Can I get a “what the fuck?”

Now a town in Alabama has passed a law that says that people must use bathrooms of their birth gender, regardless of anything else. Apparently, having that liberal, progressive Target in town scared them.

Seriously, how far is this going? Everyone needs to throw up their hands and offer a “what the fuck?” to the sky.

The main reason people are giving for these rules and regulations and laws is that they’re afraid that perverts are going to get into the bathrooms.

Um, news flash – it’s already happened.

Do you honestly believe that by stopping certain people from using bathrooms, you’re going to stop sexual assault? If you do, then let’s start by keeping out people who actually have sexual assault records. Get a cop to stand outside each bathroom at each public location in each town, and have them run a record check. What? You say that’s ridiculous? Yeah, it is. So if putting cops at bathrooms isn’t going to work, how are you planning on “protecting” the women and children? By passing a law that someone who plans on breaking a much more serious law is going to listen to? I think that, as a rule, criminals don’t follow laws, so who are you actually stopping? Someone who has to pee? Congratulations.

I keep waiting for it all to blow over and for people to go back to being sane, but I’m not sure that’s going to happen at this point. I’m worried that now that the crazy has been unleashed, it will only get worse. Like this random guy in Texas who decided that it was his job to patrol the bathrooms. What would he have done if someone didn’t meet his criteria for the ladies’ room? Detain them? Attack them? I don’t know about you, but I’m a lot more scared of a guy who is going to use his “best judgment” as to who belongs in the bathroom. Who died and left him in charge of the genitalia checks?

Transgender issues are feminist issues. We can’t exclude trans women any more than we can exclude women who were born intersex or who were born without vaginas or who had complete hysterectomies. Your genitals and sex organs don’t define who you are. Laws that discriminate against transgender people discriminate against women.

Be an ally, not an asshole.

Can I get a “what the fuck?”

War on Women – Yeah, It’s Real

Okay, so I’m not normally quite this rabid, but this is one of those times when I have to get all frothing and foamy.  (In a bad way.)

Opposing Views, which I follow on FB and read sometimes, had an article that I pulled up about a girl in India who got revenge on her rapist.  It was her uncle, and he was a religious doctor (called a tantrik) who claimed he could heal her but instead raped her.  He wanted her to come back for more “treatment.”  She came prepared – she brought a cell phone and a knife.  She recorded their conversation using the cell phone, and then she castrated him with the knife.  Nice and simple, right?

There’s even a nice picture of people standing around holding a sign that says “Stop Crimes on Women.”

But the rest of the page seems to give a totally different message.  There are five different images across the top that are meant to drag the viewer on.  Of these, four of them are of women: one of an attractive woman crying, mascara smeared; one of two women kissing, labeled “Celebrities That Swing Both Ways!”; one of a woman in very tight, very small clothing with a police officer looking on; the last one of a woman in lingerie and heels in a provocative pose, labeled “The 10 Best Butts in Hollywood!”

Seriously, Opposing Views?  Seriously?  This is the shit that you chose to pair with a story about rape?  Four different stories with images (and probably “stories” – if you can call a list of “best butts” a story) that clearly treat women as objects.  The photo of the woman in small, tight clothing doesn’t even show her face – clearly, that’s not an important part of a woman – and the headline is “New Rule in Seabrook, TX,” although I bet that, whatever was the closest town to the viewer would be reflected there.  It’s click bait.  Meaningless crap that shows women off as, well, meaningless crap.

So I’m no longer following them on FB.  And I’m posting up this blog.  Maybe if they lose enough click-thrus and followers, they might learn that women don’t appreciate being treated this way.  Maybe they’re learn that women should be treated with respect and…oh, who am I kidding?  They’ll never learn.  But at least we can stop giving them their clicks.

#YesAllWomen #NotAllMen

In the wake of the wonder of hashtags that women and men are using to try to argue sexism, sexual assault, and other fun and exciting things in the world, I wanted to write up my own experiences and share them.  Not all these experiences are mine, but all of them affected me, whether it was because I was intimately involved or because the person involved was a close friend, and I was there for them during it.

Where to start? 

I was sexually assaulted once.  I avoided it twice. 

The first time I avoided it was when a friend and I went to visit a guy she had set me up with.  I thought he wanted to be my boyfriend.  I was probably about 14, and he was over 21, but that didn’t stop me from thinking that he was interested, and he acted plenty interested.  But when we went to go hang out with him, it turned out that he had bought us wine coolers (we were both young teenage girls), and when he flipped on the TV, it “somehow” had a porno in it – “Younger Girls with Older Men.”  I could swear it was a Ron Jeremy, now that I know who he is, but at the time, I just remember thinking that maybe I was not in the best place.  I drank anyway because, hey, it was alcohol, and then I wanted to call some friends – drunk calling! – and the only phone was in his bedroom.  Of course.  So my friend and I went back into his bedroom, and then he followed us in.  Naked.  Of course.  My friend and he started going at it, and I was surprised at how quickly it had changed from a “hey, he likes you” moment to a “hey, we’re going to have a threesome.”  I was not interested, and I left the room, telling me friend to think about what she was doing.  (Yes, she was a willing participant, but being that she was 13 and he was 21, she wasn’t truly able to consent…)  After I left, she realized what was happening, pretended that she was going to get sick, and he kicked us out.  Yep.  He had driven us to his place, in a town where neither of us lived, and then went ahead and let us go on out into the street, two drunk young teenage girls.  This was before cell phones.  Luckily, I was able to call a friend who could drive who came and picked us up and dropped us off at our houses.  But who knows how many other times he did it before – or after – and things didn’t turn out that way?

The second time I avoided it was when I was dating a guy that I had known literally since kindergarten.  He claimed that I had said I was interested in him back then, but I could swear that in kindergarten I had liked another boy.  Regardless, when he asked me out, I said why not.  Like in the first situation, alcohol was involved.  I had told this date of mine that I would not have sex with him – I was always up front about the fact that I was not going to have sex at that age – and he, like so many other guys I dated, always said he would be the one to change my mind.  This particular guy, though, thought that the way to change my mind was to constantly give me alcohol.  Again, being a young teenager, I wouldn’t say no to drinking, and so most of our dates involved going to his house and getting drunk, sometimes with other people around, sometimes alone.  One time when I got fairly drunk, and was still saying no, he attempted to convince me to change my mind by just whipping it out at me, as if this would make me suddenly change my mind and fall over all him.  Instead, since I was massively drunk, I laughed at him and told him to put it away.  After that, there was some drunken fumbling, but in the end, I convinced him (through the use of a knee) that he was better off putting it back in his pants.

I would like to say that taught him a lesson, but it wasn’t the lesson I wanted him to learn.  Here’s where it turns into someone else’s story.  A close male friend of mine approached me, knowing I had dated this guy, and asked me if I could do something.  This ex of mine had apparently begun dating another girl – one I didn’t know, but one that I did meet after this – and in her case, when he whipped it out, he kept going and raped her.  She was terrified of him, and she was terrified to tell her parents because she thought they would blame her.  She hadn’t told anyone but our mutual friend, and this ex of mine was still trying to talk to her and convince her to keep going out with him.  Being the kind of person I am – and was – I confronted my ex, told him to leave this girl alone, and, okay, maybe there was some threatening involved in he continued to harass her at school.

An important thing to note – at the time this happened, he was a football player, and probably stood about a foot taller and at least 80 or so pounded heavier than me.  I was five ft one and maybe 100 pounds, soaking wet. 

What was the outcome here?  Well, his father (an ex-marine) called my mother and said that I have been threatening his son, and I was supposed to stop doing it because his son was scared of me.  Yes, scared of me.  I explained the full situation to my mother, and she was on my side and told me I didn’t have to stop scaring him.  He didn’t speak to me again after that, and, to the best of my knowledge, he also stopped talking to the girl he raped.  Did he rape anyone else?  I don’t know.  But he did find me on Facebook many years letter and send me a creepy message and friend request.  I blocked him, and I have no idea where he is now.

I would love to say these were isolated incidents, but they really weren’t. 

I knew another girl in high school who got raped and didn’t report it.  I had been friends with her for years, and so she told me because she didn’t know what to do.  She had a boyfriend, an older guy, and her parents knew about him and let her date him, but they didn’t like him very much.  She knew she wasn’t supposed to let him up into the apartment while she was home alone, but one time they were hanging out, and he asked if he could just come up and use the phone to call someone.  She agreed, knowing her parents would be home soon and thinking she could trust him since they were dating.  Instead, he attacked her and raped her on the couch before her parents could get home.  Then he left, and she felt she couldn’t tell her parents because she had disobeyed them and therefore they would “blame her” for the attack.  She finally told me because she was worried – AIDS was in the news everywhere, and when he raped her, he hadn’t used a condom.  She knew she wasn’t pregnant, but she was afraid of having an STD.  She refused to report him, especially because at that time she had no proof it hadn’t been consensual since it had been more than a month ago.  I convinced her to go to the doctor and tell him.  Her doctor was awesome and did free testing for her and told her to get counseling (which I don’t think she ever actually got).  But at least she did get her mind freed from one worry – the tests came back negative, and she went back six months later and got tested again (free again) and was clean.

If that was it, I would say it was rarer, but then I made another friend who, while she had been in college, had been in a sorority.  She had a boyfriend who was in a fraternity.  Those things are somewhat immaterial to the story, except for the fact that they knew each other because of Greek events.  She was having consensual sex with him at that time.  Then, at one party, they went back to a room where he had a friend waiting.  The plan, apparently, was for the friend and him to rape her together, but when she began fighting and yelling, her “boyfriend” discovered that this wasn’t for him.  So he left, leaving her there to be raped by his friend.  After that, his friend would constantly taunt her in the halls, leading her to drop out of college, and years later, she discovered that he had given her an STD that led to her being sterile.  She never reported the rape, either.

Notice a common thread here?  No reports ever filed.  Three women, all raped, all silent about that rape. 

Notice another common thread?  Not all guys are evil.  My friend who intervened for his female friend that had been raped and asked me to help.  A doctor who tested a girl for free just to set her mind at ease. 

Yes, I honestly believe that all women have been touched by or somehow affected by sexual violence.  But I also honestly believe that not all men are involved with it (in a negative way).  In fact, I think many men have also been affected by it, just by having contact with women who have experienced it. 

And, let’s be fair here – some men have been directly affected by being assaulted themselves…I am not including them in my blog simply because I am not friends with any men who have been sexually assaulted, or at least, none of them who have told me about it.  I’m not saying it doesn’t happen – just that I cannot speak to it.

So before you begin getting all up in arms about the trashing of men and the trash-talking about women, keep in mind that this is just one small microcosm of the world that I’ve been a part of.  In some areas, it’s worse.  Maybe in some, it’s better.  But the point is, it’s out there, and saying it’s not, and saying you’re not part of the problem isn’t good enough.  It’s time for all of us to be part of the solution.