Originally a comment on Not all directors of frat-boy movies

It seems like they, Apatow and Rogen, want some kind of special sticker that says that they are the exception to the rule that states that culture influences media which in turn further establishes cultural norms. But that is a silly exception to want if they expect their films to keep selling. The thing that keeps people going to see their stories is that they are culturally relevant.

On a slightly related personal note, I was watching Knocked Up with a good guy friend (a guy who actually IS a “nice guy”) who noticed I was becoming uncomfortable during the film. I hadn’t said anything, and even though I knew … Read the rest

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Misogyny? What misogyny?

BBC News reports:

Two teenage girls found hanging from a tree in a village in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh had been gang raped, police say.

A man has been held over the murders of the girls, who police said were 14 and 16.

Three policemen have been removed from duty for not registering cases when the girls were reported missing.

Violence and discrimination against women in India remains deeply entrenched.

Meanwhile, Farzana Parveen, the pregnant woman who was stoned to death in front of the court house for marrying a man her family hadn’t chosen? That man she married murdered his first wife in order to marry Farzana Parveen.

Muhummad Iqbal, the 45-year-old

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Extra excitement at the Columbus, Indiana Wal-Mart last Saturday.

Police say a gunshot wounded a woman inside a central Indiana Wal-Mart store after a man’s handgun fell from his pants and fired.

Columbus police Lt. Matt Myers says the 26-year-old woman was treated for an upper arm wound by medics at the store but declined to go to a hospital.

…

Myers says a 56-year-old man told officers that his handgun was in a holster when it fell from his waistband. One bullet hit the woman who was pushing a shopping cart with her newborn son inside.

Myers says officers confirmed the man had a handgun permit and he wasn’t arrested.

And that’s the end of the story.

The guy … Read the rest

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Christine Scheller reports at the Huffington Post’s Religion section on Women in Secularism…from the pov of someone not very keen on secularism.

When women leave moderate forms of religion, are their stories less interesting or was it a coincidence that all but one of the deconversion narratives I heard at the Women in Secularism III conference May 17 in Alexandria, Virginia, involved women leaving fundamentalist versions of faith? Because I’m a Christian, and I would leave those too.

So, she’s hinting, there should have been more about “moderate” forms of religion.

The question arose in light of these stories as to what keeps women in religion when it is so often hostile to us? Among the answers suggested were

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Navi Pillay, the UN human rights High Commissioner, commented today on the murder of Farzana Parveen.

“I am deeply shocked by the death of Farzana Parveen, who, as in the case of so many other women in Pakistan, was brutally murdered by members of her own family simply because she married a man of her own choice,” said High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.

“I do not even wish to use the phrase ‘honour killing’: there is not the faintest vestige of honour in killing a woman in this way,” she added in a news release, which also noted that Pakistan has one of the highest rates of violence against women globally.

And why is that? Because they … Read the rest

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Oh goody, Soraya Chemaly and David Futrelle were on an NPR talk show – On Point – today to talk about Rodger and misogyny. Before I listen, how about a quick look at the comments…

…uh oh.

Coastghost • 16 hours ago

Perhaps Americans have grown too unaccustomed to reading various plays by Aristophanes or certain epigrams by Martial or certain satires by Juvenal, or certain poems by Villon or certain stories by Machiavelli, or certain aphorisms by Schopenhauer or certain stories by Maupassant . . . . perhaps if we had not become so keen to shield our eyes from what vexes or discomfits, we would today be well-equipped to consider familiar themes upon their recurrence.

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Hard to believe but apparently not a hoax – “Joe the Plumber” says your dead kids don’t trump my rights.

Adam Weinstein at Gawker has the details.

Continuing his tradition of providing answers to questions no one fucking asked him, Joe decided to post an open letter to the families of victims killed in Elliot Rodger’s murder-suicide rampage over the weekend. Just the victims who were shot, though; not the ones who were stabbed.

His message of hope and love: Stay the fuck away from my guns.

I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now. But:

As

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From the Daily Beast this time. Emily Shire writes that #YesAllWomen is a good thing BUT it is not a perfect thing. Worryworry.

#YesAllWomen has led to an outpouring of simultaneously enlightening and disturbing examples of common-day occurrences of female harassment in theworkplace and world of dating. These, in turn, have inspired a number of men to tweet out their support and recognition of the dangers and double standards that misogyny has wrought.

However, #YesAllWomen also transformed a highly disturbed, socially isolated college student into a figure somehow worthy of legitimate discourse about the serious issues of misogyny. While it is inspiring to see positive conscious-raising tweets about the female experience come out of a national tragedy, there

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Sarah Ditum wonders why there’s an expectation of privacy for misogyny but not for the women who are its targets.

Public life is full of men with manifest habits of misogyny, but whenever this is challenged, one excuse is reliably rolled out: that was private, it doesn’t affect his job. Men, it seems, are the champions of doing two entirely contradictory things at the same time.

That’s been the consensus around Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore’s misogynistic emails. And yes, they were misogynistic – not just a bit sexist if you looked at them funny, not “private banter” (as the headline of India Knight’s Sunday Times column described them), but absolutely misogynistic: Scudamore discussed women’s breasts, described women as

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I wrote a public Facebook post in the middle of the night to express my middle of the night feeling of horror at the state we’re in. I’ll put it here too, because this is the state we’re in and it is horrifying.

——————–

I’m beyond appalled, horrified, staggered. I don’t have the words to name my thoughts on the fact that we know racist violence when we see it – we don’t get ostensibly-reasonable people trying to argue that white guys dragging a black guy behind a truck to kill him is not about racism. We don’t get ostensibly-reasonable people trying to argue that Matthew Shepard was not beaten to death because of homophobia. Why THE FUCK are we … Read the rest

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Dave Zirin in The Nation:

If a mass killing perpetrated by a deeply disturbed misogynist does not make us look at how our society promotes and perpetuates violence against women, I am not sure what will.

Just what I keep thinking, as it becomes clearer and clearer that a mass killing perpetrated by a deeply disturbed misogynist will on the contrary make a lot of us bristle with outrage at the very mention of misogyny in connection with Elliot Rodger’s adventure. It appears that nothing will  make us look at how our society promotes and perpetuates violence against women.

It does not take any sort of genius to draw a line in between the weekend’s shooting, the torments faced

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There’s an Elliot Rodger fan page on Facebook that keeps returning after people manage to get one taken down (with great difficulty because Facebook is Facebook).

Facebook has removed fan pages for mass murderer Elliot Rodger, but new ones keep popping up — including one that targeted a woman who alleged its creators have harassed her for years.

Using one misogynist campaign in the service of another misogynist campaign. Enterprising.

Facebook has since said earlier versions of the pages were removed.

A man claiming to be behind the page, an Internet radio host who goes by the moniker Wild Goose, told QMI the “page was set up [in] order to rustle the jimmies of feminists around the world who are

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And in Pakistan…

A Pakistani woman has been killed by her relatives outside Lahore High Court for marrying against their wishes.

Police said 30-year old Farzana Bibi died on the spot after being attacked with bricks and sticks.

…

Farzana Bibi’s parents accused her husband, Muhammad Iqbal, of kidnapping her, and had filed a case against him at the High Court.

However, she testified to police that she had married him of her own accord. Police said the couple had been engaged for a number of years.

As she arrived at the court building for a hearing, police said about a dozen family members pulled her aside and began to attack her and her husband, who managed to escape.

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Originally a comment on How dare you treat Rodger’s murders as political?

What’s funny is that saying ‘don’t politicise the issue’ *is* politicising the issue. Here’s my word on the subject, from my tumblr:

It’s quite simple, really. Whenever something happens in the ‘real’ world, whenever people get injured or killed due to neglect or human malevolence, there is always a cavalcade of gainsayers admonishing everyone not to ‘politicise’ the tragedy (at least whenever it’s a tragedy that can be lain at the feet of white men). Whenever there’s a shooting, the NRA falls all over itself to say that anyone who might propose reasonable gun control measures is ‘an opportunist’ who should be ashamed of themselves for taking … Read the rest

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Oh yes.

Tobias Buckell and John Scalzi on Twitter:

Tobias Buckell ‏@tobiasbuckell  10h

I love how the phrase ‘no politics’ always comes from someone swimming in politics… just of their own brand. So little self-recognition.

John Scalzi @scalzi

.@tobiasbuckell “MY politics aren’t REALLY politics, you see! They’re just plain COMMON SENSE!”

Oh yes. That “I think you are homing in on what disturbs me – it’s about trying to spin tragedy for political purposes” from earlier today is a classic example. “Your view of this is political, while my view of it is from a distant point in space where politics no longer exists.”

 … Read the rest

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