Guest post by Pieter Droogendijk

I have a rage. I’m not linking to anything, because the articles in question don’t deserve even one additional hit. But here’s the thing; there’s apparently an uproar on the internet about Rogue One, Star Wars, Ghost Busters, Mad Max, and a bunch of other crap. Here’s my take:

MORE FEMALE LEADS!

If it were up to me, every movie would have a lady protagonist. I don’t care if it “makes sense for the story;” it’s a story. Make it make sense. We have some catching up to do; men have led movies since the first one.

So another item from the Washington Post snagged my attention while I was reading the first one – sidebars work, kids! It snagged my attention so I read it, in horror.

A Playboy Playmate found this normal woman’s naked body gross. So she posted it online.

Because it’s important for the world at large to see and judge random people’s naked bodies.

Dani Mathers, Playboy’s 2015 Playmate of the Year, was at L.A. Fitness on Wednesday when the body of a fellow gym-goer offended her. The 29-year-old took to Snapchat to post the woman’s body — naked, on her story.

The caption: “If I can’t see unsee this then you can’t either.” It pictured Mathers, sporting weight-lifting gloves and a Nike tank top, covering her mouth in false-shock. What resulted was likely thousands looking at this woman’s nude body, fat-shamed by a blond Playmate, on Mathers’s public Snapchat.

Now it’s her turn to be shamed all over social media, so in a sense I shouldn’t join in by blogging about it…But I am anyway, because this kind of casual sadism interests me. It interests me partly, but only partly, because I’ve been subjected to a huge amount of it myself. Because of that I’ve learned that there are a surprisingly large number of people who are ostensibly adult, intelligent, in some sense thoughtful, who are perfectly comfortable doing this kind of thing. That is surprising to me, because it seems like being perfectly comfortable touching a red-hot stove burner.

What possessed her? What caused her to feel (rather than think) that her distaste for a stranger’s body justified her in taking a picture of it and publishing the picture online? What causes people to feel that way?

I suppose it’s partly to do with the relentless perfectionism of US media culture and porn culture, with the relentless exclusion from tv and movies of women who are too old too fat too plain too average too ordinary too flawed too not like a Playboy model. I suppose it’s partly to do with a culture that pretends women who are lawyers look like Julianna Margulies and women who are cops look like Mariska Hargitay. That perhaps partly explains the demented perfectionism, but it doesn’t explain the sadism.

That’s how it should work.

Shannon Sullivan was surprised, then angry.

Not two months after 2-year-old Lane Graves was dragged into a lake by an alligator at a Disney resort and killed, she found herself face-to-face with a sign that made her deeply uncomfortable.

The Disney College Program bills itself as a “life-changing,” “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity. Sullivan knew that she might lose her summer internship if she spoke out about this sign, but she couldn’t hold her tongue. She was willing to risk her spot in the program, one she quickly lost after she posted a photo of the sign to Twitter.

What did the sign say? “Alligators are friendly and cuddly, jump in the water and play with them!”? Not quite, but too close.

The sign read, in full:

If a Guest asks if we have gators in the water around Tom Sawyer’s Island (or any bodies of water), the correct and appropriate response is, “Not that we know of, but if we see one, we will call Pest Management to have it removed.” Please do not say we have seen them before. We do not want our Guests to be afraid while walking around Frontierland [part of Disney’s Magic Kingdom]. As a reminder, this is a serious matter. Please do not make jokes with our guests about this.

After the toddler was killed by the alligator. That’s the “correct” response how, exactly?

So Sullivan took a picture of the sign and posted it on Twitter, knowing it would probably get her fired. It did.

Her tryst with unemployment didn’t last long, though. That night, the Orlando Sentinel reached out to Disney with questions about the termination. The next morning, Magic Kingdom Vice President Dan Cockerell visited Sullivan himself to offer her internship back, which she accepted.

Disney removed the offending sign, claiming it was never authorized, the Associated Press reported.

The managers put up a lot of signs for day to day operational stuff, which don’t need approval from upper levels, and they considered this one such sign. I hope the upper levels at Disney have instructed managers to take safety more seriously than that now.

I have some experience of this, actually. I once worked at a zoo, which means I worked at a place where people could, if they tried hard enough, put themselves in danger from animals. Mostly that didn’t happen, but the potential was there.

At the time of Graves’s death, there were no signs warning visitors of dangerous animals. Three days after Graves’s death, the Walt Disney World Resort installed signs along the beachfront of its resorts that warn guests of alligators and snakes.

So Sullivan was right – and she got her job back.

Boy Scouts of America please note.

Via Muslim and Exmuslim Women for Secularism:

“Masculinity so fragile, a woman only needs to breathe to hurt it.” Artwork by Rahema Alam.

Boys at a private school in Melbourne set up an Instagram account last week in order to post photos of little girls and call them sluts.

Police are investigating an Instagram account which was set up by students at an exclusive private boys’ school to share photos of young girls without their knowledge.

The offensive account was created by two Year 11 boys at Brighton Grammar School and encouraged viewers to vote on the “slut of the year”.

“Offensive” isn’t the right word there. It’s misogynist and sexist and rapey.

A Melbourne mother who spoke out in disgust on her Facebook page after discovering that photos of her young daughter were uploaded onto the social media page, told Fairfax Media that she received a threatening phone call from from an “old boys’ club” parent on Sunday night.

The caller, who phoned on a blocked number, said the Instagram account “was just a group of young boys having fun”.

Having “fun” by violating the privacy of younger girls, by inviting people to call them “sluts,” by treating them as contemptible objects of sexual consumption, by expressing contempt for them themselves. That’s a deeply fucked up idea of “fun” and that parent should get in the sea.

One photo apparently showed a schoolgirl wearing bikini bottoms and a white singlet top and included a caption describing sex acts she would perform, the mother said. Another photo featured a group of grade six girls in their school uniforms as they walked to meet their parents after school.

“I am writing this as a mother of a girl that has not only been sexualised but violated within our small community,” the concerned mother wrote on a public Facebook post, which was shared hundreds of times before she made the post private on Sunday night.

What is this sick combination of sexual interest coupled with loathing and contempt?

The account – which was titled ys_academy_puspus – was set up by the students after school on Friday and deleted over the weekend after Brighton Grammar became aware of its existence. It is understood that YS stands for “young sluts”.

Maybe it will be the Facebook of tomorrow.

Right Wing Watch tells us about one of the people speaking at the Republican convention this week.

The Republican National Convention released a partial list today of the politicians, activists, C-list celebrities and Donald Trump family members who will be speaking at next week’s convention. What the speakers’ list lacks in establishment GOP leaders it makes up for in fringe activists. One name especially stands out: Sheriff David Clarke, the Milwaukee law enforcement officer who has made a name for himself hurling anti-Obama vitriol on Fox News and elsewhere while quietly cozying up to anti-government extremist groups.

Clarke, who is African American, has built a conservative following by enthusiastically bashing President Obama, his Justice Department, Hillary Clinton and the Black Lives Matter movement.

…

Clarke has been colorful in his condemnation of President Obama and Hillary Clinton for sympathizing with the Black Lives Matter movement, calling them “straight-up cop haters.” He called Obama a “heartless, soulless bastard” for speaking up about “goons” killed by police and said that the Obama administration’s attempts to address racial disparities in policing were a plot to “emasculate the police” in order to impose dictatorial control.” He accused the president of worsening racial divides in the country by pitting “whites against blacks” and “Hispanics against Americans.”

The sheriff is also happy to throw red meat to his conservative audience on a number of other topics. After the Supreme Court struck down state marriage equality bans, Clarke called for a “revolution” to “get this country back,” complete with “ pitchforks and torches ,” urging his audience to launch a standoff against the federal government the next time a bakery or the like is fined for refusing business to a same-sex couple.

Not all that surprising in a Trump ally, I suppose. But it gets worse.

While Clarke has no patience for African Americans who have deadly run-ins with the police, he has repeatedly associated himself with anti-government militia groups who have staged armed standoffs with federal government agents or who threaten to defy federal law. Earlier this year, when a group of armed activists took over a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, Clarke backed their cause, saying that the country had reached a “pitchforks and torches moment” that couldn’t be solved by an election.

In 2013, after he aired his ads discouraging citizens from relying on 911, Clarke accepted the “ Constitutional Sheriff of the Year” award from the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an anti-government group that promotes the idea that county sheriffs are the highest law enforcement officers in the country and thus have the power to defy federal laws that they believe are unconstitutional. In his acceptance speech , Clarke declared that “government” was the “common enemy” of the “patriots” in the room. In a radio interview that year, he said that “on an everyday basis, to me, federal government is a bigger threat” than terrorism.

Just this year, Clarke spoke at a fundraising event for the New York chapter of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government group aligned with the Constitutional Sheriffs that urges law enforcement officers and military personnel to defy laws they believe are unconstitutional and encourages its members to form militias ready to defy an out-of-control federal government.

That’s fucking scary. It’s fascism – and he’s speaking at the Republican convention.

Another day, another Allahu Akbar. Today’s location is Germany.

A police operation is underway in the German town of Heidingsfeld, part of the southern city of Würzburg, after a man launched an attack on a regional passenger train at around 9.15pm local time (1915 UTC) on Monday.

Three people were seriously injured and a fourth suffered light injuries. Another 14 are being treated for shock.

The suspect was a 17-year-old Afghan refugee.

The teenager reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” before launching the attack using a knife and axe. He was shot dead by police in Heidingsfeld as he attempted to flee the scene. His motive was not immediately clear.

If it’s true that he shouted “Allahu Akbar” then his motive is pretty clear.

I shouldn’t laugh, but…who could possibly help it?

What We Mean When We Say “Femme”: A Roundtable

Oh wow, don’t you just long to know what they mean when they say “femme”? I’m all agog, myself.

Femmes. We live in different places. We’re different ages. We have different gender identities. Some of us are people of color, some of us are white. In this representative sample, we are Autostraddle writers, or artists, or musicians, or educators, or all of these things. The only thing we have in common is that we’re queer and that, in our own deeply personal way, we breathe life into the word femme. But like so many other differences, we don’t agree on what the word femme means to us. This is the beauty of gender fluidity. We live in a world where it is totally possible to claim the same word as someone else and completely disagree on what the word means.

We are this Word, but we disagree on what the word means – yet all the same we know we are it. Isn’t life exciting? Isn’t having everything both ways a joy? Isn’t it fabulous to be fluid and rigid at the very same time? And by the way, don’t you just hate femmephobes?

In organizing this roundtable, I did have some questions in mind, like: what does the word femme mean to you, personally? How do you think the meaning of the word femme has changed in the past ten years? Do you tie your experience of femme to emotional labor, or care work? What are your femme roots? And do you lean on a queer femme aesthetic to signal your queerness, and if so, do you think this aesthetic has been co-opted? The answers revealed the exciting ways the queer world is living the word femme, right now, in this moment.

And are you totally self-obsessed, or mostly self-obsessed, or very self-obsessed indeed? The answers reveal the exciting ways self-obsession has completely replaced actual politics while nobody noticed.

Or did someone notice? Did Rudy notice?

None of the ways I describe femme are based on how someone looks. When I re-discovered femme, it was really linked to witchy things, and spirituality, and care work. Femme is connected to emotional labor and healing. It’s based on the energy you put into the world, the connection you make with people and the care you have for them. It’s allowing a particular kind of tenderness to be part of your identity. That might sound really woo-woo, but it’s true. It’s not just an aesthetic. Having something based on just aesthetics is really dangerous because it removes the politics from things.

Look around you, Rudy. It’s coming from inside the house.

The failed coup has been a gift to Erdoğan. Patrick Coburn at the Independent says he’s using it to get rid of what’s left of secularism in Turkey.

The number of people detained so far is at 6,000 including soldiers, and around 3,000 judges and legal officials who are unlikely to have been connected to the attempted military takeover.

Reichstag fire.

The failed coup is serving as an excuse for a massive round-up of members of the judiciary and army officers, far greater than anything seen in Turkey for years, and is presumably a bid to secure Erdogan’s grip on the Turkish state. So numerous are those detained that a sports stadium is being used to hold some of them, a development that has ominous similarities with mass arrests in South American coups in the last century. Some 140 out of 387 judges in the Court of Appeal have been detained along with 48 out of 156 from the Council of State.

It may be that Erdogan is using the coup to eliminate the most powerful officials seen as loyal to Turkey as a secular state.

Just possibly.

The NY Times on the Baton Rouge shooter.

As investigators worked, details about [Gavin] Long, 29, of Kansas City, Mo., began to emerge. Court records filed in Missouri showed that Mr. Long filed a name-change notice with the Jackson County recorder’s office, seeking to change his name to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra and saying he was a member of an indigenous tribe. A spokeswoman for the court said Mr. Long never filed a petition with the court, so the document was not legally binding.

Using that name, Mr. Long billed himself online as a self-help author and life coach who could help men become more “alpha.”

Like the gunman who killed five police officers more than a week ago in Dallas, Mr. Long had served abroad in the military.

Men who see themselves as “alpha,” and who see “alpha” maleness as a valuable thing, and who have spent time in the military.

Internet domain search tools show that Mr. Long registered a website called convoswithcosmo.club in April. Another website, registered privately, convoswithcosmo.com, is filled with blog posts and podcasts that match Mr. Long’s biography, including his stint in the military and educational career. The site promotes three self-help books and offers life coaching sessions for $119 an hour.

The podcasts, which began in April, are more focused toward helping men become more authoritative to impress women.

And to subordinate them. That’s what alpha males do, after all – no alpha male is going to be pussywhipped. Those are the only two choices: either the male dominates, or he’s pussywhipped. Equality isn’t a thing.

The punishment for reporting a gang rape is…another gang rape. By the same gang.

There has been outrage in India after a student was allegedly gang-raped by five men who had also raped her three years ago.

Police are yet to make any arrests although the 21-year-old was attacked last week in Rohtak town in the northern state of Haryana.

She had been pursuing a case in court against the five men, when she was attacked on Wednesday.

The woman said she was forced inside a car and the men tried to strangle her.

She was seriously injured and left for dead in the bushes. A passerby saw her and took her to the hospital.

She’s a Dalit.

Geeta Pandey of BBC News Delhi offers analysis.

The gang rape of the student in Rohtak, allegedly by the same men who raped her three years ago, is an example of how callously the authorities treat victims of rape.

Questions are being asked about how the five men, who were accused of a serious crime like rape, were free to conduct another attack.

There is also the question of why the victim and her family were not provided with any security when they said they had been threatened.

If they were higher caste, and richer, and more important…maybe security would have been forthcoming.

Chris Moos pointed out to me another Theos blog post by Ben Ryan. It too is badly written and badly thought.

A blog was recently drawn to my attention by one Dr Chris Moos that tries to paint the LSE Director Professor Craig Calhoun as a “faith warrior”. By deigning to argue that religion ought to be taken more seriously in academia in a range of different subjects as an overlooked cause Calhoun is displaying some sort of scary Christian zeal (apparently).

That last sentence really is gibberish, plus he appears not to know what “deign” means. To attempt to translate: I think he’s saying that Chris Moos is saying that Calhoun is a faith warrior because he (Calhoun) says religion should be taken more seriously. I think Ryan is also saying that Chris is being naughty in saying that. Meh. I tend to resent people who say we should take religion more seriously, and I do think it’s a form of bullying, and thus that “faith warrior” is not a bad metaphor.

It is the second half of Dr Moos’s blog that what I suspect is the real reason for the anti-Calhoun attack.

Missing word there. Contains? States? Explains? Offers? It takes a pretty bad writer to leave out a key word and not notice.

Moos led one of a series of stunts in which atheist and humanist societies show up to Freshers’ Fairs wearing t-shirts showing “Jesus and Mo cartoons”. Reports as to what happened next differ depending on who you ask, ranging between just short of the heroic martyrdom of these champions of free speech to a minor disagreement after which they were asked by the LSE to stop wearing the t-shirts or leave. This event has somehow become a cause and argument which has rumbled on now for years.

It wasn’t a “stunt.” That’s just rude. ASH societies like other societies have tables at the Freshers Fairs, and they have material on their tables and they wear relevant T shirts if they feel like it. That’s not a stunt, it’s just a thing that societies do. They weren’t asked by LSE to leave, they were asked by an officer of the LSE Student Union. The LSE SU officer really had no business doing that.

My concern over these stunts is that in this ongoing pointless dispute the protagonists are actually becoming part of a rather more sinister trend and that they have lost sight of the point of their campaigning.

First to be entirely clear – this is a deliberately provocative gesture, whatever its supporters might say to the contrary. The cartoons have been a cause celebre for years, the effect they have is well known.

Nonsense. That’s not true. Ryan may be thinking of other cartoons – the Danish Motoons and/or Lars Vilks – or he may be deliberately misleading the readers. It’s not true that J&M have been a cause célèbre for years. And that crap about deliberately provocative gesture is more of the same old bullshit by which people adopt the viewpoint of enraged theocrats in order to chastise people who are doing things that ought to be completely uncontroversial in a liberal society. It’s a bullying move, and it stinks.

If it were simply provocative that would be a bit irritating but not especially problematic – perhaps universities ought to be forced to be clearer on their stance on particular issues. However, it is the choice of target that I find distasteful. It’s the unpleasant use of jokes and mockery to create an acceptable “other”. In Britain in the past the butt of such jokes have at various times been the Irish, Jews, or among others, West Indians. Each time the effect is to justify a perception that “those people” are not welcome here or that they undermine the efforts of the rest of us. In our own time the acceptable other at which abuse can be thrown has become Muslims.

Every time these student societies decide to be provocative it is invariably Muslims who bear the brunt of the mockery. It is never Sikhs, or Hindus, or Jews or any other minority group.

Dense, isn’t he. He’s apparently forgotten all about poor dear Jesus – who is after all half of Jesus & Mo. How are Muslims bearing the brunt of the mockery when Jesus has top billing?

The guy’s a faith warrior in training.

A researcher at the godbothering thinktank “Theos” wrote a blog post saying France should stop being so stubborn and just do what the murderers want, dammit.

After each attack the security services and beefed up. After each atrocity gallons of ink are spilt about whether it is time to rethink laïcité (the famous French model of secularism) or the nature of Republic French values.

That’s how badly he writes. Apologies for making you read it.

If it’s true that after each atrocity gallons of ink are spilt about whether it is time to rethink laïcité, then people should save their ink, or rather their keyboard tapping. No, it is not time to rethink laïcité, nor is it time to rethink women’s rights or LGB rights or Kashmir or anything else the murderers may or may not be Aggrieved about. No, one does not respond to mass murder by doing what one thinks the murderers want.

But as for real change to have come from these tragedies? It seems like the increasing militarization of public spaces, with more and more armed police and soldiers, has been the only meaningful consequence. The lack of change, or at least the sense of a French state finding a way forward, creates a collective hopelessness and a helplessness. Tragedy fatigue is real; the more tragedies that occur without prompting a change the less willpower there will be to create something. There is a remarkable capacity to accept even the most appalling situations as normal.

It’s quite remarkable what Ben Ryan is saying there. He’s complaining about France’s failure to change at the behest of mass murderers. He’s saying that failure to change at the behest of mass murderers creates hopelessness – as if there were a universal desire for France to do what the murderers want. He’s saying the mass murders – the “tragedies” – should prompt change.

This is the moment to call for a new approach to French society and secularism. It is now, surely, clear to anyone with eyes to see that the hopes of creating a purely civil identity in which religion and race are irrelevant are failed. It is time the French state begins recording data on the religion of its citizens, so that it can see how trends are emerging and be responsive to the reality on the streets, not just vague assumptions and prejudices.

It’s time to question again whether aspects of laïcité that seem to disproportionately hurt minority faiths (and especially Islam) are a sensible approach to pluralism and to remove those aspects that are doing more harm than good at fostering integration. Schools need the freedom to address religious and identity issues in the classroom. It’s time to stop pretending that Frenchness can sweep these issues under the carpet and start “doing religion”, not just opposing extremism.

He reminds me of that nice Maréchal Pétain who shook hands with Hitler so politely that one time.

No no no. We don’t need a “Sharia test.” That’s ridiculous.

Newt Gingrich says we do.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has suggested testing all US Muslims to see if they believe in Sharia, and deporting those who do.

…

Mr Gingrich’s comments follow an attack in the French city of Nice, which has killed at least 84 people.

His comments echo the sentiments of Donald Trump, who has said Muslims should be banned from entering the US.

That’s a crap idea for civil rights reasons and basic decency reasons, but even if it were acceptable to go around “testing” citizens and immigrants in that way, believing in Sharia would be the wrong criterion. I hate religious laws in general, and the ones that conflict with secular human rights in particular, but many millions of people believe in them, and we can’t seal them all off. I dislike religious conservatism and don’t want it interfering with people’s rights, but I don’t get to exile all the religious conservatives. Most people who believe in Sharia do not believe in mass murder. Gingrich is being a scaremongering xenophobic fascist by saying what he said.

The Republicans have added a Bundy-party clause to their platform.

The Republican platform committee met this week to draft the document that defines the party’s official principles and policies. Along with provisions on pornography and LGBT “conversion therapy” is an amendment calling for the indiscriminate and immediate disposal of national public lands.

The inclusion of this provision in the Republican Party’s platform reflects the growing influence of and ideological alliance between several anti-park members of the GOP and anti-government extremists, led by Cliven Bundy, who dispute the federal government’s authority over national public lands.

“Congress shall immediately pass universal legislation providing a timely and orderly mechanism requiring the federal government to convey certain federally controlled public lands to the states,” reads the adopted language. “We call upon all national and state leaders and representatives to exert their utmost power and influence to urge the transfer of those lands identified.”

That’s what the armed robbers who stole Malheur National Wildlife Refuge last January were demanding – the transfer of federal land to the states.

The provision calls for an immediate full-scale disposal of “certain” public lands, without defining which lands it would apply to, leaving national parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, and national forests apparently up for grabs and vulnerable to development, privatization, or transfer to state ownership.

What could possibly go wrong?

“I have long believed that public lands are an equalizer in America, where access to public lands ensures that you don’t need to be a millionaire to enjoy the great outdoors or to introduce your children to hunting, fishing and hiking,” said Senator Martin Heinrich during a recent floor speech on ALEC-funded land seizure legislation. “This land grab idea is just as ludicrous as denying climate change, just as detached from reality, and similarly comes at the expense of our public health and protection of our public lands and resources.”

It’s just as ludicrous, but I don’t agree that it’s just as detached from reality, because that’s not the issue. The issue is one of values or goals, not one of facts. It’s not a fact that it’s good to ensure that you don’t need to be a millionaire to enjoy the great outdoors or to introduce your children to hunting, fishing and hiking; it’s a value, aka a preference, aka a moral view.

But it definitely is a value, and the Republican one is despicable.

And Turkey.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim called the insurrection “a stain in the history of democracy” at a news conference on Saturday in Ankara, the capital. He raised the death toll in the clashes to 265, with 1,440 people wounded, and he said 2,839 military personnel had been detained.

…

Early Saturday, soldiers surrendered on a bridge that traverses the Bosporus, one of two bridges that the military shut down as the coup attempt began Friday evening. Footage showed abandoned military clothing and helmets along the bridge. The government also moved on a military school in Istanbul, arresting dozens.

Disciplinary actions extended to the judicial system on Saturday as an oversight body, the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors, announced that 2,745 judges had been dismissed, the Anadolu agency reported.

That’s not a good sign. That looks like Erdoğan making himself more of a dictator than ever.