Addendum to Just feed people ,for fucks sake…
I just just hear the counter argument now..
“But without war, there would be even more people to feed & shelter!”
Yeah, I think the $1735 will cover them,too.
Category Archives: Roar
Just feed people, for fucks sake.
This is going to be a doozy of a round-up. Slacked off last week because I was overwhelmed. Lots of things going on in the area of food justice & hunger. Also, I might rant a little.
Where to start….
Well this happened: House panel OKs Farm Bill with cuts to food stamps
Like my state Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said, “Families who are living in poverty did not spend this nation into debt and we should not be trying to balance the budget on their backs.”
Yeah,that.
It was that same day that some random woman on the Internet chose to yell at me for “spreading lies about America. There are no children going to bed hungry in America!” That’s a summary. There was a shitty diatribe about how I should leave the country and whatnot. I can almost see her sitting at her computer wearing a flag emblazoned sweatshirt with the words “God Bless America” across the front.
Fuck yeah, ‘Murica!
You know this stuff happens all the time but on that specific day when even more family’s food security was compromised?Bad timing ,lady. She was also pointing at what I wrote about my personal experience with hunger . MY own story. Fuck no, you do not dismiss personal stories of hunger in America, mine or anyone else’s.
It’s true that in some poor families, children don’t go to bed hungry but their parents do. They make sure the kids get fed first and go without for themselves. But sometimes, there just isn’t enough for anyone. Free lunch in school might be the only meal that kid gets and that’s only during the school year . 
In America. Don’t get pissed off at the people who can’t eat, be ashamed that it’s happening in your fucking country.$400 billion every single year is lost because of tax evasion. FOUR.HUNDRED. BILLION.DOLLARS. That’s 5 times more than it costs to fund the whole entire SNAP program.Why aren’t you mad at those people?
Oh, and people shouldn’t have kids if they can’t feed them? Most people struggling with food insecurity didn’t start out that way. So, once they do, they’re supposed to destroy their family and their child’s life by letting them bounce around in a broken foster care system that fails children more than it rescues them, letting state taxpayer money support that child ENTIRELY without love & security of family? Well, that makes no fucking sense but if economics is the bottom line (and it always seems to be with these people) giving a family food stamps & TANF is cheaper than funding a child in the foster care system. 11 times more.
So,seriously…fuck off with the idea that people struggling have no right to keep the children they have. Your humanity and your math don’t add up.
Let’s also talk about this God blessing America business. Part of what happened in the debate over SNAP cuts was that Jesus was pulled into the conversation. What would Jesus do or say about feeding people?
My good Christian friends would say that Jesus was all for feeding anyone who needed it. Not being Christian , I trust they’re right about this. The thing is, we shouldn’t be talking about Jesus at all when making decisions that affect American citizens. This is not a theocracy. I appreciate that those against the SNAP cuts were using the Bible to point out to conservative Republicans (Christians) how against the words of Jesus they were. It’s not a strategy that is likely to work anyway. These types of Republicans use the Bible to defend what they believe , whether or not the majority of other Christians think they’re full of shit and do not interpret The Bible the same way.
I mean… Rep. Stephen Lee Fincher (R-Tenn.) used 2 Thessalonians 3:10, which says “for even when we were with you, we used to give you this order: If anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat, either.” Which implies that people who get SNAP don’t work. Oh,really?
And the other 60%? Disabled & elderly taking the biggest chunk of that percentage.
We can’t form National policies and programs based on religious text that is so widely interpreted by so many. If you want to be an asshole and not feed people, then own it. Don’t use your religion to justify it. This is probably why I don’t understand organized religion. I don’t understand why someone needs a religious book to tell the how to just be a good human being.
Thank you ,Jim McGovern for being a good human being…
He brings up so many excellent points and addresses the reasoning Republicans use of trying to reduce fraud with these cuts.
Do you know why I never discuss food stamp or welfare fraud here? SNAP works well and the amount of abuse is not worth addressing. It’s hard to convince people who have it drilled in their head that there a bunch of freeloaders abusing food stamps . I don’t know where this stubbornness and vilification comes from but it should really stop. No one has time to listen to all that bullshit.
There was a time when ending national hunger was a goal for both Republicans and Democrats and part of the reason we can’t end hunger in America right now (besides mismanaged food waste) is that everyone is too fucking concerned about what political party is doing what and make no mistake about it, which politicians are getting their pockets lined with payouts from lobbyists and special interest groups.
For fucks sake, just feed people already.
My patience is running thin with all this bullshit.
/end rant
More Shit That Will Either Piss You Off Or Inspire You
Which house members voted for the SNAP cuts and their Twitter handles -emails and phone numbers,too
Gardening, Gleaning, and Farming for Food Banks- The most practical and sensible solutions ever. A few people have sent me stories about their own food bank gardens and I’ll be sharing those in the upcoming weeks.
Poverty rates are WAY up in the suburbs - but no one really wants to talk about it
America’s poverty problem, it ain’t those other people - the face of poverty is changing
Our ‘no groceries challenge – you know, like a food stamp challenge people take to see what it’s like to live on food stamps…but real
#solvepoverty is a hashtag getting some action on Twitter lately. Here’s some stuff I pulled from that feed…
The UN says we should eat insects if we’re hungry -What is this, an episode of Survivor? Oh..wait..
Taking a look at economic mobility -from Melissa Harris-Perry. Also from MHP Digging into the health care part of the poverty issue , people who profit from poverty …and more at the website.
Poverty as a childhood disease
But really, we don’t even need to talk about it too much,Paris Hilton has the solution.
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To see all I’ve ever said here about hunger,food insecurity ,poverty, and living on food stamps, go here.
Have something you’d like to say to me in a private email? Use this form. To comment publicly, scroll down and use the comment form.
Hey,Parents of kids who went on a field trip to a Coca Cola factory in Atlanta….
Hi,there.
If your child recently went on a school field trip to The Coca-Cola Factory in Atlanta, there is a blogger who took pictures of children on that trip with the express purpose of using them to illustrate a point about childhood obesity. Their faces are blocked out but as a parent, I know that I would recognize my child in a heartbeat with giant blocks on their face…as would I’m sure anyone who knew them in real life.
View the blog post here.
The blog post is no better than a playground bully picking on a kid about their weight. The message behind the words are entirely beside the point…I don’t care what her point is, if one of my children, were in these pictures ,I would demand they be removed.
Fat shaming random children ,especially in such a public and debasing manner is unacceptable.
The author of the blog has closed comments (and I believe deleted every comment that did not support her exploitation fully) but you can contact her at the following places:
Email: michelleelizabethlim@gmail.com
Twitter: @mishlovinlife
Instagram : mishlove
Bloggers should also feel free to tell her how inappropriate and unethical this post is. A blogger who feels concern and passion for an issue can write with credibility without relying on exploitative pictures of children without parental consent. It makes the practice of blogging look like shit when people do stupid things like this.
Matriot
This is a poem I have had hanging above my desk for years, including this picture of Helen Vandevere, a righteous babe born in 1904…who has probably passed away by now. The magazine I yanked the poem & picture from was published in the late 90s, so she was nearly 100 then.
I love to share this poem around Mother’s Day. I’m not much a fan of days that have become Hallmark Holidays but other’s Day with it’s roots in anti-war sentiments is a little different. I still feel irritated at the guilt-gifting I feel like I MUST do every year for my own mother I’m not particularly close with but the history of it is special to me.
This poem is an extension of the spirit of Mother’s Day. Not only should we not send our sons to war to die but we should make caring for all the people of our country a national priority….true National Defense.
Photography © 1992 Kira Carrillo Corser
Matriot (ma´ – tri – at) noun 1: One who
loves his or her country. 2: One who loves
and protects the people of his or her country.
3: One who perceives national defense as
health, education, and shelter of all people
in his or her country. (Orig. FPA, 1991)
| Matriot
There’s not much that’s important at my age I say we damn well better I’ve lived through two depressions, I’d spend the money on health instead. How are we going to pay for all this? This is national defense. © 1992 Frances Payne Adler |
Telling kids not to do that thing you don’t want them to do doesn’t always work
I feel like I’ve told this story a million times ,so if you’ve heard it, ignore me…
When my mother was 6, she nearly shot her 3 yr old brother in the head with my Grandpa’s gun. It’s a story that I heard a lot growing up..partly because the bullet hole was left in the wall and people would be like, “Um, is that a bullet hole in the wall?” ,so it would start conversations. It was a seriously close call. My other uncle who was 5 at the time says he remembered his little brother moving just at the right moment and there on the wall where his head had been just a second before was a bullet hole.
My Grandpa was on the police force at the time but he had always had guns. His method of instructing his 5 children on anything was pretty much, “Don’t touch that!” or “It’s none of your goddamned business!”. Obviously, not super effective when it came to handling a gun or anything else, really.
Things have probably changed quite a bit among gun owners but a lot of this still hangs around. “Don’t touch that because I said so.”, might be the most instruction a kid gets on gun safety or (eve worse), “Just point at your target and pull the trigger, now.” Not to say at all that all gun owners take this approach. We have guns in our house and this is exactly the opposite of how we handle the topic. My personal belief is that a child has no business ever handling a gun, let alone owning one.
I don’t want to pigeonhold certain types of people and generalizing their actions, but I tend to believe (much of this based from what I’ve seen of people) that if a person is the kind of parent who doesn’t take the time to address a huge safety issue such as what to do with a gun, they aren’t going to talk about other important things with them either.
Like ,for instance, sex. They might say, “Don’t do that because I said so.”
This unfortunately does not only apply to gun owners who can’t talk about gun safety. People who don’t own guns falter on this topic,too. Basically, no one is perfect,especially once they’re a parent and the only absolute in parenting is that you really do not have absolute control over the actions of your children, no matter how good of a job you’re doing.
Teenagers are kind of known for 1) not doing what they’re told all the time and 2) being hornier than that one dinosaur with the predominant neck frill with lots of spikes sticking out this way and that (Styrosaurus. That’s it’s name. I think)
And even if you do tell them more than that and explain all the consequences and precautions and advise them to wait until that magical moment when they’re with their smoochy-muffin and the rain ends and a rainbow appears just as My Chemical Romance’s “Demolition Lovers” starts playing on the i-pod through shared earbuds…and they just KNOW it’s So very,very right….’
even if you tell them all the stuff a good sex-ed program should…about birth control and responsibility and all of that – they still might have sex. And they might forget the part of birth control OR like many adults, their birth control failed and they need to fix the situation before it becomes a baby. They might need emergency contraception. They might feel embarrassed to tell you they not only fucked but fucked up. They should be able to go get the help they need before they have to say, “Oh,hey… hold my hand while I have an abortion? Or baby,maybe?”.
Then there’s a whole other piece that people are not talking about at all and that is the connection between sexual abuse and teen pregnancy. Girls who are sexually abused are 5 times more likely to end up pregnant as a teenager. 20% of all teen pregnancies are a direct result of rape. Statistics are grayer when it comes to determining the exact amount of teen pregnancies that are a result of sexual abuse and not consensual sex because of their reluctance to report. 60% of teen pregnancies were preceded by rape,molestation or attempted rape. There is a huge connection here that is ignored. Teen pregnancies are not just caused by careless sex. These girls who are victims need to know that there is a backup plan for them to protect themselves from an unwanted pregnancy after an attack and access to it should not be prevented, regardless of if the girl chooses to report or not report the abuse or attack.
I think gun control and birth control are perfect companions for discussing side by side. The GOP wants gun owners to be the only ones in control of guns, and is ok with a 5 year old owning a gun .It seems like they also sort of want all the control over sex and female bodies. Does that really seem like a good idea? Because honestly, they aren’t managing the gun part too well these days. It doesn’t seem quite right they should have rights over uterine activities,too.That doesn’t seem too beneficial to society. Actually, no political party should have a right over the human body, whether it has a uterus or not. Age really shouldn’t be an issue. If she is able to conceive, she should be able to decide if she wants something growing in her uterus. Uteruses are not political domain. Guns ,on the other hand….
well…we’ll talk about that another time.
OPEN THREAD: Have you ever been threatened for speaking out against rape?
After Zerlina Maxwell spoke out against rape on a Fox News segment, she received some awful threats via the internet ,some of them saying she deserved to be gang raped and killed. Following that, there was a discussion on twitter among a few feminist bloggers and others that I follow and it turns out it’s not such a rare thing. Recently I had some rather nasty threats myself .It wasn’t the first time but in the past when it happened , what was said was something I could easily ignore and maybe even eye roll a little at. Not this time,though.
Just read the comments aimed at Trista on Rapebook as shining examples of what happens when someone tries to interfere with rape culture. And it doesn’t just happen to women who speak up. Men get shit for it,too.
So, today’s open thread topic…
Have you ever been harassed or threatened for speaking out against rape? Or have you seen it happen to someone else? In any context – in your daily life, on any social networking, on your blog ,tumblr,etc. Did it make you want to shut up or speak up more? And what the fuck do we do about it?
I just really feel compelled to chat about this today. As a person who has been raped, I’ve often said that the treatment I received afterward for being raped and then wanting to seek justice against the rapist was in a way worse than the rape itself. Now I’m seeing that people who have never experienced sexual assault of any kind getting almost as much shit for just speaking out. I don’t get it. I’m sure some of you don’t either. So, feel free to share your own experiences with the lashback…or just express your feelings about the whole matter in general.
On a related note and maybe what pushes me to talk about why we can’t talk about rape without being attacked…
RIP Rehtaeh.
Comment of the Week: “Ever since the Steubenville sexual assaults made the news, I’ve been thinking about three things that happened in my life, things that have to do with the culture of rape.”
This was a brilliant comment left on my I Don’t Want To End Rape Culture. I Want To Destroy It post earlier this week. It’s so long, it could probably be considered a Guest Post. It certainly deserves some space out of the comment section where more people might take the time to read it.
seekerofmetta says:
Ever since the Steubenville sexual assaults made the news, I’ve been thinking about three things that happened in my life, things that have to do with the culture of rape.
Rape perplexes me. It simply doesn’t make any sense to me, and I just can’t comprehend that a boy or man could even have the physical capability of performing rape.
I’m not a shrinking violet, either. I’ve had a lot of sex in my life, and many women in my life who meant (and mean) a great deal to me. Once a friend told me that her mother wouldn’t allow her as a young girl to wear tampons, insisting instead that she use sanitary napkins. Sandy described the intense humiliation she felt wearing something that felt like a canoe between her legs that she was sure everyone could see. I laughed, and then told her that from sixth grade on I was plagued with monster erections that would occur at the most embarrassing and inopportune times. In retrospect, I realize that my adolescence was a decade of nothing less than balancing a telephone pole on the edge of my pelvis. So, yeah, I was a horny little bastard, and that’s what made my first encounter with rape culture so horrifying.
It was nearly fifty years ago, at a beer party at the small, rather expensive and exclusive Catholic men’s college I attended. I was just seventeen, and the idea of my first beer bust was very cool. Of course, once I got there I had too much to drink (which would become a nearly fatal habit in my life, but that’s another story) and that only amplified what I later experienced.
Perhaps a quarter of the people at the party were girls who attended a small and equally exclusive Catholic women’s college just down the road from our school. I was surprised to learn that some of the ladies could belt down as many brews as I could (believe me, that’s saying a lot!), and everybody got very sloshed, in the way kids do because they don’t yet know how to drink. As the evening wore on, I noticed some guys were smirking and going into the woods. So finally I followed them.
A young girl was there, sitting, slumped against the trunk of a tree, drunk out of her mind, and a few of the guys were trying to make out with her. The guy I followed already had his hand in her blouse.
Now, I don’t know why I did what I did, but, like self defense, it was automatic. I stepped up and shouted “Stop it! Stop it right now!” and the guy came up with both fists clenched. I slipped around him so that the drunken girl was behind me. In the meantime, several of his friends showed up, and I honestly thought I was going to get a terrible beating from these polished, cosmopolitan Catholic brats. For whatever reason that made me even more resolute, and I raised my fists and said, “Nobody’s going to touch this girl. Nobody.” I’m sure that wasn’t too terrifying coming from a 120 lb. beanpole like me, but it worked. We glared at each other for a time, I in front of the girl and they standing around looking tough in the way football players do.
Then, thank God, her friends showed up and hurried her out of there, and I was able to rejoin the guys I thought were my friends. They weren’t. They not only had not tried to help, but thought I was some kind of Dudley Do-Right. “Why did you do that, you asshole?,” one asked, “it was none of your business.” Another said, “Shit, I was hoping they’d kick the shit out of you.”
This was just incomprehensible to me. I couldn’t imagine that my friends didn’t share my protective impulses, that they were content to watch what would have inevitably developed into a gang rape. Years later I read Edmund Burke’s aphorism that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” and the first thing that came to mind was that night in the woods.
The beer bust broke up shortly afterwards. As I was getting ready to leave, I noticed a guy abandoned by his friends, who was drunk out of his mind, and I just couldn’t leave him there to freeze. Nobody would even help me to get him up off the ground, but I was able to shame a guy from my floor to help me, a guy who would later become a conscientious objector during Vietnam. He just couldn’t fathom the fact that I wouldn’t leave the drunk alone in the woods to sleep it off, and he complained bitterly about my insistence that we walk the guy the few miles back to school.
After that night, people began to treat me differently. At first, it was nothing all that noticeable, but later it became unmistakable. I was never invited to another beer bust because I was a “straight arrow,” someone who couldn’t be trusted, and I was gradually eased out of the group on my floor at the dorm. It was odd that I was thought of as impeccably moral, because I smoked, drank and swore more than all of the rest of the guys put together.
I left school a year later because my girlfriend was pregnant, and ended up joining the Army because the draft board was breathing down my neck.
Fast forward twenty years. I’m a criminal defense lawyer, and I’m talking to Alan, a friend of mine. He was black, an athlete and a body builder, and the handsomest guy I’ve ever known. Women flocked to him. We were talking about a guy I didn’t want to defend, a vicious serial rapist. I said to Alan, “How in the world do these guys keep their hard-ons? I mean, I can’t thing of anything that would turn me off more than beating up a woman.” “I know, man,” Alan said, “I can’t figure it out either, but there must be a lot of guys out there who get off on beating up chicks.”
Another decade passes, and it’s time for me to have the “talk” with my teenaged son. He knew all about the birds and the bees and all that, but we hadn’t talked about relationships with women. I thought and thought about how to convey to him how I thought real men acted in a relationship. Finally, I came up with this: “You will never use a woman as a receptacle or a object for your sexual desires. You can do whatever you want with a girl as long as she wants to, and as long as you realize that her pleasure, and her well-being, is just as important as yours.” I told him that because it was the sum total of everything I’d learned about loving women.
I’m in my late 60s now, and I still can’t comprehend rape. Well, I learned as a lawyer that more men are raped in prison than women are out in the world, and that people rape their little kids, and that there’s more rape going on out there than anyone ever dreamed, and that some of the most innocuous guys in the world can be the worst sort of rapist. I still don’t know how the bastards keep their hard-ons, about how this horrible brutality is somehow sexually exciting to them.
But I’ve surmised that rape is only apparently about sex, that the sexual violation of someone is just the vehicle for that which the rapist really craves: the sadistic humiliation of another human being. It’s his diseased way of saying, “I ain’t much, but at least I’m more than you.” Rape, I’m convinced, is really about violence, and the reason why it hurts so much – not just physically, not just immediately, but emotionally, and for years and years and years – is because that’s exactly what the rapist wants. Rape is the scar he wants to leave on your soul.
One other thing. I’m in my late 60s now, very sick – I have three different kinds of heart disease, and a prostate the size of a basketball, and I ache all over – but I look back at that night so long ago and I am so proud of that skinny little 17 year old who hesitated not a single second to defend another human being in a moment of helplessness. After all, that’s what it means to be a real man, a man who protects, who gives rather than takes, who spends his life helping those who need him. And a man who loves, who really loves, women.
I Don’t Want To End Rape Culture. I Want To DESTROY It.
If anything positive and encouraging could come out of something as horrible as the Steubenville case, it’s the growing attention to ending rape culture. There is a problem here,though. There are people angrily proclaiming ,”We must end rape culture now!” but then there’s a whole other group of people who are like, “Rape has a culture? Can you make yogurt from it? Can you see it in a museum?”.
To change the rape culture, many more people need to become aware or even just acknowledge that there is a rape culture and where it comes from. To change something, you need to understand how it works and what caused it in the first place.Rape culture by almost exact definition is the denial that there even is a problem. It isn’t just as simple as telling everyone to knock it the hell off and stop raping or to stop victim blaming. It’s complicated. It’s going to take a lot of work. It’s going to take a lot of education and awareness. There will need to be more activists for this cause than there ever has been before. But I’m an altruistic sucker for impossible feats that change the world.
So,hey….let’s do this thing.
What It Is
The popularization of the term “rape culture” was born through the Slut Walk and Indian sister-movement Besharmi Morcha when they referred to the term in protests. The protesters defined a rape culture to be as ‘a culture where sexual violence is both made to be invisible and inevitable”.
Before this, the term began to be used in the 70s by feminist theorists and wasn’t used much outside women’s studies classrooms and the feminist community. The feminist protesters in Slut Walks threw it out there and it became something that made sense to a lot of people, both survivors of rape and those aware of the issue through association, who had never studied feminism in a classroom but certainly knew what it felt like to be living in a rape culture. The Slut Walk rallies were a dividing force in the feminist community from different angles. Some feminists felt that embracing the word “slut” & wearing of provocative clothing during the rallies only fed into the patriarchal sexualization of women and women of color felt excluded and refused to embrace a term that was culturally insensitive. However negative some feminists viewed the Slut Walks themselves, the term “rape culture” is a widely accepted part of the language used to discuss rape in a vast majority of the feminist community. The fine lines of acceptance of rape culture exists when we start examining rape as it happens not just to women but to men & children,too; and rape & sexual violence perpetrated by women. Overall,though, the expression is now also used by others who don’t see or think of themselves as feminists but recognize the problematic issues we have in our society.
To expand on the Slut Walk truncated definition, rape culture is a societal acceptance that rape is something that “just happens *shrug* ” .Even if many say outwardly that they think rape is horrible, the collective society does not behave as if they support that statement. There is an aura of shame attached to the victims of rape. Victims of rape are blamed and held mostly responsible for the violence against them instead of the rapist being held accountable & responsible for his actions. The shame & blame silences victims and prevents them from speaking out . Perpetrators and others who are witness to how these scenes play out are presented this idea that rape isn’t that bad, and that those who are raped probably deserved it anyway.
What the fuck?! How did this happen?
The simple answer is sexism.
[via Cherry Bomb Zine ]
And that honestly feels like a really bad explanation about how sexism plays into this. It feels unfair to refer to men and women in such a generalized way because we as a huma society are more complex than just that but so is sexism. The sexism that is at the base of rape culture could be something as simple as thinking a boy pushing a girl around on the playground and pulling her hair as “cute” and part of how kids act or statements that place no value on a woman as a person . Like saying breasts are so great because “you can’t motorboat a personality”, implying that the greatest asset a woman has is her boobs, not the content of her being
Obviously,other things play into how a rape culture works. It goes deeper than sexism and that explanation only addresses men as the perpetrators & females as the victims, which is an inaccurate picture of who rape victims can be. However, once this wide acceptance and trivialization is there, the base cause feeds into and produces the same end result, regardless or sex or gender of perp & victim.
We could probably attribute quite a bit of it to the increasing apathy and desensitization human beings have developed for other’s pain,suffering and struggles.
I asked people via social media earlier this week to tell me how we end rape culture. I’ve consolidated, edited,and elaborated upon all of the responses and put them in a handy list here. You can see some of the responses here . Consider the comments section on this post to be an open thread to have a dialogue about how we can better understand rape culture and the ways we can kick it’s fucking ass into the history books.
How To End Rape Culture
1. Teach your sons not to rape instead of teaching your daughters to not get raped.
2. Stop focusing on what women are wearing & determining her rape-deserving-factor based on her clothing. People have been raped wearing burqas, military uniforms,nuns habits,mini-skirts,nothing at all, and diapers. Clothing is irrelevant.
3. Every sex ed program and school handbook in the country needs to include complete and thorough explanation of what consent is.
4. Teenage boys should have to watch videos at school of girls talking about how being raped has messed up their lives. Even better would be if there were girls/women who would be brave enough to go to schools to talk about it in person.
5. When we see and hear major news outlets reporting on a matter that is rape or abuse related, hold them accountable for not using language that feeds into rape culture. Point it out on public forums such as their Facebook & Twitter accounts, call or write letters to protest & educate.
6. Accept that rape is not a trivial thing that means nothing and has no long lasting,permanent effects. If it was a meaningless act, it wouldn’t be used strategically in war.
7. Teach your daughters it’s okay to enjoy sex, that she doesn’t have to be convinced. That if she wants it, to ask for it. No coyness.
8. Respect and teach that human beings are all sexual beings but that sex is something you do WITH another person, not TO someone.
9. Truthful and actual facts about rape. Not any of that “a woman’s body just shuts that whole thing down” nonsense.
10. It may seem like it’s humanizing rape victims & helping people empathize, but saying things such as, “What if it was your daughter or sister?” isn’t helpful & in a way perpetuates rape culture by advancing the idea that a woman is only valuable in so much as she is loved or valued by a man .
11. It’s a myth that women commonly lie abut being raped. This needs to be debunked. If the topic of someone being raped should come up and someone states, “She could be lying.”, you know what to do. Put an end to that shit now.
12. Be an active parent ,teacher, or role model who teaches and demonstrates compass-
ion,empathy, and awareness of how to just be a decent human being. More than rape culture can be cured.
13. Take the feminist movement seriously. Every aspect of rape culture are things feminists have been working to change for a fucking long time. Maybe change can happen a little faster if everyone pays closer attention. You don’t have to call yourself a feminist to work towards the same goals of equality & better treatment of human being.
14: Feminists: Get off your high horse & stop alienating people who are not part of your world. Elitist scoffing at people who are just as angry and trying to understand it all isn’t helping anything. Not everyone has taken feminist theory classes or read every single word Andrea Dworkin. Also: respect that other feminists may not embrace all the same theories & if you just concentrate efforts fighting about who’s theory is correct and proper feminism, then nothing will ever change. Stop worrying about the theories and just be activists for change.
15. More men need to speak up & be a guy like Henry Rollins or Tony Porter.Men should want to refute the stigmas surrounding rape.
16. Teach your kids that if there’s a girl puking all over herself at a party, HELP HER. Don’t stand by and allow her to be taken advantage of because she’s in a vulnerable state. This applies to adults who see someone in a vulnerable position.
17. If you witness sexual abuse or rape happening, don’t be the asshole who just walks away and lets it happen.
18. Recognize that even “nice guys” rape and don’t take their side just because you previously thought they were such a nice guy. A lot of abusers and rapists are sociopaths who are fantastic at presenting a nice guy visage. Once you find out who they really are, don’t stand up for them or take their side.
19. Foster acceptance of people who do not live in the sex or gender role they were biologically born into and all LGBT people. Acts of sexualized violence against people who do not fit into the heteronormative mold are a huge problem. Make it acceptable for people to be who they are meant to be. Show zero tolerance for those who cultivate the hate.
20. Stop slut shaming. It doesn’t matter how many sexual partners someone has had in the past or presently. What a woman choose to do with her body consensual is up to her and whether she is promiscuous or not is irrelevant. No one is “asking for it”.Nope, not even sex workers.
21. Don’t ever joke about rape. It only helps to trivialize it.
More To Read On The Hows, Whys ,and What To Do About Rape Culture From Around The Web
Steubenhell on Earth from Americas Studies
“Asking for it”: some personal thoughts on conquest, discipline, and women’s bodies from The Shadows of Birds
Steubenville, Bullying and a Culture of Rape from The Redhead Bedhead
What We Should Teach Our Daughters (and Sons) About Rape from DeBie Hive
Ending Rape Culture from DeBie Hive
So, You’re Tired Of Hearing About Rape Culture? from Rant Against The Random
I Did Nothing from A Lot of Layers
The Healthy Sex Talk:Teaching Kids Consent,Ages 1-21 from The Good Men Project
Teaching Kids About Consent (and How Not To Rape) from Anktangle
25 Things Our Sons need to know about Manhood from A Holy Experience
The Day I Taught How Not To Rape from Accidental Devotional
What No One Is Saying About the Steubenville and Torrington Rape Cases from Everblog
Boys will be boys.
After the guilty verdict was read, those poor boys accused of raping a drunk 16 year old broke down in tears at the realization that their lives were destroyed.
CNN alluded to the judicial system and the drunk girl as being the ones who have robbed two “boys” of their “promising future”. What really happened was this: Two young men who win at football raped an unconscious girl ,treating the act as their entitlement as “stars” and flaunted the act to everyone by photographing the girl like she was an object for their enjoyment rather than a human being. The one rapist stated tearfully, “No pictures should have been sent out, let alone been taken.”. In other words, Goddamn, did we fuck up! If we hadn’t taken those pictures, no one would have ever known .We would have gotten away with it!
Those poor,poor boys.
Oh, the real victim, the girl who was raped? Meh. She doesn’t matter. She can get on with her life now, as if nothing ever happened.
I can’t speak for all 16 year old girls raped by jock assholes who held iconic star status in their hometown but from my own experience, a girl doesn’t simply just get over something like this and move on.It’s been well over 20 years since I was a raped 16 year old girl. The anger & rage is still just as fresh. It isn’t something you just get over. You can and do move on with your life and find happiness but that seething anger & hurt is always right there,waiting to be triggered.
In my case, I was bullied, harassed ,and threatened because I wouldn’t drop the charges. I was called a whore ,slut, and a liar by what seemed like every single person in town. I was told, “Oh,boys will be boys. This is just what they do. You need to get over it.” Like I didn’t even matter. I was just a disposable object to be used .
Then when I didn’t drop the charges and he was convicted, it was a new hell. Constant threatening phone calls, cars parked outside by house, things thrown at my window,people following me & screaming things at me when I went out in public….a general feeling of being unsafe no matter where I was.
“YOU ruined his life!” was a pretty common thing I heard. I ruined his life? HE ruined his life. I was the raped girl. He could have chosen to have a different future if HE had chosen not to be the rapist.
As is the case with these young men in Steubenville. They are the two people most responsible for life ruination and they are the last two people some want to blame. There are others who I could point fingers at but it might be hard to single out participants. These young men exist in a culture that tells them that they had every right to treat a drunk, unconscious girl like she was something for them to play with. Permissive adults, both parental & community members, gave these young men access to a lifestyle filled with activities they were not mature enough to handle . They were not taught how to be responsible ,despite being given a free pass to do what they chose. They were not told they need to be accountable for their own actions.
The entire incident in Steubenville could have been prevented and it has nothing to do with the girl involved. It’s all on the young men & the people who allowed them to believe this was ok. Fuck all the sympathy & tears for the young men. The girl is the only one who deserves it.
We , meaning all of our society, needs to make Tony Porter’s “Call To Men” and similar ideas part of our collective consciousness & the way we teach boys how to be men …which is actually the same as being moral & decent human beings. We owe it to not just our girls but our boys ,too.
It’s a girl.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to watch this entire movie. The trailer alone is a hard watch.
