feminist blogs

Woman fights back against rapist, mob sexually assaults her. UConn. Trigger warning.

Every man involved in the assault must be identified, and their names so publicized that they cannot apply for a job or an apartment without their role in this sexual violence coming up. UConn must hold them accountable. If the school does not condemn this, it condones it.

I just love to type these words: Joe Francis is in trouble again.

AP is reporting that Ashley Dupre, the sex worker who became famous in the Spitzer case, was in a GGW video. She was 17. She was drunk. She is suing.

Joe Francis, child abuser, might have to seriously consider not filming any more underage girls. But … would the GGW franchise survive?

FLDS founding patriarch Rulon Jeffs with his last two wives — sisters Edna and Mary Fischer — on their wedding day. He received the pair as a 90th birthday present.

The recent raid on a fundamentalist Mormon sect in Texas has been all over the news, and it’s a tragedy from all angles — sad that it happened in the first place, sad that there are hundreds of children with no place to go, sad that only the women and girls are having their faces shown on TV while the men who exploited them maintain some privacy. But as Sara Robinson points out, there’s a lot more to the story than just the headlines about polygamy — this is about a right-wing cult’s ability to completely separate itself from the rule of law and the protections and oversights that our society is supposed to afford all its citizens.

The FLDS had its own hospitals, which it used as tools of social control:

FLDS communities put a priority on providing as much health care inside the community as possible, so they’re not dependent on outside medical professionals. (To this end, pregnant mothers have often been sent to Hildale or Bountiful in their last months, so they can be attended by the FLDS midwives there.) Hildale/Colorado City has its own hospital — built partly with public funds — that has employed only doctors and nurses who have pledged their first loyalty to the Prophet.

As a result, the group’s women and children get much of their primary care from people who feel no accountability to established medical standards of practice, state record-keeping requirements, or any of the existing mandated reporter laws. (Most people in these communities have no idea these laws even exist.) The spotty record-keeping that results is why the state of Texas has made the wise decision to do DNA testing on all the kids: it cannot be taken for granted that their birth certificates are accurate (or, in some places, exist at all).

The FLDS has also co-opted mental health services into another form of wife abuse. In Hildale/Colorado City, FLDS doctors have proven quite willing to declare unhappy women crazy. Daphne Bramham found that up to a third of FLDS women are on anti-depressants; and that women who are express acute dissatisfaction with the life have often been committed to mental hospitals in Arizona by the community’s doctors. According to Bramham, the fear of being labeled insane and shut away in an institution is one of the most potent threats the community has used to keep women in their place.

And their own police and court system:

Much of the power of the prophets has been drawn from the fact that they historically controlled both the cops and the courts that served the Hildale/Colorado City area. Though these were officially chartered law enforcement agencies and nominally public courts, they weren’t concerned with civil law. Instead, their task was to enforce the law according to the FLDS and its Prophet. The people in these communities had no effective recourse to the laws the rest of us live under. They could be arrested, fined, jailed, and have their property seized by nominally “official” cops and courts, acting under full authority of civil government, for violating church laws.

And women who tried to escape were dragged right back to their families, or to the hospital for a mental health examination.

There’s not even oversight for the dead:

These communities also bury their own dead (and at least one has its own crematorium), which opens the way to record-keeping anomalies with death certificates — and ensures that no questions will ever be asked, and no autopsies will ever be performed. Given the genetic instability and volatile control issues within this group, it may not be wise for them to have the means to dispose of dead bodies without official oversight. We need to be asking questions about who’s in their cemeteries and crematoria, how they got there, and what kinds of records are being kept.

Lots of disturbing stuff. Read it all.

Anti-choicers in Oklahoma again demonstrate how much they care about women: So much that if women want to terminate a pregnancy, they’ll be forced to undergo an ultrasound, whether they consent or not. Making women undergo an unnecessary medical procedure against their will is bad enough — especially when medical professionals do not recommend unnecessary ultrasounds, and when ultrasounds are expensive and add significant and totally unnecessary costs to the abortion. But the Oklahoma law is even worse:

Under the guise of obtaining informed patient consent, this new law requires doctors to withhold pregnancy termination until an ultrasound is performed. The law states that either an abdominal or vaginal ultrasound, whichever gives the best image of the fetus, must be done. Neither the patient nor the doctor can decide which type of ultrasound to use, and the patient cannot opt out of the ultrasound and still have the procedure. In effect, then, the legislature has mandated that a woman have an instrument placed in her vagina for no medical benefit. The law makes no exception for victims of rape and incest.

Emphasis mine.

Nobody should be forced to undergo a medical procedure against their will. Nobody should have to undergo an invasive, expensive, non-consensual and wholly unnecessary procedure as a prerequisite for another procedure. No right-thinking person should promote a law that requires doctors to penetrate a woman’s vagina with a medical instrument against her will.

It’s disgusting. And I’m trying not to sound hyperbolic here, but it’s awfully close to sexual assault.

It’s not surprising, though. Anti-choicers are willing to do anything — even make women suffer through invasive, sometimes painful procedures (as anyone who has had a vaginal ultrasound can attest, they are not pleasant) — to punish women. It’s not about “life,” and it’s not about saving babies. It is about controlling, punishing and doing harm to women who make unapproved sexual choices.

Jeff Goldstein may have outdone himself with this one. He describes black men assaulting and gang-banging a hot white chick in order to get everyone riled up about how stupid feminists who discuss “white privilege” are — as in, stupid white chicks feel so guilty about their white privilege, they’ll get wasted and pass out so that animalistic black men can rape them. It’s a great way to show that lefties are overly-sensitive about this stuff, it really is. And remember, kids: Rape is always funny! Especially when you can use it to simultaneously tap into peoples’ fears about over-sexed black guys who are going to violate pretty white things.

Yes, I am a humorless feminist about this one. Fuck you, Jeff. But thanks for proving the point that the people who resist concepts like racism and privilege are often the ones with the most fucked-up racial issues.

Prediction: Next, I’m going to be described as “the racist one” for pointing out that Jeff played on long-established racist stereotypes of black men. Because surely, Jeff and his commentariat are colorblind, and it’s those of us who notice these things who are the people who must really think black men are the over-sexed animals.

It’s been a year and a half since Sean Bell and his two friends were shot 26 times by five NYPD officers. Bell was to be married later that day. He and his friends (who both survived) were unarmed. It seems likely that they didn’t even realize they were being confronted by plainclothes police officers, as opposed to being carjacked at gunpoint.

This morning, all of the police officers got off scot-free. They didn’t even receive a token “reckless endangerment” conviction, perhaps because the presiding judge was of the opinion that “Carelessness is not a crime.” Really? Somehow I thought that’s what reckless endangerment and manslaughter charges were all about. I guess police can’t commit those crimes. If shooting 31 times — including pausing to reload — into a car full of unarmed men doesn’t qualify, I’m not sure what does.

There was no jury, just the judge, who acquitted the three cops on the grounds of faulty prosecution.

Justice Arthur Cooperman said he found problems with the prosecution’s case. He said some prosecution witnesses contradicted themselves, and he cited prior convictions and incarcerations of witnesses.

He also cited the demeanor of some witnesses on the stand.

In other words, how dare you bring witnesses to testify against police officers who have run afoul of the criminal justice system before? They’re too sketchy to be in my courtroom. Seriously… isn’t this the crux of the problem? A blatant example of who is listened to in our courts and who gets the shaft? This is exactly why it’s horrifyingly unsurprising that cops walk.
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Just read it.

This is really beyond the pale. And really, if the “What election sexism?” Democrats can’t see how over-the-top this is, I don’t really know what to say.

Progressives should be better than this. I haven’t been a Clinton supporter, but the misogynist crap she’s gotten throughout the election has made me a whole lot more sympathetic towards her. There are a lot of questions to raise and a lot of skepticism to be had about both Democratic candidates — we can do that without resorting to sexist and racist crutches. And we can cut the whole “She’s tearing the party apart!” nonsense. You know what tears the party apart? Insulting and attacking the party’s base by launching racist and sexist attacks. Drawing big fat lines between Clinton and Obama, as if either he or she were the bad guy — and in doing so, giving John McCain (the real bad guy) a great big pass.

For thoughts on sexism in the election in general, I refer you to Rebecca Traister and Amanda Fortini.

Contact the TNR editors (letters@tnr.com) and tell them to stick to the issues — not sexist caricatures.

Thanks to Linda for the link.

Obama’s a pimp and Hillary is a bitch. Lovely.

And this comes from the pro-Obama camp. Can we please knock if off now, guys? I know we can do better than this.

Video from TRex.

Though not surprising, this is incredibly disturbing — and indicative of yet another failure of a lazy corporate media and a twisted, absolutist government that seems to be taking its cues from fascist regimes:

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

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