The War on Women

[Stephen Morgan]

"If it was rape, it was a good rape."
-- Eve Ensler, showing how opposed to rape she is

[Burnt Hill]

"If it was rape, it was a good rape."
-- Eve Ensler, showing how opposed to rape she is

Shouldnt you attribute that quote to a 13 year old fictitious character?
Should all authors be personally responsible for the words their characters speak?
You are not really that dense are you Stephen Morgan?

[Project Willow]

He isn't that dense, but he is that misogynist, and more so.

If only women were as omnipotent as he imagines. The world would be a far, far better place, maybe.

Anyway, fuck you Morgan.

[Allegro]

---

It really doesn’t take much to copy and paste from Wiki a context, which Mr. Morgan did not add in his post; further, Mr. Morgan made a line in a script look as if the line had been a direct quote by Ensler, putting in his tag line the verb “is” as if Ensler would personally believe the quoted material was true in the present. It’s likely Mr. Morgan did not consult Ms. Ensler before posting.
Not good form, Mr. Morgan,
but you already knew that.

The script and characterization in question were likely rewritten within two years of the play’s limited run in October and November, 1996. If maths don’t fail me, the play’s revisions could be approximately 14-15 years old. But I wouldn’t know that for sure.

[EXCERPT WIKIPEDIA; highlights mine.] The Vagina Monologues includes a section entitled “The Little Coochie Snorcher that Could”. This portion of the play, as originally performed, has been criticized for including a scene where a 13-year-old girl is given a drink by a 24-year-old woman who then has sex with her. At the conclusion of the segment, the narrator (the grown-up thirteen year old girl) fondly reminisces about the event, claiming that it helped to nurture her and help her grow as a woman, and included the line, “If it was rape, it was good rape”.

The segment received criticism not only for depicting the event as a “good rape”, but also for forming a double standard, as elsewhere in the play, male-on-female rape is depicted as not only inexcusable but the ultimate act of violence against women. The scene was modified in later performances; the young girl’s age was changed to 16, and the “good rape” line was omitted.

POST 2441

[Stephen Morgan]

So in other words, Ensler does in fact believe in good rape. Yes, it was a line in a script, a script which had a young pubescent girl being raped and apparently being pleased with it. Like when students really get raped by their teachers and pretend it was good, sometimes stay with their abusers thereafter. An effect of the psychological trauma. I was actually thinking of the Letourneau case. But Ensler is on a par with NAMBLA, and the fact that she edited the scripts later to take out the bits people had objected to should in no way distract from the fact that before the outrage that is what she honestly put forward.

Also, if you use the search function to look for threads with Ensler in the title you'll find two, one is a KWH thread, the other is about her racism over rape in the Congo. So, if you hate black people and love raping children then her death was a tragic day.

[JackRiddler]

What is your problem? By your "logic" (which is completely blinded by your woman-hatred), Shakespeare advocates child murder and every form of fratricide. Science fiction authors want to destroy planets, killing billions of people. And when talking about women who don't submit to his will, Stephen Morgan is on a par with Goebbels.

[JackRiddler]

By the way, Morgan's logo:

So when a London design firm creates a logo for the Office of Government Commerce, unveils its logo, and someone in the office says, “Hey, when it’s on its side, it kind of looks like a man masturbating,” cut the firm and the client some slack. Would you have seen it if they hadn’t pointed it out?

Pointing it out, I expect. Not just what's in the logo, but what's in his posts.

[Allegro]

...Not just what's in the logo, but what's in his posts.

Jack, you’re the Lumos Maxima.

POST 2443

[Allegro]

---

Women in U.S. may not agree to a definition for war on women, but they might agree on female autonomy. Yet, in my opinion, that assumption is somewhat questionable when some evangelical Christian women believe they must submit to their “Lord and Savior” as well as to another man or men with whom they feel “yoked,” however yoked would be defined for those groups and associations of women. Therefore, autonomy may include the choice to submit within religious preferences.

Anyway, this essay’s author eludes religious ideologies for autonomy and expectations of alignment of votes during elections.
Highlights mine.


Women: We often disagree. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
There Is No “War on Women”
By Allison Benedikt | XXfactor
Posted Friday, June 8, 2012, at 3:28 PM ET

What the hell does “the women’s vote” even mean? That’s the headline to Erin Gloria Ryan’s excellent rant against the general notion that all women vote in one giant lady block, passing each other our periods as we head to the polls.


Strategists and analysts and general political nerds would undoubtedly like to understand voting patterns, but is it useful to lump an increasingly diverse group into a misshapen mass and try to make heads or tales of their decisions? My personal pet issues are probably much different than a religious mother of 4 living in the suburbs, or a gun-toting female hunting enthusiast in the north woods, or an 85-year-old widow living on Social Security checks.

But if Ryan’s argument makes sense, then doesn’t it follow that there is also no “war on women”? That the phrase is just as much a media and political construct as “the women’s vote” is? The religious mother of four living in the suburbs who doesn’t care about the same political issues as I do also might not feel attacked by transvaginal ultrasounds bills. And that 85-year-old widow living on Social Security definitely thinks Sandra Fluke is a slut. Sure, I can argue that all of these fictional females are wrong, but whether we’re talking about who we vote for or what we want for our bodies, we’ve all got our own thing going on. Autonomy!

This might be why only a third of American women think there is actually a war being waged on them (to which Ryan earlier wrote: “Good grief”). From the Kaiser poll revealing this new stat:


Among women, we see some differences in the perception of a wide-scale effort to limit women’s reproductive health choices and services by religious identification. Overall, women who call themselves Evangelical Christians are somewhat less likely than Catholic women and non-Evangelical Christians to say there is a wide-scale effort to limit reproductive choices and services.

These evangelical women are, presumably, women. Women who want your/their abortion rights attacked.

So while there is undoubtedly a political assault on women who care about the same things I do—women who are probably a fairly reliable voting block, by the way—and while all women, regardless of their religious or political affiliations, would be impacted by rights-curbing legislation, it’s pretty condescending to assume these women who don’t feel bombarded just don’t know better. As Ryan puts it:


While we do have certain things in common (usually boobs, neatly tucked away sex organs, two X chromosomes, and chocoholism, but not even those traits are across-the-board), our experiences and beliefs vary so widely (like men’s!) that it’s kind of absurd to expect our votes to align.

Or our outrage.

[Stephen Morgan]

What is your problem? By your "logic" (which is completely blinded by your woman-hatred), Shakespeare advocates child murder and every form of fratricide. Science fiction authors want to destroy planets, killing billions of people. And when talking about women who don't submit to his will, Stephen Morgan is on a par with Goebbels.

When some is writing explicitly for political purposes and goes out of her way to have her hero rape a child and the child say how it's a good rape, that's a political advocacy of the rape of children, in this case the specifically lesbian rape of children.

Not everything fictionists portray is advocated. However, when a work of fiction is explicitly a work of political advocacy, that's different. When a work has the protagonist do something and portrays it in a positive light, that's different. Having the villain do something is the opposite.

Are there any other advocates of racism and child-rape you'd like to come out in support of, so as to save time later?

In fact, weren't you on the circumcision thread going on about how if there was one place on the internet you thought you could reliably find people opposed to child abuse... but on little feminist advocating the rape of twelve year olds and suddenly it's not so black and white.

As for the avatar, it's a visual double-entendre. The "Office of Government Commerce" being a bunch of wankers. They're whores to the private sector really, but one works with the material one is given. Aren't you one of the board's Thelemites? Shouldn't be objecting to a bit of stick-figure-man self-pleasure.

[Project Willow]

Morgan's use of this thread is a symbolic rape, and most of the men on this board are his enablers.

[Luther Blissett]

Project Willow, do you use tumblr and/or track any of the social justice blogs and topics being discussed there? Over the past two days I've been noticing a lot of heat between the feminist community and the trans* community, but as with many things on tumblr, I can't find the source of the discussion. It may have something to do with Laci Green (who I normally love) but who may have said something bad about trans people of color. I'm usually not-so-subtly urged to keep out of it, but I figure discussions like those could always be worth some analysis at RI, to determine whether someone's driving a wedge between normally-allied-against-power factions or whether a well-respected figure has some not-so-great leanings.

[Jeff]

Stephen, you're out of line in this thread.

And this still holds here and everywhere on the board.

[Burnt Hill]

Morgan's use of this thread is a symbolic rape, and most of the men on this board are his enablers.

In what sense PW? I mean the enabling part? Its probably obvious, but thats usually what I am most oblivious to.

[Project Willow]

In what sense PW? I mean the enabling part? Its probably obvious, but thats usually what I am most oblivious to.

In the sense that these offerings are accepted and responded to sincerely. I've just simply never understood how it can be so abhorrent to have overtly racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic views presented in this forum, while it remains perfectly okay for the same level of hatred to be expressed, albeit sometimes in somewhat coded form, towards women.

I am capable of feeling compassion for people who, out of their ignorance, or some configuration of ignorance and great suffering, adopt a strategy of demonizing entire classes of other human beings, but that doesn't mean I am required to contend with their views as if they were legitimate in any way. Quite the contrary, scapegoating is as harmful to the demonized group as it is to the person who is invested in the projection, and being compassionate requires that one set boundaries on acceptable behavior.

However, and inexplicably, a differential treatment between women and other oppressed classes exists in this forum. It makes me wonder what is going on between the sexes when many members in a group of self proclaimed progressive men seem incapable of imagining, on a visceral level, what it's like to encounter that kind of hatred, how utterly defeating and destructive it is.