Category Archives: OMFG!

Double Standards, Evidence Collection, Female Privilege, Gender Stereotypes, Gynocentrism, Male Disposability, Male Privilege, Men's Movement, Misandry, OMFG!, Rape Culture, This Is What Sexual Entitlement Looks Like..., Uncategorized

IT’S SHIT LIKE THIS, FEMINISTS – This Is Why Male Rape Survivors Don’t Come Forward (or Gendered Victim-Blaming)

33 Comments

Background: James Landrith was a 22-year-old active duty Marine 25 years ago when he showed mercy to the pregnant wife of a friend and sheltered her for the night, and then awoke to find her straddling him, with his penis in her, raping him. She threatened him with rape charges if he ever reported her rape of him. He knew he – a fit, young Marine – would have exactly zero chance of ever being believed, and even if her were believed, of ever having her rape of him regarded as rape. He was in the real rape culture, where women have unimpeded access and a full right to a man’s body.

He finally went public in 2008 and posted this article on his blog. Then it was picked up on Pajamas Media, a rather right-leaning group blog. The comments section became a cesspit of knuckle-dragging victim-blaming and sexist denialism, led by quite a few men, although one especially toxic commenter was a woman. Naturally his strongest supporters were female rape victims.

And just to prove there is no daylight between right-wing gender traditionalists and radfem gender traditionalists, at least on the subject of rape, this has kicked up again. This time the knuckle-dragging rape denialist man-haters came right after James:

Well, today I was treated to some of the worst victim-blaming I’ve received yet from rape denialists and self-appointed gender police. I’m so tired of this garbage. Why is this okay? Why is this tolerated? Why are so many people still pretending that this shit doesn’t happen to male survivors as well? I’m over being nice. I’m over tolerating the excuse-making bystanders and the colluders. I’m over all of it.

THIS * is why so many male rape survivors stay silent. THIS is why so many of our lives end prematurely and violently – especially those who deal with MST (Military Sexual Trauma). THIS is why most of us will NEVER tell ANYONE. THIS is why so many of us will never heal. THIS is why it appears that so many male survivors seem absent in the fight against sexual violence. Not only do we have to fight against the same victim-blaming from low IQ knuckle-dragging troglodytes that female survivors deal with regularly, we are also targeted often by women who have decided that men can’t be raped and if they are – then they are liars who must be bullied, mocked, harassed and shouted down into shameful silence.

 

* Yes, these links all go to James’ article. I couldn’t get to the sites he was linking to because of a filter issue but even if I had been able, go to his site anyway. He deserves the hits.

James continues:

I’m trying not to hate. I’m trying to calm down. It is going to be really difficult. I don’t know how successful that will be going forward. People are too damned evil and some of them are just plain worthless. Male survivors, just like our sisters in healing, have a lot of work ahead to fight these types of sick, disgusting, worthless excuses for humanity. For now, I’m just going to have to feel these emotions and try to keep on target. I’m not going anywhere and I’m not shutting up, but I am pissed off and beyond my levels of tolerance for disgusting asshattery right now. Please understand and let me breathe through it. I’m not sure how not to be pissed off right now. I need to accept that.

This all happens in a wider context of trivialization of male rape, smearing of male rape victims as liars, whiners, less-than-men or right on to accusing them of being the rapist in the rape, as John Markley catalogues here. How’s that for victim-blaming and rape denial and rape apology?

As John goes on to say, “Like many feminists, much of what Murphy says parallels traditionalist attitudes, but here mere parallel gives way to outright convergence.”

This is the issue for feminists: If these vile rape apologist articles are not representative of feminism, then feminists need to say more than “That’s not my feminism.” – much more. Because we are not talking about your precious feminism, we are talking about everyone’s feminism, the feminism of all feminists, and if this is in some way unrepresentative of the movement as a whole, then feminists need to say explicitly that this anti-feminist and that these people are anti-feminist, that they are not feminists at all. Anything less is solidarity with these vile, contemptible people if you still, despite failing to condemn them, call yourself by the same title they call themselves.

So far though it has been a womanist rather than a feminist who has been the clearest on the issue of male rape victims. Not a surprise, really.

Misogyny, OMFG!, Uncategorized

MISOGYNY – Magdalene laundries: Ireland accepts state guilt in scandal

40 Comments

Get ready for some rage.

For decades in Ireland, beginning in 1922, women were detained, sometimes for most of their lives, for having babies out of wedlock or sometimes just for being “morally wayward”. These women were not free to go, worked for no wages in unfit conditions as laundry workers and often were denied any contact with the outside world, including their families. The government was deeply involved in this, at all levels, all along. Now finally that same government is accepting responsibility and trying to help the survivors.

There. Got through that.

This is some pretty extreme hatred of women’s sexuality.

From the article:

“Established in 1922, some of the Magdalene laundries were still in operation as late as 1996. Half of the women incarcerated in these institutions, which washed clothes and linen from major hotel groups and even the Irish armed forces, were under the age of 23.”

And:

The key findings are:
• More than a quarter of the women held in the laundries for whom records survived were sent in directly by the state. This numbers at least 2,500 women.
• The state gave lucrative laundry contracts to these institutions, without complying with fair wage clauses and in the absence of any compliance with social insurance obligations.
• The state inspected the laundries under the Factories Acts and, in doing so, oversaw and furthered a system of forced and unpaid labour, in violation of countless legal obligations.
The report also investigated the role of the Gardaí in pursuing and returning girls and women who escaped from the Magdalene institutions.”

Words do not fail. In fact they are responding so energetically that they have to be kept in check.

This is some pretty extreme hatred of women’s sexuality and you have to ask where this really comes from. It’s not like male sexuality is exactly celebrated either in that culture. This culture and its attitudes are plenty familiar to a lot of Americans. Plenty of shaming and punishment to go around. The standard explanation, because patriarchy, is a just-so story with no real explanatory power.

This is what I think: This is the face of deep-seated self-hatred, the kind that infects an entire community after centuries of defeat and degradation. Vae victis*. Thank God the sun is rising finally.

 

*Vae victis: “It sucks to lose”

Double Standards, OMFG!, This Is What Sexual Entitlement Looks Like..., Uncategorized

DOUBLE STANDARDS – Hillary Clinton trashes whiners

7 Comments

A big part of the gender discussion is identifying and decrying double standards. This is a story about someone doing just that.

This time it’s feminist icon Hillary Clinton telling women to stop whining about their own life choices. Suck on that, all you Hillary-haters.

Secretary Clinton made her remarks perhaps in reply to but certainly in the context of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s recent article in the Atlantic “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”.

That article was all about double standards, as in moaning that there wasn’t one in this case. The base assumption was that men can go out and work 80 weeks and center their lives around career ambitions and then come home and have a family life, but poor, oppressed women don’t get to do that. When they go out and have careers, they get “penalized.” And it’s just sooooo unfair!!!

The truth is that men who work 80 – or 90/100/120 – weeks and center their lives around their careers do not have any kind of family life and what little they have they have at the sufferance of the wives they are supporting, and they can be dismissed from these lives at a moment’s notice by their wives completely unilateral decision. The wife they have been supporting will be deemed the “primary caregiver” (even though she couldn’t even caregive herself well enough to be self-supporting) and that will be dispositive in awarding child custody – and there goes his right to raise his children, there goes his family life. So no.

That article was attacked for its privilege blindness in complaining about the trade-offs women have to make, as if men haven’t been making the same trade-offs for centuries, generally without anything like the same degree of choice.

Quoted from the Marie Claire article:

“I can’t stand whining,” Clinton told Marie Claire. “I can’t stand the kind of paralysis that some people fall into because they’re not happy with the choices they’ve made. You live in a time when there are endless choices. … Money certainly helps, and having that kind of financial privilege goes a long way, but you don’t even have to have money for it. But you have to work on yourself. … Do something!”

She goes on to say that different people can handle different levels of stress and complexity and that’s about that – something she should know quite a bit about.

Evidence Collection, Misandry, OMFG!, Posts by Commentators, Rape Culture, This Is What Sexual Entitlement Looks Like..., Uncategorized

MISANDRY – How a real feminist responds to gross, dehumanizing misandry

195 Comments

Commenter Marja Erwin posted a comment that included this very interesting link. She tells us she got into a flamewar over it. I’ll bet she did.

The comic shows a young woman on a park bench doing something on some kind device. A man who she thinks is “Eeeewwww….gross!” sits down and looks at her. She pulls out a gun and splatters his head in a spray of blood.

Oh the righteous female anger of the oppressed raised in opposition to hegemonic masculinity.

Under the comic and a comment about it, Valerie Keefe makes a comment of her own. She slams the comic and the commenter, calling one one or both “cissies”. (Best new word of the week)  That’s gets it exactly right.

Commenter Stoner With a Boner said:

I know it’s just a comic but….
The “reaction” is WAY outta proportion to the “crime.”

Crime? What fucking crime? A man sat next to her on the same bench. The horror!
He was using the term “crime’ metaphorically as part of a set phrase, but the comic does in fact treat a man daring to sit next to a young woman as a crime worthy of summary execution.

You know where this kind of thing is considered a crime or some kind of gross offense? In India, as when an Untouchable or someone too far down the caste scale gets too close to some high-caste person.

And that’s the mentality we are seeing here, a gendered caste mentality, the notion that men are unclean and horrible just by fault of existing and that a girl has a God-given right to kill a man just because she feels like it.

This is a KKK mentality. There was a time when a black man presuming to sit down next to a young white woman, as in the cartoon, was taking his life in own hands, or more likely just throwing it away.

The comments on this were a zoo. More than one idiot called thought to point out that this was “just a joke”, that pathetic weak old tired lying excuse, that she didn’t actually kill anyone. I don’t see how they get that interpretation, and I don’t see how that matters except to expose their own man-hatred and how dishonest they are willing to be to excuse man-hatred.

This is as far down the road of toxic damseling as you can go, as deep the Pure Vessel Victorianism as you can go.

Read Valerie’s comment in response. As usual Valerie Keefe lays the smacketh down on exactly the right spot.

Valerie, you say stuff like this makes you feel ashamed to call yourself a feminist. I say your response to this should make you feel proud to be a feminist.

Evidence Collection, Gynocentrism, Misandry, OMFG!, Posts by Commentators, Uncategorized

MISANDRY – Dismissing women’s rape of boys

126 Comments

Commenter MaMu1977 left one of his very powerful comments in Typhonblue’s post “Male Privilege: Slut Shaming”

 @Ginkgo

“Got lucky”?
In my 33 years on this planet, I’ve known 7 boys who have killed themselves as the result of adult women/young boy relationships. Two of them killed themselves to get away from their “loving stepmother”, two of them committed suicide after they were convinced that they’d be accused of rape if they ever left her, and the other three killed themselves when they were dumped and suddenly realised that they were persona non grata among their female peers. I won’t even go into the details about how every “pussyhound” that I’ve ever known was introduced to sex by a (much) older woman. There may be fewer female pederasts than male, but the females get coddled and protected from punishment while the males are (at the very least) warded away from their targets.

 You can try to dismiss an account like this with “data is not the plural of anecdotes” but then the burden of proof is on you to show how MaMu1977 is not a good sample, that his observations are anomalous.

Remember his account the next time you hear some moron claim that child rape hurts girls worse than boys. Does anyone have any stories of girls committing suicide as a result of having been raped as minors? I am sure there must be some, just never heard any.

And what’s going on with this?

Two of them killed themselves to get away from their “loving stepmother”,

Where were thier fathers in all this? Obviously the boys were living with their fathers if we area talking about step-mothers. Why did their fathers entrust them to this degree of abandonment to women who were not their mothers? This is as bad as when a mother lets her boyfriend/husband-of-the-month or whatever abuse her children.

I apologise for my fervour, but I’ve lost friends to this dynamic (in comparison, even the girls who I’ve known who were engaged in similar age-disparate relationships tended to muddle through.) Yet, we live in a world in which the same women who worry about whether Justin Bieber is going to dip his wick in the wells of his underage fans, seemed to see nothing wrong with a movie like this…

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_(film)

I think moderation would be something to apologize for.

And for the record, Justin Bieber was accused of having fathered a child by a grown woman who would have been a child rapist if she had in fact not been lying – it’s telling that she thought she could make a claim like that and not be risking rape charges.

Now that’s a real rape culture.

Misogyny, OMFG!, Sigh, This Should Not Happen

MISOGYNY –The Religious Right and Military Medicine; Rape and the Military Abortion Ban

73 Comments

Here’s an example that I had no reason not to know about and yet it wasn’t until someone pointed it out to me. This was in the local paper the other day.

 MG Donna Barbisch (Rtd.) wrote a very sober and modest opinion piece that pointed out that military women who get pregnant by rape are not able to get abortions through the military medical system. I know all the justifications for this, and they are all unacceptable and self-serving and dishonest.

For those who don’t get the scope of the problem, let me lay out a few facts. Military members on active duty must use the military medical system. The first is that the military medical system is the only provision the military makes for service members’ health care – there is no choose a health plan and then go find a doctor you like. Second, even stateside there are strict restrictions on using civilian medical care because the service views your body and your health as their asset and doesn’t want either exposed to treatments they don’t control, so that even if you are willing to spend your own money, it is prohibited.  Third, this military care is something the military and the nation owe to service members. It is our obligation them.

So this situation is disgusting.

Two things stand out immediately about the article. The first is the very narrow scope of what the general is asking for. She is only asking for abortion coverage in cases of rape, and she bases this only on coverage already afforded civilian federal employees. That is almost scathingly modest, basically an accusation of depraved dismissal of what these service members are owed in basic support of the force.

The second thing that stands out almost as an accusation is her moderate tone. She argues in very clear and detailed arguments why military women need this coverage, why they are entitled to it, and then goes on to justify this by citing the debt we owe our sldiers, etc., etc…… basically coming down to the plain old ingratitude of the American people towards soldiers in imposing this ban on abortions for rape victims, when to me the only sensible response to this kind of ingratitude and misogyny is a………much less nuanced.

How bad has it gotten when an officer is reduced to this pleading tone? It reminds me of pleas I remember from childhood against segregation. The tone tells you what kind of mad dogs the writer has to placate.

How did this absurd situation even come into being? Certainly an abortion ban, even a general one, was NOT put in place to promote military readiness, since in fact it decreases readiness to have soldiers pregnant or tied down with an infant at home. You would expect the military to be pushing birth control and encouraging abortions when that failed simply as an organizational policy if readiness were the overriding consideration.

Well, we all know where this comes from. This comes from exactly the same place the anti-gay policies and even the supposed mitigation, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, come from – the insistence of some civilians to make the military dance to their religious tune. This has nothing to do with civilian control of the military – civilian control of declaring and ending wars, civilian control of funding, civilian control over appointment of officers – do you see anywhere in this where a civilian has any interest in a soldier’s abortion or in a soldier’s sex life or life partnership? This is not a new attitude at all; this is why when COL Beckworth opened a whorehouse for his troops because he got tired of the STD rate in his units, it was considered very daring, even during Vietnam.

I have news for these people. Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are not your property. You are not the customer who gets whatever she wants because the customer is always right. Don’t make your religion into public policy and we won’t make a public issue out of your religion.

Oh, and generally in matters of abortion, I think the father should have some say into what happens to what is after all his child. Not here. Rapists have no say, not fathers who are fathers because of rape or mothers who got pregnant by raping a man and who are expecting child support to raise children they should never have custody of. That’s what I think of the rapist’s rights in this.

MG Barbisch goes on to say that there is a legislative fix for this embarrassment coming together. Good.

This whole mess comes down to two things: failure to respect military people as fellow citizens and broken trust. Both are immoral.

Gender Stereotypes, Misandry, OMFG!, Rape Culture, The Gender Lens, Uncategorized

RAPE CULTURE – Rape Culture on Steroids and Sociopathic Self-Excusals

41 Comments

Want a look into the mind of a rapist waiting to happen? Here she is.

This article is not about one particular rapist-to-be and sociopath. Those we will always have with us. This article is about the structures in the culture that enable and license this particular rape culture. Let’s look at her own words to see how many we can identify:

By way of context, let’s start where she does:

“Frequently, I tell my friends that my life is a bad romantic comedy. There’s plenty of comedy, little romance, and never a happy ending.

 

This has become all the more apparent as I have attempted to make sex a regular rather than sporadic occurrence in my post-30 life.

 

I swear that I have managed to meet the only 200 men on the planet who actually say “No” when you ask for sex. (Of course I’m exaggerating. I don’t think I personally know 200 men that I find sexually attractive.)”

She then continues:

“Of late, I’ve had more than a few homegirls tell me about the negative reactions that they have gotten from men they were casually involved with, when they tried to prioritize sex in the interaction. Apparently, even when these brothers weren’t all that interested in a relationship, they took it as a serious blow to the ego, to find out that sisters just wanted to engage them for their bodies and sexual talents.

 

And in the classic fashion of those with privilege, they played the victim, changed the rules, and refused to give the thing they had the power to give. In this case, sex.”

Get that? Refusing sex is an assertion privilege. She’s entitled to his body. This is rape culture distilled down to one sentence, this is the mind of rape culture and she has the mind of a rapist.

This really does show the power of a limp dick though, doesn’t it? Some people seem really angry with it; maybe they see it as a real threat to their privilege. And by any sane measure, claiming an entitlement to sex with someone whether that person ants it or not, is an expression of privilege.

She goes deeper into this:

“I have a strong personality, I’m outspoken, and smart. Whatever the fuck Steve Harvey says, I know some brothers have found it intimidating. Denying sex becomes an easy way for men to let you know who’s boss.”

What does this sound like? This sounds like every man who has ever said the same about women withholding sex, only when men do it, it’s an expression of privilege. You, know, the “average frustrated chumps” that society mocks and sneers at, virgin-shames, and all the rest. Note how here she says exactly the same thing, but frames it as though she’s the one being dominated. Toxic femininity much?

The self-delusion or complete inability to hear herself or whatever it that is going on here just gets thicker:

“I wish I had some pithy insights about how to negotiate this madness. For instance, I know these kinds of stories make pro-sex feminists (of which I am one, very uncomfortable). In a system that highly constrains choice, agency is a precious commodity, and no one likes to feel like they have no agency. And that is how this shit feels on many days.”

Agency. She’s the righteous victim because she is being denied agency over someone else’s body? Because that agency over their bodies is rightfully hers, not theirs. That should go without saying. /s

This is how utterly deaf to her own self-contraction she is:

“In my twenties, men exercised male privilege by demanding sex or moving on to women who would give it to them. Now that I’m in my thirties and dealing with older men who are not the horn dogs they were in their twenties, they want to slow down and be substantive.”

Wait, so how is she now not exercising privilege by demanding sex? Oh right – she’s the eternal underdog; she can do whatever she likes and it’s justified.

Then just to cement her victim status moral position, there is the claim to mind-reading, on grounds of “truth to power” racial moral superiority, the all-knowing underling trope; in this case the ability to know exactly what some group of people are thinking and dealingwith, whom she probably has only workplace interactions with.

“This is the kind of ish that professional women of color confront on our journey to trying to find the balance, the all, that highly educated professional white women rarely have to think twice about. {Good reply here though.} I mean, fuck ALL. Can I just get some?!”

Well yeah. Have you ever thought about PAYING for it, like all those privileged men? Probably not – that ticket to free sex you have between your legs has probably privileged into irreparable blindness.

Anyway, how is she going to know what “highly educated professional white women” think about? Well, instead of guessing, she might read some of their whining “where are all the good men” articles that have practically become a literary genre unto themselves. Just a thought.

As a parting shot, she wraps herself in the mantle of the righteous warrior battling insurmountable odds.

“But I know my desires are healthy. Human. Holy, even. I also know that #AClosedMouthDon’tGetFed. So I have no choice but to keep asking, hoping that in “asking, it shall be given, that in seeking I will find.” And along the way, I will remember Joan’s most important words from Emotional Justice: ”I try to be as fearless as possible in my love practice.” Word. May courage be my angel.”

So the whole article just reeks of specious moralism in the service of an almost sociopathic sense of her own entitlement and denial of these men’s subjectivity and autonomy – objectification taken about as far as it can be taken.

Now let’s look at the structures in the culture that enable and license this particular rape culture , the structural elements of her argument. By structural, I mean memes in the culture that support and encourage her attitudes.

One is the sense that it is somehow courageous for a woman to want sex and to say so.
Another is the sense that “whatever Lola wants, Lola gets”, not just entitlement princess entitlement, but also the idea that the measure of real man is how well he pleases a woman.

Then there is the hoary old patriarchal macho trope of the ever-ready, sex-crazed animal that we know all men really are, so when he is not interested in sex, he really is but he’s just denying me for some ulterior reason.

There is damseling in presenting herself as “fearless in her love-practice” as if her rape culture mentality is heroic, as if she is engaged against huge oppressive odds. Because not getting laid on demand is such an oppression, you know.

Then there is the melodramatic moralistic language. Quoting Jesus in defense of her sociopathic sense of entitlement to other people’s bodies is pretty brazen.

But most of all and foundational to all of it is the insistence on her own victimhood, and to the morally superior position that victimhood confers, as a basis not only for her dehumanizing and objectifying rapey demands but also as moral justification for them.
These are the poisoned fruits of victimhood, and they are hanging all off her whole article.

We can see immediately that these are structural elements of the female gender role as it is constructed in patriarchal, at least Western, patriarchal culture, (if that happens to be a type of jargon that speaks to you.)

And hat tip: I picked this up on Reddit, r/mensrights, where the comment thread was good.
Commenter TarcyMorganFreeman notes:

“One of the most ironic things I expect to read today, possibly this week.”

Eh-yup.

This is what it comes down to:

“[–]ErikAllenAwake 20 points21 points22 points 2 days ago
I am drowning in the irony of a woman blatantly saying “Those with privilege play the victim” and immediately playing the victim as a reaction.

 

permalinkparentreportare you sure? yes / noreply
[+]gege33 5 points6 points7 points 2 days ago (0 children)
[–]gege33 5 points6 points7 points 2 days ago

Didn’t you hear? Men can never be victims. /s”

And women can never have privilege and can never misuse it. In fact they are immune from ever doing anything wrong to a man. Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.

Misandry, OMFG!, Uncategorized

MISANDRY – Encouraging Sign – Noted Feminist Demolishes Pro-circumcision Arguments

38 Comments

Catherine Bennett, a well-known British feminist, has an op/ed at the Guardian that is to date the sanest, calmest, most complete and most unaswerable treatment of the circumcision question.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that a feminist is saying these things. Feminists got on the right side of this issue from the very beginning, or many did. But more importantly the vocabulary of concepts for discussing infant MGM as a form of misandry and a human rights abuse comes out of feminism, all of it. Thank you feminists. Thank you feminism. Now shout down those people who dismiss concerns about circumcision as trivial or somehow misogynist(!) as anti-feminist.

Can I get the MRAs to say “Thank you feminists. Thank you feminism”?

The comments are the usual hot mess of misinformation, disinformation, hysterics and then sweet reason counter-attacking. The op/ed is good, but the comments are where the real meat is.

You get all the usual idiocies: MGM is in no way analogous or as severe as FGM, how dare you compare them? FGM is equivalent to penectomy, not circumcision. (This one is just straight anatomically illiterate.) Circumcison is sacred, how dare you try to ban it, how bigoted of you. Then there is the intentional and misleading conflation of infant and thus  nonconsensual circumcision with adult circumcision. It’s all the usual dishonest tricks.

It should amaze me though it does not that anyone can argue for infant circumcision as a religious right, that they can assert their own individual rights, in complete disregard of someone else’s individual rights. People should be reminded that they live in some rather fragile and exposed glass houses.

Gender Stereotypes, OMFG!, Uncategorized

Pair Bonding

15 Comments

It seems to be controversial for some people that humans are a pair bonding species. Here’s a little piece of anatomical evidence that supports the contention that humans are pair bonders.

How do you get males to interact with you on an emotional level and as a person, maybe even get one of them to commit emotionally to you? You evolve breasts that look like ass cheeks so they will come around front and look you in the eye, at least for a while.

I don’t know what category this goes in, evolutionary psychology or evolutionary anatomy, but then again in this case there may be no separating them.

 

Gender Stereotypes, OMFG!

DOUBLE STANDARDS – Ain’t I A Woman? – 2012

17 Comments

Here’s a disgusting story. It happens to be out of Georgia, but it is certainly not something peculiar to Georgia. It illustrates a general pattern in how gender norms and privileges apply, and to whom they apply.

This is what happened. A kindergartner threw a tantrum in school, the police came and zie didn’t calm down in time, the police handcuffed zir and took zir to jail. No one got hurt or was ever in any real danger of getting hurt. Who knows what triggered the tantrum, or ever why a kindergartner even especially needs a trigger to throw a tantrum. A kid has a right to act like a kid now and then.

Three guesses as to the gender of the kindergartner, and the first two don’t count. Were you right? If you were wrong, actually you were not all that wrong and this is why:

We are all used to stories of little boys being punished for things little girls do also but don’t get punished for – two kids hug in school, the boy gets suspended and the girl doesn’t. That kind of thing is just standard data, happens every day all over. No news. It’s an example of female privilege, undeniable female privilege. When is the last time you ever heard of a little white girl being treated this way?

But in the US, being female is not enough to get you female privilege. You have to be white too. That’s who gets all the press if she disappears – natalee holloway – if if she gets murdered – Jon Benet Ramsey. Those are the deaths and kidnappings that are trruly tragic. Buti if you’re not white, you can’t really be fully female in our gender system and you don’t get the same kind of notice, and your misbehavior is not going to get the same kind of understanding and leniency, and wrongs commited against you are not going to evoke the same level of outrage. Sojourner Truth saw this more than a century ago and called out an auditorium-load of high-minded white women on this. They couldn’t be bothered to answer her, however much they cheered her. Maybe because the answer was so obvious.