Did you know that rape is a form of casual sex? News to me, too.

Good old Man Boobz has done it again, and lead me to a post I can write about by Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart.

*Trigger warning for sexual assault apologia, and sexual assault stories


She made a “flow-chart” (in scare quotes because it’s…not really a flow-chart at all so much as, I don’t know, vomit with a bunch of arrows? I’m being generous here) in which she tries to show how casual sex leads to “ECONOMIC STAGNATION!!!!!!!!!!” Yes, that is an exact quotation from her chart. And you know, I could detail, as others already have, how problematic it is to assume that something untested and unproven is “common sense”, but that’s not what pissed me off or inspired me to write about it. Rather, it’s that sexual assault is included under “casual sex”.

It gets easier

As a feminist, one becomes more and more aware of our misogynist society and all of the little and big things that help to uphold it. As anyone recognizable as a woman, cis or trans, one thus can no longer accept street harassment as "normal" behaviour. But it's still hard to deal with. Realizing that such people are exercising their privilege and think of you as an object, rather than it being something you've done, doesn't help one deal with such harassment, at least at first.
      

A true account of abortion

I have a story to tell here. For safety's sake, I won't tell who's it is, be that mine, my friend's, my family member's, or some random woman's whom I met on the bus, although I have written it in my style regardless. But I have to tell it because it deals with an important issue to me, made even more important by this story, and it flies in the face of many common myths surrounding abortion. Nothing has been embellished here; it's all true. Some of those reading may know whose story this is, and that's fine, but I'm relying on the relative anonymity of the internet to at least induce enough confusion to protect the narrator's identity.

*Trigger warning for sexual abuse, emotional turmoil, and described abortion

I can't help but cry

I love The Curvature and visit it often. There hasn't been an update in a while and the last post is on the De Anza rape case, an open letter in empathy to the victim since she lost the civil suit too. I had already read it, but couldn't help myself from reading it again. Maybe because the complete lack of justice in this case hurts and I'm still trying to process it, I don't know. But I decided to read Cara's earliest post on this. It's full of rage and understandably so, but coherent nonetheless. I also read the one following it. Cara's been at this case for a while, so I imagine she's still pretty upset by this.

WWII Survivors and their Descendents Oppose Israel's Treatment of Palestinians

*Trigger warning for psychological after-effects on war survivors

As I allude to in this blog's description, I am a woman of multiple causes, one of them being the Israel/Palestine conflict. As a result of being pro-Palestinian, I inevitably discovered Norman Finkelstein, and I have read several of his books and have attended two speeches. It would take an entirely different post to detail my respect and admiration of this man, but that's for another day. I frequent his website and there is an excerpt of a political memoir he's writing. The excerpt focuses on his mother, who survived the holocaust. For the sake of brevity, I have placed in ellipses those parts not relevant to what I want to discuss.

Every night as we watched the news on television my mother would avert her eyes and raise her hand to block the screen when scenes from Vietnam flashed across it. After a few moments the question would invariably come: "Is it over yet?" Not at all given to self-dramatization, she simply couldn't endure the scenes of destruction and death. ... My mother's whole being revolted against it. ...