Rape Jokes: Feminists have no sense of humour, redux

More and more comedians are coming out of the woodwork to defend their colleague Daniel Tosh for his defense of rape jokes. For those of you who missed the controversy, a woman who saw Tosh at the Laugh Factory reported that the comedian made “some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc.”

She yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!” So, Tosh responded by saying, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…?”

From here.

The media reports regarding Jerry Sandusky sexually assaulting boys at Penn State would have been *hilarious* if not for all those kill-joy feminists who don't get the point of rape jokes, right?

Here's a powerful account from one Sports Illustrated reporter who gets it.

Christian pathologies and serial killers.

What's the connection between women murdered by serial killers, a judge's legal pillory and the physical abuse of a girl?

Men. Men - Dominique Strauss Kahn-types - who declare they “love” women but in fact practice a range of manipulative tactics that have one purpose: to ensure a woman is available, willing or not, to service their needs.

Men who sexualize women, who can casually say about a friend of yours: "I'd fuck her!"

Men who offer to pay their wives for sex. Men who use their status and power in the work place to elicit "favours". Men who feel that if they've provided dinner, they're entitled to a roll in the hay.

Men who fetishize *exotic* women of African, Aboriginal, Asian, Middle Eastern, South Pacific ancestry. Men who project their needs and desires onto women and assume their raging fantasies are shared.

The stink of male entitlement and privilege oozes up from news stories these days.

This, for example:

A Manitoba man has been spared a criminal record for whipping his 11-year-old foster daughter with a riding crop as punishment for bad school behaviour. [...]

He admits striking the girl 10 times in the buttocks, which caused her to go to hospital with minor injuries. [...]

Crown attorney Debbie Buors told court the man quoted Bible verses as he struck the girl, who was put in his family’s care by Child and Family Services after being seized from a distant relative.

He was telling her "Spare the rod, spoil the child" and "When you are evil you go to Hell," while dishing out the punishment on the family’s property in eastern Manitoba. [...]

"Verbal words were not having an effect on her. She was going to have to have a spank," the man told court on Monday. He said he’d used corporal punishment in the past on his other children as a "last resort."

"I don’t think (at the time) it was out of order. I’m finding out now maybe it was," he admitted.

The man said the criminal case has ripped his tight-knit family apart because he hasn’t been allowed to see the girl for the past three years while on bail awaiting trial.

"I feel like my child has been abducted from me," he said.

That girl was probably removed just in time from his clutches. In a few years, he would have probably moved on to sexual assault, and quoting Bible verses in support.

Such overweening proprietary, misogynist behaviours manifest themselves in a multitude of malevolent actions.

This, for example.

Judge Douglas is facing four allegations of wrongdoing here.

One is that she allegedly participated in her lawyer husband Jack King's scheme to entice a client of his into having sex with her and thus sexually harassed the man; that she failed to disclose this in her application for the bench; that she altered a diary entry and thus tried to thwart the CJC investigation, and that, as a result of the public availability of intimate sexual pictures of her on the web, posted there by Mr. King and Mr. King alone, she is unable to continue sitting as a judge.

More information about the case from today's piece by Blatchford, whose focus has been true and rigorous on this story. As I pointed out in a tweet earlier this week, this is a cautionary tale for women who believe in the "justice" system. There are men who relish the adversarial tenor of the law and will exploit it to screw women, with or without their consent.

And then, there is this:

Shawn Cameron Lamb, 52, has been charged with three counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of Tanya Nepinak, Carolyn Sinclair, and Lorna Blacksmith, police announced Monday morning. Police are also investigating whether the accused could be involved in other unsolved cases of murdered or missing women, the source says.

All three women worked in the city’s sex-trade industry. Police said the bodies of Sinclair and Blacksmith have been located – reportedly in dumpsters and wrapped in plastic – while the search for Nepinak’s remains is ongoing.

Court records obtained by the Free Press show police believe Nepinak was killed Sept. 13, 2011, Sinclair was killed Dec. 18, 2011 and Blacksmith was killed Jan. 12, 2012.

By the way, Lorna Blacksmith was not a sex trade worker. That fact is important to her family though probably irrelevant to her killer.

No woman is safe from predatory men who, (paraphrasing the words of Mark Steyn) can conveniently use institutions to justify their pathologies.

There are many other connections, many other manifestations of sexual violence against women.

The skinny on fashion pix.

Last January we posted this when altered photographs were published, giving the impression that a curvaceous actress had overstepped the boundaries of what the fashion world considered fashionable.

Today @Amphitrit directs us to her blogpost that features a number of NSFW photos that contrast two women's bodies; one is average and the other is the couture and fashion photographers' ideal.

Guess which one?

Yes. The scrawny-as-a-coat-rack frame is the one that works best to display designer clothing.

Go read her.

More at Plus Magazine, which had the courage to publish this full-bodied feature article and a powerful editorial: What is wrong with our bodies?

The answer to the question is this, there is nothing wrong with our bodies. We are bombarded with weight-loss ads every single day, multiple times a day because it’s a multi-billion dollar industry that preys on the fear of being fat. Not everyone is meant to be skinny, our bodies are beautiful and we are not talking about health here because not every skinny person is healthy.

Yo! Penis People!

Read this and try to plumb the depth of Theo-Neo-Con loathing and disgust for women.

Today the GOP-led House of Representatives, with the blessings and encouragement of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops and extremist religious groups such as the Family Research Council, passed a bill in a vote of 251 to 172 that would, among other things, allow doctors and hospitals to "exercise their conscience" by letting pregnant women facing emergency medical conditions die.

Yes. Die.

This is what the Republicans called the "Protect Life Act." And no, I am not kidding.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called it what it is... "a savage assault on women's health."

Here's the representative of that hate.





Abortion is always an issue.

What to do with a Girl like Maria Magdalene*

Mother Jones magazine has delved into the lucrative American Christian-run 'corrective' organizations turning life into Hell on Earth for American youths, with emphasis on rendering girls into Stepford zombies, but not ignoring the rending psychological and physical damage done to boys as well.

Incompletely obedient youth touted as criminality to their parents becomes an excuse parlayed into unregulated imprisonment, punishment and torturous indoctrination into a certain interpretation of authority made sancrosanct by a veneer of religion.

I've often wondered how many broken inner children, grown and with children of their own to break, are the invisible mainstays of organizations wanting to move regional theocratic control into imperial state authority over everyone. For every survivor who continues to dissent, how many are silent and obedient, needing to identify with the abuser or fall apart more completely than they are if consciously having to face the idea this wasn't done to save their spirits, but to callously exploit them as resources?

Fewer than historically indoctrinated by state-run theocracies. That's the sad thing. Compared to pre-separation of state and church, this is improvement. The despots running these hellholes have to hide it now, however thinly in some locales. They have to demand anti-regulation. They have to close down and move. They have to make excuses and dismiss survivors and the damage done. They long for the return of theocratic glory days where all of that *work* lying about it won't be needed. Because they know what's really at stake here. Their comfort and bank accounts, the rest be damned. Literally.

I expect this is where someone makes the "No True Christian" jazz hands argument to make it all go away.

*Where the Hills aren't Alive, so much as they Have Eyes.

What a terrible time to be a USian woman

Mother Jones:

The Indiana House yesterday passed a bill, HB 1210, that would force women to carry pregnancies past 22 weeks to term, even if the father of the fetus is their rapist or family member. The only reason a woman could get an abortion after 22 weeks (and most medical experts don't consider a fetus viable until around 27 weeks) is if carrying the fetus to term would result in the woman's death or "substantial physical impairment." Even then, her doctor would be required by law to perform the abortion in a hospital with a prenatal unit, and in the way that "would result in the best opportunity for the fetus to survive."

Wait. There's more:

--Women seeking a first-trimester abortion must be advised that they may face increased risk of breast cancer after the abortion, and that giving birth protects women from breast cancer.

--Women seeking abortions must be advised that "physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm."

--Abortion patients are advised that "medical evidence shows that a fetus can feel pain at or before 20 weeks".

--Before an abortion, the woman must view an ultrasound unless she certifies, in writing, in advance, that she does not wish to do so.

I can't work up any anger anymore. I just want to cry.

ADDED: And now I am crying. Because I watched this.