This is both hilarious and disgusting – the New York Times solemnly reporting on a male composer who gets extra super-duper creative by dominating his wife. The Times says this is “kink” but it sounds much more like the same old arrangement there always was.

The OkCupid message Mollena Williams received in December 2013 was, in some ways, standard. It was complimentary: “Wow — your profile is great.” It was confident: “I am an artist, very successful (probably member of the top 10 or 20 in my genre in the world).” It was polite, signing off with “warm wishes.”

But something was a bit out of the ordinary, speaking to its author’s interest in domination and submission. The central desire? “I would like to tame you.”

The writer was Georg Friedrich Haas, whose powerfully emotional, politically chargedmusic and explorations of microtonality make him one of the world’s leading composers. His work had brought widespread acclaim, but his personal life was troubled, with three failed marriages in his wake, when he met Ms. Williams, a writer and sex educator who specializes in alternative lifestyles. Shortly after he messaged her, the two began a relationship and were married last fall.

I hate to be the one to break bad news, but a man dominating a woman isn’t an alternative lifestyle. It’s about as conformist as a lifestyle can possibly be.

In a joint appearance with his wife, who now goes by Mollena Williams-Haas, late last year at the Playground sexuality conference in Toronto, then in an interview this month in the online music magazine VAN, he has “come out,” as he put it, as the dominant figure in a dominant-submissive power dynamic. Mr. Haas has chosen to speak up, both because Ms. Williams-Haas’s sexual interests are widely known (her blog, The Perverted Negress, is not shy about kink and bondage) and because he hopes to embolden younger people, particularly composers, not to smother untraditional urges, as he did.

But the urges aren’t untraditional. They’re so.very.traditional.

Their marriage can seem, in this regard, distinctly old-fashioned, and not in a Marquis de Sade way. While the terms they negotiated at the start of their relationship do not prevent her from pursuing her own professional and personal life, Ms. Williams-Haas devotes much of her time to supporting the work of a man — “Herr Meister,” she has nicknamed him — for whom a “good day” is one in which he composes for 14 or 15 hours.

Ah they finally noticed!

“She makes my life as comfortable as possible,” Mr. Haas said.

Ms. Williams-Haas, who described the situation as feminist because it is her choice, said, “I find intense fulfillment in being able to serve in this way.”

And that right there is what’s so fucked up about “choice” feminism, aka libertarian or liberal or third wave feminism. No, not every “choice” is feminist just because it’s a woman making it. Michelle Duggar isn’t a feminist.

She conceded the discomfort many may feel with a black woman willingly submitting to a white man. “It’s a struggle to say, ‘This is genuinely who I am,’” she said. But she added, “To say I can’t play my personal psychodrama out just because I’m black, that’s racist.”

Right. So if she started actually calling herself his slave, and he called her that too, it would be racist to give that the stink-eye? Please.

And that’s especially true when they’re out there proselytizing. If it were just their private games at home then whatever, but here they’re making a case for it – and I say that’s revolting.

Mr. Haas said that he felt liberated after what he described as a lifetime’s and three divorces’ worth of suppressing what he once considered “devilish” desires. The change has altered his music in ways both quantifiable and more ineffable. He said that his productivity had roughly doubled since meeting Ms. Williams-Haas, which will delight his fans.

Well as long as he feels liberated, that’s what counts.

So we can’t escape the influence of the Duggars after all. The “Learning Channel” is still advertising them to us as wholesome fresh-faced Good People who keep women chained to the stove and permanently pregnant.

After costarring on TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting, Jill and Jessa Duggar have landed their own series Jill and Jessa: Counting On, premiering on the cable channel on Tuesday, March 15, Us Weekly has learned exclusively.

Following their three-part special of the same name that aired on TLC last year, the series will follow the lives of the two sisters as they deal with life’s challenges, including raising their own families. The episodes will show Jessa and husband Ben Seewald bonding with son Spurgeon, 3 months, while Jill and husband Derick Dillard balance caring for son Israel, 10 months, with working as missionaries in Central America.

Missionaries – as if anyone anywhere has anything to learn from narrow, ignorant, indoctrinated zealots like them.

A Gujarat village has forbidden unmarried female humans to use cell phones.

The Gujarat village of Suraj in India has reportedly banned girls and unmarried women from the use of cell phones, threatening fines for possessing or using a phone unless the call is from a relative and received on a parent’s phone, according to Hindustan Times.

Because they could use their phones to make appointments for fucking.

“Why do girls need a cell phone? Internet is a waste of time and money for a middle-class community like us. Girls should better utilize their time for study and other works,” said Devshi Vankar, sarpanch (elected head) of the village.

Oh yes? Why just girls then? I suspect Mr Vankar is bullshitting us there, trying to pretend he has a respectable reason for treating girls but not boys like infants.

Read the full story at Hindustan Times.

The Senate Republicans yesterday formally announced that they’re refusing to do their job.

President Obama, don’t even bother.

That was the clear message from Senate Republicans on Tuesday as they decided to formally ignore any nominee the president appoints to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee—the panel responsible for vetting court picks—emerged from a private meeting Tuesday afternoon and declared there was a “consensus view”among them not to grant an Obama nominee a hearing, much less a vote, before the presidential election. The committee members then sent a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell putting their decision in writing.

They should be impeached. They’re violating their goddam oath to uphold the Constitution.

McConnell’s second-in-command, Senator John Cornyn, said members of the Judiciary Committee were “unanimous” in their view that there should no hearing for Obama’s nominee. “The reason for that is, it’s not about the personality, it’s about the principle,” Cornyn said.

There is no such “principle.” It doesn’t exist. They’re making it up, aka lying.

It’s not a surprise, Russell Berman goes on, they said all along they wouldn’t, but it wasn’t clear at what point they would refuse to do their job. Would they hold hearings and then say No?

Or would they ignore the nominee altogether rather than risk giving an otherwise qualified person an opportunity to make their case in public? On Tuesday, they confirmed they would follow the advice of conservative activists, who are urging senators to avoid any discussion of the merits of Obama’s choice and stick to the principle that because the presidential campaign is already underway, the public should decide who gets to replace Scalia on the court.

That’s not a “principle.” The presidential campaign is always underway, and there is no rule or practice about not filling a court vacancy during a campaign.

I guess not lying isn’t in the Book of Republican Virtues.

Tarek Fatah wonders what on earth the city of Ottawa thinks it’s doing “celebrating” the hijab.

This Thursday, the City of Ottawa will be holding a public event celebrating the Islamist hijab; an article of cloth that many Muslim women consider akin to the medieval chastity belt.

He says we need to understand the history of the Islamist revolution in Iran to get what this is all about.

On March 7, 1979 the Islamic Republic declared that henceforth all Iranian women would not be allowed to step outside their homes if they did not have their heads covered by a chador (a black, blanket-like shawl) or a hijab.

Many Iranians first thought of this decree as a joke, but when it became clear the ayatollahs meant business and would imprison any woman found “naked” with her head not wrapped in cloth, there were spontaneous protests across the country.

But the mullahs had the power, and the protests failed.

The hijab had come to stay, and over the years spread its tentacles across the globe as a political statement, hated by many Iranian women, but loved by Islamist followers of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan’s Jamat-e-Islami in North America.

This Friday, Iranians will go to the polls to elect a new parliament.

Not up for discussion or a vote in this election is the oppressive hijab that many Iranian Muslim women have been fighting against, risking arrest — and even lashings.

If it were, few doubt the law of the hijab would die an instant death. But no opponent of the hijab is permitted to stand for election.

But there is Facebook now.

With the advent of social media, however, the fight against the hijab has taken a new form.

Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad created a Facebook page “My Stealthy Freedom” where thousands of Iranian women are posting videos and pictures of themselves, without the mandatory head covering.

The page has garnered more than 750,000 likes and has drawn the ire of the Iranian government.

So why is Ottawa “celebrating” the fiendish thing?

Let’s have a few photos from My Stealthy Freedom:

Celebrate that, Ottawa.

Peter Walker posted about a new occupation of Malheur.

There’s a new occupation of Harney County. They’re here to take back the land. They’re calling on millions to flock to their cause.

Follow the link to see all his photos of the occupiers.

The linguist Deborah Cameron asks an important question:

The question feminists should be asking about women calling each other ‘dude’ or ‘you guys’ isn’t why they’re talking like men (they aren’t), it’s why they can only express cool solidarity with other women by using prototypically male address terms. Aren’t there any female terms that would serve their purpose just as well?

In principle there are, sure. In practice, there aren’t any yet.

I propose Bletchley.

The Guardian reports:

In Australia, 853 people have made a claim or substantiated complaint of child sexual abuse against one or more Christian Brothers, with 75% of victims under the age of 13 at the time, a royal commission has heard.

The royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse has turned its attention to the Christian Brothers as the third round of its hearings into the diocese of Ballarat began on Monday. A religious community within the Catholic church, the Christian Brothers primarily worked in educational facilities for children.

Where they had a selection of children to predate on, and a veil of piety to hide behind. Perfect setup, innit.

The commission’s data showed that the highest number of claims of child sexual abuse were against a brother identified only as Brother CCK, who had 46 complaints made against him about incidents in Victoria and Tasmania. The average age of his victims was 11 years old and the abuse occurred between 1963 and 1987, including in Ballarat.

Another Brother, Stephen Farrell, a Christian Brother at St Alpius Boys’ School in Ballarat East, had allegations of sexual abuse made against him from six people, with the abuse allegedly occurring between 1971 and 1974. In 1997, Farrell was convicted of nine counts of indecent assault against two boys aged nine and 10 at the school but his two-year prison sentence was wholly suspended.

If you’re a guy with a taste for raping children…what do you do? You have a think about where a lot of children can be found, then you have a think about how to get away with it.

One, Brother Edward Dowlan, “made little attempt to conceal his behaviour”, Barlow said, frequently placing his hands down boys’ pants while they walked around. In a previous commission hearing about Ballarat held last year, the commission heard from a witness that he was raped by Dowlan.

It was a survival of the fittest environment, Barlow said, describing how the Brothers beat him, including bashing him on the head, when he was 15 years old.

He said he tried to stick up for the younger children who he knew who were being abused by the Brothers but was not taken seriously, even when he called his mother from the school and told her what was happening.

“Looking back at my time at St Patrick’s we were in a dysfunctional and closed environment where the abnormal was normal,” Barlow said.

“As 15 to 16 year olds, we had no idea really of the outside codes of ethics, morality and justice, so it was not a notable thing for us to see that these things were happening.”

So perfect for the predators. Not so great for the prey.

From the Huffington Post UK:

A transgender student is set to make history and represent the UK’s female students by running to become the National Union of Students’ women’s officer.

Anna Lee, a student at Lancaster University who describes herself as a “queer trans disabled lesbian woman”, is the first openly trans woman to stand for election in a national role. Lee is currently her students’ union’s vice president for welfare and community, and says she is “passionate” about equal rights.

There’s a Facebook page for her campaign.

“I never believed that running to be national women’s officer was a possibility,” she said in a Facebook post. “I felt that I had hit a glass ceiling. Now, I find myself in unchartered waters, and some shards of that glass ceiling will undoubtedly hit me.

“I know the Women’s Campaign is ready. I know NUS is ready. I’m not convinced that the rest of society is.”

I don’t see why it should be. Why not have a national trans people’s officer instead? Or two of them? I don’t think a trans woman should seek to represent women, because trans women don’t have the common or garden version of the experience of growing up female in a still sexist world. They have the experience of being trans, instead.

“But – when the transphobic ‘feminists’ come and try to tear me down, I will just fight harder and with the help of amazing activists we will show them, together, that the NUS Women’s Campaign demonstrates a progressive approach to inclusive feminism.”

The maths student’s pledges include fighting for a “statutory, gender neutral sex education” for students, decriminalisation of sex workers, and lobbying for a debate in parliament over tampon tax in SUs.

Lee accuses mainstream feminism of “constantly” forgetting about trans women, and says the NUS should be fighting for all women, “not just a few”.

She wants to be the women’s officer and the very first thing she does is bash feminism. What good is an anti-feminist women’s officer? She wants to be the women’s officer and she considers women to be “just a few”? She wants to be the women’s officer and she thinks women are some tiny trivial minority that doesn’t count?

This is where trans activism is right now: constantly bashing women and feminism, and demanding that feminism put trans women first. It doesn’t have to be that way, it never had to be that way, but that’s how it’s playing out. It’s sad and destructive and pathetic.

You probably saw about the meta-study of all the studies the other day that found – surprise! – that homeopathy is as worthless as it says on the tin. The guy who chaired it did so much meta-studying he got bored.

Professor Paul Glasziou, a leading academic in evidence based medicine at Bond University, was the chair of a working party by the National Health and Medical Research Council which was tasked with reviewing the evidence of 176 trials of homeopathy to establish if the treatment is valid.

A total of 57 systematic reviews, containing the 176 individual studies, focused on 68 different health conditions – and found there to be no evidence homeopathy was more effective than placebo on any.

Homeopathy is an alternative medicine based on the idea of diluting a substance in water.

According to the NHS: “Practitioners believe that the more a substance is diluted in this way, the greater its power to treat symptoms. Many homeopathic remedies consist of substances that have been diluted many times in water until there is none or almost none of the original substance left.”

But why would more water than there is in the known universe have power to treat symptoms? Unless the symptoms are all thirst, I suppose. But I don’t grasp the basic principle that more dilution equals more power. Dilution should make the power less, not more. If you dilute coffee it doesn’t make you more awake. I suspect a practical joke lasting centuries here.

Writing in a blog for the British Medical Journal, Professor Glasziou states:

“As chair of the working party which produced the report I was simply relieved that the arduous journey of sifting and synthesising the evidence was at an end.

“I had begun the journey with an ‘I don’t know attitude’, curious about whether this unlikely treatment could ever work… but I lost interest after looking at the 57 systematic reviews which contained 176 individual studies and finding no discernible convincing effects beyond placebo.”

Poor guy. It does sound deadly boring.

H/t Omar

This piece by Bailey Lamon, Why This Radical Leftist is Disillusioned by Leftist Culture, is being passed around. I certainly recognize the culture she’s talking about.

I’m tired of the cliques, the hierarchies, the policing of others, and the power imbalances that exist between people who claim to be friends and comrades. I am exhausted and saddened by the fact that any type of disagreement or difference of opinion in an activist circle will lead to a fight, which sometimes includes abandonment of certain people, deeming them “unsafe” as well as public shaming and slander. It is disgusting that we claim to be building a new world, a new society, a better way of dealing with social problems — but if a person makes a mistake, says and/or does something wrong, they are not even given a chance to explain their side of what happened because the process of conflict resolution is in itself driven by ideology rather than a willingness to understand facts. Actually, in today’s activist circles one is lucky to be given any sort of due process at all, while everyone is put under social pressure to believe everything they are told regardless of what actually occurred in a given situation. This is not freedom. This is not social justice. There is nothing “progressive” or “radical” about it, unless you are referring to fascism.

I would expand her description, because it’s not even limited to when “a person makes a mistake, says and/or does something wrong” – it also covers when a person says something perceived as wrong, like for instance when she dissents from a local bit of dogma that’s only been dogma for about five minutes and will probably be overturned by tomorrow. It also covers when the only mistake the person made was letting the policers into the room. It also covers when the person flatly refuses to believe things simply because someone said them. It covers a whole lot of situations that people have no business policing at all.

This is why yes we do get to discuss gender:

Let Clothes Be Clothes

On the right: a blouse with pink flowers and frills and lettering and the words “Berry cute like Mummy”

On the left: a sweatshirt with blue spots and collar and the words “Wheelie cool just like Daddy”

From the Space Needle webcam this morning (click to embiggen):

Have a brilliant Storify by Blair Braverman about a 200 mile dogsled race interrupted by finding a hypothermic musher lying in the snow.

After we left downtown, the trail ran between a highway and stormy @LakeSuperior. 45mph wind, whiteout conditions. I couldn’t see my dogs.

2:33 PM – 18 Feb 2016

The third stage of the race was when things got exciting. The dogs looked great and I was feeling good about our chances of finishing.

23 miles into the wilderness, I came around a corner and there was a woman lying on the trail.

She could barely talk. I put hand warmers on her neck and made her eat candy. It was 18 below zero and she’d been lying there for hours.

So. Let’s drop in on the Socratic Club at Oregon State University for a moment.

They were going to hold a debate about gender, but then they decided not to.

We are sorry to have to inform you that the debate on Thursday, February 25th on the topic “Is Gender a Choice?” has been canceled. Our debaters were informed that some students on campus are offended by the topic of the debate and may plan to protest the event as transphobic, despite the fact that we had both sides fully represented. Because of this one of our speakers did not feel comfortable proceeding with the event. We are disappointed, but understand.

Both sides of what? There are two sides, and only two sides? Well it was a debate, and I suppose debates generally do have two sides, except for political ones which can have anything up to 375.

Anyway, the thing that interested me was this comment by someone named Arlo:

Gender is not a topic for a bunch of cis people to sit around and theorize about, or debate about, as if trans people don’t really exist, or that their identities are something that can be questioned.
This is the transphobic BS we have to deal with daily.
So when we practice our free speech to point out how things are affecting us as a marginalized group, and people actually listen and do something about it, doesn’t mean you’ve been denied anything.
Get over yourselves. The fact that you are all on here arguing that you should be able to be bigoted shitbags shows that you have not lost your freedom of speech. You’re just getting called out on it.

The fact that any of you think trans people are just a small population of people just goes to show how little you know about the population whose identities you wanna debate about.

That interested me, especially the first sentence.

Gender is not a subject for “cis” people to talk about? It’s only trans people who get to talk about gender? Gender belongs to trans people, and no one else?

Why would that be? How could that possibly be the case? How could anyone think that? What is it about the current state of trans activism that is causing impressionable people to pick up such ideas? How could anyone think that trans people have a monopoly on gender, and only trans people have an interest in it?

Gender oppresses everyone. Gender oppresses boys and men who get bullied for not being tough and brutal enough. Gender oppresses girls and women for reasons I’ve been yammering about since before the railroads were built. Yes it is a subject for us to “sit around and theorize about” – all day long, in all weathers, in any company, whenever we feel like it. It’s not owned or monopolized or incorporated or patented by anyone who gets to shut us out of discussions about it.

A political movement that’s shot through with bullshit has am unhappy future. I hope trans activism can start to do better soon.

Speaking of faking up the wildlife footage – you know that trope about lemmings throwing themselves off cliffs? To quote Elaine in Seinfeld: fake fake fake fake.

Snopes has the story:

Some of the most memorable scenes in White Wilderness, Disney’s 1958 Academy Award-winning “True-Life Adventure” nature documentary about wildlife in the snowy northern portions of the North American continent, were ones featuring the death of lemmings who drowned after jumping off cliffs and into the sea. But the scenes shown in the documentary were staged by filmmakers in order to replicate supposed real-life behavior of lemmings that could not be captured on film, and thus did Disney perpetuate for generations to come the legend of periodic, inexplicable mass suicides by lemmings who die by hurling themselves off of cliffs.

The narration in the film accompanying the lemmings scenes begins as follows:

It is said of this tiny animal that it commits mass suicide by rushing into the sea in droves. The story is one of the persistent tales of the Arctic, and as often happens in Man’s nature lore, it is a story both true and false, as we shall see in a moment.

What the audience then sees is what appears to be a horde of lemmings entering the Arctic sea by jumping off cliffs and scampering across rock-covered beaches to enter the water from the shore, whereupon they swim out to sea and (we’re told by the narrator) eventually drown — not quite because they’re simply committing suicide, the film states, but because they’ve supposedly mistaken the vast expanse of the Arctic sea for a lake and assumed there’s a reachable shore just across the water.

But it was faked up.

None of what was shown in the film was realistic lemming behavior, however. Disney’sWhite Wilderness was filmed the Canadian province of Alberta, which is not a native habitat for lemmings and is landlocked with no outlet to the sea. The filmmakers had to import lemmings to Alberta for use in the documentary (reportedly by purchasing them from Inuit children who had caught them in other provinces); through the use of carefully controlled camera angles and tight editing, the filmmakers made no more than a few dozen lemmings look like a much larger number, placing them on turntables to create a frenzied migration effect and then herding them off a cliff and into the water (which was actually the Bow River, not an Arctic sea).

Nine photographers spent three years stitching it all together.

Certainly nature documentaries are notoriously difficult to film as wild animals are not terribly cooperative, and many nature shows and films of this era (including Disney’s “True-Life Adventure” movies and the Wild Kingdom television series) staged events to capture exciting footage for their audiences. Nonetheless, in this case what was depicted on screen was a complete fabrication, not a recreation of real animal behavior that filmmakers were unable to capture on film.

Lemmings do not periodically hurl themselves off cliffs and into the sea. Cyclical explosions in population do occasionally induce lemmings to attempt to migrate to areas of lesser population density, and when such migrations occur, some lemmings do die by falling over cliffs or drowning in lakes or rivers. These deaths are neither acts of “suicide” nor the result of compulsive unreasoning behavior, however; they’re accidental deaths resulting from lemmings’ venturing into unfamiliar territories and being crowded and pushed over dangerous ledges or venturing into the water in a quest to reach new territory.

You know all those desperate refugees who drown in the Mediterranean trying to escape from Syria or Libya? Yeah.

H/t Dale Husband

There’s a popular open Facebook group, Occupy Menstruation.

Today it has a post excited about degendering menstruation.

Degendering Menstruation: It’s Beginning

I see a shift happening in the collective consciousness of the menstrual activist community. People are posting simple reminders that it is not only women who bleed, and slowly this is changing the language chosen for posts—rather than talking about women all of the time, people can start talking about menstruators.

Well thank fuck for that, right? I’m so sick of people talking about women all the time. Goddam women – they suck up all the oxygen in the room and then ask for even more. Women dominate everything, and nobody else can ever get a word in.

There are some woo comments on that post.

Miranda Grey whose next Worldwide Womb Blessing is coming on on Monday, February 22, issued a very inclusive statement recently saying that the Divine Feminine energies belong to everyone. “The Womb Blessing is open to all who resonate with the energy, with or without a womb or a cycle,” she wrote and specifically welcomed trans gender people to explore her womb blessing.

Oh yes the Divine Feminine energies handing out womb blessings – it doesn’t get any better than that.

Menstrual blood is sacred. It contains coded dna reflections of our current levels of consciousness. As well as ancestral information. It also contains the building blocks of life…creating a human. Inserting a vagina onto a man will not be able to replicate that. He doesn’t have the necessary inner workings to bleed as a biological female does.
Man has his own sacred fluid which is sperm containing his genetic and spiritual codes. Yes the collective consciousness now wants to evolve beyond male and female restrictions and according to many it has been on the cards for some time for humanity.

Menstrual blood contains coded DNA reflections of our current levels of consciousness? I did not know that. I thought it contained chunks of endometrial tissue.

Me, I hate the whole linkage of women with that kind of bullshit. I identify as bullshit-averse.