Do Something Real for #NotFunnyFacebook

When I heard about the Twitter campaign against Facebook's rape joke pages my first thought was, "come on, Internet, seriously? This is why we can't have nice things!". I mean, don't get me wrong, my generation is the Web 2.0 generation and most of the time I loves me the intertubes, but this is the kind of totally ineffective action that gets the whole internet generation dismissed as irrelevant. #notfunnyfacebook may raise awareness about Facebook's fucked up obscenity standards (rape jokes = hilarious, breastfeeding = BANNED!) in some places, but not among the people whose opinions matter to Facebook.

Because here's the thing. People expect a company to care how their customers feel about their service. But people need to realize that on Facebook we are not the customers, we are the product. And companies really don't care how their product feels about anything. What we need to do is hit Facebook where it hurts: in the advertisers. So here's what I recommend. It's more work than just tweeting a hashtag, but I think it's much more likely to be effective.

Step 1:
- Go to one of these pages of rape jokes. They can be hard to find because most articles about them decline (understandably) to link to them. I've so far found two, here and here. (It should go without saying, but trigger warning for sexual violence on those two pages.)

Step 2:
- Make sure you can see the ads. If you use AdBlocker Plus like I do, you need to set it to "disable everywhere" and reload the page.

Step 3:
- Hover your mouse over an ad and a little blue/grey x will appear in the top right corner. Click it.

Step 4:
- A drop down menu will appear with two options. Select "Hide all ads from [this provider]". Then Facebook will ask you why. Select "Other" and type "Supports a page that endorses rape".

Step 5:
- repeat steps 3 and 4 until all the ads on that page are hidden. Then reload the page and go back to step 3.

I don't know for sure if this will work. I don't know if anyone reads the comments when you block an ad for "Other" reasons. But I do know this: The only thing, and I mean ONLY thing, Facebook cares about is their advertisers. And if enough people start to do this, in a regular and sustained way, it should cause a blip in either Facebook's or the advertisers' analytics and someone might pay attention.

Tweeting a hashtag is great, but it's only ever step one. To be effective, we need to move on to step two.

No Offense

Recently a girl in my new lab said to me, "you can tell me if you find my jokes offensive. I know I tend to joke about a lot of crazy stuff, so you should tell me if it bothers you." She had just made a slightly off-colour (and not very funny) joke. Doesn't matter what it was.

I smiled blandly at her and returned to the actual conversation. At the time I thought that I was deciding not to say anything about her somewhat offensive joke because I didn't want to take the time to explain that the reason I found the joke offensive was not the reason she thought someone might find it offensive. Like explaining to someone that when they call your shirt "gay" you aren't offended because they didn't like your shirt. It wasn't that, but it was somewhat analogous. And I just didn't want to get into it.

I mean, it's true. I didn't want to get into that with her. But as I let more and more stupid little things from her slide, and I had absolutely no interest in mentioning any of them, I realized there was more going on. So here's the thing.

It's not about my feelings. First of all, my feelings don't get particularly hurt when someone makes derogatory remarks about a group I'm a member of. It's pretty simple: if someone is that much of a bigot then their opinion doesn't matter to me, and if their opinion doesn't matter, then nothing they say can hurt me. Really. My primary emotional response is boredom. But that's an aside, and here's the more important point: when it comes to my relationships, I don't want someone to refrain from making certain jokes or using certain language because I find it offensive. I want them to refrain from doing those things because *they* find it offensive. I want them to have thought critically about the assumptions that underlie their jokes and about the effect their language has on others. And if they are someone who does not do that kind of thinking, well, I want them to wear that fact on their sleeve.

Just one thing I do have to get off my chest, though: If you want to have a career studying sexually transmitted infections, then by the time you're in grad school you should be able to talk about sex without needing to crack terrible jokes to assuage your discomfort. Seriously.

Something You Can Do

Via Bitch, PhD, we see that anti-choice organization Operation Rescue will holding protests outside abortion clinics all over the US and in a few Canadian cities for 40 days starting /september 23rd. You can check their website to see if a clinic in your area is being targeted, and if so, get in touch with them and ask how you can help.

Please do contact the clinic first, and don't just show up to yell at the protesters. The point here is to help protect the clinic's staff and patients from harassment, not to make life just outside their doors even more noisy and tense.

Four Months and Two Days Early, the Message is the Same

George Sodini was certainly disturbed. Healthy, well-adjusted people don't go into fitness clubs and shoot up aerobics classes. Nor do they enter universities and shoot students sitting in class and walking in the halls. Marc Lépine was also crazy. But to therefore conclude that nothing about society can be learned from their actions, that nothing can be generalized from their self-stated motivations, is preposterous.

It is possible, even likely, that in a society free of patriarchy, Sodini and Lépine would still have gone on murderous rampages. These two men both felt they had failed in some aspect of their lives. For Sodini it was sex and romance, for Lépine the failure was more general, I think. He was rejected by the army, had difficulty making friends, and generally wasn't happy with his life. It seems likely to me that these failures would still have happened in a patriarchy-free society. Sodini and Lépine both blamed others for their failures, not taking any responsibility on themselves. This strikes me as equally likely to have been true even in a patriarchy-free society.

What strikes me as considerably less likely is that in an egalitarian society, they would have chosen to blame for their failures, and therefore kill, the same groups of people they did.

Even lunatics need context from which to draw their ideas. Sodini didn't shoot up an aerobics class, he shot up a women's aerobics class. Lépine didn't kill students, he killed female students. And the stories they told are familiar as hell. Any woman trying to make headway in a male-dominated field, hell, anyone with regular social contact with a large number of men has heard these stories before. Amanda Marcotte gets it exactly right when she says that women are put down, beaten, or killed for being insufficiently compliant. From refusing to be sexually available to a man to daring to succeed where a man has failed, the crime for which women are continually punished is that of acting like competent, self-reliant, independent adults, and it is exactly this behaviour that George Sodini and Marc Lépine blamed their failures on. It is for these reasons that Sodini and Lépine killed women and not some other group.

Contrary to what Naomi Lakritz seems to think in the above-linked article, I am not blaming men (all men or any particular men, or men as a group) for Sodini and Lépine's behaviour. I don't believe that all men have a little Marc Lépine in them, or that men as a class can be hanged on George Sodini's actions. What I do believe is that the choices these men made were not conceived in a vacuum. Like the choices many other men make, to beat or rape their wives and girlfriends, to mistreat the women in their office, to pass over their female employees for promotion, and to dismiss their female friends in conversation, Sodini and Lépine's choices of who to kill are symptoms of a common cause. Of attitudes prevalent in our society, and many other societies, about how women are or should be versus how men are or should be. These attitudes are held and perpetuated by both men and women and it's less a question of blame than it is one of effect and remedy.

In effect, if not intention, these massacres are acts of terrorism against women. That they were killing women because they were women means that I, and all the other women who weren't in those rooms, am still alive only by an accident of time and place. That knowledge breeds fear. It disinclines women to do things, go places, participate fully in society.

So what's the remedy? I'm not sure. But I would say that, contrary to what Ms. Lakritz would like, the first step is talking about it.

In Case There Was Every Any Doubt That a Scientist's Politics and Assumptions Can Invade Their Work

Observe the radically different descriptions of what is essentially the same behaviour in males and females, from Animal Behaviour 8th Ed. by John Alcock, page 369:

Male satin bowerbirds, as we saw in the previous chapter, are capable of copulating with dozens of females in a single breeding season, although they rarely have the good fortune to do so. In other words, males of this species have the capacity to be polygynous. In contrast, most female satin bowerbirds are monogamous, mating with just one male per nesting attempt. But the satin bowerbird's mating system (males potentially polygynous, females mostly monogamous)...

Because girls and boys is different, see...

What She Said

This whole gleeful hate-on that so many people have for Sarah Palin has really been rubbing me the wrong way lately. Now Flea has explained why.

No One Actually Buys this Shit, Right?

I wasn't going to blog about it, because it isn't even my country, but some of the things McCain said last night were insane. I mean I know a certain amount of insanity is needed to retain the RTC vote, but for the sake of my sanity I refuse to believe that *anyone* could be won over by these gems:

• The idea that nuclear power should be safe is a radical environmentalist position


• The use of airquotes when talking about how late-term abortion bans* shouldn't include exceptions for women's "health"


• The idea that military personal, upon leaving the army, should be fast-tracked into teaching positions in public schools without needing to do any training or pass any certification exams or otherwise show that they, you know, can teach

He also completely cracked me up when claimed that his campaign couldn't be held responsible for Palin's "palling around with terrorists" smear because every rally has its fringe elements.

---

*As an aside, I am very angry at Obama right now for coming out in support of banning late-term abortions, and I don't care if he does think there should be exceptions for the life and health of the mother. These late term abortion arguments are a *huge* red herring in the abortion discussion and he should have called McCain out on that. Women don't up and decide, at 8 months gestation, that they'd rather not be pregnant after all, TYVM, bikini season is coming up so let's go have an abortion.** By including exceptions for life/health of the mother (and one assumes that this includes allowing the termination of fetuses that are dying and/or wouldn't survive out of the womb), the only abortions such a ban would prevent are those of women who have been trying to abort since their first trimester but couldn't because they lacked access, or those being considered by women whose social/economic/whatever situation has just changed dramatically, to the point where they no longer feel they can continue with the pregnancy. In addition, supporting late-term abortion bans while allowing earlier abortions pretty much always requires making what Amp calls the "woman, what woman?" argument. That is unfuckingacceptable and Obama should be ashamed of himself. Here's hoping that his enforced-childbirth support is really just pandering to that seeming majority that believe they support such positions only because they don't actually know much about it.

**Although I personally believe that if they did they should still be allowed to have one, because it's still their damn body.

So It Turns Out...

Greg Laden? Awesome on race. Awesome on science education. Kind of a sexist asshat.

It's really a shame. Come on people, there are so many good reasons why this woman shouldn't be VP. Having been a beauty queen isn't one of them.

I'm actually quite disappointed, because I'm usually a fan of Laden's. But I know that he was called out on the beauty queen thing in his first post on Palin, and he hasn't either stopped doing it, or explained why he thinks it's okay.

Amazing

Everyone needs to go watch this speech by Barack Obama.

I can't help it. I ought to know that every step in an election campaign is choreographed. That I should make no assumptions that a politician's words in any way reflect their beliefs. I know that, but I just can't help it. This speech gives me hope. Maybe it's just that I've never heard Obama speak before. I have heard that he's an excellent orator and it could be that that's all this is, but I don't think so.

I can't endorse the speech unqualifiedly -- there were three things in it that I found objectionable -- but three things in a 37 minute speech is not bad, and for the bulk of it I was amazed. Obama was saying things that are necessary, things that I think every American (and Canadian) needs to hear, but as important as the content of the speech is, more important is the fact that Obama delivered it, and delivered it now. He could have left it a desk drawer (or more likely a file on his computer), waiting for the day when he was retired and had nothing to lose.

I honestly didn't think I would live to see the day that a serious politician who has a real chance of winning the American presidential election would stand up and speak an uncomfortable truth to people who might not want to hear it, people who he hopes will nonetheless vote for him. It sets a heartening precedent. Obama's courage (and, one hopes, success) in delivering this speech opens the door to something resembling honest discussion about oppression. It makes room for women politicians to speak up about back-alley abortions and the necessity of reproductive rights. It makes room for gay and lesbian politicians to talk about the days before Stonewall and the ongoing oppressions they face.

I'm not so naive as to think that this is going to start happening regularly, or right away. But it's happened once, and that means it can happen again.

Update: Pam Spaulding at Pandagon has written a post saying much of what I was trying to say, and more, much more eloquently than I did. Just go read that.

It Just Seems to Me

Without saying a word against the gentleman who was actually doing the job -- as far as I could tell his behaviour was completely professional and above reproach -- it just seems unlikely to me that the Athletics Department couldn't find a single woman with the skills to install an automatic opener on the door to the women's changeroom. I'm not sayin', just sayin'.

Rachel Maddow Hits It out of the Park

I've become familiar with Rachel Maddow through her frequent appearances on Keith Olbermann's Countdown show, which I watch through Crooks and Liars, and I'm a bit of a fan. At this Pandagon post we see Maddow going head to head with a crazy person who supports abstinence-only education, and she pulls no punches.

My favourite bit is towards the end:

Maddow: If abstinence programs are being used to substitute for programs that actually give people usable information about contraception, STDs and HIV, then they are killing people.

Thank you, Ms. Maddow.

It's also nice to see a host (in this case, Dan Abrams) who doesn't feel he has to be carefully neutral when faced with the choice between hard data and gibbering idiocy.

Melissa Wins

Via Pandagon, Melissa McEwan of Shakesville has an excellent post up about the problem of disembodied girly bits.

If you can stomach the whole thing, I recommend going through it one at a time, if only to allow the effect of "okay, that's gotta be it. What?!? ANOTHER one?!?" to sink in. But if you really can't stomach it then at least scroll to the bottom and read what she actually has to say. My favourite bit?

I'm a girl with absolutely no interest in participating in my own subjugation, thank you very much.

This post was part of a so-far-ten-part series McEwan is doing on the appalling prevalence of bits-of-women novelty items available for sale, everything from rape-me pencil holders to vagina urinals. The tenth post here linked has links to the first nine. The above-linked exhaustive boobie list was number eight.

A Crowded Institution

I like this post of Andrea's about polygamy, but I have to respectfully disagree with her on one point:

I firmly do not believe that multiple marriage has anything at all to do with same-sex marriage. The MacLean’s article says, “Marriage, already open to same-sex couples, could become a very crowded institution.” Oh, for Chrissakes. Did you really need to toss a sprinkling of homophobia into the mix? Because we queers are crowding the straights, is that it? Invading their personal space, perhaps? I didn’t realize that marriage was a room with a maximum capacity. Are we a frickin’ fire hazard now? Screw you. Get the fuck over it, people.

I agree that that was a homophobic and assholish comment on the part of the McLean's author, and that people do need to get the fuck over it, but I strongly disagree that same sex marriage has nothing to do with non-religious polygamy. Indeed, I think they are two aspects of the very same issue.

To me, the crux of the SSM debate was whether we wanted marriage to be a religiously defined institution, based on traditional ideas of relationships as necessary for social-group-mixing, transfer of property, etc., or an institution based on sense and legal expediency, providing humane and reasonable ways of dealing with such questions as health-benefit sharing and income tax on households that share expenses, child custody when households split up, etc. If we decide on the latter then the reasons for restricting the institution to groups of two evaporate along with the reasons for keeping it between opposite sex couples.

Like Andrea, I think that marriage is an out-moded, irrelevant, oppressive, and mysogynist institution (which is what I assume she means when she says "marriage kinda sucks"), and I think we need something new. If people want their religious institutions to bless their romantic/sexual relationships, that's their business, but I don't want to have to be involved in their fight to get the religious institutions to bless *this* particular pairing, or *that* particular set up. That is so resoundingly not my problem, and the best way to keep it that way is to make religious marriage an exclusively religious institution, carrying no legal weight whatsoever, and come up with something else on the legal side of things. I think what would work best (and Andrea touches on this as well) is a set of standard but tweakable contracts that have more to do with how a household is set up financially and in terms of child care, and don't worry about who's fucking whom. I agree that we need a system where two people in a romantic triad can sponsor the third for immigration based on their relationship, but I don't think that's enough. We need a system where a woman who stays home to care for her sister's or adult daughter's child will qualify for domestic partner benefits, and get consideration in terms of custody should the household split up. Households and families do not always consist of two (or more) adults who are sexual partners, plus kids. Adult siblings living together, groups of unrelated but not-sexually-involved women living together to share resources and raise their kids, grown children living with their parents or aunts/uncles, and all manner of other households are all completely normal, healthy and good ways to live, and the law needs to reflect that.


I think the conservatives who screamed that same-sex marriage was just a stepping stone towards allowing consenting adults to enter into whatever relationship they wanted, with full legal sanction, were absolutely right. I just don't see what the bad is.

And So It Goes

When I was in middle school and highschool I had an English teacher named Mary Ann Duffy. She was an articulate, no-nonsense shit disturber. She was also the only English teacher I have met who had any brains at all.

I remember one of my first classes with her in grade 7. I was at a new school, hadn't really made friends yet and was nervous as hell, and she laughed at my joke when I answered her question "what kind of clauses are there other than a subordinate clause?" with, "an INsubordinate clause...?"

I remember laughing when we were reading Midsummernight's Dream and came to the line where Lysander says:

You have her father's love, Demetrius;
Let me have Hermia's: do you marry him

(This is when Hermia's father is trying to convince her to marry Demetrius, but she and Lysander want to marry each other). And I remember Mary Ann appreciating that I laughed, and agreeing that it was funny (to the bafflement of my classmates who, I think, all thought Lysander was asking a question).

Mary Ann fertilised the writing seed Mr. Eckler had planted in me in elementary school, and she encouraged me in all the things I needed to be encouraged in. She thought it was important that we all speak our minds, and I think she saw it as a part of her job as English teacher to give us the tools we needed to speak our minds as effectively as possible. She taught us that it was possible to be diplomatic without compromising our message. She also taught us that sometimes diplomacy was not what was called for.

Some years after she had left the school, I learned that she had died of a brain tumor. I was very sad, not so much for myself, since it had been years since I'd seen her, but because the world needs as many Mary Anns as possible.

Then, just recently, I discovered Molly Ivins. When I saw her speaking in the Dildo Diaries, I realised that she was channelling Mary Ann (or maybe Mary Ann had been channelling Ivins). Mary Ann was exactly the type of person who would have had zero patience with the "dipshit stuff" that Ivins talks about in the video. Reading Ivins' columns, I heard them in Mary Ann's voice.

The more I read Ivins' work, the more I realised that, while Mary Ann was gone, and that was sad, we still had Ivins, and that made it just a little more okay. Watching this video that P.Z. Myers is promoting, I realised just how much Molly Ivins was standing in for Mary Ann in my mind.

At this point, the only thing I can think of to do is to make sure that when I grow old I'm as crusty and witty and articulate and funny as Mary Ann and Ivins were. When I grow old I will say precisely what I think, and I will never be too afraid.

I just hope they can forgive me if I can't do it with a Texas accent.

S'Aright, Asshole...

... I doubt they want you, either.

Jerks.

Googlebombs Away!

There is a serious problem on the internets. When I google the word "abortion" the first hit is for an extremely creepy website, www.abortionfacts.com (these assholes get no link-love from me). Abortionfacts.com is creepy because it isn't immediately obvious what they're about, but 10 seconds of clicking and reading reveals them to be of the pregnancy crisis centre variety. A bunch of pretend-compassionate assholes who try their darnedest to deceive women who are pregnant and don't want to be out of getting abortions. These people are scary.

Unfortunately, the only way to get them off the front page is to get enforced childbirth supporters to stop linking to them, and we can't do that (at least not without some 1337 h4xx1n9 5k1llz, and certainly not legally). What we can do, however, is googlebomb something else so that these assholes are no longer the top hit.

I recommend the National Abortion Federation. They're already the second ghit, so we don't have far to go. It's real simple. All you gotta do is put a link to the National Abortion Federation, using the word abortion as the link (just like I've been doing here), on the front page of your blog or website. So, whaddaya say? Shall we bump these low down dirty deceivers off the top of the list?

Meaty Gender Post

Over at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte has an excellent post about the gendered politics of eating meat.

While this idea isn't a new one to me, this is the first time that I've seen it explicitly stated. Up until now I only had it internalized, and a vague awareness of that internalization.

What I mean is that it's always surprised me when I find out that a man is vegetarian. The more manly and heterosexual that man is, the more surprising I find it (and the more effeminate the man is the less surprising I find it). I've been aware that it surprised me, and I've often wondered why that's the case, but I'd never consciously made the connection between eating meat and manliness.

Amanda does an excellent job of pointing that out, and of tying it in with other ways in which misogyny is used to market (self-)destructive products or behaviours (like newer, faster cars, and joining the army) to men*.

Not having a television, I'm generally not in a position to know what's going on in the world of TV marketing, but I have to say that Amanda's descriptions of the fast food commercials hardly surprised me.

____________
*Any commenters of the PHMTAIWJTFI variety will be spanked.

I Think I'll Get A Job In A Slaughterhouse

It must be nice to get paid not to do your job.

I'm no legal expert, so I can't say what the laws actually say, but I will say this: If the laws prevent an employer from taking action against a person who refuses to perform perfectly standard and legal aspects of their job, that they knew about when they took the job, then the law needs to be changed.

And if the law doesn't prevent it then serious pressure needs to be brought to bear against these companies. They need to be boycotted, picketed, and denounced until they start making their employees Do Their Jobs.

I mean really. How old are these pharmacists? 10? They're certainly acting it.

It's real simple people: If your job requires you to do something you find morally reprehensible, get a different job.

I'm incessantly amazed at the stupidity of my species.

Go Ahead, I Dare You.

Call this video of two embryos exploding murder.

Do it.

Compare, in all sincerity, this to the killing of two fully developed human beings.

Please, I beg you. It would so make my day.

(hat tip, PZM)

I Just Don't Know

Should I go to Vienna in the first or second half of June? Should I move away to be with my partner in September, or stay in Montreal? How long should I spend in Toronto this spring? I just can't decide. It's my lack of Y-chromosome, I think.

Fortunately, for me, there is help.

Women, call Senator Napoli for any decision you have to make. The phone numbers for the entire South Dakota senate can be found here.