Everyday Sexism

[beeline]

[imgur-album]http://i.imgur.com/5m4cq1J.jpg[/imgur-album]

[Perelandra]

How amazing is it that women can be well-educated and intelligent and still not be clear on this stuff?! Hell, I'm still stumbling through understanding verbal abuse well enough to be able to put a name to it and I'm 66
LilyPat

Thank you for the links, LP. I think we're all in need of ongoing education. I know it's helping me identify the subtle BS that (still) happens all the time, and I will use it to help others.

[LilyPatToo]

You're welcome. And if you really want to get a crystal clear idea of what verbal abuse is, look for a copy of Lundy Bancroft's great book Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. He was the first counselor for abusive men and wrote a book specifically for the partners (straight, gay or lesbian) of abusers to help them past the confusion that nearly all of them felt. They'd been blamed for the abuse for so long that most had internalized the idea. He's not prejudiced against men, the way that some of the other verbal abuse experts are--just uncompromising about the problem, its origin and treatment. The book is deeply disturbing for what it has to say about males in many human cultures and I wish more people had read it, so that respectful communication could occur more often between partners, families and friends.

LilyPat

[JackRiddler]

Feminism
Posted on May 23, 2013 by isabelsadventuresinnicaragua

I get asked a lot what I miss most about American culture being here. The first things that usually pop into my head are trivial: the food or the connivence of everything in America. But my Peace Corps friend Alba has always replied: feminism. And the longer I have been here, the more I agree. Feminism, the basic idea that women should be politically, socially, and economically equal to men, was something I had taken for granted until I came to a country where there is a wildly unbalanced gender divide.

If we define sexual harassment as unwanted sexual advances or obscene remarks, then I am sexually harassed every single day. When I walk down the street, men make cat calls or piropos at me. After being here for 8 months, I’m still learning how to tune it out, but it bothers me to a depth that is difficult to describe. I don’t feel unsafe, and I never have here, but to hear their whistles and comments makes me tense up, avert my eyes, walk faster, cringe, glare, clench my fists. And when you hear not one, but 20 piropos every time you walk down the street, it starts to wear at you. I want scream at them that I am a professional, I am educated, I am a person, I am not an object. In a country that on so many levels is incredibly friendly and welcoming, I now only greet women, children, my students, or people I know personally on the street– I ignore every man from age 15 on up. Sometimes it feels defeating, like I don’t want to even leave the house. Sometimes it feels enraging, like I am going to sock the very next person in the face who makes a comment at me. Sometimes I just feel sad, that I am dealing with this for two years, but the women of Nicaragua have to deal with this for every day for their entire lives.

The piropos are the most vocal, obvious lack of gender equality, but it goes much deeper. I’ve stopped asking women if they are married. The correct first question is do you have children? All women have children, but not many women have a man stick around long enough to help them raise it. I can count on one hand how many women I know here that have a husband or a man helping them. Nicaragua is a country of strong, single mothers and Mother’s Day is an enormous holiday in Nicarauga. I was even told that I also get to celebrate Mother’s Day because I will be a mother in the future. It is assumed that you will have kids and it is also assumed that you will most likely raise it by yourself or with the help of your sisters, mother, or grandmother.

Yesterday, during my literacy class at the Casa de Mujer, I taught a very pregnant 12 year old the Spanish alphabet. Her husband is 30 years old. She is too young and her pelvis is too small to even give birth naturally. Her c-section is scheduled for next week. I am so intensely angry at the situation and the injustice of it and the fact that in Nicaragua, there is nothing really that can be done to help this girl. There is no legal age of sexual consent, there is no concept of statutory rape. At age twelve, I was in 7th grade, I played on a softball team on the weekends, I participated in Science Olympiad, loved the TV show Lizzie Magguire, and The Giver was my favorite book. At twelve, I had a baby sister, I didn’t have a baby and I didn’t have a husband. I didn’t have to do the family’s laundry by hand, I didn’t spend the entire day cleaning the house, and I didn’t skip school in order prepare three meals a day from scratch. And the most rattling part for me is that this is normal. Nicaraguans look at that girl and say, “qué lastima,” what a shame, but they have seen it all too often.

I don’t know what needs to happen in Nicaragua to incite a drastic gender revolution, but things need to change. As one feminist here for two years, I’ll start by sharing my experiences. I’ll tell them how I am 25 and I’m not married and I don’t have kids yet and that is ok. I’ll tell the girls that they do have choices and they do have options and they don’t need to say yes to the first boy that tells them they are pretty. When I work up the courage, I’ll stop and tell those men on the street who give me piropos that if they want to talk to me, they can do so in a respectable way and they can call me by my first name. I think it will take a long time, but I’m trying to have faith that poco a poco, little by little, gender change will happen in this country.

Wow.

This:

At age twelve, I was in 7th grade, I played on a softball team on the weekends, I participated in Science Olympiad, loved the TV show Lizzie Magguire, and The Giver was my favorite book. At twelve, I had a baby sister, I didn’t have a baby and I didn’t have a husband. I didn’t have to do the family’s laundry by hand, I didn’t spend the entire day cleaning the house, and I didn’t skip school in order prepare three meals a day from scratch. And the most rattling part for me is that this is normal.

--is also a question of class and poverty, as well as the evident sexism (almost no 12-y.o. boys prepare meals.) But I expect the author's aware of that.

It's a relative perspective of course. Many of the differences here are nominal, like the end of the apartheid in the South, but many, many are substantive. It's not justice or equality here, either, and there are obvious atrocities on the gender question also going on here. But the points she makes are real. How to make it better here and there, and not worse, is the question.

.

[justdrew]

hopefully it's getting better now that the Sandanista are back in power. 1990 was a bad bad year for for Nicaraguan women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista_National_Liberation_Front#Women_in_revolutionary_Nicaragua

[Iamwhomiam]

I posted this story on my blog, but I wanted to make sure it was seen here, too!

"In the fall of 1988, the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes went to Lead, South Dakota, to play a basketball game. SuAnne was a full member of the team by then. She was a freshman, fourteen years old. Getting ready in the locker room, the Pine Ridge girls could hear the din from the fans. They were yelling fake-Indian war cries, a “woo-woo-woo” sound. The usual plan for the pre-game warm-up was for the visiting team to run onto the court in a line, take a lap or two around the floor, shoot some baskets, and then go to their bench at courtside. After that, the home team would come out and do the same, and then the game would begin.

Usually the Thorpes lined up for their entry more or less according to height, which meant that senior Doni De Cory, one of the tallest, went first. As the team waited in the hallway leading from the locker room, the heckling got louder. The Lead fans were yelling epithets like “squaw” and “gut-eater.” Some were waving food stamps, a reference to the Reservation’s receiving federal aid. Others yelled, “Where’s the cheese?” The joke being that if Indians were lining up, it must be to get commodity cheese. The Lead high school band had joined in, with fake-Indian drumming and a fake-Indian tune. Doni De Cory looked out the door and told her teammates, “I can’t handle this.” SuAnne quickly offered to go first in her place. She was so eager that Doni became suspicious. “Don’t embarrass us,” Doni told her. SuAnne said, “I won’t. I won’t embarrass you.” Doni gave her the ball and SuAnne stood first in line.

She came running onto the court dribbling the basketball, with her teammates running behind. On the court, the noise was deafeningly loud. SuAnne went right down the middle; but instead of running a full lap, she suddenly stopped when she got to center court. Her teammates were taken by surprise, and some bumped into one another. Coach Zimiga at the rear of the line did not know why they had stopped. SuAnne turned to Doni De Cory and tossed her the ball. Then she stepped into the jump-ball circle at center court, in front of the Lead fans. She unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders and began to do the Lakota shawl dance. SuAnne knew all the traditional dances. She had competed in many powwows as a little girl, and the dance she chose is a young woman’s dance, graceful and modest and show-offy all at the same time. “I couldn’t believe it; she was powwowin’, like, ‘get down!’” Doni De Cory recalled. “And then she started to sing.” SuAnne began to sing in Lakota, swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl.

The crowd went completely silent.

“All that stuff the Lead fans were yelling, it was like she reversed it somehow,” a teammate said. In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song.

SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni De Cory, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game.

“It was funny,” Doni De Cory says, “but after that game the relationship between Lead and us was tremendous. When we played Lead again, the games were really good, and we got to know some of the girls on the team. Later, when we went to a tournament and Lead was there, we were hanging out with the Lead girls and eating pizza with them. We got to know some of their parents, too. What SuAnne did made a lasting impression and changed the whole situation with us and Lead. We found out there are some really good people in Lead.“

Thank you for sharing this moving article with us. Ah, the awesome power of an empowered woman! She is indeed blessed. The recounting of her feat will be passed on and encourage others to emulate her wholesomeness.

[Iamwhomiam]

This is a conversation posted on facebuk some time ago that I thought enough of to copy. I had thought about posting it back in the misogyny thread or as its own thread in response to some of our more argumentative folk.

It's appropriate for the Sexism thread I think, so here it is. A mom with two young kids, a boy "K" and a girl "Ky," seeking 'alone time':

So I was taking a bit of time to be alone in the bedroom. I asked the kids to give me a little "alone time." Three minutes in and I hear what sounds like a stampede towards my door....

<knocking>

Me: Yes?

Ky: Mom, K won't give me my doll.

Me: That's too bad, Ky. I am sorry K's poor choice is upsetting you.

...
Ky: Well, I keep asking him nicely and he won't give it to me.

Me: Goodness, Ky, I am so sorry. Maybe you can choose not to let this upset you so much.

Ky: What?

Me: Well, it is not your fault that K is choosing to be mean. But he is still choosing to be mean isn't he?

Ky: YES!

Me: And you have tried asking him nicely, right?

Ky: Yeah

Me: And he still chooses to be mean?

Ky: Yes.

Me: So maybe you can just move forward without your doll, right now, and make a choice not to be upset.

Ky: Ohhhh. Okay. <goes upstairs to her bedroom and shuts the door>

<K sits down outside my door with Ky's doll and asks me for a hairband for the doll's hair. I tell him that the doll belongs to Ky and she has the hairbands. He then asks if I want to play with him. I explain I am having "alone time." He sits with the doll for about 5 minutes, then gets up and goes upstairs with the doll and knocks on Ky's door.>

I flip on the "baby monitor:"

Ky: Yes?

K: Ky, would you like to play with me?

Ky: (inaudible)

K: Well, I am sorry I made a poor and mean choice to take your doll. That was not nice. Here is your doll.

Ky: < opens bedroom door>

K: Now will you play with me?

Ky: Okay.

<They play for a few minutes. Then dad walks through from the home office>

Dad: Are you 2 getting along?

Ky: We just started.

Dad: You just started getting along?

Ky: Yes.

<Dad goes downstairs to kitchen>

<Ky and K play for about 15 minutes.>

K: Here, you can play with one of these. Pick the one you want.

Ky: <picks one>

K: No, not THAT one! Pick this one.

Ky: You told me to pick the one I want! I want the big one.

K: But you should have the small truck because you are a girl and the big trick is dangerous!

Ky: I want the big one.

K: But it is dangerous!

Dad: K???

K: WHAAT?

Dad: Ky wants to play with the big truck. Girls can play with things that are dangerous, K!! You need to allow Ky to play with the big dump truck because you gave her a choice and she chose that one. If you don't let her play with it just because she's a girl, that is seeexxxiiiism.

K: Ohhhh, I don't want to do THAT! Here, Ky, you can play with this big one.

Ky: Thanks!

<Playing trucks and stuff for about 15 minutes>

K: Wanna play monkeys jumping on the bed?

Ky: On the couch?

K: Yeah!

Ky: Okay! <laughs>

K & Ky: (thud! thud! thud! Just over my head) 2 little monkeys jumping on the bed, one fell off and--

Me: KIDS???

<could have heard a pin drop>

[American Dream]

hopefully it's getting better now that the Sandanista are back in power. 1990 was a bad bad year for for Nicaraguan women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista_National_Liberation_Front#Women_in_revolutionary_Nicaragua

Yes- a valid point also but then again look at how many Sandinista stalwarts stood strongly by Commandante Daniel Ortega- even if the sexual abuse allegations were true...

[parel]

mindboggling. I mean what the fucking fuck?

Texas jury gives OK to kill escorts who take your money and do not provide sex

GOVERNMENT TOPICS
JUNE 6, 2013BY: DAVID PHILLIPS


A Bexar County jury in Texas on Wednesday acquitted Ezekiel Gilbert of murder in the shooting death of 23-year-old Lenora Ivie Frago, an escort whom he found on Craigslist. Gilbert had admitted to the shooting of Frago.

The Texas jury acquitted Gilbert of the murder charge because he was attempting to retrieve the $150 he'd paid to Frago, who wouldn't have sex with him. In Texas those actions are justified by a Texas law which allows for the recovery of property by “law abiding citizens” if the crime takes place at night.

Prosecutors Matt Lovell and Jessica Schulze argued that the law was not intended for someone trying to force another person into an illegal act such as prostitution

Had he been convicted, he could have faced up to life in prison for the slaying of Lenora Ivie Frago who died about seven months after she was shot in the neck and paralyzed on Christmas Eve 2009.

“I sincerely regret the loss of the life of Ms. Frago,” Gilbert said Wednesday. “I've been in a mental prison the past four years of my life. I have nightmares. If I see guns on TV where people are getting killed, I change the channel.”

The verdict came after almost 11 hours of deliberations that stretched over two days.
http://www.examiner.com/article/texas-j ... rovide-sex

[Burnt Hill]

In the comments, from

Brooke Neal · Greensboro, North Carolina

It used to be legal in Texas to shoot your wife if you caught her in flagrante delicto (presumably with another man). But if a woman caught her husband in a similar situation, not so much. It's not surprising that Texas doesn't value the life of any woman, but especially not a "bad" woman.

[ShinShinKid]

This site is going up for all those women out there who do study the martial arts! And, those who don't!

http://helpusgreatwarrior.tumblr.com/

I read until my eyes gave out...!

[LilyPatToo]

What a great comic, ShinShinKid--thank you My favorite one so far...

LilyPat

[Twyla LaSarc]

On the job search:

I go into a local bar that had an ad up for cooks.I was wearing my cooking duds from my other job which includes large boots. I brought my resume but I had to fill out an app anyway, which I did in scrawl, because that is how I write by hand anymore. The manager who came over to talk to me ignored the CV, peered at the app, gave me an odd look and asked;

"What experience do you have with waiting tables or bartending?"

"None," I replied.

We got the conversation back on track quickly as I explained why I was there, but it was one of the oddest moments I've had in awhile.

[General Patton]

When I was a little kid, my Dad taught me that the weakest bone is the little finger and, if I was ever attacked, I should grasp that finger and bend it backwards as hard as I could. Many years later, while shopping in a deserted pet care section of a department store, I was grabbed from behind by a tall, strong man. He easily lifted me off my feet, pinned my arms to my body and covered my mouth and nose with his hand.

If you are ambushed and scared, you are significantly less likely to have full fine motor control needed for grappling. Grabbing objects becomes much harder. Having one simple go-to reflex is useful but requires lots of repetitive training. Keep in mind that the standard operating procedure for any predator is to catch you off guard or ambush you.

http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2010 ... -past.html
If you get scared enough that your heart rate goes over about 115 BPM, you will start to lose your fine motor skills. That means your precision grabs and locks are gone.

About 155 BPM, complex motor skills deteriorate- you lose your patterns, combinations, traps and sweeps.

About 175BPM, planning and thinking are severely compromised. You lose your near vision, peripheral vision and depth perception. Your hearing will deaden or be lost.

Above 175, if there is anything in your bladder, you will lose it. Most will freeze or curl up in a ball and wait for mommy to save them. Only the grossest of physical activity is possible- running and flailing.

In short, the more desperately you need your skills, the less you will be able to rely on them. If you ever hear or say or think, “If it was for real, I’d do better” know that it is a lie. When it is for real, you will do much, much worse than in practice. The belief that people improve under stress is a myth.

These stress levels can be induced in most people with nothing more than aggressive verbal threats.

Please, people--tell your mothers/daughters/sisters about that little trick. I've spent a lifetime being targeted for suggestive comments on the street (and, incredibly, it's still happening even now that I'm in my mid-60's), but there are more overtly abusive, predatory men out there too. Another tactic to use on larger attackers if you're pinned front-to-front by one is to strike upward with the heel of the hand against the base of the nose where it meets the upper lip. I'm told it can kill if the nasal cartilage is shoved up into the brain, but even a light blow is supposed to be exquisitely painful and should distract an attacker long enough for a woman to run like hell.

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ulti ... 001576;p=0
http://www.fightingarts.com/reading/article.php?id=511

Consider the number of people who get their noses broken every year, hell consider people who survive being shot with low caliber pistols. Most evidence suggests the driving nose into the brain thing is a myth.

[LilyPatToo]

I've never used the "drive the nose into the brain" thing, but I do know that any blow--upward or straight-on--to the nose can cause such extreme pain that most attackers not on PCP will lose all interest in predation for at least a minute or so--long enough to run away.

But I have used the "break the little finger bone" tactic while being held almost completely immobile against my attacker's body, with my feet at least a foot off the ground and while terrified out of my wits. So I know for a fact that, whatever is said to the contrary by "experts", this small woman being preyed upon by a very tall muscular male had enough fine muscle coordination to easily grasp and snap his finger with the one forearm/hand I could move.

And I also remembered (during the attack) the fact that I could still move my legs and was wearing 2 inch heels and drove one of them directly into his shin bone. I'm assuming that takes some sort of muscular control--fine or gross--too. I wasn't flailing wildly, I was focused very tightly on injuring him with those slim, lethal heels.

So please don't tell people that they probably cannot perform a very simple action while under attack. Most women get this message in a more general sense from birth onward and it's very disempowering and inaccurate. I did it without training or practice, too, which tells me that if folks take self-defense classes, their rate of success should be higher than mine. My Dad simply told me about the little finger being a weak point even in a muscular person and it popped into my mind in the midst of panic and disorientation and worked like a charm.

LilyPat

PS Another woman who survived an attack has come up with a WatchOverMe app that automatically sends an alert out to your emergency contacts via SMS, email, or Facebook if you don't check in after activating it. It also provides your emergency contacts with your most recent location via GPS and turns on your iPhone's camera + audio recording functions to let your loved ones know what's going on. Here's an article about her experience.