Yesterday, as part of MLK Day events at Yale, there was a free Sweet Honey in the Rock concert. It was amazing. Everything about it was fantastic. I just finished reading a biography of Afeni Shakur (a really rad Black Panther, b/k/a Tupac’s mom) by Jasmine Guy, and the end of the book is the…
We have this entire culture that’s telling people that there’s One Right Thing To Want. Dudes, for instance, are supposed to have a high sex drive, to like porn, to enjoy casual sex, to be attracted to thin young feminine large-breasted women, to want anal sex and public sex and rough sex, to not want pegging and ageplay and vanilla missionary with the lights out. If you’re asexual you’re broken; if you like drag you’re a pervert and probably a pedophile; if you’re a male submissive you’re pathetic and unmasculine; if you’re queer you’re destroying America. I don’t understand why people do this: what possible gain could there be from reducing the vibrant rainbow of human sexuality to two colors (the dude color and the girl color)? Those two colors look much nicer as part of the whole spectrum.
Women who are too sexual aren’t taken seriously, and women who aren’t sexual enough aren’t taken seriously. Women who are conventionally attractive get valued solely for their sexual appeal; women who aren’t conventionally attractive get dismissed for their lack of it. Women who are conventionally attractive are assumed to be dumb bimbos; women who aren’t conventionally attractive are assumed to be either bitter or desperate. Women who are conventionally attractive get trivialized; women who aren’t conventionally attractive get treated with pity and contempt. We can’t win.
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| — | (via buenaastardis) |
Alexia Webster
“Pantsula emerged in the 1950′s and 60′s in townships around South Africa. It was initially a style of dress often associated with tsotsi’s (gangsters) but grew into a culture, a way of life. Eventually this cultural expression extended into a performance and a dance form.
By the 1980′s , when townships were erupting in resistance to Apartheid, the police and army went to war against young kids in the streets, Pantsula dance had become an entertaining and satirically subversive form of grass roots expression. It was a commentary on the social and political issues that people were facing, a form of resistance.
It continues to play that role. Its a voice from the margins. A voice on the periphery on South Africa’s hall’s of power and offers opportunities to these young men on the fringes who otherwise have had very little support.
These photographs are the first from an ongoing project exploring the ritual of becoming visible through Pansula dance.”
The problem with cultural appropriation is that it replaces the original with a copy created by the dominant culture. It dilutes the original, removes all symbolic value from it and replaces it with a ready to consume product devoid of context and meaning.
Cultural appropriation, at its most extreme, is a violent form of colonization because it removes the original group behind the culture and reinforces stereotypes about that group (i.e. ALL First Nation folks are reduced to “war bonnets”, whether their culture uses them or not; all Latin@s are reduced to a stylized version of Catholicism regardless of their spirituality; etc.). The mechanism of commodifying a culture ends up being a tool to re-inforce [sic] racism as it reduces the people behind those cultures to a mere cartoon like representation of their realities. It’s a great way to ultimately Other and objectify entire groups of people by taking something that is dynamic and ever evolving and freezing it for a marketing photo opportunity.
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| — | Flavia Dzodan (via harvestxvx) |
Today, I got a “Avoid Being a [Rape] Victim” sheet from a college professor that told me I shouldn’t wear a ponytail, talk on my cellphone in public, or be in a grocery store parking lot.
tulletulle: missworld: femasculine:prettyyoungtext:
Screw that. I put together a sheet of my own from various other sources to distribute to my classmates tomorrow. I would have liked to include a lot more information, but printing stuff costs money (specifically, my limited funds). With some careful formatting and double-sided printing, the text will fit onto one sheet of paper. I copy/pasted this from Word, so the format and bullet-points may look wonky, but you’re welcome to copy/paste/print this for your own means. Here we go:
What’s wrong with suggesting that women take precautions to prevent being raped?
It’s wrong because it puts the onus on women not to get themselves raped, rather than on men not to do the raping; in short, it blames the victim. (Finally Feminism 101)
A lot has been said about how to prevent rape. Women should learn self-defense. Women should lock themselves in their houses after dark. Women shouldn’t have long hair and women shouldn’t wear short skirts. Women shouldn’t leave drinks unattended. Hell, they shouldn’t dare to get drunk at all. Instead of that bullshit, how about:
If a woman is drunk, don’t rape her.
If a woman is walking alone at night, don’t rape her.
If a woman is drugged and unconscious, don’t rape her.
If a woman is wearing a short skirt, don’t rape her.
If a woman is jogging in a park at 5 am, don’t rape her.
If a woman looks like your ex-girlfriend you’re still hung up on, don’t rape her.
If a woman is asleep in her bed, don’t rape her.
If a woman is asleep in your bed, don’t rape her.
If a woman is doing her laundry, don’t rape her.
If a woman is in a coma, don’t rape her.
If a woman changes her mind in the middle of or about a particular activity, don’t rape her.
If a woman has repeatedly refused a certain activity, don’t rape her.
If a woman is not yet a woman, but a child, don’t rape her.
If your girlfriend or wife is not in the mood, don’t rape her.
If your step-daughter is watching TV, don’t rape her.
If you break into a house and find a woman there, don’t rape her.
If your friend thinks it’s okay to rape someone, tell him it’s not, and that he’s not your friend.
If your “friend” tells you he raped someone, report him to the police.
If your frat-brother or another guy at the party tells you there’s an unconscious woman upstairs and it’s your turn, don’t rape her, call the police and tell the guy he’s a rapist.
Tell your sons, god-sons, nephews, grandsons, sons of friends it’s not okay to rape someone.
Don’t tell your women friends how to be safe and avoid rape.
Don’t imply that she could have avoided it if she’d only done/not done x.
Don’t imply that it’s in any way her fault.
Don’t let silence imply agreement when someone tells you he “got some” with the drunk girl.
Don’t perpetuate a culture that tells you that you have no control over or responsibility for your actions. You can, too, help yourself. (Men Can Stop Rape)
In case you aren’t sure how to avoid raping, here are a few questions you may want to ask yourself:
© How do you define consent? Have you ever talked about consent with your partner(s) or friends?
© Do you think it is the other person’s responsibility to say something if they aren’t into what you’re doing? How might someone express that what is happening is not OK? Do you think it is possible to misinterpret silence for consent? Do you think silence is consent?
© Do you check in as things progress or do you assume the original consent means everything is OK? If someone consents to one thing, do you assume everything else is OK or do you ask before taking things to a different level? Do you think consent can be withdrawn after it’s been given?
© Do you pursue someone sexually even after they have said they just want to be friends? Do you assume that if someone is affectionate they are probably sexually interested in you? Are you clear about your own intentions?
© Have you ever tried to talk someone into doing something they showed hesitancy about?
© If someone is promiscuous, do you think it’s less important to get consent?
© Do you ever try to get yourself into situations that give you an excuse for touching someone you think would say no if you asked? (i.e., Dancing, getting drunk around them, falling asleep next to them.)
© Do you ever feel obligated to have sex? Do you ever feel obligated to initiate sex? Do you ever try and make bargains? (i.e., “If you let me______, I’ll do ______for you?”)
© Do you feel like being in a relationship with someone means that they have an obligation to have sex with you? What if they want to abstain from sex? Do you whine or threaten if you’re not having the amount of sex or kind of sex that you want?
© Do you think it’s OK to initiate something sexual with someone who’s sleeping? What if the person is your partner?
© Have you been sexual with people when you were drunk or when they were drunk? Do you seek consent the same way when you are drunk as when you’re sober?
© Do you initiate conversations about safe sex and birth control applicably? Do you think saying something as vague as “I’ve been tested recently” is enough?
© Do you think if a person has a body that can get pregnant, it’s up to that person to provide birth control? Do you complain or refuse safe sex or the type of birth control your partner wants to use because it reduces your pleasure?
© Do you think only men abuse? Do you think that in a relationship between people of the same gender, only the one who is more “manly” abuses?
You may want to keep in mind that rapists are often not strangers.
© 73% of sexual assaults were perpetrated by a non-stranger.
© 38% of rapists are a friend or acquaintance.
© 28% are an intimate.
© 7% are a relative.
Rapists are rarely hiding in the bushes. More than 50% of all rape/sexual assault incidents were reported by victims to have occurred within 1 mile of their home or at their home.
© 4 in 10 take place at the victim’s home.
© 2 in 10 take place at the home of a friend, neighbor, or relative.
© 1 in 12 takes place in a parking garage.
© The average age of a rapist is 31 years old.
© 52% are white.
© 22% of imprisoned rapists report that they are married.
© In 1 in 3 sexual assaults, the perpetrator was intoxicated — 30% with alcohol, 4% with drugs.
© In 2001, 11% of rapes involved the use of a weapon.
© 84% of victims reported the use of physical force only.
Rapists rarely serve time in jail for their crimes. 60% of rapes/sexual assaults are not reported to the police, according to a statistical average of the past 5 years. Those rapists, of course, never spend a day in prison. Factoring in unreported rapes, only about 6% of rapists ever serve a day in jail. (Rape Abuse & Incest National Network)
