The Old School Lunch

If there’s one thing you learn about what happens to a country/society/people during and after any sort of conflict or war or series of wars, it’s that violence against women (as it was likely present to being with) leaps off the charts even when things are “starting to get better” (or at least when people think they are). So one of the absolutely worst things a country could possibly do is to purposely hyper-sexualize the imagery and perception of women even more under the guise of placating the anxieties and fears of those inside and outside Israel for tourist dollars: “it’s alright, Israel’s alright..see! We’ve got beautiful women here in bikinis! They’re here waiting for you to take them!”

The longer this Michael Vick thing goes and the more I hear about animal rights activists so loudly saying how evil he is and how he should burn in hell, the more I wonder what these people are thinking when Bosox Julio Lugo takes his wife’s head and slams it on the hood of his car. I wonder where these people are when MLB rising star Elijah Dukes sends his wife a voicemail message of “you dead, dawg.” I wonder where the boycotts and picket lines are when the Denver Broncos give a hefty contract extension to a player who has had repeated run-ins with the law for repeatedly beating his wife.

Dogs don’t deserve the barbaric treatment that they get in these dog-fighting circles, I get that. I get that they can’t speak out for themselves so that’s why people need to do the speaking. I get that everyone is going after Vick because he’s the big, famous target of the most popular sport in America and maybe then people will stop and think before they raise a dog to fight. What I don’t get is how people can prioritize injustices in such a way that basically says that cruelty against dogs is more important of an issue…is an issue that people are more passionate about and organize quickly for…than men’s violence against women.

[Real question that we ask at the New Job, real answer from a single mother]

Q: What do you hope your son or daughter will learn over time from this experience?
A: To learn to respect women.

Q: You sound awful.

A: It’s the flu. I’m getting my ass kicked. I had to take a day off work the other day.

Q: You aren’t supposed to do that, aren’t you? You’re still training?

A: Yea, but if you’re sick you’re sick.

Q: When did it start?

A: Wednesday night, after I watched Transformers.

Q: Transformers made you sick, figures.

A: I thought it was good, actually. I mean, there were some eye-rolling moments with the “it’s gotta be Japanese” lines and “I always fall for the bad boys” moments and such but overall, it was fun. I don’t understand the folks who say “it’s too serious” or “it’s not serious enough.” It’s robots turning into cars and ships, after all.

Q: Didn’t mind all the GMC/Chevy ads then?

A: It’s to the point where I think viewers are used to it. I wish they could’ve been a little more subtle but it’s certainly not as bad as…say the Dr. Pepper shot in Spiderman. I think the ad-campaign by the automakers makes it worse than it is in the movie.

Q: So what’s been new otherwise?

A: Work. An under-wraps project that I won’t talk about at length (and jinx) until it’s out. Ummm, friend’s birthday coming up, so I managed to finally use that Amazon gift cert I had originally saved up for a camera I wanted to buy.

Q: What’d you get for the present?

A: Season one of….a certain TV show. DHARMAINITIATIVE*cough

Q: I hope he’s not reading this.

A: I don’t think he is.

Q: Do any of your in-person friends know about this?

A: No, I doubt it. They’d have to dig around a bit to find it. Or get at it through the Flickr.

Q: Why don’t you want them to read it?

A: Eh, it’s the lesson I learned from the first blog.

Q: You learned a lot of lessons from that “trial” I imagine.

A: Oh yea.

Q: You want to buy a camera? What for? You’ve already got one.

A: The most advertised feature of mine is that it also doubles as an MP3 player. And it was a gift. From my uncle who I don’t like. It’s time for an upgrade.

Q: What are you hungry for?

A: Nachos. Not really. I wish I wanted nachos so I could go get them. I have zero appetite right now. I could’ve gone the entire day yesterday on tea but I forced myself to eat a salad and then a mini-pizza.

Q: You’re about to say something?

A: A certain flickr group popped into my head just now. I posted about it a long time ago, but basically it’s a group called “feminism” and a majority of the photos people add there I have no idea how they’re related to feminism. So someone posed the question in the group…and the first response was something like “women are beautiful, mothers and nature” and stuff like then and then later on a guy chimes in with the old “this is a good discussion to have” and then proceeds to talk about how his photos (almost voyueristic photos of mainly young, white, attractive women) are somehow a comment on feminism. I don’t get it.

Q: People want views and subscribers. Hence they add their photos to every single group they belong to.

A: Yea.

Q: Are you going to talk about Chris Benoit?

A: God. I’ll just say that while i’m not a medical professional and I don’t know with intimate knowledge the effects of steroid use…just the way in which people are making this out to be purely roid rage is just ridiculous. It’s like a bad SVU episode. Society will always find ways to minimize, evade, cover up domestic violence, men’s violence against women, etc. If we suddenly found out that Dubya physically assaulted his wife, people would start saying that he’s just crazy, stupid and power-hungry. While the latter certainly is true for DV abusers, people just wouldn’t say “hey, it’s a man hitting a woman.”

Q: In Dubya’s case it seems like they’d concentrate on him though and not “the victim” which is unusual for how society reacts.

A: Right, it’s a different case because obviously the man is who he is. But in either way, it situates the abuse in a certain way to avoid looking at it directly. It’s like taking a side-glance at Dubya and focusing solely on him to avoid even considering that it’s indicative of a larger societal problem.

[Because apparantly every Amish kid during Rumspringa starts smoking]

The first time I put Devil’s Playground in my netflix queue, they sent me the wrong DVD. It was Devil’s Playground, alright, but it was some weird 70’s movie about some dark night at a church.

Anyways, this time I got the actual documentary and some interesting things I learned:

1. The Amish aren’t necessarily so anti-technology as people would believe. One guy cites an example of how an Amish community could potentially embrace a solar-powered battery charger while completely dimissing cars and motorcycles. It’s not so much about hating anything that require electricity as opposed to seeing how certain new things could negatively impact the “slow down, enjoy the scenery, don’t obsess about material things” community attitude.

And, unfortunately, that’s about it. I can’t name anything else. This was a very disappointing documentary because I feel that it could’ve been so much more but concentrated to exhaustion on the teen partying/drugs/alcohol “I want freedom” one-sided aspect of it while almost completely ignoring anything that has to do with gender, sexism, or race. I don’t know, but when in the beginning you have an Amish girl saying something along the lines of “you’re supposed to have kids until you can’t have any more” and “women are the weaker sex so they don’t do men’s work” it’s probably something to follow up on as the kids venture outside into the world. They do sorta get into it with that Velma/Verba character but that’s more of an “I want an education and career and choices” thing (though she does say that if she returned to the church, she’d have two kids by now) but it’s not nearly enough or specific enough. The documentary does dangle some bait at you though when one Amish girl says “during Rumspringa, the boys dress in English clothes but the girls usually still wear the traditional clothing” at which point you’d think “hmm, the filmmaker probably asked a follow up asking why, right?” Wrong. No follow up because either they didn’t think it was important or they wanted us to come to our own conclusions which I think is pretty lazy documentary filmmaking.

And race. I have a hard time believing that a kid growing up in an Amish community who is suddenly thrown into the “English” world doesn’t have any sort of questions or experiences regarding race. There isn’t one single mention of race anywhere in the documentary and actually I don’t think I saw any person of color in the entire film. Emma comes the closest because I suspect people will think she’s mixed American Indian or something but even that’s a huge stretch. The kids didn’t make one sort of comment like “woah, there are all these different kids of people in the world” during the entire filming process? Really?

[From the NetFlix queue]

Completely disturbing, refreshing, brilliant and utterly depressing: Maxed Out

Makes me want to rethink that new digital camera purchase…

For people to stop buying his crap.

[Jeff Passan, thank you]

A while ago, I wrote about how in professional sports, crimes like domestic violence, rape and sexual assault aren’t taken seriously so much as they’re immediately forgiven if not ignored by the teams, the players, the fans and the media. In the bigs of the NBA, the MLB and the NFL, male athletes who commit domestic violence against their wives or girlfriends are especially given little (if any) penalty or consequence. In other words, the sports world condones the abusive behavior of their male “role models” with their silence and unwillingness to act and speak out against violence against women.

One of the things I pointed out was that while most people in the sports world (and world in general) say “hey, it’s not my business” or “let the law take care of it,” the reality is that every single person in any aspect of the NFL, MLB or NBA can play a part in confronting it. I said very specifically that it is absolutely crucial that sports news agencies and sports writers do not hesitate to write, follow up and make harsh judgements about batterers because when you’re not squelched by Bud Selig or David Stern, you can say what Jeff Passan boldly is in effect saying about Dukes, the Devil Rays and the MLB in his Yahoo! sports column: you’re all full of shit if you’re going to let this guy threaten to kill his ex-wife and do nothing about it.

There aren’t many sports writers with the guts to be honest and say something like this but i’m glad that for today at least, someone did.

[But I guess they can’t since the new blog disabled comments]

Back before I joined forces with November P. to create Hollaback PNW, I was in charge of the mildly disastrous Hollaback Seattle. People still comment on the Seattle blog but mostly on a certain post in which I talked about sexist (and homophobic and racist) t-shirts (which was also cross-posted at Shrub.com and my old blog).

Deciding to include sexist t-shirts as part of Hollaback Seattle and Hollaback PNW is not something that I just did on a whim. The hollaback “formula” if you could call it that, is very clearly concerned with street harassment as its roots are in the subways and sidewalks of New York. I whole-heartedly believe in that mission but to me, wearing a t-shirt that says “millions of myself died on your daughter’s face last night” or some shit is very, very similar to a guy saying “millions of myself died on your daughter’s face last night” (i’m going from memory, but that or something similar, is an actual t-shirt that was sold by a certain website). It’s not the exact same thing, but it’s along the same type of thinking that I was willing to put emphasis on that as a part of what Hollaback PNW does.

The folks who stumbled across the Seattle blog and read the post, don’t really agree:

A frequently overused cliche unfortunately applies here: Lighten up. A T-Shirt isn’t the same as sexual assault, and suggesting otherwise is bullshit — just ask anyone who’s been a victim of the real thing.

People that wear shirts like that make themselves look like assholes. Stop worrying that they don’t respect you; it’s clear that they don’t respect themselves, and they’re doing you a favor by letting you know that they’re not worthy of your respect either.

First of all, I never said that a sexist t-shirt was the same thing as sexual assault so immediately you’re reading something other than the actual post. Second, though it could in theory be sometimes convenient to know that an asshole is an asshole if he wears so on his t-shirt, in practice that’s ridiculous because it just excuses any sexist, racist or homophobic behavior and place the responsibility on the others to just walk away or ignore it.

I feel strongly about this so I felt the need to comment, despite how long it’s been since this has been posted..

I don’t get the big deal. My fiancé loves Tshirt Hell and I also find the contents humorous. I can understand why you are insulted, but you need to understand -it’s a joke-. People who actually mean the things on the tshirts, for example “I belong in the kitchen” with a picture of a girl on it, are indeed assholes. But you have to understand that the shirts are purely sarcasm and poking fun at stereotypes and how seriously they’re taken.
People take things so seriously that saying a word that even suggests anything automatically makes you racist, sexist, or a pig. But it’s not the word. It’s the person.

Tshirt hell is purely for the sake of being controversial. I dislike disrespectful tshirts, but when I do they’re actually being serious and mean what the shirts says.

There is a huge difference between seriousness and sarcasm. You kind of jumped right over the line and assumed that all of it is serious. For example.. Do you seriously think someone really means it when they say they like women ground up in the freezer? I mean god. When you read ‘like I like my coffee’ you think of something normal, warm, maybe sweet, but when you see the back you get something gross and shocking. It’s purely for kicks, for reaction, for shock.
My love of my life also has that shirt and it made me laugh. (he’s no pig, he’s no brutal being, he’s gentle, sweet, and shy, and very kind.) He bought it because he loves sarcastic jokes, and he likes controversial things.

You can hate all people who mean it, all people who wear things that make a statement about the way women should be or stereotypes about other groups.. But be careful before you take it seriously. Not all of those shirts are made to be anything but laughed or gaped at.

So…as long as I preface anything I do with “this is meant to be controversial…I know people aren’t going to like this” i’m out of the woods? Well, then I guess I can go ahead and print those hilarious VT shooting t-shirts i’ve been thinking of because after all, i’m just that much of a “rebel” who doesn’t care and I welcome the big old controversy storm and since I consider myself such a softie on the inside, who cares?

And no, I don’t think people mean this seriously but it doesn’t mean that it’s not offensive. I can’t make this any clearer. Most so called jokes that end up being incredibly offensive to different groups aren’t meant to be serious but what they talk about isn’t a laughing matter. It does not in any way excuse the joke from being a piece of shit or the joke writer from being a piece of shit.

But going back to my hilarious VT t-shirt idea…I wasn’t being serious, I swears! I’m just being sarcastic and witty and pushing the envelope. I mean seriously, can you imagine a comic appearing on the Tonight Show and attempting to make a joke about VT? Any joke. Can you in any capacity see a joke that wouldn’t get a reaction of stunned silence if not a hurtling of boos? It’s because a joke about VT wouldn’t be the least bit funny. We all agree that it’s a horrible tragedy because people died, people were hurt, people suffered in unbelievable ways. Why don’t we think the same way when the jokes are about men killing women, domestic violence or rape?

But that’s only a certain portion of the offensive t-shirts. Many of the t-shirts in question don’t make fun of murder, DV or rape but objectify and degrade women through crude sexual jokes of the most Kappa Kappa Gamma variety. And with this people say, “well, it’s not MURDER is it?” which again, i’m exhausted having to say this again and again to these folks: you cannot compare this oppression with that oppression and say that since once is worse in your eyes that the other doesn’t matter and doesn’t deserve airtime. If people really thought like this, we’d roll our eyes when a kid got into a car accident and broke a limb and talk about how a kid got cancer in Mexico and then talk about how kids in North Korea don’t have food to eat and then kids in Africa don’t have food to eat and are made to be child soldiers.

What i’ve learned from this t-shirt thing is this: people don’t and will not take it seriously (all the t-shirts, from the DV to degrading frat jokes one) because most folks are hell bent on comparing EVERYTHING to do with women as “if it doesn’t involve a vicious beating and rape that resulted in death” then it’s not worth talking about. Realizing that this is how our society situates violence against women, oppression of women is pretty fucking infuriating and depressing because it’s a way of the patriarchy building giant roadblocks in front of itself: it stops people from ever digging deeper when they’re convinced that this is what oppression looks like and anything else is just being too sensitive, if not paranoid.