“The three of us chatted for a bit longer, eventually exchanging pleasantries and going our separate ways. I resumed moving from group to group, now mostly listening, and was amused to see that Carl—no last name given or requested—continually moved away from me, as if afraid that I’d taint his ranting with more of my unfortunate facts. I’ve encountered his type before, usually at "political" protests. They’re the sort who would rather we paved the world and shot the sick, instead of risking life being unpredictable and potentially risky. In another time, they were anti-Semitic, antiblack, antiwomen’s liberation, anti-gay, or all of the above. Now, they’re antizombie in the most extreme ways possible, and they use their extremity to claim that the rest of us are somehow supporting the “undead agenda.” I’ve met a lot of zombies. Not as many as Shaun and Mom have, but I’m not as suicidal as they are. In my experience, the only “undead agenda” involves eating you, not worming their way into public acceptance and support. There will always be people for whom hate is easier when it’s not backed up by anything but fear. And I will always do my best to hoist them by their own petards.”

Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde (Essence Magazine, 1984)

JB: One of the dangers of being a Black American is being schizophrenic, and I mean ‘schizophrenic’ in the most literal sense. To be a Black American is in some ways to be born with the desire to be white. It’s a part of the price you pay for being born here, and it affects every Black person. We can go back to Vietnam, we can go back to Korea. We can go back for that matter to the First World War. We can go back to W.E.B. Du Bois – an honorable and beautiful man – who campaigned to persuade Black people to fight in the First World War, saying that if we fight in this war to save this country, our right to citizenship can never, never again be questioned – and who can blame him? He really meant it, and if I’d been there at that moment I would have said so too perhaps. Du Bois believed in the American dream. So did Martin. So did Malcolm. So do I. So do you. That’s why we’re sitting here.

AL: I don’t, honey. I’m sorry, I just can’t let that go past. Deep, deep, deep down I know that dream was never mine. And I wept and I cried and I fought and I stormed, but I just knew it. I was Black. I was female. And I was out – out – by any construct wherever the power lay. So if I had to claw myself insane, if I lived I was going to have to do it alone. Nobody was dreaming about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out.

JB: You are saying you do not exist in the American dream except as a nightmare.

AL: That’s right. And I knew it every time I opened Jet, too. I knew that every time I opened a Kotex box. I knew that every time I went to school. I knew that every time I opened a prayer book. I knew it, I just knew it.

JB: It is difficult to be born in a place where you are despised and also promised that with endeavor – with this, with that, you know – you can accomplish the impossible. You’re trying to deal with the man, the woman, the child – the child of whichever sex – and he or she and your man or your woman has got to deal with the 24-hour-a-day facts of life in this country. We’re not going to fly off someplace else, you know, we’d better get through whatever that day is and still have each other and still raise children – somehow manage all of that. And this is 24 hours of every day, and you’re surrounded by all of the paraphernalia of safety: If you can strike this bargain here. If you can make sure your armpits are odorless. Curl your hair. Be impeccable. Be all the things that the American public says you should do, right? And you do all those things – and nothing happens really. And what is much worse than that, nothing happens to your child either.

Shortly after the United Nations speech that made her a feminist icon, Emma Watson, inevitably, weighed in on that other feminist icon, Beyoncé. “I felt [Beyoncé's] message felt very conflicted,” Watson said, “in the sense that on the one hand she is putting herself in a category of a feminist, you know this very strong woman and she has that beautiful speech in one of her songs ["Flawless"] but then the camera, it felt very male, such a male voyeuristic experience of her.”

Watson’s comments echo a consistent feminist criticism of Beyoncé, who has often been accused of being too sexual and too eager to perform for the male gaze. This criticism has continued even though Beyoncé has recently emphatically claimed the feminist label, sampling Nigerian feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speech “We Should All Be Feminists” and appearing at the Video Music Awards in front of a giant sign reading “FEMINIST.” Nonetheless, Annie Lennox recently called Beyoncé “feminism lite” and added, “I think what she does with [sex] is cheap….” Janell Hobson, an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York, told me that following her Beyoncé cover story for Ms. magazine, she received a ton of pushback from feminists who felt that, in Hobson’s words, Beyoncé was “too sexy to be the ‘perfect feminist.'”

Again, Watson’s assumption, and the general assumption of critics, is that Beyoncé’s sexual performance is a display for men. She’s seen as anti-feminist because she plays into a “male voyeuristic experience.” Beyoncé’s audience, however, is, for the most part, not composed of male voyeurs. It’s overwhelmingly female.

Marcus sees Beyoncé through the historical lens of feminist performance art, which is not staged for the male gaze, but rather attempts to explore the relationship between that gaze, female bodies, and female fantasies.
A study from February ranked artists on a music-listening service based on the gender of their listeners. Beyoncé was the third most popular artist for women; for men, she was 24th. Rihanna, another artist known for her sexualized performances, was first among women and only eighth among men. Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, and Lady Gaga also ranked higher among women than among men. This ranking dovetails with anecdotal observations: Sharon Marcus, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and a self-declared Beyoncé fan, told me that in her experience, “the straight men I know have no interest in Beyoncé whatever, and even seem to be averse to her…. Beyoncé’s fanbase is primarily women and gay men.”

Research findings published in the latest issue of Science trace the origins of the outbreak to Kinshasa in the 1920s, where epidemiologists believe it emerged from a "perfect storm" of explosive population growth, a booming sex industry, burgeoning public transportation networks, and the use of unsterilized needles in health clinics. Here's The Guardian's Ian Sample:

An international team of scientists led by the universities of Oxford in Britain and Leuven in Belgium reconstructed the history of the HIV pandemic using historical records and DNA samples of the virus dating back to the late 1950s. The DNA allowed them to draw up a family tree of the virus that traced its ancestry through time and space. Using statistical models they could push farther back than the 1950s and locate the origin of the pandemic in 1920s Kinshasa.

People with HIV in central Africa at the time did not have specific symptoms that would have been written down in their medical records. The virus causes the immune system to collapse, leaving people open to all manner of infections. "For an epidemic like HIV where we're trying to track back to before it was even discovered, genetics is the only source of information we have," said Oliver Pybus, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University and senior author on the study.

The genetic data suggests that pandemic HIV spread rapidly through the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country the size of western Europe. From the late 1930s to the early 1950s, the virus spread by rail and river to Mbuji-Mayi and Lubumbashi in the south and Kisangani in the north. There the virus took hold and formed secondary reservoirs from where it spread to countries in southern and eastern Africa.

I am for equality for women, but i am against Sarkeesian and Alexander and Quinn... My take on why many of us fall into this category. Maybe a post for women to read? (self.KotakuInAction)
submitted 8 hours ago by GOU_NoMoreMrNiceGuy
raise of hands among the men here - who is against equality for women?
i would imagine that the crickets have become quite loud and there's not a hand to be seen.
so why would i be against the women in this #gamergate dustup? how could i take sides against them?
imo, because they are not worthy of support... and they're actually not worthy of feminism - and they're giving it a bad name. they're certainly making ME dislike the term.
speaking of terms, i've only recently encountered 'Social Justice Warrior'. LOL. are they serious? that's like a pastiche of a caricature. and as far as i can see, their stock in trade is just being loud and obnoxious. In flying the banner and hiding behind the cover of feminism while basically just attacking men and what they like and how they are. That's pretty much their WHOLE shtick... interestingly, they are surprised then when men actually push back.

THE PROBLEM WITH SARKEESIAN:
her critical thinking skills and her arguments are atrocious. basically, she manipulates and cherry picks to make an argument that she intended to argue... it is less about reporting on the reality of what she has discovered and more about just having an agenda and arguing it hell or high water.
her biggest flaw is attributing everything to the malice of men. that all the problematic issues in games she sees is due to the innate sexism among the game creator men. but there are lots of other explanations that explain certain phenomena in games as well as books or films and other narrative based experiences... she picks at the fact that women frequently lack agency but in most popcorn fiction, almost every character that is NOT THE PROTAGONIST lacks agency - and in actual fact, the "tightest" stories are those in which EVERY THING in the story is a reflection of the main character... that's the "hero's journey" paradigm that's so popular in the west. the RIGHT thing to argue is that there should be more female protagonists... that is defensible. but to say that because a secondary female character lacks agency and that that is reflective of some sexist viewpoint is just absurd.
essentially, she twists and reaches to make EVERYTHING about sexism when there are simpler, better and more true answers.

and finally, perhaps the thing that encompasses all of the above:
THE PROBLEM WITH POPULAR FEMINISM:
as evidenced in those three as well as websites like jezebel... there's a LOT not right about them... so i'll pick out a few issues that i have.
the objectification of women. they've got to get over it. this is what men do. PERIOD. tits and ass will ALWAYS be important to men. that is never going away. and the odd thing is that while complaining about such objectification, they PLAY INTO it with their blood engorged vagina analog lipsticks and pushup bras and etc etc etc. fucking have some goddamn consistency with your positions eh ladies?
you can't attack this without it being an attack on men. this is SIMPLY OUR NATURE. and if the media out there is filled to the brim with that kind of stuff you should address it as an issue of REPRESENTATION - that the male pov is ubiquitous and there should be more perspectives from females... that's FINE to fight for. but to say that all this objectification is somehow WRONG... that is an attack on men.
also, people in GENERAL objectify others. this is NOT just a male thing. it's a human thing. when's the last time that you thought about a cashier at the grocery story or mcdonald's as a human being with a family and feelings and maybe a parent that depends on them etc etc etc? we objectify the people in our day to day lives who are not important to us according to their significance in our lives... they are THE WAITRESS, THE CASHIER, THE CABLE MAN, etc. all we want out of them, the aspect of their lives that we are concerned with is that they fulfill their function! without this kind of heuristic, we would be UNABLE TO FUNCTION IN THE WORLD for fuck's sake!
rape culture. i don't know what this is. my group of board gaming, videogame playing, comic book reading fellows don't approve of rape. are there a bunch of you guys out there that think it's peachy keen? is there a "murder culture" too? or a "culture of mugging"? criminals always have and always will exist in the world. people we pass by every day are perpetrators of all kinds of crimes including rape, assault with a deadly weapon, drunk driving, etc. doesn't mean there's a "culture" of it.
i have plenty of female friends. none of them have been raped. but when this discussion comes around, feminists freely throw out crazy numbers like "1 in 4 women"... wtf?? is that including or excluding third world nations with genocidal civil wars going on??? Are they including when guys check them out???
And HOLY SHIT - IF IT IS TRUE THAT WOMEN ARE GETTING RAPED EVERY OTHER TIME THEY LEAVE THE HOUSE GET A FUCKING GUN!!! get two! get titanium chastity belts and electrified bras and don't leave the house without covering fire and a bowie knife in your teeth! I WOULD!

Isn't that interesting.

Tumblr emailed me to tell me they deleted my post calling out the dude who sent me a rape threat.

But hasn't banned the dude who sent me a rape threat, even though I reported him.

I guess Tumblr just wants to make their site safer for people who send rape threats than those who receive them.

I guess it's not considered harassment to send rape threats, but if you name the person who sends you rape threats, you are harassing them.

INTERESTING
Misandry Mermaid also had her account temporarily suspended by Tumblr, though for a time, she thought she'd been permanently removed from the platform. The original harassing message sent to her was:



Misandry Mermaid's original post doxxing her harasser is still down, but it has been stored on Google cache. With the help of her followers, she managed to get ahold of and post a number of salient details about her anonymous harasser: a photo of him, his name, his birthday, his address, a picture of his house, his phone number and the names of his parents. (At least one person apparently called his parents and spoke to them about his messages.) She asked them to report him for harassment, and a Tumblr was started in the actual name of this 17-year-old from Wisconsin. The blurb on it read:

I send women rape threats on the internet...I live with my parents...They defend my rape threats, saying I only do it because I have autism. I sure hope I'll never need to go to college or get a job someday, otherwise these rape threats I send people might come back to bite my misogynistic, rape-threat-loving ass. Welcome to my blog.

This is a piece about football and feminism so before I proceed, let me offer an obvious but necessary caveat. I’m a dude. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to write about feminism. But it does mean that some readers can and will object to a piece by a guy about women who call themselves feminists and who also watch football.

So let me say for the record that I am not trying to mansplain the evils of football to feminists, or suggest how they should feel about something as complex as football. What I am trying to do is to understand why women, and feminists in particular, not only tolerate but in some instances consume (and therefore sponsor) a game as flagrantly misogynistic as football.

But before I get into all that, I want to talk about Hannah Storm, because she’s the one who got me thinking about all this. Last Sunday, Storm took a few minutes on Sportscenter to rebuke the NFL for its conduct around the Ray Rice scandal and violence against women more generally. The veteran broadcaster and ESPN anchor explained that she and her three daughters were all huge football fans. “One of my daughters has her first fantasy football team this season,” she noted. “But at breakfast this week, instead of discussing how her team was doing, we watched the Ray Rice video play out again, in all its ugliness.”

Storm added that she’d spent the week answering a series of “seemingly impossible questions” from her daughters about the league, then posed a few of her own, such as when the NFL would “take the lead on the issue of domestic violence,” and, more dramatically, “What exactly does the NFL stand for?”

The response to this soliloquy was a rousing chorus of Give ’em hell, Hannah! So maybe I’m the only person in America who came away with a few questions of my own — for Storm.

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/28/feminism_and_the_nfl_are_not_compatible/

Sam Pepper, the YouTuber who posts videos in which he sexually assaults women, has been under fire this week for, you know, sexually assaulting women on camera. Many women have also stepped forward to discuss their personal experiences with Pepper – and the YouTuber has subsequently been dropped from his network.

If you’re not sure what’s going on, here’s the background. First, Pepper posted a video in which he grabs women in the street without consent – one of many videos on his channel that feature Pepper sexually assaulting women. In the midst of the backlash, Pepper decided to announce that this particular video was actually a “social experiment,” meant to draw attention to the plight of men who are affected by domestic violence. While sexual harassment and domestic violence against any gender are incredibly serious and important issues, there’s no doubt in my mind that Pepper was actually just scrambling to save face.

Now, New Media Rockstars is reporting that Pepper has been dropped by Collective Digital Studio, the multichannel YouTube network that represented him. CDS’s Karlyn Nelson told NMR that she can “can confirm that Collective Digital Studio is no longer working with Sam Pepper.” Which is great; except, you know, CDS only just signed Pepper to their roster on August 4th. That means CDS had no problem signing someone to their label who had sexually harassing videos up like “How To Pick Up Girls With A Lasso” or “Licking Strangers” until the backlash started. But we’re glad CDS has dropped him now, regardless, along with VidCon and YouTubers React.

The drop comes at a time when several brave women have stepped forward with allegations about their experiences with Pepper and sexual harassment. Laci Green, the SEX+ YouTuber who posted the original open letter to Pepper and has spoken extensively on the issue, uploaded this video, which has a great summary and explanation of what she’s been hearing from women about Pepper across the internet.