Recommended Reading

Two posts about recent rape stories to add to my post earlier this week for Blog Against Sexual Violence that will piss you off:

In line with the way the Air Force handled the rape survivor who decided to decline testifying, a rape victim was arrested for--get this--having sex with minors. (via F-word)

So a woman reports being drugged, then repeatedly raped by three teenagers. Those teenagers video the attack, and post it on YouTube. She is initially too scared to report the crime to the police, but eventually does so. No charges are brought - against the teenage boys. But she is charged with sex with a minor and perverting the course of justice. Her own children have been put on the Child Protection Register.

And via Feministing, an appeals court decided to uphold the choice of the Nebraska judge who banned the word "rape" from his courtroom, making "sex" and "intercourse" the terms used to describe the rape. So much for getting people past the misconception that rape is about sex, eh?

Why calling out misogyny matters (via Feministe)

This is why I continue to call out the use of misogyny and sexist insults in this campaign. It’s not so much that I’m defending Clinton (though I think she’s getting an unfair shake in the media and in the blogosphere, and that annoys me), but that I’m calling this shit out because this shit hurts women. Women like me. Women like many of you. Women like your daughters, your sisters, your mothers, your friends, your spouses, your SOs. If it’s okay to dehumanize a US Senator and presidential candidate as “that thing” or dismiss her as “that bitch,” or set up a 527 called “Citizens United Not Timid” (aka C.U.N.T.) to “educate the American public about what Hillary Clinton really is,” then we now have an environment in which it’s okay to dehumanize, demean and diminish ordinary women because they’re women.

This is a great post not only about the misogyny against Sen. Clinton, but about how women are discounted, dismissed, and insulted everyday and all this Clinton crap is just the public face of a culture that does not take women seriously.

Media Watch: Dunbar Village (via Racialicious)

And excellent recap of the defense of the rapists in the Dunbar Village incident by the NAACP and Al Sharpton, who are protesting the rapists' arrest because they out to be treated the same as in another incident involving white individuals. As Racialicious argues, no the cases aren't the same, this isn't an issue of race, and you're just protecting rapists and basically looking like an idiot (my words).

Women Want Their Sexuality Back -- Now. And Opening Marriage Just Might Help. (via Huff-Po)

A great post about how both the cult of virginity (ie Purity Balls) and the valorization and objectification of hyper-sexuality in young women operate on the same logic: they both subscribe to the notion that the aspect of a woman's life and identity that is most fundamental and valuable is her sexuality--and that it doesn't belong to her. It belongs to her dad...or to all men as a (privileged) class. We should neither reject having or abstaining from sex because of what it says about us as women, we should do what we do because we own our bodies and our sexuality. A snipet:

I epitomize a woman who demands control over her own sexuality. That terrifies people. And rightly so. Once we girls refuse to think of ourselves as nothing more than receptacles for the male sex organ, then we are free to spend less time tossing our hair and more time tossing out the trash who are serving in office, making the laws, presiding over the bench, and generally perpetuating the myth of woman as helpless toy.

What some people fail to understand though is that women having control over their own sexuality (let alone their bodies and their minds and their lives) benefits everyone because those women have the opportunity to be whole women. And no self-respecting man should want anything less. No more guessing what she's thinking or what she wants. No more living with someone who has become so programmed to ignore her own desires that she doesn't even remember what they were. No more wishing you had an equal but pretending you wanted Barbie.

I used to be upset by the people who called me a whore and said they pitied my husband. "Who are you to think you deserve to be happy?" their comments seemed to say. "How dare you want to be fulfilled sexually? You're just a woman," I heard them whispering between the lines.

How do class and race affect different women's approaches to sex work? (via Why I Hate Fun)A really interesting post that discusses the discursive production of prostitution as liberatory is a (white) privileged position that some sex workers are fortunate enough to be able to take, and is one that ignores the situations and experiences of women of color in the industry for whom it is nothing close to a "choice."