Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
News
Breaking News: Dwight DeLee, convicted of manslaughter and not murder for killing Teisha Green, did get the maximum allowable 25 years in jail today, + 5 years of supervision after his sentence.
Here’s the AP version of the story, & here’s the Essence magazine article about Teisha Green, by her mother.
(h/t to Andy Marra of GLAAD & TLDEF)
There is too much rape in the news coming out of Africa, but this story, covering the recent spike in male rape victims, should be required reading. It’s not easy to get through.
Aid workers struggle to explain the sudden spike in male rape cases. The best answer, they say, is that the sexual violence against men is yet another way for armed groups to humiliate and demoralize Congolese communities into submission.
And as with female rape victims, the male rape victims are mocked for their suffering:
But nobody knows the exact number. Men here, like anywhere, are reluctant to come forward. Several who did said they instantly became castaways in their villages, lonely, ridiculed figures, derisively referred to as “bush wives.”
Gender-baiting is a worldwide fucking sport, and it tires me. These poor guys. That said, this phenomenon certainly is another excellent argument for why we should give a shit when women get raped – because obviously, gender stops mattering and a whole country is being traumatized.
(another h/t to Sarah)
Roger Cohen followed up his column mentioning the women of Iran with a column about them entirely:
A friend told me he no longer recognizes his wife. She’d been of the reluctantly acquiescent school. Now, “She’s a revolutionary.†I followed as she led us up onto the roof. The “death to the dictator†that surged from her into the night was of rare ferocity.
Very much worth reading – go check it out.
There are so many articles about the protests in Iran, but in a sense, this photo says it all for me. (Image from the TimesOnline.)
Oh, Ken Zucker decided to mess with the wrong person when he sent Lynn Conway a letter accusing her of libel. She has, in turn, filed an official complaint against him.
You can find the actual letter here, along with all the supporting evidence. The short version can be found in this article on Queerty.
He was a brave man, an abortion provider in Kansas who’d been shot before, had his clinic bomed. Mike Hendricks of the Kansas City Star pretty much sums up how he was murdered, & by whom.
I’ll have more to say about choice, abortion providers, & violence, but for now I’m just sad & disappointed.
If you’re angry, send a letter of support or a donation to your local Planned Parenthood.
Fairfax High School elected a male student Prom Queen.
Tom Ackerman, a gay man, has vowed to call his friends’ wives their girlfriends, because he’s decided his religious views don’t allow him to recognize opposite-sex marriage.
The New Scientist tells you everything you ever wanted to know about female ejaculation (& maybe a few things you didn’t want to know).
A woman named Brenda Lee got dragged bodily off of Air Force One when she tried to give President Obama a letter asking him to stand up for heterosexual marriage.
Publishers Weekly reports from the BEA that US Publishers have vowed to fight digitized piracy.
In a not an unironic juxtaposition, Epistemology of the Closet author Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has died at the age of 59. Without her, there would be no Queer Studies.
While most of us were having a day on Monday, and many of us were celebrating victory in Vermont, one mother lost her child because he was bullied and taunted for being gay.
Enough of this. We have to put more pressure on school administrators to do a helluva lot more when it comes to school bullying.
The other part – which we don’t talk about often enough – is why homophobia is still allowed to go unchecked amongst the middle school set, and how we might prepare kids who are being gender-baited or gay-baited (whether or not they are queer) to deal with it.
There’s been a lot going on:
Quite a week for the LGBT community!