the first time when the laughter arose—the topic of our discussion was feminist ethics.

So again I was horrified by unintentional invocation of domestic violence. Fortunately, five minutes of web searching proved the Elizabethan-stature legend untrue. The law never existed, though it was referenced several times in the 19^th century in domestic abuse trials. The phrase first appeared in a fencing manual by Sir William Hope in 1692, reading:

“What he doth, he doth by rule of thumb, and not by art.”

                   I was relieved somewhat, but I remained troubled by questions of the relationship between feminism and language. A common objection raised against the movement(s) which I think bears addressing is the claim that feminism “mangles” English, insofar as every political movement exploits language. I hope to make another post on the subject soon, but for now I open the floor to discussion.

Is guilt an appropriate response to mistaken offensive utterances?

Do you have any distasteful phrasing habits you’d like to break for sexual-political reasons? Do you even want to break them?

That is, do they do harm in of themselves, or are they symptoms of a more widespread apathy towards sexual violence? Is it enough for modes of thinking to change, or must language with it? “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds,” thus spoke Zoroaster.

Or, must language change before thought can?

Or better yet, who loves making fun of yogurt commercials??  I do!  I just had to share this video that I saw on feministing.  Enjoy.  It’s fricken hilarious.

It’s not letting me embed the video for some reason, so just click here to see it.

Here’s to all the moms out there!

You are awesome, hardworking people, and you deserve to get more than just one day of recognition.

Cheers, and Happy Mother’s Day!

Background on the sitch:

Republicans and Democrats have been squabbling all week about the proper procedure for voting on a war spending bill.

To make their feelings known, the minority Republicans have been employing stall tactics to gum up most everything the majority Democrats bring to a vote.So on Thursday, the Democrats offered up a routine Mother’s Day resolution — or set a trap, depending on your point of view. It was named House Resolution 1113, “Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mother’s Day.”

Resolution passes, 412-0.  BUT WAIT.  Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) calls for the house to “reconsider” the vote.  This time, 178 Republicans vote “nay” to a resolution honoring mothers.  Best line of the article:

Among them [was] Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann, a mother of five and a foster mother of 23 children.

I want to laugh, really I do.  But seriously?  These people represent us.  

I guess I really have nothing more to say except read this article from the Washington Post.  Basically: BEST TITLE EVER.  If you even get as far as the title, it will make me happy.  

When I was a kid, I remember flipping through my mom’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, an amazing and groundbreaking work published in 1970 that made people aware of issues of women’s health and fought discrimination within the fields of medicine and public health policy.

I just found the Our Bodies, Ourselves of the blogosphere, titled “Our Bodies, Our Blog.” Maintained by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the same group responsible for the publication of the original book, this blog follows women’s issues mostly from a health perspective, but also has a good dose of general feminist activism thrown in.

Check it out–it’s pretty cool.

Because the American Life League will be staging protests at “any clinics or facilities that distribute the birth control pill” to mark the 43^rd anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court case that recognized a couple’s right to privacy extended to the free purchase of birth control.

Predictably, their hip, youthful site is a wonderland of misinformation, but what irked me most was the rather lame assertion from the front page:

The constitutional right to privacy has nothing to do with birth control.

If not in a locked bedroom—hell, if not in an individual’s uterus—where exactly is one entitled to privacy?

Some of the science would be comical if it weren’t cited in earnest. Under the laundry list of ailments caused by the pill, they cite a study in which:

Researchers…found that caged adult [male] trout exposed to ethynylestradiol, a synthetic estrogen, were half as fertile as fish kept in clean water. The trout were exposed to the estrogen for two months, and then bred with a healthy female.Doug Myers, a wetlands and habitat specialist for the Puget Sound Action Team, said that scientists are “finding the presence of female hormones making the male species less male” in frogs, river otters and fish. “Scientists in western Washington found that synthetic estrogen – a common ingredient in oral contraceptives – drastically reduces the fertility of male rainbow trout.”

Because trout are interchangeable with human test subjects…or not.  At least they picked a vertebrate.

Also, the trout used in the study were male. How many men do these people think are on the pill? Don’t answer that.

Under “How the Pill Kills,” they elaborate on the “abortifacient” capabilities of the pill, which:

Changes the lining of the uterus. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the five- to seven-day-old baby to attach to the lining, where he/she would receive the nourishment needed to grow. If the baby does not successfully attach to the lining, he/she dies and is expelled from the body during menstruation. This process is known as a chemical abortion.

But it’s not.  The majority of conceptions, with or without the pill, naturally terminate before the zygote even attaches to the uterine wall. The site fails to mention this.

And, yes, there’s a Facebook group.

Since I am nearing the end of my time at Marquette, I have been doing some serious contemplating about what have been the most important experiences for me.  And, I do find that working on this blog has ranked among the more formative experiences of my education.  Not only has it forced me to put some of my drifting thoughts to “paper” (so to speak blog), but I have had my eyes opened to a new way of disseminating information and expressing views about feminism or other current events.  The blogosphere is a fascinating world, and I am glad that this blog has forced me to explore it.

This is why I find it so sad that there are certain people who, in their trolling way, seek to  shut up or shut down other feminist bloggers.  In particular,  I would like to express The Word Warrior’s solidarity with Cara from The Curvature blog–a witty and well-informed take on feminism from Cara, who is also a contributor to Feministe (yet another of my femiblog faves).

Cara posted an angry, but called-for, reaction to the recent story of the disgusting comedian Johnny Vegas’s sexual assault of a woman onstage, while the crowd did nothing to stop it.  However, a bunch of folks–mostly Rev. Stuart Campbell and the readers of HIS blog–wrote some nasty, insensitive, and inane responses to Cara’s post, defending Vegas, minimizing the sexual assault, and accusing Cara of being unreasonable because she herself is a survivor of sexual assault.  Cara is now taking a few days off to catch up and get over some of the stress caused by these trolls.

Please do me a favor and visit Cara’s site, explore it, and show her your support.  Moreover, reading some of the trolls’ comments (if they have not been deleted yet–and they do deserve to be deleted) will show you how pervasive rape culture really is.  Not only is it a culture in which people would laugh at forced penetration, but it is a culture in which people will accuse anyone critical of the perpetrator of being “hysterical” or irrational.

So, kudos to Cara, and I hope you come back soon!