Short Takes

(Still searching, btw, for that block of time which would allow me to continue my Call to Action — on which there’s been damn little action, btw. You’d think SOMEONE could post the link to some other blogs, or to DU, or something, wouldn’t you? Oh well.)

Gratuitous sexism:

They were such obvious WH hos, I’d have expected them to be wearing stiletto heels and thongs.

Ah! so much for the oft-trotted out defense (at DU) that “whore” isn’t sexist since it can apply equally to so many men these days. Sorry, folks, as this exemplifies, you can NOT divorce it from its original denotation; you will never be able to divorce it from its original misogynist denotation.

2. MORE OF THE SAME

This has the same effect, I think (proves exactly the opposite of what the porn defenders dlaim). If being so called “sex-positive” (to borrow a phrase) were all that upstanding and honorable and positively appreciated by society at large, we wouldn’t be snickering over McCain offering his wife for the topless and sometimes (nearly) bottomless little biker babe contest, now, would we?

McCain Gaffes, Volunteering Wife For Topless Contest

“I was looking at the Sturgis schedule, and noticed that you had a beauty pageant, so I encouraged Cindy to compete,” McCain told an audience at the rally. “I told her with a little luck, she could be the only woman to serve as both the First Lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.”

I dunno. Call me crazy. I just think the title, “Miss Buffalo CHIP” shoulda warned him off saying anything from the start. Dontcha agree?

3. Katie Couric claims she’s a victim of sexism

And I believe she is.

US newsreader Katie Couric claims she is a victim of sexism
America’s highest paid newsreader has claimed she is a victim of
sexism and that discrimination based on gender is more prevalent
– and tolerated – in US society than racism.

Katie Couric, the CBS evening news anchor who earns a reported $15 million a year, compared herself to failed presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton in an interview with Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

“I find myself in the last bastion of male dominance, and realising what Hillary Clinton might have realised not long ago: that
sexism in the American society is more common than racism, and certainly more acceptable or forgivable,” Miss Couric told
the paper as she covered Senator Barack Obama’s Middle East tour.

“In any case, I think my post and Hillary’s race are important steps in the right direction.”

Ms Couric, who in 2006 became the first woman to present a primetime network news broadcast solo, has faced intensive
scrutiny not only of her job performance but her outfits and personal life since taking over the CBS Evening News.

And I know she’s right. Further, I believe that one of the reasons — not the only reason, not the main reason probably — that she has done so poorly is that people in this culture are more used to and therefore more comfortable with male voices for serious network news anchoring. This may or may not be something people are even aware of, or if they are aware of their own preference wouldn’t consider it sexist, but it is. The other reason she’s done poorly (not unlike Hillary) is that she had some whacky ideas about how to do the news.

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Gut-wrenching

“The knife … was for the guys on my side.”

Good Goddess, can it be much worse than that — that your most urgent and daily fears are about what your “buddies” might do to you, you know, the ones who are supposed to help protect you, watch your back? Shudder.

I’ve spent most of today so far immersing myself in more about the military’s treatment of women, including revisiting some old links I had.

In addition to the LaVena Johnson case, there’s also Suzanne Swift. She’s very much alive, thankfully, but she’s been through her own kind of hell. VoxExMachina talks about her case at I Need to Calm Down.

Would that these two cases were all that we needed to be concerned about. Unfortunately, LavVena Johnson’s father has himself been introduced to the tip of the iceberg:

“[LaVena’s father] John Johnson has discovered far more stories that have matched his daughter’s than he ever wanted to know. Ten other families of ‘suicide’ female soldiers have contacted him. The common thread among them — rape.”

As I hope anyone reading this recognizes, yes of course we want justice for these two women, but we also want all our other military women protected from the predators who are their countrymen. CountryMEN, I’d like to restate for emphasis. It’s time to rise above individual stories to address the whole problem.

How bad is it? Very bad:

A 2003 survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military.

A 2004 study of veterans from Vietnam and all the wars since, who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder, found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while in the military.

And in a third study, conducted in 1992-93 with female veterans of the Gulf War and earlier wars, 90 percent said they had been sexually harassed in the military, which means anything from being pressured for sex to being relentlessly teased and stared at.

I understand that that last figure citing sexual harrassment could be seen as far less serious than rape or sexual assault, but I think that would be an erroneous assumption or conclusion. First, I can assure you that sexual harrassment is itself a horrific, disempowering “assault” on any woman, especially someone young and isolated, as our women in the military and especially in the war zone are.

Second, an incidence of 90% is sky high — a terrible marker indicating far more serious, systemic problems. It seems inevitable to me that any organization with that high an incidence of victims of sexual harrassment would also have a proportionally high incidence of rape and other sexual assault. No surprises there.

Now, why does it matter? Can’t these women just buck up and get on with their lives? In a word, No. Our women and men are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan scarred for life because of the PTSD from being in combat (and yes, women ARE in combat). And in addition — a second burden the men for the most part don’t have to shoulder — our women are coming home with PTSD from the sexual assaults they endure, a malady that will likely dog them for most if not all the rest of their live unless they get superb psychological care:

“Some women do fairly well while they’re in the military and don’t fall apart until after they’ve been discharged,” said Callie Wight, a psychotherapist who has been treating trauma survivors, including veterans, for 16 years. “Some women can’t hold it together while they’re in the military because of the PTSD they’ve begun to experience, and so begin to fall apart while they’re in the military … PTSD symptoms are a normal reaction to an abnormal experience.”

PTSD is often associated with mental symptoms: inability to sleep, extreme nervousness, anxiety, and the ability to be easily startled. Wight has found from her work over the past 10 years with female survivors of sexual trauma, that many women also suffer physical symptoms, especially when they don’t seek medical help for their PTSD.

“She’s desperately trying to forget about what happened to her, get over it and get back to what was her normal style of functioning,” said Wight. “But what happens with psychological trauma experiences is unless that trauma is really dealt with consciously, in a therapeutic way, all of those attempts to put it behind her only serve to suppress the information, not eliminate it.”

Physical symptoms can include chronic pelvic pain and irritable bowel syndrome. Some women also become bulimic, compulsive eaters, and abusers of drugs and alcohol — their attempts to “self-medicate” rather than seek professional help.

Even just sexual harrassment can be extremely wearing — not to mention dangerous in a war zone:

In the current Iraq war, which Pickett spent refueling and driving trucks over the bomb-ridden roads, she was one of 19 women in a 160-troop unit. She said the men imported cases of porn, and talked such filth at the women all the time that she became worn down by it. “We shouldn’t have to think every day, ‘How am I going to go out there and deal with being harassed?'” she said. “We should just have to think about going out and doing our job.”

which includes trying to stay alive, and keeping their “buddies” alive too. If their mind are filled with fear and loathing, that kind of focus is going to be much harder to keep. Sexual harrassment and sexual assault of our women can put ALL our troops’ lives at increased unnecessary danger.

I wonder if any of us can even imagine the type of “filth” that she’s talking about? Here’s one woman’s description of what she endured in the Army (please do yourself a favor and read her brilliant essay in its entirety), and it takes my breath away each time I read it:

I just wanna take that piece of ass body, put tape over her mouth, and do things to her. . And then like, I reach in, I yank out her vocal cords and then she just orally satisfies me by the pool. Oh, she’s totally a mute Kim. And she’s totally nude. . And then I break her legs and position them in the back of her head so that she’s sitting, and they’re permanently fixed like that.

I don’t think I could endure hearing that kind of thing more than once. I don’t know what I would do, or what would happen to me, but I do know it’s almost more than I can bear just to read it.

To be continued, hopefully this evening. Much more to come.

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Time for ACTION: The Rape and Murder of our Military Women Must End. Now.

And so must the military’s outrageous and corrupt cover-ups. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, and now I have to write about it again because it won’t leave me alone.

I have been deeply troubled by not just the story of LaVena Johnson, but also of all the other military women, especially those who are asked to serve in Iraq and any other places in that field in support of this tragically misguided war (or anyplace in the whole entire military, actually, but it seems especially frequent in the war zone). Here’s a repost of a shocking article about the subject.

If you haven’t, please watch

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New Category: Totally Gratuitous Use of the Female Form

Almost always scantily clad. (Hmm, wonder why that is?)

I’m so terribly tired of women’s bodies being used to sell stuff. Aren’t you? This image was taken from DU a short while ago. It’s an ad (obviously), using a scantily clad disembodied portion of the female form.

I should think that this sort of “ad” wouldn’t be allowed on a “progressive website,” but I’d be wrong, wouldn’t I? (And don’t imagine I’m “against” the female form — quite the opposite is true. I’m just against its commercialized/commoditized overused MISuse.)

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How could I forget this?

I HAD to make time and come back here to post this. This is a post from a guy who doesn’t think he’s a sexist, though his posts at DU over the years have again and again proven otherwise. Here’s just such a one and I agree: could it BE any clearer?

Two Women – Two Hats – Two Candidates … could it be any clearer?

And here are the two images:

Says he about his incredible, um, observation:

I was struck by this image of the woman at the Obama rally in Berlin and how it evoked an image from nearly four years ago. The similarities …. and the ENORMOUS difference. There’s something far more profound than I can find words to express. The two images – worth far more than a thousand words, it seems.

And that’s another thing we agree about: his post and images ARE worth more than 1000 words, far more. Unfortunately, sir Nut didn’t like hearing some of those words from another feminist on his “find” and actually took it very hard. The exchange is well worth reading. Mr. Tahiti Nut absolutely loses it. Here’s something else he probably wouldn’t appreciate: I confess to being seized with a really bad — uncontrollable — case of the giggles that he found his little comparison “profound.”
The other noteworty thing, and tragically sad yet totally predictable, is how a post like this invites further sexism. The thread is rife with sexist and ageist insults. The opening post made sexism and ageism not just okay, but an easy way to bond with a longterm, well-respected (ugh) DUer. Disgusting. Bit such a thread is allowed to stand at DU. No one in charge seems to care. Also disgusting.

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What lengths men will go to to protect their stash

Their stash of porn, that is.

Here, for example, is the utterly ridiculous notion that feminists who object to pornography — any pornography, apparently — are bigots. Yes, anti-porn feminists are bigots because they claim (to quote the guy): porn = violence against women. And that, he claims, is bigotry.

Oh my. Here’s the opening paragraph of the discussion thread he’s upset about:

Why is it, when the subject is pornography that degrades women, we are assured that viewing pornography has no influence on people’s actions, but so many today are convinced that Jim D. Adkisson did what he did because he listens to Right Wing commentators?

Adkisson wa the guy who shot up the Unitarian church, and listed a whole host of rightwing hatemongers among his reading list. I certainly think it’s a legitimate question she posed whether or not one is for or against pornography. But to Taverner’s fevered brow, it is bigotry. Apparently now porn consumers are (or should be) a protected group — ?? a minority?? (Oh, would that were the case! )

That’s not the only crazy/creepy idea he has. Here are a few more:

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One woman’s suffering….

NOTE: I kept this as a draft (then forgot it) because I needed to doublecheck that this “special” did air on MSBNC, and it did,  though not until 11 pm Eastern. Needless to say I didn’t watch it.

—————————————–

It’s a story more horrifying, more sick and degraded than I can handle, personally, which is why I’ve said nothing about the Josef Fritzl case in Great Britain. It takes something out of me just to do a google search to come up with a link. It’s not a story I’ve willingly — or would willingly — follow, and I sit here typing this with a mild but actual case of physical nausea. This is the man who imprisoned his daughter in a dungeon for 24 years, repeatedly raped and tortured her and she bore him x-number of children. Sorry, if you want the exact number you’ll have to go find it yourself.

The sickest of the sick.

Can there be anything worse? It beggars the imagination to think of that as a possibility. And yet…

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Sorry, Sister: Howard Dean’s No Sexist

I get a little annoyed with people who don’t know what they’re talking about but don’t have a clue that’s even a possibility, so proceed with abandon to mischaracterize something, thereby spreading ignorance around.

Here’s Marcia Pappas, apparently of New York NOW, and egalia of Tennessee Guerilla Women agreeing with her:

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Short Takes

1. Okay, Heather Wilson is bad, but not that bad.

One poor fool holds Congresswoman Wilson responsible for her husband’s alleged sexual assault of a teenage boy:

Anyone married to that beast would be capable of very evil sex deeds.

Sheesh. Is that sexism gratuitous enough for ya? It’s clear the guy doesn’t even mean it, yet simply has to say it anyway. Can’t stop himself. Ugly. Unnecessary. And yet it’s allowed to stand without being removed.

2. News stories on two of the North Carolina women murdered: Holly Wimunc and Nancy Cooper.

I’ve been thinking some more about the threat to our military women posed by our military MEN. More to come on that.

3. How to be a feminist activist without having to work too hard or risk jail at feministgal. Good piece. One of my first “lessons” about political activism was that merely voting is a form of activism.

4. Feministing does a very good job of revealing the bankrupt logic of PETA’s use of women’s naked bodies to capture public attention. (Is THAT gratuitous enough for ya?)

5. Everyone agrees: Purity Balls are creepy to the max.

Well, perhaps not the male half of those participating. But who knows?

There’s a very good reason for the overwhelming negative reaction by the rest of us. I think most psychologists would refer to the practice as incestuous on some level. Emotionally incestuous, perhaps. There’s something quite unnatural, I think, (not to mention highly inappropriate) about a father being overly interested in his daughter’s sex life.

Sure, he has a right to be concerned about her — but not quite to this extent and not in this way. Not to the extent he spends much time thinking or imaging or talking about it or having grown-up style formal dances around the subject. Not to the extent he makes her promise her sexual fidelity to HIM. No, no, no, not right at all!

To be honest, I think this practice is almost worse than being chattel. At least chattel has no overt sexual context.

We’ll talk more about sex and young women in the days to come too. I’ve got a lot to say on the subject.

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Women soldiers raped? murdered? Aw, who cares?

Our women GIs are being raped by their male comrades-in-arms. The graphic accompanying this article shows that 9 out of 10 women marines experienced unwwanted sexual touching. NINE OUT OF TEN!! That’s an obscenity beyond words, but you’ll find very little outrage on DU. Responses ranged from

Nothing new here (ho hum):

Hasn’t this been known for years?

to Nothing new here and whadya expect? This is war and rape is part of war, and women are expendable, whether ours, theirs, official or unofficial and even forced, no matter. Boys will be boys, especially when they’re horny:

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