April 2011
March 2011
“
A friend of mine has an American boyfriend, who once said that he always had figured that the odds that his girlfriend wouldn’t have sex with him (or have huge hangups about it) would be around 50-50, and I never really understood why. I think I unconsciously imagine American culture as “just like ours except everyone speaks English” (I’m Swedish), probably because American media is everywhere here and thus kind of feels like “home” even though it’s not. I know the gender roles are a bit different but that didn’t seem to be the whole explanation. I thought there must be something else going on, but I couldn’t figure it out.
Then, I started reading http://www.fugitivus.net/ and Tiger Beatdown, and I learned just how hard it can be for Americans to get birth control, plan B or an abortion, even though they’re legal. Here, there are youth clinics that seem pretty similar to PP, except they are not controversial at all. You will probably visit one as part of sex ed around 8th grade. Abortions are free up to a certain age (18 or 20 or something) but even when they’re not, they won’t cost more than 300 SEK (around $45). Minors don’t have to notify their parents. Birth control is subsidized and you can get free condoms from the youth clinics. Some people dislike abortions, but they have no political influence, and absolutely no one thinks the plan B pill is immoral.
Several of my friends have needed plan B, some of them while minors, and they just went to the nearest youth clinic and asked for it. No charge, no hassle, no protestors, no conscience clauses, no having to travel hours and hours just to find a clinic. Just swallow the pill, withstand some friendly teasing and get on with your life.
I think this difference between American and Northern/Western European women’s lives is absolutely fundamental, and to me it completely explains why my friend’s American boyfriend expected that girls wouldn’t sleep with him – not because they wouldn’t want to or because American women are more sensitive to pressure from gender roles, but because they would be taking a huge personal risk. I totally get why a lot of people wouldn’t be up for that. (It also explains why some Americans want to use condoms and the pill at the same time – before understanding your lack of abortion access that seemed pretty paranoid to me, but now I get it!)
I try to imagine not having access to affordable birth control or abortions, and it’s a horror movie level of scary. Just imagining that someone could impregnate me against my will and not being able to do anything about it… holy shit.
” —AK, a Swede, commenting on the reproductive rights situation in America, on the Tiger Beatdown post
“I am with Jo in that I live in the UK and am very grateful that I do. I watch the healthcare debate in general and the reproductive rights debate in particular in the States in horrified fascination. That a country which thinks it is the pinnacle of the civilised western world quite blatantly denies its citizens healthcare – AND THINKS THIS IS OK – is mind blowing. And that is before we even get to the reproductive healthcare argument. Our political system is bad over here, but the US political system is beyond description – who are these people (mostly men) who keep getting elected? Why do they get elected? Do people not vote? Or do they vote in an uninformed way? What is going on?”
—MatariJ, commenting on the Tiger Beatdown post (bolding mine)
“We live in a culture of reproductive violence against anyone who can get pregnant. And so, so much of the violence is invisible, even to the people who experience it, because it’s normalized. When my boyfriends tried to pressure and coerce me not to use birth control, it was a form of violence. When I was raised, as a devout Catholic, without any reliable or scientifically accurate information about abortion and birth control — when I was encouraged throughout my own life to value my health less than I valued fetuses — it was a form of violence. When condoms broke, or guys “accidentally” had sex with me without condoms, and I was treated with hostility and shamed for being upset about it, it was a form of violence. When I wasn’t given information about how Plan B worked, when I was told it was “a form of abortion,” when information proving that wrong wasn’t widely accessible to me, it was a form of violence. Having to go 45 minutes away to get it? Violence. Not being taught, as an essential part of self-care, where to access it? Violence. I should have been told “it is a normal part of self-care to brush your teeth, shower frequently, use tampons or pads, always use birth control and to know that Planned Parenthood will give you emergency contraception for $15,” ALL of those messages should have been TOTALLY NORMAL AND WIDESPREAD throughout my adult life, but they weren’t. Not being given appropriate instructions for how to take the pill, or being prepared for or warned about its potential side effects, and experiencing intense physical discomfort with no warning? Violence. Yeah, obviously, being slut-shamed and thrown out of a clinic was violence. But everything that occurred along the road, everything that got me there, was a totally normalized form of reproductive violence, and I didn’t see it, because no-one ever told me to identify it as violence when it happened.”
—Tiger Beatdown: On Rape Culture and a Culture of Reproductive Violence
The horrors for Eman al-Obeidi, the woman who accused Gaddafi’s soldiers of rape to a hotel-full of journalists just keep getting worse →
thedailybeast.com
From the Daily Beast:
Now the men Eman al-Obeidi says raped her are suing her. In Libya, as across much of the Middle East, rape victims are doubly traumatized. After their assaults, they are shamed—even murdered—for destroying the family’s honor.
“Women still suffer from outdated cruel concepts that a woman who was raped brought it on herself,” Sarah Leah Whitson, a Libya researcher for Human Rights Watch, says. “She may as well go hang herself because who is going to marry her now.” […]
Libya has no constitution, and the death penalty applies to anyone caught advocating for a constitution. With no fair laws on the books, women are left to suffer from social codes that are often lethal. […]
In the chaos of Libya today, two doctors working in the eastern city of Ajdabiya have reported that they’ve found condoms and Viagra in the pockets of Gaddafi’s dead soldiers, which they believe indicates a premeditated intent to rape. One physician, Abdul Rahim Aquila Najib, told Al Jazeera, “The Gaddafi soldiers have said that those of your women who celebrate loudly, we will come and we will rape them.”
Another quote:
Because rape victims are at risk of being killed by either their families or that of their attackers, Libya sends victims into social rehabilitation centers. Women, even children, who have been raped, are sent away for “moral” re-education. The only way out of such centers is to marry your attacker. This is a solution some Libyan judges mandate. In a 2005 report, Human Rights Watch documented a girl in one such social rehabilitation center who had tried to defend herself against rape by wielding a kitchen knife. She was charged with assault.
“The problem with ‘gypped’ is both that it includes a racial slur, and that many people are not aware that the term is a slur. So people tend to avoid ‘Jewed’ because it’s obviously not an acceptable term to use, but they may pick up ‘gypped,’ having heard it around and used in the same sense; it’s abstracted from ‘gypsy’ so they may not realise they’re using a term referring to an actual group of people, and that furthermore, the term embedded in the slang is not just an identity, but is actively offensive (think of ‘I got kiked’ instead of ‘I got Jewed’).”
—
Language Matters: No, ‘Gypped’ is Not a Good Alternative to ‘Jewed’, by s.e. smith at this ain’t livin’ (via adorianmode)
My history teacher actually mentioned this once. Like, really. I was pleasantly surprised.
(via technicolortimecoat)
Because I’ve always seen it spelled “gipped”, I didn’t really make this connection until fairly recently, but yeah, I need to avoid this term.
(I’ve never heard “Jewed” used as a verb, either. I didn’t know that was a thing. But then again I have heard “so-and-so is such a Jew”, which is pretty much the same thing, so…)
(via pseudo-tsuga)
I have seen some seriously awful racist vitriol thrown at Roma people, and that was just on the internet. IRL they are still a very marginalized and discriminated-against group. Don’t say “gypped,” kids.