Where is this place?

Five guesses — click the “rest of this entry” link for the poll (sorry, if I put it on the front page everything gets messed up.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on July 31, 2007, 4:25 pm EST

10 Comments »

Been tagged by Witchy Woo, and since I’m too damn lazy to flesh out the dozen or so substantive posts I’ve got vaguely stewing, I’ll do this instead. Thanks for the save, Witchy!

This is tricky because every time I think of some reasonably interesting fact to share about myself, I realize that it could serve as a clue to my Real Identity, and we certainly wouldn’t want that, would we?

Here goes:

1. I love to draw.
2. I have consulted the I Ching and acted on its advice. Yes.
3. I am old enough to remember when the Post Office had a picture of President Lyndon B. Johnson on the wall.
4. I have experienced several incidents in my life that make it difficult for me to completely discount the possibility of ESP, despite my highly rational leanings and education.
5. I starred in a horror film.
6. I have a dressmaker mannequin with adjustable sizing.
7. I believe I may have suffered slight brain damage at the age of 11 or 12 as a result of a high fever (I don’t remember the year of my illness exactly). After recovering from the very high fever, I had lost the ability to manipulate a knife and fork and had to re-learn table manners. I also had to re-learn how to write, and my grip on a pen has been awkward ever since, so much so that people at first think I am left-handed (although I am right-handed). I also, since that fever, have had a tendency to reverse left and right when speaking or giving directions.
8. I absolutely love, love, love dogs.

Okay: tagging Ann at Feminist Law Professors, FlawedPlan at Writhe Safely, Laurelin at Laurelin in the rain, Kaitlyn at Oh Monkey Trumpets, Simply Wondered (Richard) at there’s a place for us, Ginmar at A View From A Broad, ae at arse poetica, and you — anybody out there who feels like chiming in. Why the hell not? It’s 400 degrees and the humidity’s 27,000%. We’re not gonna change the world in this kind of weather.

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on July 30, 2007, 7:41 pm EST

9 Comments »

The 41st Carnival of Feminists is up over at Cruella-blog and the Simone D. post is included. Thank you, Cruella, for helping to spread the word about this situation.

Please, everybody, take a moment if you haven’t already to email or call the New York State officials listed in the post. Also, there are now public hearings scheduled in New York over the next month so citizens can speak out on the state’s practice of forcing electroshock on patients. This is a good time for us to be lobbying state officials on this issue, even those of us who aren’t New Yorkers. Every call and email helps.

Posted by Violet under Simone D. on July 20, 2007, 12:02 pm EST

2 Comments »

If you know anything at all about rapture Christians, you probably know that they want all the Jews to return to Israel so the End Times will come, when Jeebus will rapture up the Christians and then slaughter the Jews.

This story is old, but I just now came across it. It’s about a couple of Christian missionaries who decided that the best way to get Russian Jews into the washing machine would be to make up shiny pretty Jew-friendly Bibles in the Russian language:

They need Bibles, but a Bible with a difference – a Bible to touch their hearts! Instead of a cross, we put striking illustrations of the Star of David and Menorah on the cover, and called this Bible, The Holy Scriptures. Inside, we added a special feature — a selection of God’s promises to the Jews, which include the Messianic prophecies.

Since there’s no chance the washing machine could actually turn on, I suppose this is harmless enough. (Not the Christofascist support for right-wing Israeli politics, but the Bible distribution bit.) The nice Jewish people get their Bibles, the crazy Christian people get to feed their fantasies, and I get a nice giggle. Everybody’s happy!

Posted by Violet under Godbags on July 17, 2007, 5:43 pm EST

10 Comments »

I’ve discussed anal sex a number of times with guys my age (and I’m referring to lovers, not office mates), guys who grew up when I did, before the culture became pornified. For the men in my life, pornography was the Playboys they whacked off to as teenagers, which they outgrew when they began their adult lives and started having actual adult sexual relationships with other human beings. Unlike young men today, they did not spend 90% of their waking lives whacking off to internet XXXtreme porn from age 12 on.

At any rate, the anal sex conversation is always the same, and we always say the same things to each other: Why do men and women do that? Why would a man want to do that? (This is the guy wondering aloud to me.) It’s understandable for gay men, they don’t have anywhere else to put it, but geez, women have those nice warm soft vaginas…

I have never had a lover — and remember, my men are not of the porn-fed variety — who wanted anal sex. Instead they wrinkle their noses and go, “ew, that place is for pooping…”

But it’s a new world. Now every young American male is consumed with the yearning to fuck some woman up the butt, and today Twisty explains why in Anal is the new ‘third base’. Of course I knew this already, but the Twist has such a way with words.

First she quotes from an article in Details, “the essential men’s magazine for looking good and living well”:

“Once a guy has anal sex, he’s put on a pedestal by his peers,” [Philip] says. He claims he hasn’t had much trouble getting women to agree to it. “I only had to persuade two girls. [I asked] ‘Can I put it in your butt?’ At first they were like, ‘No, it will hurt.’ Then time after time of having sex with them they finally said okay. It hurt them the first time, but after that they always said they enjoyed it—if not a little, then a lot.”

And this:

“For most of my friends, it’s sort of a domination thing,” says John (not his real name), 30, a writer in New York. “[It’s] basically getting someone in a position where they’re most vulnerable. My friends enjoy that and they tell their friends they did it. But it’s not like girls are ready for it—it’s something they do when they’re really drunk.”

Or in Twisty’s words (with my emphasis):

It’s an escalation of porn culture. Since the excessively vaunted sexual revolution decreed that all women henceforth would be empowerfulized by their service to male sexuality — getting jizz in your wig is a big compliment! — too many women have been giving up the vagina too easily, and even blow jobs are hackneyed now that housewives are writing mundane marriage manuals on the subject. “Regular” het sex just isn’t brutal or insulting enough anymore. There’s no sport in it, no swaggering triumph, nothing to give men “a good story to tell over beers.”

I have no idea how many of the new breed of hetero butt pirates are actually motivated by a conscious desire to degrade women — thank god I’m not dating any of these clowns so I’m spared intimate knowledge of their fuckedupedness — but I’m quite sure that all of them are motivated by the desire to do whatever they’ve been whacking off to on the internet since they were 12. Monkey see, monkey do. Doo. And apparently anal sex is such a mainstay of the modern porn industry that you probably have to send a self-addressed stamped envelope to Burma and get on a six-month waiting list for a video that doesn’t have anal.

Speaking of the escalation of porn culture, Zuzu’s new blog is up and one of her first posts is on Captivity, a mainstream Hollywood torture-porn flick. I’m sorry, I just had a brief out-of-body experience there after typing the words mainstream Hollywood torture-porn flick. I don’t know what happened, my soul just flew up to the ceiling and started batting frantically at the light fixture like a moth. Okay, I’m back now. Anyway, it is certainly… interesting, yes, I think I’ll stick with that, interesting, that torture porn is now acceptable enough that people make Hollywood movies out of it. I imagine within a few years there will be a torture-porn award category at the Oscars.

Sometimes I’m so glad I’m old.

Posted by Violet under Pornography on July 15, 2007, 3:39 pm EST

33 Comments »

That’s the question that faced me earlier this week when I went over to Writhe Safely to see what FlawedPlan was up to. She’d blogged about the case of Simone D., a Hispanic woman who has lost her appeal for mercy — yes, mercy — from the New York Court of Appeals. Simone D. had begged the court to spare her the torture of forced electroshock, and the court said no.

The trivial answer to the question of why we in the feminist blogosphere aren’t on this case is that most of us probably haven’t heard of it. I hadn’t. But the larger question is why: why isn’t this kind of thing on our radar?

Electroshock treatments are a barbarity, a form of medical assault that should have gone the way of the ice-pick lobotomy. I knew that already; what I didn’t know was that it is particularly targeted at women.

But let me back up a minute, because if you’re reading this you may not know that first thing, that electroshock (ECT for short) is a travesty. So a quick run-down:

ECT belongs with that class of psychiatric treatments that includes lobotomies, ice-baths, and insulin shock, all of which certainly have a number of effects on patients, though curing illness isn’t one of them. What all of these treatments do (if we can even dignify them with the word “treatment”) is basically shatter the human organism. It’s like curing a headache by cutting off someone’s head. Lobotomies destroy the brain, insulin shock causes brain and other physical damage, ice-baths terrorize people, and ECT does it all: brain damage, emotional terror, physical harm.

So why do some doctors keep giving shock treatments? For the same reason that doctors kept giving lobotomies and inducing insulin comas: if you can’t cure someone’s headache, at least you can cut off her head.

I knew all that, but what I didn’t know was this singular, terrifying fact which I now call to your attention:

Throughout the history of ECT, one statistic remains constant: Women are subjected to electroshock two to three times as often as men.

That’s from the paper Understanding and Ending ECT: A Feminist Imperative, by Dr. Bonnie Burstow, and I would like everyone reading this to stop now and go read that. Please.

If you’re like me, you will read that paper and the blood will drain from your head and your stomach will knot up and you will think Why didn’t I know this? I should have known it; I should have known all about it. As I said to FlawedPlan, I knew (separately) that ECT was a crime, and I knew (separately) that women have been disproportionately diagnosed as mentally ill, very often simply for failing to conform to patriarchal values. But I had never put those two things together. Hadn’t thought about it. I did not know that ECT has always been overwhelmingly targeted at women and that it is still, today, being used to bully women into obedience.

Go read the paper.

Women being shocked to control their behavior, women being shocked for failure to be “good” wives and mothers, women being shocked for post-partum depression, daughters being shocked on their fathers’ say-so after reporting that their fathers sexually abused them, wives being shocked on their husbands’ say-so because of “feminist-type thinking.”

Women in the hospital for depression caused by a lifetime of physical and emotional abuse, being subjected to a “treatment” that is, in itself, physical and emotional abuse.

Women being shocked by male doctors — 95% of shock doctors are male, 70% of shock patients are female — to keep them in line.

Women being shocked, shocked, shocked, shocked. Even when they go to court and beg to have the torture stopped.

Which brings us back to Simone D., whose appeal for mercy has been rejected.

This is from the dissenting opinion of one of the appellate judges on the case:

Simone D. claimed that ECT inflicted pain on her. So, counsel tried to focus on the pain a patient undergoing ECT might suffer. On a prior petition that did not result in court-ordered ECT, Simone D. had been examined by an independent expert who suggested the alternative of psychotherapy with a Spanish-speaking therapist. [Simone D. does not speak English. –V.S.] This therapy was tried, but for only a few weeks. In an effort to show that this alternative to ECT deserved a longer testing period, Simone D.’s counsel attempted to cross-examine Dr. Brodsky on this subject. In addition, Simone D. had experienced cognitive impairment from ECT, resulting in its discontinuance in 1996. Her attorney, therefore, tried to cross-examine Dr. Brodsky on the extensive course of ECT administered to his client over the years without permanent improvement.

When Simone D.’s counsel tried to ask questions about the physical pain ECT causes, and also about grand mal seizure, the court interceded and proclaimed that it was familiar with the workings of ECT. When counsel sought to elicit information about hemorrhages and the rupture of the blood/brain barrier caused by ECT, the court sustained the petitioner’s objections. Likewise, the court thwarted counsel when he inquired about the dosage and duration of ECT, the Food and Drug Administration risk classification of ECT machines, and the identification of succinylcholine. These were but a few of the limitations the court placed on counsel as he attempted to show that Simone D. should not be forced yet again to undergo ECT. At the conclusion of Dr. Brodsky’s testimony, Simone D. renewed her application for an independent examination. The court denied the application as unnecessary. After closing arguments, the court found that it was in Simone D.’s best interest to administer ECT even though it acknowledged that she would probably never “get better”: “she perhaps could die. Perhaps she wants to die. But that’s not for us to determine. We must prevent her from dying.”

The “court,” you see, knows all about it.

One could almost wish that the “court” would find itself in a mental hospital where no one speaks the court’s language, being subjected to forced shock treatments despite repeated protestations that they don’t work, that they hurt, that they’re destroying the court’s brain, that the court is terrified every time it is strapped to the gurney, that maybe it would be better just to have someone the court could talk to instead, someone who could actually speak the court’s language…

Ahem. Back here in the real world, the Wittenberg Center has a list of New York State officials you can contact to help Simone D.:

** Gov. Eliot Spitzer:
Complete the web form at: http://161.11.121.121/govemail
Phone: (518) 474-8390. Fax: 518-474-1513.

** Lieutenant Gov. David Paterson:
He is legally blind and has been charged by the Governor with dealing with disability issues.
Complete the web form at: http://161.11.121.121/emailltgov
Phone: (518) 474-4623. Fax: (518) 486-4170

** Office of Mental Health Commissioner Michael Hogan:
Phone: (518) 474-4403. Fax: (518) 474-2149.

** Peter M. Rivera, Chair, New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities:
Email: riverap@assembly.state.ny.us
Phone: (718) 931-2620.
Write: 1973 Westchester Avenue; Bronx, NY 10462 USA.

The Wittenberg Center also has some sample comment text you might use and some more background on Simone D.’s case.

Beyond the Simone D. case, there is the larger issue of ECT as something feminists need to address. Dr. Bonnie Burstow writes about the need for us to, first of all, educate ourselves so we can get past the shock doctors’ smug assurance that ECT works. We need to understand that shock treatments are a form of violence against women; we need to deconstruct the medical mythology to see what is really going on.

Some feminists have already done this; I don’t mean to imply that everyone out there is as oblivious as I was. But the modern-day situation with ECT has been largely overlooked by the feminist movement, and that needs to change. The women who find themselves strapped to a gurney with electrodes on their heads are our most violated and vulnerable sisters. That they’re there in the first place — because of post-partum depression, because of sexual abuse, because of a society that condemns non-conforming women — is our business as feminists. And what’s being done to them as “treatment” — strapped down and tortured so they’ll shut up and behave, their pleas for mercy falling on deaf ears — that’s our business too.

A few links on the ECT issue in general:

Electroshock as a Form of Violence Against Women, another paper by Dr. Bonnie Burstow
Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault: Academic Papers
Forced Electroshock, from ECT.org

Posted by Violet under Recommended, Simone D. on July 12, 2007, 1:35 pm EST

64 Comments »

If you are a female human being, you know all about harassment and threats from men. If you are a female human being who’s ever lived in the city, you know in that in the urban landscape, the threat level from men is so high and so constant that just walking down the street while female is orange-level hazardous. There are no “good” sections in the city if you’re a woman; there are no good neighborhoods as opposed to bad ones. They’re all bad. The gibbering assholes own the streets, and every woman is simply their prey.

All of us have imagined to ourselves how things would play out if the shouted intimidation turned into physical assault (that is, those of us who haven’t already had that experience). “I’d swing my backpack at him. I’d kick him in the nuts. I’d fight!” You think? That’s what some women in Greenwich Village did, and guess what? They were sentenced to jail. Sent to jail for years…for the crime of “assaulting” the asshole who’d assaulted them.

I’m going to quote directly here from the excellent summary of the case by Imani Henry:

The attack

On Aug. 16, 2006, seven young, African-American, lesbian-identified friends were walking in the West Village. The Village is a historic center for lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) communities, and is seen as a safe haven for working-class LGBT youth, especially youth of color.

As they passed the Independent Film Cinema, 29-year-old Dwayne Buckle, an African-American vendor selling DVDs, sexually propositioned one of the women. They rebuffed his advances and kept walking.

“I’ll f— you straight, sweetheart!” Buckle shouted. A video camera from a nearby store shows the women walking away. He followed them, all the while hurling anti-lesbian slurs, grabbing his genitals and making explicitly obscene remarks. The women finally stopped and confronted him. A heated argument ensued. Buckle spat in the face of one of the women and threw his lit cigarette at them, escalating the verbal attack into a physical one.

Buckle is seen on the video grabbing and pulling out large patches of hair from one of the young women. When Buckle ended up on top of one of the women, choking her, Johnson pulled a small steak knife out of her purse. She aimed for his arm to stop him from killing her friend.

The video captures two men finally running over to help the women and beating Buckle. At some point he was stabbed in the abdomen. The women were already walking away across the street by the time the police arrived.

Buckle was hospitalized for five days after surgery for a lacerated liver and stomach. When asked at the hospital, he responded at least twice that men had attacked him.

There was no evidence that Johnson’s kitchen knife was the weapon that penetrated his abdomen, nor was there any blood visible on it. In fact, there was never any forensics testing done on her knife. On the night they were arrested, the police told the women that there would be a search by the New York Police Department for the two men—which to date has not happened.

After almost a year of trial, four of the seven were convicted in April. Johnson was sentenced to 11 years on June 14.

When I lived in the city I walked everywhere, of course, because that’s what you do when you live in the city. If I’d been a millionaire I suppose I could have hired a 24-hour bodyguard and chauffeured limo, but I wasn’t a millionaire. And so I had to actually walk on the sidewalk. The constant constant constant constant stream of intimidation and abuse from men was such that I don’t know how I kept my sanity.

One day I lost it.

I was walking to work in the evening in winter, so it was dark, and I was carrying a pair of tennis shoes. A car full of men started crawling the curb beside me, with the guys keeping up a steady barrage of comments on what exactly they were going to do to me and how, etc. etc. etc. etc. It was a small street, traffic was extremely light, and I was the only pedestrian in view, all of which made their behavior even more threatening. I flipped. I was so sick of being harassed, so sick of the fear, so fed to the teeth with the trauma of walking while female, even a barely discernible female wrapped in a winter coat and a huge scarf and wearing goddamn snow boots — aaggghh, even thinking about it now, years later, I shake with emotion. At any rate, a switch went and I erupted in fury. I hurled myself at the window of the car and started hitting at the men with the pair of tennis shoes I was carrying. I think I was shrieking at them to leave me alone leave me alone leave me alone leave me alone!!!!!!!!

And so they did. They sped off, fortunately without killing me first.

In the years since then I’ve marveled several times over what a fool I was. I could have been murdered so easily. “There wasn’t a cop anywhere in sight!” I’ve thought to myself. Irony. The thing is, now I realize that I was a lucky a cop wasn’t in sight. I could have gone to jail. For assault.

via Heart.

Posted by Violet under Gender Issues on July 9, 2007, 12:28 am EST

6 Comments »

A federal appeals court has ruled that people can’t sue the Bush administration for illegally wiretapping them because without having already proven that they were harmed by being illegally wiretapped, they don’t have standing to sue.

Got that?

No, of course it doesn’t make sense. Here’s what makes sense: the judges who delivered this ruling are Republican appointees. Nothing like having most of the federal judgships in your pocket.

Posted by Violet under Just Impeach the Stupid Freak on July 7, 2007, 10:35 am EST

1 Comment »

I’m bored with Shrub’s pardon of Libby. Excuse me; not pardon. Commutation. The sentence has been commuted. No jail time for Scooter, which is a crushing blow for literature fans everywhere who’d hoped he would use his months in the clink to write more novels about children being raped by bears.

Conspiracy-minded folks are indulging in various speculations as to why the Shrub pardoned the Scooter. Was it to prevent Scoot from “singing”? Self-important newspaper folks are writing knowing editorials in which they opine that El Presidente is either exerting his massively erect willpower (still hard as a rock after all these years!) or, alternatively, humbly and courageously following his own difficult path to truth and justice, secure in the knowledge that he’s a lame duck anyway. I read all this and I say: oh for chrissake. We’re talking about Shrub. This is a guy who fries retarded people and thinks the Constitution is a piece of toilet paper stuck to his shoe. Of course he pardoned Scooter. His whole presidency is one giant fuck-you to justice and accountability and basic human decency. He pardoned Scooter because he could. And he giggled while he was doing it.

I half-expected Salon to front with the story today as well, and they do have some opinion pieces on it, but their lead instead is an interview with Paul Davies, who’s still flogging the anthropic fallacy. Poor guy’s been banging on that box for 20, 30 years now; I wish he would find God already and be done with it. You just wanna send him a nice fruit basket or something.

But as I read the Davies piece, I realized that here was the real explanation for the Libby business. The absolutely amazing thing is that if any single aspect of the universe had been even a tiny bit different, the Libby pardon would not have happened. Think about it! If the gravitational constant were just a tiny bit off, if the strong nuclear force were just an eensy bit stronger, if even one trilobite had survived the Permian die-off (or two, rather), if Shrub didn’t have that recurring problem with constipation — if any one of those or a billion other things had been different, Scooter Libby would not have been pardoned. Now what are the odds of all those things coming together by chance? It’s astronomical. There’s just no way it’s all a big coincidence. It’s almost as if the universe were fine-tuned to make the Scooter Libby pardon possible — and not just possible, but inevitable.

Doesn’t that make you feel better?

Posted by Violet under Just Impeach the Stupid Freak, Various and Sundry, Recommended on July 4, 2007, 12:34 am EST

5 Comments »

Fuck off. Go away. Do not post here. If you do, your comment will be deleted.

The intertube is a big place and there are plenty of websites where you can indulge your fetid delusions about how the nigras/Jews/bitches have ruined the world and robbed you of your destiny. Not here.

FUCK OFF.

Posted by Violet under Reclusive Leftist, MRAs/FRAs on July 1, 2007, 8:56 pm EST

Comments Off

It’s time for another episode of “what the fuck is this picture supposed to be?” This small image is the accompanying illustration to a story in NY1 about the ban on trans fats in New York restaurants.

What is it?

My guess: a Max Ernst-style landscape of giant glazed doughnuts under a lowering gray sky.

Any other ideas?

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on July 1, 2007, 5:02 pm EST

11 Comments »