Domestic abuse

A great post from a survivor of an abusive marriage, addressing the issue of “why do women stay?” and how responses to a survivor are often just victim-blaming instead of true support.

Filed under: relationships, sexual violence, solidarity

New to the blogroll

Angry Black Woman: via Winter at Mind the Gap! who says everyone should read this blog, and I concur. I’ve read a few things there every now and then, but recently I’ve been lurking and learning almost daily.

This recent post is particularly relevant to Australians during Reconciliation Week:

In other words, if you are White, 99% of the time Racism doesn’t affect you. Therefore, you may not see nor understand Racism when it happens.

If you are a Man, 99% of the time Sexism doesn’t affect you. Therefore, you may not grok Sexist behavior when it occurs nor will you always see Sexism when it is plain to others.

This goes for any -ist or -ism or -phobia you can think of. This goes for you, even if you’re a minority, when it concerns people who are not like you.

What does not affect you personally often will not impact on your consciousness unless you’ve trained yourself to see and understand.

Therefore, the next time you feel yourself declaring something “not racist” or “not sexist” or “not offensive”, think about whether you feel that way because you’re not the one on the receiving end of racist, sexist, or offensive behavior/words/actions/images.

Awesome. Edited to Add: Angry Black Woman also compiled the May 2007 Erase Racism Carnival of blog-posts, and is a panelist at WisCon 31, the feminist SF convention just winding up in the States.

Anybody else found an awesome source of compulsive reading recently?

Filed under: bigotry, racism, solidarity

Feminism – an ethic or a subculture?

This post is text yanked from the previous post, because the beginning and the end of the post were just a really, really bad match, and I think the feminist material deserved its own post. So if you’ve already read the previous post, this is the same stuff, OK? If you haven’t read it yet, please read on:

As I write this, An article I marked for sharing in my feed-reader is from Mind the Gap!, in which Zenobia muses on the human habit of labelling ourselves and the problems which can be created if self-labelling takes over one’s identity to the point where a subculture is created rather than an ethical stance, say, in the instance of the label “feminist” .

The idea of a subculture is that it offers a haven for people who feel different (often inferior / superior to most people) to shelter from “the drones” or “the randoms” and partake in an alternative lifestyle, dressing in a certain way and doing certain things, and more importantly maybe, deciding against doing certain other things.

The trouble with treating feminism that way is that it deals with something fairly universal: the idea that there is a feminine (socially imposed or otherwise) which negatively impacts on the lives of women, and that we don’t think it should. If you treat that as a subculture the effects are disastrous: what applies to those who don’t belong doesn’t apply to those within the circle, and vice-versa. It also causes feminists to adopt with pride the stereotypes that are applied to them, leading to endless discussions of haircuts, clothes and leg-shavery.

This ties into Lauredhel’s recent post on fluffy feminism: on one side the “fluffy” individualist feminists are defending an attachment to fashion and raunch culture as refusing to be confined within a sidelined feminist subculture, and on the other side the liberal and radical feminists and womanists are defending a cynicism towards fashion and raunch culture as central to a feminist ethical stance.

Filed under: ethics, solidarity

Jessica Valenti on cyberbullying

Jessica Valenti, the executive editor at Feministing, writes in The Guardian on cyberbullying in light of the threats made against Kathy Sierra. Valenti had her own problems with online harassment last year after attending a bloggers’ lunch with former President Bill Clinton, which generated widespread hysteria from partisan misogynists that she discusses in the article.

Sierra thinks that online threats, even if they are coming from a small group of people, have tremendous potential to scare women from fully participating online. “How many rape/fantasy threats does it take to make women want to lay low? Not many,” she says.

But even women who don’t put their pictures or real names online are subject to virtual harassment. A recent study showed that when the gender of an online username appears female, they are 25 times more likely to experience harassment. The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, found that female user-names averaged 163 threatening and/or sexually explicit messages a day.

“The promise of the early internet,” says Marwick, “was that it would liberate us from our bodies, and all the oppressions associated with prejudice. We’d communicate soul-to-soul, and get to know each other as people, rather than judging each other based on gender or race.” In reality, what ended up happening was that, online, the default identity became male and white – unless told otherwise, you would assume you were talking to a white man. “So people who brought up their ethnicity, or people who complained about sexism in online communications, were seen as ‘playing the race/gender card’ or trying to stir up trouble,” says Marwick.

The whole article is well worth reading, and raises many important issues for women interacting online.

Filed under: bigotry, blogging, cyberbullying, solidarity