WASHINGTON -- It's been a rough week for Crystal Moore. She got fired from her job as the police chief in Latta, S.C., despite a spotless 20-year record with the department, and she's not alone in believing the town's new mayor fired her because she's a lesbian. It's the first time she hasn't had a job since she was 9, her health insurance runs out at the end of the month and she doesn't know where her next paycheck will come from.

But if the firing weren't enough of a shock, something else unexpected happened: Her community -- a tiny conservative town of about 1,410 residents -- is rising to her defense and demanding that she get her job back.

Dozens of people have picketed outside town hall and held prayer vigils. Kids she met while patrolling at a school have told her they support her. Members of the town council voted to take action to go around Mayor Earl Bullard and try to reinstate her job. Her former team of officers calls her every day to lend their support. And teachers, preachers and counselors in town have all approached her to tell her she deserves her job back and that her sexual orientation should have nothing to do with her job.

"People call us the Bible Belt in the South, and to have so much support is awesome. I'm going to tell you, it's amazing," Moore told The Huffington Post. "The good Lord has really blessed me with a lot of family and friends."
Even people that Moore threw in jail say they want her back as the police chief.
"We just had a big case with a firearms place broken into, and even the people we investigated came up and hung their necks and said, 'You did your job. We respect you for that,'" she said. "They're saying, 'I'm helping Ms. Crystal to keep her job and she's the one who locked me up.'"

MRAs post secret recording of non-secret event, confuse feminism with the complete opposite of feminism


If you’re a feminist holding an event, and you don’t want to have recordings of that event posted online without your permission by MRAs, it looks like your only option is to ban anyone and everyone associated with A Voice for Men from the premises. AVFM “activism director” Attila Vinczer has made that very clear.

Earlier this month, you see, Jaclyn Friedman – feminist writer, speaker, founder of Women, Action & The Media (WAM!) – gave a talk at Queens University in Kingston, Canada, followed by a panel discussion.

A number of Men’s Rights Activists associated with everyone’s favorite hate site A Voice for Men showed up with cameras and other recording devices, as they do.

The organizers made clear that there was to be no filming or recording of the event.

They had security remove Steve Brule, an MRA-sympathetic “documentarian” who’d shown up with his camera gear. Organizers had every reason to worry about Brule and his camera: in the past, footage from Brule has been used by AVFM to dox feminist students. Nevertheless, he cried foul, saying that he promised the security guards he wouldn’t film the event –honest! — and, absurdly, claiming that he had been discriminated against as an “old guy.”

But organizers let in other MRAs, apparently on the condition that they not record any of the proceedings.

Well, I guess we now know how much those sorts of promises are worth. Today, A Voice for Men posted a recording of the event. Vinczer explained that

"I herewith revoke my word not to record the Jaclyn Friedman What’s Feminism Got To Do With It public event. Had security not violated my Charter Rights I would never have had to take the steps I did to preserve those rights."

More on this ridiculous story:

http://manboobz.com/2014/04/21/mras-post-secret-recording-of-non-secret-event-confuse-feminism-with-the-complete-opposite-of-feminism/

In the past few years, an increasingly identifiable trope has been steadily implemented among television’s most buzzed about shows. It’s not the use of anti-heroes, or tokenism, or killing characters, or any other practice that’s become quite as overt. Instead the current go-to twist for TV’s most acclaimed programs is rape.

Technically, rape on TV isn’t anything new, just as rape everywhere isn’t anything new. From Luke and Laura and Edith Bunker to the entire run of Law and Order: SVU, television has portrayed rape in almost every way possible. And it’s not the only kind of media to so. Film continues to use rape in a wide spectrum of ways too. Recently, everything from poorly reviewed schlock like 3 Days to Kill, to critically acclaimed Oscar-winners like 12 Years a Slave have made rape a prominent plot point.

However, the difference between something like 3 Days to Kill and 12 Years a Slave (besides all of the other differences, that is) comes down to how rape factors into the overall narrative. In 12 Years a Slave, rape is part of the society that the characters live in. It’s a brutal but inescapable fact of life.

But in 3 Days to Kill, it’s a plot device. The film’s use of rape has little to do with the realities of rape itself, and instead exists only to move the story forward.

Rape is a fact of lif. While we’ve come a long way from southern plantation owners, rape continues to manifest itself in modern society through many, many avenues. Only now have we begun to scratch the surface on what rape culture truly is and how pervasive it is in all of our daily lives.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/22/tvs_rape_problem_is_bigger_than_game_of_thrones_partner/

But there is a long history of institutions regulating bodies in such a way that white bodies become the norm. In the case of the Army, they outrageously suggest that “Braids or cornrows that are unkempt or matted are considered dreadlocks and are not authorized.”

Though racial references are never used, these kinds of regulations are surely raced. The idea that “dreadlocks” or “loc(k)s” which is the more politically correct term, are merely matted hair is offensive, culturally ignorant and racist. There are far too many certified loctitians who take great care in choosing healthy grooming products for their robust clientele for people to continue to believe that locs are unclean and ungroomed.

Moreover, forcing members of the military to chemically or manually straighten their hair is a violation of black women’s bodily autonomy and right not to be exposed to harmful chemicals.

There is some evidence linking the chemicals in relaxers to increased risk of fibroids among black women. And the fact that these same chemicals can eat through a soda can in a matter of a few days — as evidenced in an experiment in Chris Rock’s “Good Hair” documentary — suggests that black women have every right to be wary of using these kinds of products.

However, there is something that is fundamentally problematic about deeming black women’s hair in its natural state to be unkempt. No other group of women is required by default to use chemicals to tame their hair or to pay money for expensive weaves, exploitatively culled from the hair of South Asian women. They may be required to keep it at a certain length, to keep it clean and combed, and maybe not to dye it. But that is it. Those are reasonable regulations in a military industrial complex that functions through complete disciplinary control over the body.

Let’s say you wake up one morning and you decide, for some reason, that you’d like to make it your goal for the day to get yourself banned from the Men’s Rights subreddit.

If you’re a feminist, it’s not hard. I managed to get myself banned there some time ago and all I had to do was … well, I’m not exactly sure what it was I did. Actually, I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, Reddit-wise, other than argue with the regulars there. It’s possible I may have engaged in some light sarcasm. So maybe try that.

If, on the other hand, you hate women, all you have to do is … well, again, I’m not sure. Because earlier today, as one friend of Man Boobz pointed out on the Against Men’s Rights subreddit, a dislikeable fellow who calls himself sciencegod posted an elaborate, graphic torture fantasy to the Men’s Rights subreddit. I’m posting it below as a thumbnail; click to see it full size, but TRIGGER WARNING because it’s very graphic.

It got some downvotes, and the mods deleted the comment. But it didn’t occur to any of the mods, evidently, to actually ban this user from the Men’s Rights subreddit.

Because obviously anything he might ever have to say on the subject of Men’s Rights is much more worthwhile than anything I might ever have to say on the subject.

I asked the mods why they felt it necessary to ban me when they wouldn’t ban someone like sciencegod, and here’s the response I got back:

Sexual abuse should not be an inevitable feature of incarceration.

Passed by unanimous congressional consent, PREA establishes a standard that rape in prison—just like rape on the outside—is unacceptable*. For the first time prisons, jails and immigration and juvenile detention facilities are required to track incidences of prison rape; provide resources to help protect prisoners; and extend recourse to survivors. With national standards finalized last year, many facilities are only just now starting their first on-site audits. Going forward, at least every three years, inspectors will look for things like whether staff has been trained to help prevent sexual assault or if prisoners have been informed of how to report incidents.

The takeaway: “PREA acknowledges that prison rape is a problem,” says editor Alex Friedmann, who follows PREA developments closely for Prison Legal News’ 9,000 subscribers, 70 percent of whom are incarcerated. “You can’t brush it under the carpet anymore. You can’t say that prisoners deserve it.”

Stigma makes tracking sexual assault inside prison walls difficult.

Roughly 200,000 men, women and children reported being sexually abused in detention facilities in 2011, the most recent year for which the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has anonymously self-reported data from inmates. For prisons, whites reported inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization at twice the rate of blacks. Black and Hispanic inmates reported higher rates of staff sexual misconduct. Persons of two or more races reported by far the highest rates for both inmate-on-inmate (4 percent) and staff sexual misconduct (3.9 percent). And of the more than 600 correctional facilities surveyed that year, the Oglala Sioux facility in Pine Ridge, S.D. reported the highest rate of staff sexual misconduct (10.8 percent)*. (The national average for prisons and jails is 2.4 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively).

Despite the above, however, the true incidence of sexual violence for all inmates is likely higher, Chris Daley, deputy executive director of Just Detention International, says. “We just don’t have a good method of estimating how much higher.”

Friedmann points out that the stigmas bounding rape and sexual assault victims to silence on the outside are exacerbated behind prison walls. “If anything [the pressure to not report is] more exacerbated in prison where any sign of weakness sets you up for further abuse,” Friedmann says. “And, if you’re being abused by a staff member you may face retaliation, too.”

Jill had been murdered almost six months earlier, and Adrian Bayley’s defence team were presenting a rather feeble case for a four-week adjournment of his committal hearing. Bayley appeared via video link in the Melbourne court as I sat flanked by two friends and a detective. The screen was to my right, mounted high up and tilted slightly towards the bench. It was uncomfortably silent apart from the occasional paper shuffle or short flurry of keyboard clicks. Bayley’s face appeared on the big-screen TV, looming over my seat. When that moment arrived, a jolt of nausea came and went. But the worst was to come, made all the more horrifying because it was unexpected.

The judge asked Bayley whether he could he see the courtroom. I don’t remember his exact words, but he replied that he was able to see his lawyer and half of the bench. I had come face to face with him before in court, but I'd never heard him manage more than a monosyllabic mumble into his chest. This was different. There was a clarity of communication, sentence structure, and proper articulation. It was chilling.

I had formed an image that this man was not human – he existed as a singular force of pure evil who somehow emerged from the ether. But something about his ability to weave together nouns, verbs and pronouns to form intelligible sentences forced a re-focus – one that required a look at the spectrum of men’s violence against women, and its relation to Bayley and the society from which he came.

By insulating myself with the intellectually evasive dismissal of violent men as psychotic or sociopathic aberrations, I self-comforted by avoiding a more terrifying concept: that violent men are socialised by the ingrained sexism and entrenched masculinity that permeates everything, from our daily interactions all the way up to our highest institutions. Bayley’s appeal was dismissed, but I left court that day in a perpetual trauma-loop, knowing I needed to re-imagine the social, institutional and cultural context in which a man like Bayley exists.

We’ve covered the 3 P’s of Manhood (protect, procreate, and provide), and we’ve distilled them down to the fundamentals — the ancient, nearly universal standards of manhood that have existed around the world for thousands of years.

But in studying them, one can’t help but notice that their requirements are not exclusively manly. Haven’t women played a part in these roles, not just now, but since time immemorial? Is it possible then to drill down through these fundamentals even further, to find the role and its attendant attributes that are, if not exclusively manly, then the most distinctively masculine — the very core of manhood?

If we look at the procreator and provider imperatives, we find that they are roles that men and women share – and that what is distinctively masculine about them comes down to a difference in emphasis.

In the procreator role, it most certainly takes two to tango. The emphasis is simply placed on the man taking the initiative in getting the proceedings started.

In the provider role, men and women have shared the responsibility for contributing sustenance to their families since the dawn of time. Here the emphasis is on the husband contributing more than the wife, and making a more vital contribution (protein vs. plants, in premodern times).