Feminism – Page 13

Happy Bad Mothers’ Day

Published on March 18, 2007

It’s Mothers’ Day again in the UK, and as has been par for the course so far in life, both my sons seem to have blithely ignored it. I think I may have made a rod for my own back; it was me that taught them it’s a manufactured, capitalist holiday designed to squeeze more money out of our guilt, but WAAAH! You little ratbags! You could at least’ve sent a card!

At least there’s always the Bad Mothers Club to solace all us misunderstood British mothers out there. It’s written largely by its users and though it’s occasionally cheap, vulgar and hardly correctly feminist it’s compelling reading for the window it gives into other women’s lives and families. The personal stories and comments are often hilariously funny as well as frequently tragic:

Oh-so-perfect-Dad katkit66

Ok this really pisses me off. I look after my 5 year old daughter 6 days a week and on the 7th she goes to visit her dad.

Great. A full day to myself. But on her return I have the same conversation with her every single bloody week. ‘My Dad says you should play with me more. ‘Now before you read any further let me tell you, I DO MY BEST. I do her homework with her – I have made special documents on the computer soley for this. I read a bedtime story to her every night. I play Barbie dolls with her. I help her play dressing up. I play I spy on the way to and from school with her. I play computer games with her. I play ‘lets be silly’ with her, even when I,m on the bloody toilet. I could go on, but I wont.
My point is, that her Dad lives with his Mother, so when my little darling visits him for the day, he hasnt got to do the shopping, the cooking, the washing, the ironing, the cleaning etc etc, SO HE HAS GOT THE BLOODSY TIME TO PLAY ALL DAY WITH HER COS HE DOES SFA ELSE!!

Boswellox, bollocks Yacketyblah

OMG it annoys me so very much. Boswelox and pentapeptides and Pro V. Erm, no. I don’t buy it.

Ooo, look, I’m rubbing a tiny bit of this soapy thing on my perfectly made up cheek and lo and behold, look how clear and clean my still perfectly made up airbrushed skin is. Please rush out and buy me!

And, Nadine Baggott, I happen to think that around £20 for a bottle of the same stuff I can get at tesco for a couple of quid may as well be a celebrity price tag.

STEPSON FROM HELL justmyfather’swife!

I’ve looked after him for the past 13 years (14 since his natural mother died) He’s now 21 and ever since leaving school has been in and out of prison, in trouble with police, on curfew (mostly at ours!) He’s now got his girlfriend pregnant and we’ve just paid 200 quid yet again to keep him out of prison for her sake! Now I’m the big bad wicked stepmother because I broke up a physical fight between them, in MY house. Hence my name you’re JUSTMYFATHER’SWIFE!!!!

Stop any J. Random Woman in the street and you’d hear a story like one of those. As all mothers of whatever variety know, motherhood is a blessing and a curse; nothing in life can ever give you such joy or such pain; particularly so at the moment with the political and ecological outlook so bleak and the future so doubtful.

This being the internet I’m bound to be accused of having beien exclusionary of fathers and the childless in this post to the glories of motherhood – well, tough titty. It’s Mothers Day and even if my kids have forgotten, off having their grownup lives, I haven’t. Today as every day I shall be acting like the Bad Mother I am.

AA – Battery Included

Published on March 17, 20079 Comments

How often have you heard recently that some sexually predatory and disgraced politician or cleric is OK now, the slate’s been wiped clean and it’s all good with jeebus because it was all about the booze, or the drugs, or the sex addiction and blah blah they’ve gone into rehab blah?

Rehab is a massive business worldwide; the teen rehabilitation clinic industry alone is worth $1.2 billion annually. Making money from human misery can even buy you an ambassadorxhip to Europe.

12-step programs, being peer-led and largely self-directed, really should be better than these medically industrialised warehouses of emotional trouble, shouldn’t they?

But a recent rape case questions whether anyone involved in 12 step programmes like AA ever give any thought to the damaged people that some of their admittedly criminal peers may have left in their wake. Are 12-step programmes a good alternative to medical rehab or are they ultimately an expression of pure selfishness in emphasising the addicts’ recovery above all other considerations including the law?

Tucked into Deborah Orr’s column in this morning’s Independent was this short item:

An astonishing rape case in the US features a man who got in touch with a woman he’d raped may years before and confessed to her by letter in order to “make amends” in step nine of his 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous programme. The woman in question, a Mrs Seccuro, was unimpressed by the gesture, because her own recollection was of a violent gang rape, while her assailant’s was of something deeply unpleasant but rather less elaborate.

I hadn’t picked up on this in my meandering around the internets so I went googling, and it’s a well reported but ugly story:

Holy Vagina-ing Vaginas, Vaginawoman!

Published on March 9, 20071 Comment

Is that enough ‘vagina’, Avedon?

The word “vagina” is in the title of this post

“Vagina – now suspend me”:

3 High school girls from Lewisboro, New York were suspended from school for saying the word ‘vagina’ at a public reading, against the direction of the school’s staff.

[…]

I challenge every blogger who reads this, to use the word “vagina” in a blog post title, linking to Debra’s site to give your readers the reason why you’re speaking up for the genital that’s getting the short end of the free speech stick in a New York school.

“Vagina Verboten”:

More importantly, they received a monumental life lesson on what it means to be born with a vagina.

Comment of The Day

Published on March 9, 2007

Concerns online civility and comes from Sifu Tweety in response to another comment on his own post on lawyer Jil of Feministe’s law school and online harassment by rightwing fuckwits:

Sifu Tweety Says:
March 7th, 2007 at 10:58 pm

[…]

What makes me nervous, and why I mentioned it, what makes me nervous anytime anybody of any gender implies it, is the theory that we should somehow “do something” that stops these people from being able to act like assholes in the first place. Because we cannot. There is no way. The internet completely breaks that (already broken) paradigm, and to forcefully reassert that kind of paradigm on the internet breaks the internet. Period.

And the more people don’t understand this, the more people think about the internet as the “real world,” the more likely it is that somebody will actually find a way to break the internet legislatively – again, this is not a partisan thing, although it should be, stupid dems – and then all of the world-changing things we love about this medium, the thing we have in common, will become more broken promises, just like TV, just like cable, just like movies, just like the fucking printing press as most of the world concieves it, as the traditional powers retake control, and all this citizen powered malarkey becomes a memory.

So, yeah, those guys are unbelievable shitheads, but all of us must fight for their ability to do at least some of the things they do. It’s to us that they’ve hitched their wagon, to our tools.

It’s unfortunate sometimes, but freedom means freedom for everyone, even the shitheads, and we just have to accept it. Damn you, personal liberty, why must you be so bloody double-edged all the time?

Happy International Women’s Day II – “The knife wasn’t for the Iraqis,” she said. “It was for the guys on my own side.”

Published on March 8, 2007

I do urge you to read Helen Benedict’s piece ‘The private war of women soldiers’ (Salon day pass required).

I remember reading and writing about reports of soldier on soldier sexual assault right back at the start of the Iraq war and I also remember wondering how, when they were attacking their own comrades the US forces could possibly claim its troops were spreading freedom and democracy.

Nothing’s changed since then; if anything the situation for women troops seems worse than ever:

As thousands of burned-out soldiers prepare to return to Iraq to fill President Bush’s unwelcome call for at least 20,000 more troops, I can’t help wondering what the women among those troops will have to face. And I don’t mean only the hardships of war, the killing of civilians, the bombs and mortars, the heat and sleeplessness and fear.

I mean from their own comrades — the men. Comprehensive statistics on the sexual assault of female soldiers in Iraq have not been collected, but early numbers revealed a problem so bad that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered a task force in 2004 to investigate. As a result, the Defense Department put up a Web site in 2005 designed to clarify that sexual assault is illegal and to help women report it. It also initiated required classes on sexual assault and harassment. The military’s definition of sexual assault includes “rape; nonconsensual sodomy; unwanted inappropriate sexual contact or fondling; or attempts to commit these acts.”

Comprehensive statistics on the sexual assault of female soldiers in Iraq have not been collected, but early numbers revealed a problem so bad that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered a task force in 2004 to investigate. As a result, the Defense Department put up a Web site in 2005 designed to clarify that sexual assault is illegal and to help women report it. It also initiated required classes on sexual assault and harassment. The military’s definition of sexual assault includes “rape; nonconsensual sodomy; unwanted inappropriate sexual contact or fondling; or attempts to commit these acts.”

Woohoo, a website. The usual Bushco, rubbing butter into a 3rd-degree burn. And it’s not even the best butter.

[…]

Unfortunately, with a greater number of women serving in Iraq than ever before, these measures are not keeping women safe. When you add in the high numbers of war-wrecked soldiers being redeployed, and the fact that the military is waiving criminal and violent records for more than one in 10 new Army recruits, the picture for women looks bleak indeed.

[…]

Having the courage to report a rape is difficult enough for civilians, where unsympathetic police, victim-blaming myths, and simple fear prevent 59 percent of rapes from being reported, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice. But within the military, reporting is even more risky. Military platoons are enclosed, hierarchical societies, riddled with gossip, so any woman who reports a rape has no realistic chance of remaining anonymous. She will have to face her assailant day after day, and put up with rumors, resentment and blame from other soldiers. Furthermore, she runs the risk of being punished by her assailant if he is her superior.

Read the whle article

All this in a combat zone too. Anonymous reporting is all very well for statistical purposes but it still means the perpetrators aren’t punished and can carry on raping, groping and assaulting with merry, military-sanctioned abandon.

Many women in front line infantry units are there because they need the money to feed their children or because they have no hope of further education funding or a career otherwise. They can’t afford to complain. They have way too much to lose.They’ll have to find some other way to equalise matters, In a place where everyone is wearing a sidearm there’s always the old Vietnam solution to the problem of a pestilent superior to fall back on. I wonder when news of the first Iraq or Afghanistan female on male fragging will hit big media?