She used to be the sweetest girl ever
Now she like sour amoretta
She used to run track back in high school
Now she tricks off the track right by school

- The Sweetest Girl – Wyclef Jean featuring Akon

I make them good girls go bad
I make them good girls go
Good girls go bad

- (I Make) Good Girls Go Bad – Cobra Starship

Lights is blinding,
girls need blinders
so they can step out of bounds quick,
the side lines is blind with casualties,
who sip the lite casually, then gradually become worse,
don’t bite the apple Eve,
caught up in the in crowd,
now you’re in-style,
and in the winter gets cold en vogue with your skin out,
the city of sin is a pity on a whim.
good girls gone bad, the city’s filled with them,
Mommy took a bus trip and now she got her bust out,
everybody ride her, just like a bus route

- Empire State of Mind – Jay Z

Yes, I love pop music. Having been a dancer for a number of years, anything that makes me want to move is labeled good in my book. Now that I have that admission out of the way, my love of pop music results in encountering a stratosphere of jaw dropping messages that pop culture continuously pushes. One theme which has made me particularly chagrined over time is the “good girls gone bad” theme.

This theme is one of those that makes me grit my teeth more than others. Finally upon downloading Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind and discovering it was retread yet again (The Sweetest Girl had me yelling at the radio for awhile.) I sort of boiled over. This ridiculously pervasive attitude springs in part from the idea that men have a biological need for sex and must do what they can to procure it while women are supposed to withhold, do not need sex and should not want it. That the “promiscuous” woman, or the stripper and prostitute are “good girls gone bad” is a double standard that serves to prevent men from being held accountable for what we are all supposed to believe is just business as usual, aka “biologically sanctioned” degradation.

In the same way that the actions of abusers and rapists are erased through the language we use and the victim subsequently gets blamed, the same occurs with this “good girls gone bad” meme. While the “fall” of a woman in particular ways is an event to pay attention to and police, that a man is never held accountable for his side of the equation creates a continuum of behavior that is at best tolerated and at worst encouraged. It’s the promiscuous woman, or the stripper and the prostitute who cause the blemish on society rather than the man that creates the demand. (I’ll hold off on the crazy concept that women also want and like sex for another day.) Same justification Islamic fundamentalists use for the Burqa. We’ve even gone so far as to label places where men traffic in women “gentleman’s clubs” – business as usual when a gentleman participates in le doux commerce – women are just something else to be bought and sold.

Oh, but hey, silly me…. how could I forget that a man’s role isn’t completely erased in this equation……. Life for a pimp is tough! (Life Out There is Hard for a Pimp – Three Six Mafia)

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Aside from a sprinkling of leaders and 1 or 2 “great people” – who are male bodies anyway – and despite being 50% of the population I should be happy we just got that, I’m told. Well, I’ve been advocating flipping the ratios of government offices so that we have a majority of women instead of men for a long time – nothing wrong with that, right? My overall point being that women constantly get that we should be happy with whatever bone someone throws us, but to reverse the situation would be utterly ridiculous and inconceivable. And I suppose you can say that politics is such a different thing in comparison to representation in a game, but that’s the problem – women are so rarely represented in an equal manner ANYWHERE. And we’re expected to just be happy with what we’ve got. We live in the man channel baby! (Chick flick = film with more than two women. Chick books = books about women. Some sort of equal representation of experiences might dilute testosterone or something.)

I’m cutting the angry part. Read at your own risk.

First story of the day I see, Rihanna was beaten to a bloody pulp and left unconscious in the street by a no good piece of shit. (Kanye West – “Give him a break.” At least I know you’re a no good piece of shit too!) But of course she must have done something to provoke him. Yeah. Let’s continue to be a world full of domestic violence and rape apologists because then we’ll never actually have to address the problem – abusers and rapists rather than the women they beat and rape and murder. Let’s keep letting these men off the hook in favor of concentrating on the woman’s actions.

Add to that the Muslim woman who was beheaded by her husband because she filed for divorce. (Why she stays – often a woman is seen as “stupid” for staying and continuing to take abuse, except that violence escalates when she makes the move to leave, and this is often when he will kill her.) Of course, that’s one story from today, and there are always more and more and more both here and around the globe. I want to know what a world looks like where we take violence against women seriously.

In a similar vein, something that has been pissing me off for a long time – also filed in the “men use religion for all sorts of heinous things” and “women are chattel” categories – Christian nutjobs who deny women the right to leave an abusive husband because “it doesn’t say so in the Bible.” I’m looking at you Rick Warren, and all your small brained misogynistic cronies. Take your (written by men, surprise surprise) Bible and shove it.

Also, the Rock for Life cretins who believe it’s their right as patriarchal Christian men to restrict a woman’s access to abortion and birth control. I was also horrified to see them glorify women who opt not to have abortions despite their lives being in danger. Remember, the cells growing in your body are far more important than you. To say otherwise would actually grant you person-hood and that’s only reserved for men.

You can all take your patriarchy and your religion elsewhere. In fact, go to El Salvador where women are put in jail for 30-50 years if they have an abortion, and you can all hold hands and sing Kumbaya till someone has an unwanted pregnancy (In part due to your mind-boggling restrictions on birth control. Get me a hanger. The constant effort to control the reproductive and sexual lives of women enrages me. But hey, FREE VIAGRA!).

I planned to write a longer post on all these things – Rick Warren, El Salvador and Rock for Life men, but the whole thing just gets me so angry that I really haven’t been able to untwist my brain from the knots they give me.

Speaking of patriarchal Christian men, how can I not mention Mike Huckabee, a man who freed a rapist despite victim’s pleas and advocates that women submit to their husbands. Yeah, I’d certainly trust you to take care of me! “Do the Right Thing” my ass. Please return to whatever hole you came from. Whatever God has in store for you, I hope she makes it good. Eye for an eye and all that, right? Your presidential campaign videos, in which you sat around with Chuck Norris (won’t even start with him) with a cowboy motif (representative of a genocidal era) and talked about how we need a real man for president was truly sickening. You need to get hit with the clue bat, sit down and STFU.

Last but not least, Cara blogged about a Japanese computer game called “RapeLay” in which “The entire objective of the game is to rape women with varying levels of violence — sometimes stalking them first, sometimes using gang rape scenarios, and sometimes forcing them into abortions afterward.” And here I was disgusted at the level of rape and misogyny in Conan the Barbarian and GTA games!

The point isn’t “oh my god, this game is going to create rapists.” The point is “oh my god, this game is going to make rapists think that people are on their side.” Which, of course, too many people actually are already, through their rape apologist jokes and excuses. The premise of the game reinforces the idea of rape as okay and not a big deal. It reinforces the idea that women exist for the sexual pleasure and abuse of men. And the preview of the game Boing Boing, which does not include any actual rapes but only attempted rapes, also ends up reinforcing the dangerous and stereotypical idea of your “real” rape victim who always cries, calls out in distress and overall completely breaks down at actual violence or threats of it.

This post has a lot more vitriol than I usually like to display. I’ve been feeling angry and sad over the pieces of news all day, and I’m just angry at the world right now. People are sick. In blocking these things out for the last few months I seem to have lost a degree of numbness. I am going back to Civ IV. Let me know when the financial crisis has blown the world up for good.

ETA: Twisty’s post sort of restored a little bit of my sanity.

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Helen Benedict cites these statistics in her recent article Why Soldiers Rape: Culture of misogyny, illegal occupation, fuel sexual violence in military. A note at the bottom states: [Editor’s note: This article is adapted from The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, to be published by Beacon Press in April 2009.]

Yes, you should read the whole article.

• A 2004 study of veterans from Vietnam and all wars since, conducted by psychotherapist Maureen Murdoch and published in the journal Military Medicine, found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving.

• In 2003, a survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War by psychologist Anne Sadler and her colleagues, published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military.

• And a 1995 study of female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars, also conducted by Murdoch and published in Archives of Family Medicine, reported that 90 percent had been sexually harassed, which means anything from being pressured for sex to being relentlessly teased and stared at.

• A 2007 survey by the Department of Veterans Affairs found that homelessness among female veterans is rapidly increasing as women soldiers come back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Forty percent of these homeless female veterans say they were sexually abused while in the service.

Defense Department numbers are much lower. In Fiscal Year 2007, the Pentagon reported 2,085 sexual assaults among military women, which given that there are about 200,000 active-duty women in the armed forces, is a mere fraction of what the veterans studies indicate. The discrepancy can be explained by the fact that the Pentagon counts only those rapes that soldiers have officially reported.

Having the courage to report a rape is hard enough for civilians, where unsympathetic police, victim-blaming myths, and the fear of reprisal prevent some 60 percent of rapes from being brought to light, according to a 2005 Department of Justice study.

But within the military, reporting is much riskier. Platoons are enclosed, hierarchical societies, riddled with gossip, so any woman who reports a sexual assault has little chance of remaining anonymous. She will probably have to face her assailant day after day and put up with resentment and blame from other soldiers who see her as a snitch. She risks being persecuted by her assailant if he is her superior, and punished by any commanders who consider her a troublemaker. And because military culture demands that all soldiers keep their pain and distress to themselves, reporting an assault will make her look weak and cowardly.

For all these reasons, some 80 percent of military rapes are never reported, as the Pentagon itself acknowledges.

And another good article from the summer: Homelessness a Problem for Women Veterans

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Via Sociological Images — a truly great blog I discovered recently — comes this story about a Sarah Palin lookalike contest held at Vegas strip club (oh, sorry, “gentleman’s club”).  Lots of bikinis, sexualized use of guns and sexism abound.  You can view more photographs of the event here.

The saddest thing is that it’s not the most offensive display of sexualized misogyny that has been directed a Palin.  The sex doll came close, but I’d say that award goes “Nailin’ Paylin,” the Larry Flint pornographic film starring yet another Palin lookalike, the existence of which all of us should have seen coming.

There are two problems with both the porn film and this strip club contest, and neither one of them is about porn and stripping in general.  The first issue is consent.  Sarah Palin did not consent to having her image used in this way.  Portraying her sexually like this without her consent is a violation — and contrary to what many people apparently think, existing as a woman in public is not the same as consenting to use of your body as public property.  This isn’t satire or parody; it’s just sexist and degrading.

Which brings us to the next issue.  The entire reason that anyone gets to hide behind the parody and “all in good fun” arguments is precisely because portraying Sarah Palin sexually is intended to be mocking towards her.  It’s taking a powerful woman and working to make her non-threatening by turning her into a sexual object.  And it’s the very opposite side of the coin as calling Hillary Clinton ugly and denying her sexuality.  Both reinforce the ideas that women exist to sexually pleasure men, and that sexuality is the only power we have (or should be allowed).  Whether revoking or affirming that “power,” the result is an attempt to render the woman inferior and powerless.

Click here to read the whole thing.

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Malalai Kakar – “Malalai Kakar, prominent Afghan policewoman. Murdered in Kandahar” – AFP – From the article Women Who Took on the Taliban – and Lost (I am not sure how to cite an AP photo, so gave as much info as possible – but will continue to look for the proper way.)

Malalai Kakar was a police officer in Afghanistan murdered by the Taliban approximately 2 weeks ago. (Couldn’t find an exact date.) I suppose you can say that the US stint in Afghanistan has been a huge success if you think that violence against women and girls and the resurgence of the Taliban is of no consequence. All of these articles about Kakar are worth reading in full, but I’ve excerpted many of them here. Bold formatting is mine.

The first time I saw Malalai Kakar was in Kandahar city, at a women’s conference organised by a group of spirited young Afghan-Americans determined to give the Taliban a symbolic bloody nose in their spiritual homeland.

It was the autumn of 2003 and, as the country’s only policewoman, Kakar was already a celebrity. She walked into the room wearing a blue burqa and, as she began unloading her things, a pistol emerged from underneath the traditional garment, held in a hand graced by immaculate, red fingernails.

It was an arresting, symbolic image.

‘Just another woman who can be killed.’ – Hamida Ghafour

In an attack claimed by the Taliban, two gunmen on a motorcycle shot and killed Afghanistan’s most high-profile female police officer on Sunday as she prepared to leave for work in the southern city of Kandahar. The police in the city said she died instantly from gunshot wounds to her head. Her 18-year-old son, driving her car, was seriously wounded and taken to the hospital.

The police officer, Malalai Kakar, who was in her mid-40s with six children, was an iconic figure among women’s groups in Afghanistan and abroad. Often profiled in the Afghan and foreign news media, she was one of the leading totems for the wider freedoms gained by women when the Taliban, with their repressive policies toward women, were ousted from power by an American-led coalition in 2001.

The attack was the latest in a wave of attacks on women across Afghanistan for which the Taliban have claimed responsibility. After scattering in the wake of the 2001 offensive, the Islamic militants have regrouped over the past two years.

“We killed Malalai Kakar,” a Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, told the news service Agence France-Presse in a telephone call.

Ms. Kakar, with the rank of captain, was head of Kandahar’s department of crimes against women. She joined the police in the city in 1982, following in the footsteps of her father and brothers, but was forced out after the Taliban captured Kandahar in the mid-1990s and barred all women from working.

Taliban Claim Responsibility in Killing of Key Female Afghan Police Officer – John F. Burns

Commander Kakar, 40, knew her work made her a Taliban target. She led a unit of 10 policewomen specialising in domestic violence cases. She was uncompromising with suspected abusers, men who in the past had relied on male police officers to turn a blind eye.

“I’ve been accused of being rough with husbands who beat up their wives” she said. “But I’m angry, we try to apply the law in the right way and the constitution is supposed to protect women’s rights.”

Women who took on the Taliban – and Lost – This article elaborates on 3 of the 5 women in public life they had interviewed when the Taliban was ousted who have since been assassinated. Highly recommended read. (As are all the articles.)

Yesterday, the Taliban claimed responsibility for Kakar’s killing, saying she had been a long-term target. In a perverse nod to gender equality, in killing her, they acknowledged that an Afghan woman can be as deadly an enemy as any man.

Unusual as she clearly was, Malalai Kakar was also part of a long-standing tradition of Afghan women who “outman” their men in bravery. These are women who take sides in wars, taking up arms for or against the government. In the past, such women used to be mainly the stuff of legends. They were admired and held up as role models but not feared, since they weren’t real.

Early Afghan historical works are full of such women. Reminiscent of the epic German poem the Nibelungenlied, these tales of warriors, horses and fortresses feature young women such as Shah Bori, described as a girl with a taste for male clothing and horse riding. She is said to have liked living the life of a warrior, refusing for a long time to get married. She is also said to have died fighting the troops of King Babur, in the 16th century.

Then there’s Nazauna, who, legend has it, single-handedly protected the Zabol fortress with her sword; that was in the 18th century. And in the 19th century, there was the original Malalai, after whom Malalai Kakar was named: Malalai of Maiwand, who turned her headscarf into a banner and led a successful rebellion against the British.

The Fighting Women of Afghanistan by Nushin Arbabzadah

Kandahar’s Woman Detective

I worked very briefly on helping to design an awareness campaign during my time at Human Rights Watch about the Taliban targeting girls’ schools. And yet the dominant narrative seemed to be how much of a success the US tour in Afghanistan was. Not so fast.

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You can’t get out of the sex class just by saying you’re out of it. Saying “no” to uncouth boys in preparation for heterosexual marriage (heterosexual marriage is the basic unit of patriarchy) and calling it “empowering” is no different from saying “yes” to uncouth boys in preparation for a BDSM three-way and calling that “empowering.” In trying to liberate themselves from what they have rationally identified as the constraints of the sex class mandate, both the virgin and the sex blogger actually capitulate by continuing to define themselves in terms of sex (Fredell even aligns herself with pornulists when she describes virginity as “extremely alluring”). Note that control of the concept of sex is not up to either of them. That pleasure falls strictly within the purview of the male-dominated social order. Thus, in a patriarchy, all sex, gay or straight, marital, pre-, or abstained-from, is dudesex.

That’s the thing about patriarchy. It does the defining, not you. That’s what makes it the dominant paradigm. You can abstain from sex, you can fuck your way across the universe, you can be a stone butch dyke with a utility belt, you can get your boobs amputated and your uterus ripped out, you can be sex-neutral in your own crackpot mind, you can be ugly or hawt, you can be the Democrats’ presidential nominee, you can even age out of desirability, but you will always be defined in terms of, and used according to, that which the dominant culture describes as your essence: sex. Or, as you are alternately defined: a receptacle for the perpetuation of male supremacy.

(Should probably clarify by saying – I love the way Twisty writes about things I hate very much.)

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I’m sick of the privilege. I’m sick of the way men can disengage from conversations that challenge their line of thinking and may just force them to see outside their own fucking bubble. Really, it enrages me. A few people have left our guild, but a small reason cited was that they didn’t like me – because I call them out on their misogynist shit. Yeah, I’ve had my share of being called sensitive in a number of different ways in the past year or so and I’m entirely sick of it. I don’t care if people think I’m sensitive when I can.not.stand hearing the word “rape” dropped all the time as the word of choice for having been blitzed in a battleground. I don’t care if people think that I’m just being too fucking sensitive when I DON’T want to hear shit like “this boss is going to go down like a hooker on mardi gras”, “hold on while I slap Biel’s head under the table”, or the women that you’ve been lucky enough to have sex with be referred to as “pieces of ass.”

Spend a day being a “hooker” and get back to me when you find you can’t joke about the fucking nightmare that it can be. Get back to me when you’ve been reduced to sexual services and parts, or when you’ve been the victim of a violent sexual assault. Get back to me when YOU’VE BEEN RAPED. But hey, since we’re men who don’t generally have to worry about/deal with/think about this shit in any way because it doesn’t effect us, it’s lolfunny and NOT A BIG DEAL!!!!!! And if someone challenges me on it, let’s be defensive about it and remove myself from the situation rather than think about it in any way, shape, or form that is empathetic!!!!

I resent that anyone feels they have the right to this, that they don’t have to consider what they say and the way it can effect others. YOUR WORDS DO NOT EXIST IN A VACUUM. How in the fucking hell is anybody that fucked up that they feel they don’t have to monitor the misogynist shit that spews out of their mouths? Oh, wait, I know – when you don’t consider women to be HUMAN BEINGS.

And ok. I’m trying to turn this perspective around. In the same way I constantly see men turn their backs on these conversations, and be able to deny their complicity, their lack of awareness, their privilege, in the same way they can just shut down any sort of dialog, white feminists do the same when women of color engage them. And I can’t imagine the rage, when someone claims to fight for you and then they turn their backs when you try to point out the ways that they’re racist/exclusive etc. etc. Just as men have the privilege to shut out certain elements of conversation, unfortunately we as white women have the ability to do the same, and obviously we have. For decades.

I feel kind of better since I vented. I had a more thoughtful post (read: trying not to be angry) about language in gaming in the works. Maybe one of these days it will see the light of day.

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