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.

What is religion for? To strip away all rights from women and girls, in order to imprison them at home and prevent them from doing anything other than domestic and sexual / reproductive service. At least that’s often how it appears. Now it’s riding bikes, for girls over five. (Yeah, girls of six are such sluts – I notice that every day.)

An ultra-orthodox Jewish leader has reportedly banned girls aged five and older in some areas of Israel from riding bicycles – claiming it is “immodest”.

The rabbi of the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Nahloat distributed the stringent decree to his followers in synagogues across the area.

He had said young girls riding bicycles could “cause serious damage to their modesty” and that bicycle seats caused young girls to sit in a way men found “provocative”, according to the Arutz Sheva 7 website.

The hell with men. Men should deal with their own shit, not make women deal with it by abandoning all activity.

In December ultra-orthodox rabbis requested women in Israeli city Bnei Brak refrain from studying in higher education, according to Yeshida World News website.

They claimed institutions which teach secular subjects presented a real danger, and that girls and women should not study.

This is what I mean. They must get their jollies this way, listing all the good things women and girls can’t do, have, see, watch, hear, say, read. Hahaha we can study and you can’t, we can ride bikes and you can’t.

And the irony is. The scorching fucking irony is, that’s exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews. Anne Frank notes the moment when she and Margo can’t ride their bikes any more. Forbidding universities to enroll Jews came very early – no study for Jews. But when it’s just girls and women – oh that’s not hideous sadistic bigotry any more, that’s just normal.

The victim of the Stanford rapist read him a letter describing the “severe impact” the assault had on her at his sentencing. BuzzFeed has that letter. Everyone should read it.

The woman, now 23, told BuzzFeed News she was disappointed with the “gentle” sentence and angry that Turner still denied sexually assaulting her.

“Even if the sentence is light, hopefully this will wake people up,” she said. “I want the judge to know that he ignited a tiny fire. If anything, this is a reason for all of us to speak even louder.”

So spread the word.

She doesn’t bury the lede:

You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today.

You shouldn’t go inside people you don’t know unless they invite you. Really.

On January 17th, 2015, it was a quiet Saturday night at home. My dad made some dinner and I sat at the table with my younger sister who was visiting for the weekend. I was working full time and it was approaching my bed time. I planned to stay at home by myself, watch some TV and read, while she went to a party with her friends. Then, I decided it was my only night with her, I had nothing better to do, so why not, there’s a dumb party ten minutes from my house, I would go, dance like a fool, and embarrass my younger sister. On the way there, I joked that undergrad guys would have braces. My sister teased me for wearing a beige cardigan to a frat party like a librarian. I called myself “big mama”, because I knew I’d be the oldest one there. I made silly faces, let my guard down, and drank liquor too fast not factoring in that my tolerance had significantly lowered since college.

The next thing I remember I was in a gurney in a hallway. I had dried blood and bandages on the backs of my hands and elbow. I thought maybe I had fallen and was in an admin office on campus. I was very calm and wondering where my sister was. A deputy explained I had been assaulted. I still remained calm, assured he was speaking to the wrong person. I knew no one at this party. When I was finally allowed to use the restroom, I pulled down the hospital pants they had given me, went to pull down my underwear, and felt nothing. I still remember the feeling of my hands touching my skin and grabbing nothing. I looked down and there was nothing. The thin piece of fabric, the only thing between my vagina and anything else, was missing and everything inside me was silenced. I still don’t have words for that feeling. In order to keep breathing, I thought maybe the policemen used scissors to cut them off for evidence.

She found her hair was full of pine needles. For hours she shuffled from room to room being examined.

I had multiple swabs inserted into my vagina and anus, needles for shots, pills, had a Nikon pointed right into my spread legs. I had long, pointed beaks inside me and had my vagina smeared with cold, blue paint to check for abrasions.

After a few hours of this, they let me shower. I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don’t want my body anymore. I was terrified of it, I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.

She went to a party last minute with her younger sister, and goofed around and drank too much too fast – and the next thing she knew, all that.

That day she was told only that she had been found behind a dumpster, potentially penetrated by a stranger, and should get retested for HIV. They gave her a new sweatshirt and sweatpants because they kept all her clothes.

My sister picked me up, face wet from tears and contorted in anguish. Instinctively and immediately, I wanted to take away her pain. I smiled at her, I told her to look at me, I’m right here, I’m okay, everything’s okay, I’m right here. My hair is washed and clean, they gave me the strangest shampoo, calm down, and look at me. Look at these funny new sweatpants and sweatshirt, I look like a P.E. teacher, let’s go home, let’s eat something. She did not know that beneath my sweatsuit, I had scratches and bandages on my skin, my vagina was sore and had become a strange, dark color from all the prodding, my underwear was missing, and I felt too empty to continue to speak. That I was also afraid, that I was also devastated. That day we drove home and for hours in silence my younger sister held me.

All that because some entitled guy wanted to shove his penis in someone. Some brief fun for him, at the price of all that and more for her. It’s out of proportion.

I tried to push it out of my mind, but it was so heavy I didn’t talk, I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t interact with anyone. After work, I would drive to a secluded place to scream. I didn’t talk, I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t interact with anyone, and I became isolated from the ones I loved most. For over a week after the incident, I didn’t get any calls or updates about that night or what happened to me. The only symbol that proved that it hadn’t just been a bad dream, was the sweatshirt from the hospital in my drawer.

One day, I was at work, scrolling through the news on my phone, and came across an article. In it, I read and learned for the first time about how I was found unconscious, with my hair disheveled, long necklace wrapped around my neck, bra pulled out of my dress, dress pulled off over my shoulders and pulled up above my waist, that I was butt naked all the way down to my boots, legs spread apart, and had been penetrated by a foreign object by someone I did not recognize. This was how I learned what happened to me, sitting at my desk reading the news at work. I learned what happened to me the same time everyone else in the world learned what happened to me. That’s when the pine needles in my hair made sense, they didn’t fall from a tree. He had taken off my underwear, his fingers had been inside of me. I don’t even know this person. I still don’t know this person. When I read about me like this, I said, this can’t be me, this can’t be me. I could not digest or accept any of this information. I could not imagine my family having to read about this online. I kept reading. In the next paragraph, I read something that I will never forgive; I read that according to him, I liked it. I liked it. Again, I do not have words for these feelings.

On the other hand – he is an athlete. So.

And then, at the bottom of the article, after I learned about the graphic details of my own sexual assault, the article listed his swimming times. She was found breathing, unresponsive with her underwear six inches away from her bare stomach curled in fetal position. By the way, he’s really good at swimming. Throw in my mile time if that’s what we’re doing. I’m good at cooking, put that in there, I think the end is where you list your extracurriculars to cancel out all the sickening things that’ve happened.

Let me just repeat that.

She was found breathing, unresponsive with her underwear six inches away from her bare stomach curled in fetal position. By the way, he’s really good at swimming.

Now here’s how this works – he was able to rape her because she was too drunk to resist, and because she was too drunk to resist, she was also too drunk to remember – so he was able to use that in his defense.

The night after it happened, he said he didn’t know my name, said he wouldn’t be able to identify my face in a lineup, didn’t mention any dialogue between us, no words, only dancing and kissing. Dancing is a cute term; was it snapping fingers and twirling dancing, or just bodies grinding up against each other in a crowded room? I wonder if kissing was just faces sloppily pressed up against each other? When the detective asked if he had planned on taking me back to his dorm, he said no. When the detective asked how we ended up behind the dumpster, he said he didn’t know. He admitted to kissing other girls at that party, one of whom was my own sister who pushed him away. He admitted to wanting to hook up with someone. I was the wounded antelope of the herd, completely alone and vulnerable, physically unable to fend for myself, and he chose me. Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t gone, then this never would’ve happened. But then I realized, it would have happened, just to somebody else. You were about to enter four years of access to drunk girls and parties, and if this is the foot you started off on, then it is right you did not continue. The night after it happened, he said he thought I liked it because I rubbed his back. A back rub.

Never mentioned me voicing consent, never mentioned us even speaking, a back rub. One more time, in public news, I learned that my ass and vagina were completely exposed outside, my breasts had been groped, fingers had been jabbed inside me along with pine needles and debris, my bare skin and head had been rubbing against the ground behind a dumpster, while an erect freshman was humping my half naked, unconscious body. But I don’t remember, so how do I prove I didn’t like it.

I thought there’s no way this is going to trial; there were witnesses, there was dirt in my body, he ran but was caught. He’s going to settle, formally apologize, and we will both move on. Instead, I was told he hired a powerful attorney, expert witnesses, private investigators who were going to try and find details about my personal life to use against me, find loopholes in my story to invalidate me and my sister, in order to show that this sexual assault was in fact a misunderstanding. That he was going to go to any length to convince the world he had simply been confused.

I was not only told that I was assaulted, I was told that because I couldn’t remember, I technically could not prove it was unwanted. And that distorted me, damaged me, almost broke me. It is the saddest type of confusion to be told I was assaulted and nearly raped, blatantly out in the open, but we don’t know if it counts as assault yet. I had to fight for an entire year to make it clear that there was something wrong with this situation.

To be continued. I think we need time to digest.

Susan Cox at Feminist Current reports an odd exclusion:

Lady*fest, a feminist festival scheduled to take place June 22nd – 25th in Heidelberg, Germany, has declared the clitoris “exclusionary.”

The festival, which features workshops, lectures, and art, had initially planned to include topics like, “clitoris/glitzoris” and “masturbation” as part of their art exhibition, but protocol documents from the last planning meeting now explain that the clitoris is “problematic,” because it refers to female anatomy.

Well excuuuuuuuse the fuck out of me – should we all get them chopped off then? Does that idea sound vaguely familiar?

I can’t wait for our trans racial allies to start saying black skin is “problematic” because it refers to something about black bodies.

Except of course I can wait for that, I can wait forever for that, because it would be grotesque and disgusting. Why do so many people think it’s perfectly all right when it comes to women?

The festival organizers have stated that, due to being a “queer Lady*fest,” it shouldn’t empower “only certain groups,” such as those with clitorises, and that the festival will not be “excluding any groups” by referencing female anatomy. Lady*fest claims these actions embody their policy, which translates to, “be tender to all genders,” and that being mindful of how female anatomy offends people will provide “a safer space to all human beings by applying awareness.”

So then why have a “Lady” fest? Why have feminism? Why not just give up struggling and join the MRAs when they cry, “I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist”? Why not just spell it out that you think women are the only truly privileged people on the planet, and should be taken down a peg or ten?

Naida Pintul, a radical feminist and former organizer of Lady*fest who lives in Heidelberg, is critical of the decision. She told me via email, “Female anatomy has become a taboo.”

“This is a postmodern version of the same old hatred of female bodies and their biology. Once again, we are not supposed to talk about the reality and the consequences of having our female reproductive organs.”

We’re not supposed to talk about abortion as a women’s rights issue. We’re not supposed to talk about pregnancy as something particularly relevant to women. We’re not supposed to destigmatize the vulva by having vulva cupcakes at festivals.

Initially, the decorating of “vulva cupcakes” was planned as an activity to celebrate and destigmatize female anatomy. This event was also cancelled by festival planners on account of vulva cupcakes not being “inclusive” of everyone’s identity.

Erase all the women.

The other day I commented on a post by a male friend about George Tiller in response to someone who made a sarcastic remark about how great abortion is. The following exchange happened:

Me: If you need one, it fucking well is.

Male friend: I support the availability of abortion only in the most extreme cases. Like when a woman is pregnant and doesn’t want to be.

A woman: Like when a person is pregnant and doesn’t want to be, yep.

A woman found it necessary to jump in and correct the guy who said, wittily, “I support the availability of abortion only in the most extreme cases. Like when a woman is pregnant and doesn’t want to be.” A woman thought that was necessary and worthwhile. A woman thought it was wrong to talk about pregnancy and abortion as something to do with women.

This shit has to stop.

Cats sleeping in awkward positions: