Reader, she married him

So, this guy? Ray Rice, this guy who plays football for the Baltimore Ravens? The one who punched his girl friend so hard he knocked her out, and was suspended by his team* the NFL for the whoppingly punitive two games?

Today a new video was released that shows the actual knockout punch, and the team has now fired him.

Before all they had was a video showing him dragging her unconscious body off an elevator and dumping her on the floor just outside it.

I don’t quite understand why the first video wasn’t enough. [Read more…]

Penis Home Road

Raw Story reports that Mars Hill church is shrinking operations as more people learn what a pathetic patriarchal mess it is.

An August profile of Driscoll published by The New York Times explained that he had been accused “of plagiarizing, of inappropriately using church funds and of consolidating power to such a degree that it has become difficult for anyone to challenge or even question him.”

A month earlier, it was revealed that Driscoll had posted hundreds of inflammatory Internet comments almost 15 years ago.

Although the media focused on his comments about the U.S. being a “pussified nation,” bloggers who followed Driscoll closely argued that his views on women and sex were the larger problem.

[Read more…]

Sommers Watch

Oh the hell with it, it’s just going to have to be a recurring, updatable thing.

The insult-tweets of the former philosopher, now American Enterprise Institute hack, Christina Hoff Sommers.

Updating.

Oh goody, she does a Dear Muslima.

Sexism in US: Some video games use damsel-in-distress tropes.Sexism in Iran:

She sent that out a couple of hours after RTing her source:

Retweeted by Christina H. Sommers
Jack @SkipTerrio · 18h
For the edification of the 3rd wave #feminist mob, this is what an ACTUAL #patriarchy looks like:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9487761/Anger-as-Iran-bans-women-from-universities.html …
(cc:@CHSommers)

Jim Lippard objected.

.@CHSommers Therefore… ? Beheading is worse than a migraine, therefore no one should complain about or treat migraines?

Sommers informed him that the subject wasn’t migraines.

Bad analogy . The endangered damsel trope is not a migraine. It’s a reverie enjoyed by millions of people: Men, women and children.

That’s the kind of thing that makes me twitch with fury – the smug, determined mindlessness of it. How much attention do you have to pay to understand that a popular “reverie” is not automatically harmless just because it’s enjoyed by millions? Lots of very popular fantasies are woven into thought-structures that are harmful to subordinated people! The fact that many people enjoy such fantasies does not magically render them harmless.

Or, as Jim put it:

.@CHSommers Some people still like lawn jockeys & Confederate flags, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right to criticize them.

But again, Sommers explains:

Another false analogy .Not saying damsel trope is good BECAUSE people like it–saying its harmless, so leave those who like it alone.

Cool, except that there’s no reason to think it is harmless.

————————–

Now it gets meta.

A few minutes ago.

Oh my! An alarmed critic has created “Sommers Watch” to monitor my tweets.Don’t miss the comments.

I told her I’m not alarmed but disgusted.

Her fans are telling me I’m bullying her. Well, I might be, if she were a nobody and if she were not being so free with the insults. But she’s not a nobody:

  • She’s a Name anti-feminist
  • She has a gig at the American Enterprise Institute
  • She appears on mainstream (as well as less mainstream) media regularly
  • Her tweets get shared by Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker
  • She has 12 thousand-plus followers

And we already know she’s free with the insults. So no, I don’t think I’m bullying her.

——————–

Three hours ago.

@GoodJKnight I don’t think @maddoxrules disagrees. But attacking genres that millions of men (and lots of women) love is hardly inclusive.

We have to like everything that already is, and label all attempts to improve them “attacking.” We have to defend the popular and bend all our efforts to making the unpopular even more unpopular.

—————

An hour ago.

The gender warriors made a huge tactical error when they went after the gamers. Wrong group to irritate.

Spoken like a true bully. “Wrong group to irritate” because they’re many and noisy and mostly pseudonymous and not inhibited about threats and harassment. How ugly of Sommers to gloat about it. (And “the gender warriors” of course knew all that, but were brave enough to proceed anyway. How squalid of Sommers to pretend it was just a stupid mistake.)

Imagine saying something similar about the Little Rock Nine or the Freedom Summer campaigners in Mississippi in 1964. “The civil rights workers made a huge tactical error when they went after the Mississippi white supremacists. Wrong group to irritate.”

The next in the pair.

College deans, news editors, politicians–ran for cover when gender hardliners made strident demands. Gamers–male & female–fighting back.

The word “strident” is a sexist dog-whistle. Sommers can’t possibly be unaware of that. She’s doing this crap deliberately. It’s ugly stuff.

———————

An hour ago.

Shows like Oprah & The View make no effort to be male inclusive. They privilege female perspective.Where are the haranguing gender bloggers?

Two hours ago.

Excellent discussion of college rape panic & how males are treated like monsters and females
–fragile maidens. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/09/05/us_colleges_sexual_assault_crusade_123851.html

Noxious to the Constitution

Mark Joseph Stern reports that Judge Richard Posner’s ruling striking down Indiana’s and Wisconsin’s gay marriage bans is a masterpiece of wit and logic.

Ironically, by writing an opinion so fixated on the facts at hand, Posner may have actually written the one gay marriage ruling that the Supreme Court takes to heart. Other, more legacy-minded judges have attempted to sketch out a revised framework for constitutional marriage equality, granting gay people heightened judicial scrutiny and declaring marriage a fundamental right. But Posner isn’t interested in making new law: The statutes before him are so irrational, so senseless and unreasonable, that they’re noxious to the U.S. Constitution under almost any interpretation of the equal protection clause.

[Read more…]

From bit-shuffling to caring

Metaphors aren’t just decoration, they’re more like the foundation. Michael Chorost explains in the CHE.

[I]n their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, the linguist George Lakoff (at the University of California at Berkeley) and the philosopher Mark Johnson (now at the University of Oregon) revolutionized linguistics by showing that metaphor is actually a fundamental constituent of language. For example, they showed that in the seemingly literal statement “He’s out of sight,” the visual field is metaphorized as a container that holds things. The visual field isn’t really a container, of course; one simply sees objects or not. But the container metaphor is so ubiquitous that it wasn’t even recognized as a metaphor until Lakoff and Johnson pointed it out. [Read more…]

Guest post: Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf

It’s Sunday afternoon, so why not have a spot of Walden, courtesy of Henry David Thoreau and Project Gutenberg.

From Chapter One, “Economy.”

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. [Read more…]

Guest post: Sometimes the incentives ran all the way up to murder

Originally a comment by Freedmen’s Patrol on Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery.

Before I get into this, I want to alert readers that I’m going to quote a period description of brutality, including sexualized violence, against a young slave girl. It also includes the use of precisely the racial slur one would expect. If this would traumatize the reader, please skip the comment and continue your day. I don’t want to bring that kind of upset on anybody. I apologize for any distress caused. I don’t really want to write this myself, but I think that what the Economist is denying deserves to be seen.

It’s horrific to think about, but sometimes the incentives ran all the way up to murder. If a planter could get more out of the slave before working the slave to death than paid to buy the slave, then the planter could just buy a new one and repeat the process. This isn’t a prominent feature of American slavery, though it did happen and slaves who had been disabled or otherwise could no longer produce as they once had could be sold to someone on the cheap who would finish the job. Things tended to be rougher the further South and West one went in the South. Sugar plantations were notorious for going through slaves at a great clip. The American sugar industry was marginal compared to cotton, but down in the Caribbean sugar generated so much profit that it made perfect economic sense to work slaves to death in the very dangerous sugar factories and then just buy new slaves off the boats. [Read more…]

Driven out

Last Monday Jenn Frank wrote a piece for The Guardian about “a hot trend among a vocal minority of gamers right now: the harassment of women developers and critics.” She summarized what’s been happening to Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn.

Yes, it’s been quite a banner season for the collective of self-identifying core gamers who gather on forums to muster shared fury. Now they feel they are at war with a group of left-leaning games writers and developers who they refer to as “social justice warriors” – this is effectively anyone who has ever questioned the patriarchal nature of the games industry or the limited, often objectifying depiction of women. Because, you know, games are fine as they are thanks.

It’s so familiar – in fact “familiar” isn’t even the right word; it’s not so much familiar as exactly the same thing. I’m surprised these angry gamers don’t call Sarkeesian and Quinn “rage bloggers” or “FTBullies” or “The Sisterhood of the Oppressed.” [Read more…]

Clerics jumped in

Another depressing/enraging story out of India – a woman is repeatedly raped by her husband’s father while the husband is working in Dubai, and clerics want to reward the rapist and punish the woman.

The 28-year-old victim alleged that her husband has been working in Dubai for the last two years and her father-in-law has been sexually assaulting her at gun point since 2013.

She remained silent because he used to threaten to kill her. He also video recorded his act and threatened to make it public if she opened her mouth. [Read more…]