The Guardian publishes samples of the many many letters urging Judge Persky not to sentence Brock Turner to prison.

The father’s letter, however, is just one of dozens of testimonials that Turner’s supporters sent to Persky – letters that the judge said he seriously considered in his decision to allow the former swimmer to avoid the minimum prison time of two years prescribed by law.

The Guardian has obtained copies of all the letters Persky received – statements that defend Turner’s actions, blame the victim for being assaulted, and decry the consequences the swimmer has faced while ignoring the suffering of the 23-year-old woman. The letters, along with Turner’s own statement, provide a window into a culture that critics say devalues victims, minimizes the seriousness of campus sexual assault, and fails to hold perpetrators accountable.

And treats people less white than Turner very differently.

Some examples from some letters:

Carolyn and Richard Bradfield, grandparents

Brock is the only person being held accountable for the actions of other irresponsible adults. He raised a right hand, swore an oath and told the truth.

Brock is a good 20 year old young man who has never been in trouble. Brock has essentially served a 14 month jail sentence while awaiting trial. We beg the court to grant time served and no additional time to our grandson, Brock Turner.

I guess the grandparents think Emily Doe should be held accountable for her own rape? Turner assaulted her, so she should be held accountable just as he is? Or maybe more? The fact that she didn’t assault anyone is beside the point?

Carleen Turner, mother

He will live a lifetime of scrutiny, he lost 2 jobs just because he was accused of this, now he faces of lifetime of struggling for decent work. Can he be on a college campus? I don’t know … I beg of you, please don’t send him to jail/prison. Look at him. He won’t survive it. He will be damaged forever and I fear he would be a major target. Stanford boy, college kid, college athlete – all the publicity. This would be a death sentence for him. Having lost everything he has ever worked for his entire life and knowing the registry is a requirement for the rest of his life certainly is more than harsh. His dreams have been shattered by this.

His dreams. Never mind about her dreams.

Caroline Turner, sister
A series of alcohol-fueled decisions that he made within an hour timespan will define him for the rest of his life. Goodbye to NCAA championships. Goodbye to the Olympics. Goodbye to becoming an orthopedic surgeon. Goodbye to life as he knew it.

It’s almost as if Emily Doe raped him, not the other way around.

Jeff Coudron, family friend
The verdict hurt because we knew he was a great kid that in the matter of a few hours, made a few bad decisions that have changed his life forever. The media never mentioned the girl’s name to protect her, but they plastered Brock’s everywhere, even before he was tried.

There’s a reason for that. It’s because she is the victim and he is the rapist.

Meghan Olson, assistant swim coach for the Dayton Raiders swim club

In spite of one night of alcohol-induced poor decision making, Brock is still the same intelligent young man that enrolled in Stanford University in the fall of 2015 and can unquestionably make a significantly meaningful contribution to society.

It was just bad decision making, that’s all – no, not even bad, just poor. It was poor decision making. Or maybe mediocre? Let’s call it mediocre. It was mediocre decision making. We don’t punish that. End of.

Media Matters has a depressing report on the way cable news in the US talks about abortion.

A Media Matters study of 14 months of evening cable news programs found that discussions of abortion were weighted toward anti-choice speakers, which resulted in widespread misinformation on the topic. Of the three networks, Fox News aired the largest number of inaccurate statements about the most prevalent abortion-related myths, and MSNBC was the most accurate.

…

Media Matters analyzed the following four abortion-related misinformation claims:

1) Government funds given to Planned Parenthood through Medicaid are illegally used to pay for abortions;

2) Birth control acts as an abortifacient;

3) Planned Parenthood “harvests” or “sells” or is “profiting” from fetal tissue; and

4) The Center for Medical Progress’ work or videos are “journalism” or fair depictions.

But it’s not as if people get their “information” from watching tv news oh wait yes it is.

All findings ​about statements relate to the four abortion-related misinformation claims on qualifying segments:

• 705 statements containing inaccurate abortion-related information aired on Fox News;
• 158 statements containing accurate abortion-related information aired on Fox News;
• 70 percent of Fox News appearances* were by people — including hosts, correspondents, and guests — who either identify as anti-choice or who consistently or mostly made anti-choice statements;
• CNN had three times the number of anti-choice guest appearances as pro-choice;
• 49 percent of MSNBC appearances were by people — including hosts, correspondents, and guests — who either identify as pro-choice or who consistently or mostly made pro-choice statements;
• 6 percent of MSNBC appearances were by people — including hosts, correspondents, and guests — who either identify as anti-choice or who consistently or mostly made anti-choice statements;
• 40 percent of all appearances on all three networks were made by people who either identify as anti-choice or who consistently or mostly made anti-choice statements;
• 17 percent of all appearances on all three networks were made by people who either identify as pro-choice or consistently or mostly made pro-choice statements;
• 62 percent of all appearances on all networks — including hosts, correspondents, and guests — were male; and
• There was one appearance by a group that represents and advocates for reproductive rights for women of color.

Well it’s not as if disinformation can cause any harm…

An extract from Kat Banyard’s new book Pimp State:

The steady creep of “sex work” into 21st-century vernacular is neither incidental nor accidental. The term didn’t just pop up and go viral. The Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP), an organisation that openly campaigns for brothel-keeping and pimping to be recognised as legitimate jobs, credits itself as largely responsible for “sex work” replacing “prostitution” as the go-to terminology for institutions such as the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

“More than mere political correctness,” the NSWP proudly states, “this shift in language had the important effect of moving global understandings of sex work toward a labour framework.”

Oh yeah? Then where are the health and safety regulations? Where is the safety equipment? Where are the sexual harassment classes?

The whole point of the sex industry is that it offers men the chance to buy sexual access to women who do not want to have sex with them – otherwise they wouldn’t have to pay. Masking its fundamental purpose thus becomes the primary PR challenge for the prostitution, pornography and strip club trades if they are to survive – maybe even thrive – in a society that has decided, at least in principle, that women are not subordinate sex objects and rape is a bad thing.

Perhaps the single most effective strategy hit upon so far is to pump out the myth contained in the term “sex work”: the myth that it is possible to commodify consent.

How can sexual consent be a thing that can be bought and sold, yet we can still talk with a straight face about there being such concepts as healthy sexual relationships and meaningful consent? If, while having sex with someone, you feel repulsed by them touching you, afraid of what they might do, degraded and humiliated by the sexual acts, hurt by the hateful words they’re whispering in your ear, sore because he’s the fifth man you’ve had sex with today, exhausted from it all, traumatised, abused – the fact that you’ll get a bit of cash at the end does not change anything. There is no invisible hand in the prostitution market that magically disappears the lived experience of sexual abuse.

And a minority of privileged prostitutes who have a pleasanter lived experience doesn’t change that, any more than a handful of comparatively humane slave-owners made slavery acceptable.

Trades weave themselves into the fabric of society. We know this. We place all kinds of restrictions and prohibitions on markets precisely because of this. Because the risks, particularly to the most vulnerable and marginalised in society, are just too high. Commercial exchanges that people may agree to participate in without a gun being held to their head – such as sales of human organs, voting rights, bonded labour contracts – are nonetheless deemed legally off limits. It’s the line in the sand that societies draw to say that the harm to those directly involved, to third parties, or to the bedrock principles necessary for equal citizenship, is simply too great. Some trades are too toxic to tolerate.

A basic principle that is utterly indispensable to ending violence against women, not to mention to our fundamental concept of humanity, is that sexual abuse is never acceptable. Not even when the perpetrator has some spare cash and the person he’s abusing needs money. Cheerleaders of brothels, porn sets and strip clubs would have us believe that the sex trade levitates above the level of social values and cultural beliefs. But no one can opt out of its effects. A market in sexual exploitation, accepted and tolerated, influences who we all are as individuals, and who we are as a people.

A society that acts in law and language as if men who pay to sexually access women are simply consumers, legitimately availing workers of their services, is a society in deep denial about sexual abuse – and the inequality underpinning it.

•Pimp State: Sex, Money and the Future of Equality by Kat Banyard (Faber & Faber, £12.99). To order a copy for £10.39, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call the Guardian Bookshop on 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

There’s a new way of being shitty: the [[[echoes]]] symbol.

Updating to say: those brackets should all be parentheses, as should all the brackets below, including in the quoted passages. Pretend you see three curved vertical lines facing right plus three curved vertical lines facing left.

In the early days of the social web, putting someone’s name in multiple parentheses was meant to give that person a cute virtual hug. Today, it’s something far more sinister.

Neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and white nationalists have begun using three sets of parentheses encasing a Jewish surname — for instance, [[[Fleishman]]] — to identify and target Jews for harassment on blogs and major social media sites like Twitter. As one white supremacist tweeted, “It’s closed captioning for the Jew-blind.”

Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor for the New York Times, wrote about his experience as a victim of this harassment in a May 26 story.

“Hello [[Weisman]]” it began after Weisman tweeted a Washington Post article about Donald Trump titled “This Is How Fascism Comes to America.”

Weisman asked his harasser, @CyberTrump, to explain the symbol. “It’s a dog whistle, fool,” the user responded. “Belling the cat for my fellow goyim.”

The squalor we are living in never ceases to amaze me.

With the parentheses, @CyberTrump had alerted an army of trolls. The attacks that followed were sudden and unremitting. “The anti-Semitic hate, much of it from self-identified Donald J. Trump supporters, hasn’t stopped since,” Weisman wrote.

The origins of the symbol [[[]]] can be traced to a hardcore, right-wing podcast called The Daily Shoah in 2014. It’s known as an “echo” in the anti-Semitic corners of the alt-right — a new, young, amorphous conservative movement that comprises trolls fluent in internet culture, free speech activists warring against political correctness and earnest white nationalists.

That last is one of those sentences that demonstrate why the “Oxford” comma can be so necessary. I stopped to try to figure out why free speech activists were warring against both political correctness and earnest white nationalists, which makes no sense. Then I realized it was bad punctuation. But I digress. The point is, yes, we’re all well familiar with that new conservative movement and its enthusiasm for harassing people.

Last week, Mic staffers became the target of anti-Semitic trolls a day after Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who has a large following of conservatives, tweeted a Mic story about Trump.

So now I know why I’m seeing people with [[[]]] on their Twitter handles.

Jen Gunter asks a very pertinent question about Brock Turner’s father that I wish I’d thought to ask myself.

And as for Brock Turner’s father who feels that his son doesn’t deserve jail for one 20 minute period of bad behavior (or an “action” as he called it) in a life of otherwise “good,” I guess I’d say if your son were unconscious behind a dumpster and an otherwise “good man” were caught raping your son would you think the injuries not serious and what punishment do you think that man would deserve?

And how deeply would you mourn for that man’s lost ability to enjoy a good ribeye steak?

Oh fuck.

ISIS on Thursday executed 19 Yezidi girls by burning them to death, activists and eyewitnesses reported.

The victims, who had been taken by ISIS terrorists as sex slaves, were placed in iron cages in central Mosul and burned to death in front of hundreds of people.

“They were punished for refusing to have sex with ISIS militants,” local media activist Abdullah al-Malla said.

“The 19 girls were burned to death, while hundreds of people were watching. Nobody could do anything to save them from the brutal punishment,” an eyewitness said in Mosul.

We’re a mistake. Human beings are a mistake. We must be, or we wouldn’t be capable of that kind of thing. All that brain power, and it’s not enough to prevent us from doing things like that.

The Independent also reports the story as do other news sources.

From the “this must be parody” file, Yale students launch a petition telling the English department to stop requiring English majors to read Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton.

The prestigious Connecticut university requires its English majors to spend two semesters studying a selection of authors it labels the “major English poets”: “Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Donne in the fall; John Milton, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, and TS Eliot or another modern poet in the spring”.

Now, if I were in charge of that course I might swap Spenser for someone else – like, maybe push Milton back into the first semester and add Keats to the second. I can see quibbling over which “canonical” poets to include – but I can’t see saying “no ‘canonical’ poets at all!!” English majors read English literature – that’s what the major is.

It would be fabulous if there were comparable women poets from those centuries, but there just aren’t, for the familiar obvious reasons – most girls weren’t even taught to read, let alone encouraged to futz around with writing down words. It’s a huge historical injustice, but that’s not a reason to skip reading Shakespeare.

But students have launched a petition calling on Yale to “decolonise” the course. They want the university to abolish the major English poets requirement, and to refocus the course’s pre-1800/1900 requirements “to deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity”.

I’m betting Yale already does include courses that do things along those lines, to the extent that one can with regard to literature that was unfamiliar with most of those categories; it’s not clear why students think it should get rid of major poets from the curriculum altogether.

The petition says that “a year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of colour, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity”, and that the course “creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of colour”.

Setting aside the tiresome didacticism of the language for the sake of argument, that’s true in a way. It’s true that it can be depressing (at least at intervals) to immerse yourself in a literature that someone like you could never have had a share in creating. The students aren’t completely wrong to say that. But…they are wrong to say that the thing to do then is throw out Shakespeare and Wordsworth. The cure is far worse than the disease.

One student, Adriana Miele, told the student newspaper that change was needed in the English department “because it openly rejects the very legitimate scholarship, criticism and analysis that many other academic departments at Yale embrace”.

In April, Miele wrote a column in the Yale Daily News in which she criticised the course because while students “are taught how to analyse canonical literature works”, they “are not taught to question why it is canonical, or the implications of canonical works that actively oppress and marginalise non-white, non-male, trans and queer people.”

No. Shut up. Don’t be schewpid. The works don’t “actively oppress” anyone. Maybe if Miele read a little more poetry she would manage to wean herself off language like that, with its combined staleness and dishonesty. It’s true that no one in the 16th century took the trouble to recruit non-white, non-male, trans and queer people to write poetry so that it could be taught to Yale students in the 21st century – but that by itself is not oppression, and it doesn’t makes the poetry that was written “actively oppressive.”

“It is possible to graduate with a degree in English language and literature by exclusively reading the works of (mostly wealthy) white men. Many students do not read a single female author in the two foundational courses for the major. This department actively contributes to the erasure of history,” Miele wrote.

They don’t read a single female author in the two foundational poetry courses because women don’t loom as large in English poetry as they do in the English novel. I hope Emily Dickinson is one of the alternatives to T S Eliot, but other than that – the supply is thin.

Slate writer Katy Waldman, who studied English literature at Yale, advised students that “if you want to become well-versed in English literature, you’re going to have to hold your nose and read a lot of white male poets. Like, a lot. More than eight.”

“The canon is what it is, and anyone who wishes to understand how it continues to flow forward needs to learn to swim around in it,” writes Waldman. “I am not arguing that it is acceptable for an English major to graduate from college having only read white male authors or even 70% white male authors. But you cannot profess to be a student of English literature if you have not lingered in the slipstreams of certain foundational figures, who also happen to be (alas) both white and male.”

It is what it is. Women can be poets now. In the past? Not so much. Affirmative action doesn’t work well on the past.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Not blaming her directly.

Another thing about the DUI – it is very possible, and in fact happens every day all over the driving world, that people who drive drunk may get safely home without hurting anyone (this doesn’t make it OK, mind you). A person who rapes drunk cannot, by definition, get safely home without hurting someone, because in rape there is always another person involved. Yet society is harder on someone who is driving drunk who has not hit a tree, a car, or a person, but who has just weaved in and out and can’t walk a straight line, than on a young man who uses his drunkenness as an excuse for sexual activity with a woman against her will.

Part of this is the force of things like M.A.D.D. which has focused on the children that might be hurt if you drive drunk, and the innocent young things that get killed by drunk drivers while they are playing in the yard or riding their bike. Campus rape, on the other hand, happens to grown women, women who are in college by choice, and by definition have given up the right to be considered innocent young things simply because they are on a college campus, and therefore behaving in a manner not suitably womanly.

Promising young woman raped in the prime of her life, perhaps depression or pregnancy prevent her from completing her degree and reaching her full potential because someone else chose to violate her rights. Versus. Promising young athlete jailed and suspended, unable to finish his program and compete in the Olympics because (a) he chose to commit a heinous crime; or (2) promising young woman took a drunken revel too seriously, and ruined his life by going into hysterics and refusing to acknowledge her own role in the crime action that was committed against her person. Which story does society prefer? The second, of course.

If we acknowledge the ongoing reality of the first, and the ubiquitous nature of rape culture, we will be morally obligated to change our own behavior to help prevent such horrible things from happening. That’s real work. Blaming the woman already has the structure in place. We don’t have to change anything, just shrug our shoulders and accept that, in some way, she was asking for it, and maybe she even liked it.

Society can make those changes. It just doesn’t want to.

An incident:

In the interest of privacy, this person chooses to remain anonymous. Please keep it that way. But feel free to share the hell out of this.

“Today, I talked back to a catcaller. I do this often, and when I say I’m putting myself in physical danger when I do this, I’m laughed at. I’m told to stop overreacting. I’m called overdramatic.

Today, I talked back to a man who touched me in the street without my permission. It doesn’t matter what I said. What matters is that he grabbed me by the back of the head, called me a whore, and threw me into a wall. Because I stood up for myself after he put his hands on me.

The details are irrelevant. I will tell you that this happened in the middle of the afternoon. I will tell you that there were onlookers who did nothing to help. I will tell you that as I crawled around on the sidewalk, feeling for my dropped glasses, nobody came to help. I will tell you that as I walked away, shaking, bleeding from my mouth, nobody offered to walk me home.

I will tell you that I sobbed in the arms of a friend, and asked him to help me invent a story to tell the rest of my friends, because I was so ashamed. I will tell you I blamed myself for being too mouthy. I will tell you I’m still crying.

I will tell you this isn’t the first time. That I anticipate it will not be the last. I expect to get hurt again. I expect to be hit by more men in my lifetime. I expect to be called names and threatened. I anticipate it. It has happened enough for me to anticipate it. And still, I was not prepared.

I will tell you I was terrified to post about this for fear of being called more names. Things like “overdramatic” and “attention whore”. I was terrified to even tell anyone what happened. Because I assumed I would be blamed. I will tell you that I’m a tough cookie and a badass woman, and I still can’t help but blame myself.

This is 2016. I was attacked by a man, and I am preparing myself to be asked what I did to deserve it, and told what I should have done to prevent it. This needs to be talked about. My story is not even a little unique. ‪#‎notallmen‬ helps no one, when ‪#‎somemen‬ are all it takes.”

Another one who claims to be both femme and afab but also non-binary – or did claim, since this is from 2014, and with any luck there has been some maturing since.

So, what with being called out for being fake and a pretender by both myself and others, I sometimes get the desire to prove myself as non-binary. Especially since I am someone who was both assigned female and birth, and presents as largely female.

I did go through a phase where I tried to present as androgynous. I failed hopelessly at it. Why? Two reasons.

1. I’m a 34DD. Let that sink in. Try to hide that under a binder. It doesn’t work. A sports bra flattens them down a bit, but they’re there, and they’re always going to show.

2. I’m a feminine person. I just am. I like pretty earrings and make-up, which is something about me that has nothing to do with my gender identity, but when paired with an afab (assigned female at birth) body, distinctly marks me as female. I didn’t like having to give up being pretty, wearing make-up, wearing clothes and accessories that weren’t all bland muted colours.

So why the perceived need to “prove myself as non-binary”? Why all this struggle over a superfluous label? Why not just get on with life? Why not rejoice in the greater freedom women have to wear all different sorts of clothes (while still if you like working to make it so that men have more of that freedom too) and just be a woman with a varied wardrobe?

The truth is, you can’t win at being androgynous. Not unless you’re willing to give up your own personal style to fit into society’s incredibly narrow and limited idea of what androgyny is. So fuck it.

Hm. I’m not sure society has any idea, narrow or broad, of what androgyny is. I’m not sure society thinks about it enough to have an idea of it. It’s not a mass-popular subject.

Yeah, I wear make-up, and earrings and breasts. You know who else does? Drag queens who still identify as male. And that’s the real point here: gender identity and gender presentation are two completely different things. I am a non-binary person who presents as female because it fits with my style, and because it’s convenient for me, but that doesn’t change the fact that I am non-binary.

What fact? What fact is that, exactly? What fact are you talking about? How do you know it?

I don’t think there is such a fact. I think there are lots of facts of the type “X doesn’t like to be confined by silly arbitrary rules about what women / men can wear” but few if any facts of the type “this person who was assigned female at birth and presents as largely female is non-binary.” What this blogger is calling a fact is actually a decision – and that’s fine, people can decide to be non-binary or gender nonconforming or whatever they like, but a decision to be something doesn’t always translate to a fact that one is that something. It’s a complicated verb, that one – Bill Clinton wasn’t only ducking and weaving when he pointed out that “is” can mean different things. The blogger is non-binary if she / they wants to be, but that’s all for her / them to decide, it’s not a separate fact that can’t be changed by external reality.

Or to put it another way, it’s not clear what the blogger means by “I am a non-binary person who presents as female” when all these labels seem to depend so very heavily on getting confirmation from others. It’s also not clear what the point is.

I go to work every day as a female. I’m read as female, and I introduce myself as a female, and it’s fine. Then I come home and I take off my costume. I go back to being myself. But the breasts won’t come off. I go online and present myself as non-binary –

Ahhh yes, now I know where we are. Of course you do. Online is like that. I present myself as non-grumpy, non-boring, non-sullen, non-all sorts of things that show up in meat space but don’t online. Don’t we all. And that’s just it: we all do, to varying degrees. It’s not a new discovery of Today’s Kids that what the world sees does not perfectly match up with our sense of ourselves. It’s a newish or intensified discovery of everyone who lives partly online, one that people just didn’t have a medium to make before the internet. Maybe a few people did – I bet George Orwell felt a difference between the self who wrote the essays and the one who had colleagues at the BBC.

So that’s how it is – we all go back to being ourselves. It’s not so much non-binary as non-public or non-social or non-external.

A school in India for girls who have escaped sex slavery.

More children are sold into prostitution in India than in any other country. In villages such as Simraha, it is not uncommon for girls as young as 12 or 13 to be sold.

At this school, many of the children playing games, doing homework, helping with dinner and making crafts are the daughters of prostitutes. They are members of a marginalized caste known as the Nat community, which is trapped in a system of hereditary prostitution.

Their school, not far from the border with Nepal in the Indian state of Bihar, is part of a national program of girls’ boarding schools called Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya, intended specifically for minority groups. Founded by the nonprofit organization Apne Aap, its supporters and the Bihar state government, the school aims to break the bonds of caste and inequality.

“The school keeps them safe and away from the home-based brothels that they were growing up in,” said Ruchira Gupta, Apne Aap’s founder. “Otherwise, they would join their mothers in prostitution.”

They’re still subject to pressure though.

A few graduates of the school are even heading off to college — with ambitions of becoming lawyers and doctors.

But many struggle to achieve a much smaller ambition: avoiding being caught up in systemic prostitution.

At the school, fathers regularly put pressure on the girls to do their “family duty” and start working as prostitutes. Some fathers have tried to snatch the girls back.

What loving parents.

The LA Times piece has many photos from the school.

I’ve been thinking about this word “femme” – which, it seems to me, an awful lot of straight people have “appropriated” from lesbians, but that’s a slightly separate issue. What I’ve been thinking about is the fact that it’s a substitute for the word “feminine” but sounds hip and knowing, while “feminine” just sounds dopey and last century. Maybe the appropriation isn’t a separate issue after all then, since people tend to appropriate words and gestures and the like for increased hippitude.

Anyway, “femme” is a cooler way of saying “feminine,” but the trouble with that is that erases the political aspects of the word “feminine”…and that’s not a good idea.

What do you think of when you hear or see the word “feminine”? Graceful, fragile, dainty, pretty, delicate, weak – you see where I’m going with this? From dainty and delicate and weak you get to subordinate, powerless, compliant, second class. It’s not just random that that’s what feminine means; it’s political. What it means isn’t hip at all. Calling it femme instead makes it sound rebellious instead of compliant.

I’ve been thinking about the word because of something I saw on a blog that made me laugh incredulously –

________ is not safe, especially for femme women and femme AFAB non-binary people.

Say what? Femme AFAB non-binary people? Aren’t those just…um…women? If they’re both “assigned female at birth” and femme aka feminine, then how are they non-binary? How is this not, again, appropriation? How is it not appropriating a hipster label in order to seem less boring than tedious yawny ol’ women?

I think the hipsters are making a mistake thinking they can make “feminine” no longer political by changing it to “femme.” The word “feminine” has creepy overtones for a reason, and that shouldn’t be brushed aside.

Have some Virginia Woolf on The Angel in the House:

What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? But wait a moment. Articles have to be about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her–you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it–in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all–I need not say it—she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty–her blushes, her great grace. In those days–the last of Queen Victoria–every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: “My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.” And she made as if to guide my pen.

A pox on all the arts and wiles of our sex.

And here’s another one –

Young soldiers training at Deepcut Army barracks lived in a “highly sexualised” environment where senior staff preyed on recruits in an “abuse and misuse” of power, the British Army’s director of personal [CORR] services has admitted at the inquest into the death of Private Cheryl James.

A lack of supervision and welfare helped create such an environment at the barracks in Camberley, Surrey, Brigadier Donnelly said .

Pte James, 18, was found dead with a gunshot wound to her head in November 1995.

They did a new inquest because the one at the time may have missed some witnesses and some evidence.

There was a room for fucking set aside at the barracks.

Alison Foster QC, representing [Private James’s] family, asked Brig Donnelly about evidence of a sexualised atmosphere and abuse of power at the barracks. “There was certainly a sexualised atmosphere at Deepcut, yes,” he told the hearing.

Ms Foster asked: “Do you accept that this could present a morally chaotic environment for a young female person of teenage years? … The pressure on a young female recruit could be intolerable, couldn’t it?”

Brig Donnelly replied: “Yes. We did not have the structures in place to provide a proper duty of care.”

When asked if there was a culture of misogyny in the Army, Brig Donnelly said: “The attitude and language in certain parts of the Army represented a misogynistic viewpoint, which is seen as of its time.”

Seen by whom? It’s not as if 1995 pre-dates feminism, nor is it as if misogyny has gone away now. In other words, “of its time” my ass – all times are misogyny time.

The inquest also heard that male instructors saw women as a “sexual challenge” and that senior ranks sexually propositioned female recruits. Jane Worboys, who did basic training with Pte James after joining up in May 1995, said that shortly before her death Pte James had been locked in a room by a sergeant who harassed her. “He tried to have his way with her. She told me that he had locked the door and was chasing her around the desk. As far as I am aware, nothing physically happened on that occasion.”

Locking the door is physical. Chasing is physical.

In a statement, Emma Norton, a lawyer for human rights group Liberty who represents Mr and Mrs James, said: “Over the last two days Mr James has listened to Brigadier John Donnelly give evidence about life in Deepcut barracks in 1995, when his daughter was there. Mr and Mrs James, for the first time in 20 years, have received a public acknowledgement of some of the concerns they have been raising all this time and a formal apology from the MoD. Liberty and the James family would like to acknowledge this important step.”

Pte James, from North Wales, was one of four young recruits found shot dead at Deepcut between 1995 and 2002, amid claims of a bullying culture.

That’s a sad sad story.