Why I Fight (the trolls)

I spent this weekend high on painkillers while trying to pass a kidney stone, arguing with strangers on the internet. This may seem like the least productive weekend a PhD student could possibly have - I didn't get a scrap of my own reading done! So, why on earth did I spend all this time in a vortex of hundreds of comments?

The first thread of comments I engaged with was an argument with a man who saw himself as qualified to give safety advice to women. At the outset, I responded assuming that he meant well, but that his privilege was showing prominently. As the thread went on, it became clear that he did not care so much about our safety but about his apparent right to be right - even, in one astounding comment, asserting that a black friend cannot possibly be a black woman, but is merely saying so for rhetorical purposes. Feminists can play that game for as long as misogynists can, and we did. Hours of back-and-forth commenting later (I have never been called a liar quite so many times, in quite so irrational a manner), he left, and I vowed to leave the group.

Then another thread popped up.

The UBC Take Back the Night March had, reportedly, some issues with including trans* folks. That was apparent from the event page itself - the wording was problematic in the way that revealed that organizers likely saw trans women as something other than, well, women. At the very least, it was clear that they hadn't done their homework, and that making a safe space was not a priority for this event. I didn't attend the actual march, but one attendee posted voicing her disappointment with the way trans* voices were silenced. I cannot comment on what was or was not said at the march itself; the commenting maelstrom that followed was, to say the least, everything but inclusive.

At issue here was the inclusion of a group called Vancouver Rape Relief in the rally. VRR has a problematic legal history of having excluded Kimberley Nixon, a trans woman, from their volunteer training group on the basis of her trans history. Their own website makes their position on the case clear. After a lengthy legal battle, the courts decided that VRR could legally decide who was and who was not a woman for the purpose of their peer counselling programs.

As a cis feminist who is absolutely committed to equity and justice for all women, I am appalled at their implication to decide who is and who is not a woman. Their decision to exclude Nixon from their work indicates that she was not enough of a woman for their purposes. This sentiment is not something that was simply buried; it is not a small fragment of VRR's history. This is something that came out, repeatedly, in the comment thread I was arguing in over the weekend. Several commenters claimed that including trans women as volunteers would undermine their peer counselling approach, because it was based on having a common experience, from birth, as women.

This idea of a common women's experience is what I particularly wish to address, now that I am not (kidney) stoned.

As a white, middle-class cis woman, raised in a feminist household, I would never presume that I shared a common girlhood with women who did not have the privilege of food security, a stable home, not being subject to racism, and being embraced as a girl from the day I was born. I don't remember ever being told by my family that I couldn't do something because I was a girl - those sentiments were new to me when I went to school. When I briefly aspired to be a pro baseball player, my family signed me up for preschool t-ball in the park. My t-ball failures had nothing to do with being a girl, or social prejudices, and everything to do with poor hand-eye coordination (something I still lack). I honestly do not remember being faced with sexism until I was nearing puberty. The other privileges I was born into diluted the privilege I did not have. Layers of privilege inform how and when women experience sexism. It is far from purely a function of how doctors judge what we have between our legs as infants.

The other point that commenters brought up was that of reproduction and relationships. To many of them, a common women's experience consisted of dreaming of weddings from a young age, or fantasizing about what to name our children. Anyone who has read this far will probably realize that - shock! - neither of those experiences have anything to do with being cis. I can say that from a young age, the idea of a wedding filled me with trepidation, rather than girlish dreaminess; even before I had a word for "lesbian," I imagined myself marrying a woman and I knew, somehow, that this would mark me as different. As I grew older, I learned that I could not legally marry - and that stung.

As for reproduction, well, not all cis women experience childbirth. Experiences of pregnancy intersect with those of abuse for some, but not all, cis women. No, a trans woman would not have the experience of growing a baby inside her uterus - but is that really the marker of womanhood? The millions of women who are not mothers, or who are mothers but do not give birth to their children, would likely disagree. Cis privilege lets cis women claim ownership over experiences such as motherhood - but they are not universally ours, and they are not exclusively ours. Women experience motherhood in myriad ways.

So, hopefully I have made a solid position for how I believe that cis women and trans women are all women, are all equally women, and can be peers - just as much as, say, women of different sexual orientations could be peers. I do wonder how the VRR supporters in the thread would have responded if someone had substituted the word "trans" for "lesbian" and "cis" for "straight" in their comments.

So, why do I fight if it is inflammatory? Well, I am fighting precisely because it is inflammatory. In fighting, I am trying to build fires, rather than extinguish them. Before I face a comment wall accusing me of arson, I should point out that these are metaphoric fires - and in this metaphor, fires are a good thing. Bear with me.

This is inspired by Khelsilem Rivers' metaphor of decolonization as the regeneration that happens in a forest fire. Persuading VRR to rethink their policies is not decolonization, but it is regeneration, and it is change. With leaves burnt off and trunks laid bare, we can see the fundamental similarities that unite us as human beings, rather than the cultural meaning that we have attached to various aspects of our bodies. Fire is also a source of community; it allows people to come together, to have dialogue, and to heal.

I engaged with these commenters because they are people who care, passionately, about eradicating violence against women. I hope they can begin to fight for the rights of all women, and fully include all women, rather than just those they feel they can relate to the best. I argued because we are all survivors, and we are all afraid, and often in pain from that. Not all of these women are trolls, even though some of them were awfully abusive to the trans* folks in the thread. They were arguing to defend an organization that quite possibly saved their lives. As a survivor, I respect their fear. Some of these women participated in other threads that denied rape culture, and we were a united front. I hope one day to see them defending trans women as vigorously and passionately as they'll defend cis women.

It takes a long time for sparks to ignite a pile of soggy wood, but when we are cold, it is worth it. I hope the dozen or so of us who kept commenting have inspired at least some thought, some reconsideration, from other women on the thread. After a few days of arguing, I am out of matches - but if I have to, I'll whittle another one.

Skirts don't cause rape. Rapists do.

A series of sexual assaults at the University of British Columbia are all over the news this week, and tonight some students held a rally to speak out against rape culture, and protest how police responses focus on women's actions (I did not attend this event, so I won't be speaking about anything that happened on campus this evening).

The comments on the event's Facebook page, however, are troublesome. In responding, yes, I fed a troll. Sometimes, though, the trolls dig up the skeletons that people with privilege hastily and improperly bury; we might as well dust off and reconstruct those skeletons, and have them out in the open.

"What if the sexual assaults were actually murders? Would we be mad at UBC telling us to be careful? Absolutely not. We would be vigilant and would see it more of just trying to protect ourselves."

I firmly believe that if these assaults were murders, the campus would be in lock-down mode by now, until the perpetrator was found. Security would be exceptionally visible. At present, it is not - I went to UBC for a concert on Saturday evening, and never once saw a police officer or security guard. Police telling students to be careful is unhelpful. Students know to be careful, but many of us have learned the hard way that being careful is not enough to prevent rape. 

One young man posted an article that pointed out the commonalities between all the victims thus far. According to 24hrs.ca, "all the victims were women, they were all wearing skirts, and they were all approached from behind." The man who linked to this article used this information to encourage his peers not to wear skirts, for the time being, and vehemently (albeit ineffectively) defended his position against the numerous people, myself included, who objected to this.
 
"If black people wearing hoodies, and only them, were being targeted and beaten by a random attacker, would you criticize someone who said "wearing hoodies for the time being is a bad idea"?"

Newsflash to this man - people did make such suggestions after Trayvon Martin was shot. But those suggestions, like his point about skirts, miss the point entirely. Trayvon's murder was not about his clothing, but how a violent man perceived his clothing in connection with his race. These sexual assaults are not about women wearing skirts (and indeed, that detail could just be a coincidence), but about the assumptions that a potential rapist makes about women wearing skirts, and about women in general. If everyone executed by a prison firing squad was wearing an orange jumpsuit, surely we would recognize that the problem was not the uniform, but the prison system itself.

"Sure, we should educate men not to rape. But what do we do with the mentally unstable, who can't be taught? What should the women do during the time in which education is still being applied and the unstables are still out at large?"

I am concerned about the implication that "unstables" "at large" are generally responsible for sexual assault. People who have mental illnesses are, by far, more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crimes. As well, many rapists do not necessarily have a mental illness, but instead grew up in a culture that normalizes sexual assault. Or they may have a mental illness, but that illness is not likely the cause of their violence. That being said, someone who attacks strangers certainly has a problem.
We need to support one another. We need to check in with our friends, and make sure that they are safe. We need to create a safe space for survivors of violence who are triggered by these events. Women walking at night don't need to be told to stay vigilant - most of us already are. And note that the women who were attacked fought back. Women are going to keep on fighting back, but we shouldn't have to fight alone. Yes, this man may have a mental illness, and this is exactly why there need to be better social supports and community services. It's unlikely that this was someone who was never troubled before and then, out of the blue, started attacking women. We need an infrastructure that will notice warning signs of people who might become violent, and intervene before they hurt somebody.

“Often being vulnerable is one of the characteristics. Maybe if they were intoxicated? That’s another way of a person being vulnerable.”

So says psychologist Bill Coleman. What he ignores is that an entangled rope of rape culture and misogyny make women vulnerable. I don't know if the women involved in the assaults at UBC were drunk, but intoxication is beside the point. Being intoxicated makes everyone vulnerable - but without rape culture, that vulnerability would be an increased risk of choking and accidents, not violence.

So many people are painting this as a matter of one violent man and a handful of unfortunate, vulnerable, or careless women. There seems to be this myth that rape culture is only applicable for things like "date rape" (I hate that term), or parties where young men "take advantage" of intoxicated girls. Rape culture is more than that. Rape culture is when men make suggestions about women's behaviour, without offering tangible support, joining us in resisting, and asking what they can do to help. Rape culture is pretending that this is an individual issue, rather than a systemic one, and ignoring where systems of privilege intersect. Rape culture is when trans* voices are pushed out of the conversation. Rape culture is when people argue that attempted rape, or non-penetrative sexual assault, is "not as bad." Rape culture is when white men ignore black women's experiences of their gender and race intersecting and contributing to violence. And rape culture is not abstract. Rape culture does perpetuate rape. If you are laughing at it or denying it, you are part of the problem.

Thoughts after camp

This was not how it was meant to be. In May, the mountain was a haven, and a place of understanding, more or less universally. This camp was largely that way, but for one fellow camper who shattered my sense of safety.
Everyone else said she is a good person who merely said inappropriate things and has a crass sense of humour. And yes, of course she is a good person. Good people, however, do fucked up things sometimes. When I saw her bothering another girl about her introversion, her facial expressions, her mannerisms...it looked more to me like bullying than horsing around. But it was the rape jokes that were hardest to hear. The threats were not genuine, but they were still disturbing. Oddly, the girl who was the target of those words insisted she was not upset; perhaps she was too drunk to recognize how bad those words sounded. Perhaps because we are women, it did not seem so serious. She saw herself as a bystander who should have intervened when the noise of their conversation kept me awake, and she apologized. But I saw myself as even more implicated, feeling too vulnerable to stand up and stop the hugely problematic things that were being said.
The others in the cabin were supportive, and fabulously so, totally there for me when I panicked and felt triggered. It was jarring to feel that triggered in what is otherwise a safe space, but I was relieved that most people there were focused on helping everyone feel as safe as possible in our cabin. I told a counsellor (for those unfamiliar with A-Camp - yes, we have counsellors, even though we are adults. And this is why we have counsellors. The staff are part of what makes this camp so safe, and so cohesive). She intervened, and the jokes stopped, but my sense of safety did not fully return. I cannot trust someone who says such things, even in jest, while intoxicated. I am saddened that none of us had the strength to discuss, in that moment, why this was problematic. I am worried that we see such "jokes" as commonplace, as innocent, rather than as a manifestation of rape culture. And it hurts to see this happen in a space that is otherwise so focused on safety, and that has otherwise been nothing but affirming to me as a survivor. The laughter and joy and pride and love at camp was there, but had to coexist with the vigilance, analysis, and fears that I had hoped to leave at home.

[I could easily write a gushing post about everything that was absolutely right about camp, and that I loved. I did overall have a wonderful time! But this here is my safe space to talk about things that aren't ok; people who know me in the real world have undoubtedly heard me pontificate about the good stuff almost endlessly, but I have not been as vocal about this part of the weekend]

The sign on the door will not protect you

It seems like every few months I have a discussion with friends about safety, and bathrooms. Whether we should have gender-neutral bathrooms in public places, what this should look like, and so forth. I think whenever such topics come up, others are surprised that I'm in favour of gender neutral washrooms, even if this means not having a dedicated women's washroom. Likely they assume that as a rape survivor, I'd feel safer peeing in a space where men are not allowed.

Now, on one level they are right - I don't like multi-stall washrooms in general, because I don't feel safe there. Often the stalls go only partway to the ground, leaving lots of potential for someone to spy under a door. And that's just weird. So it is uncomfortable, but I've gotten to a point where it is less uncomfortable than a day-long persisting feeling of needing to pee.

So, why don't I mind men being allowed in the washroom? First of all, I don't think it's my right to decide who is a man and who is a woman - these are mutable identity categories. While I am not in a headspace right now to find research on the matter, I do know that many people are harassed or assaulted for not conforming to binary gender norms, and are not safe in any multi-stall public washroom. Gender-policing is more dangerous than the potential of a man in a women's washroom. I would hazard a guess (and please do point me in the right direction for studies on this matter!) that there are more transphobic bigots out there than there are perverts who go into women's washroom for a thrill.

In this statement I am absolutely not denying the violence that women can and do face in public washrooms. However, the sign on the door is not some sort of force field. It cannot protect us from violence. Men can enter the women's washroom in most public buildings fairly easily, and often might not be noticed (I should also acknowledge, of course, that not all sexual predators are men!). I know this personally. I was raped, by a male student, in a women's gym changing room in my own high school. Was he allowed in? Absolutely not. But this did not stop him. The little woman/superhero-in-a-cape sign on the door is meaningless to someone who intends to rape. He cared only that I was alone in a space; a gender-neutral space might actually have been safer, as more students sharing it would minimize the likelihood of me having been alone as the after-class slow-to-dress straggler.

So, an unsolicited element of my own experience, perhaps. But I don't want to see friends boxed into washrooms where they face transphobic violence all in the name of protecting survivors such as myself. We need to crush rape culture, but gender-policing peeing people is not the way to do it.

3652

That's how many days I've had this blog for (for the mathematically challenged, that's 10 years, less a day).

I'm doing a PhD in history. Studying change is something that I do. Studying stagnation, too. In 10 years I've seen change in the world, and I've seen it stagnate and go flat. Nothing changes, yet nothing stays the same. Same old story, what's the use of tears? What's the use of praying if there's nobody who hears? Turning, turning, turning turning turning through the years.

When I started this blog, it was all about me; my healing, my pain, my challenges. It was a private place; my mother knew where I kept my diary, but didn't know where to find me on the internet. Now, it's about bigger things, although the political is still very personal for me. Ten years ago, rape culture certainly existed, but wasn't labelled as such in popular discourse. The internet has given us a place for dialogue and social growth, but it is also a minefield, a sinkhole, a crevasse. Ten years ago, a teen was raped, but cell phones had no cameras, teens did not have Facebook, and text messaging was rare. Today, one click of a camera changes and ends lives. Perhaps it can bring justice, but not before bullying, stigma, and constant torment. The aftermath has changed immensely over the past ten years, and I cannot fathom how my horrors could have manifested themselves differently had they occurred in 2013, not 2003. Turning, turning, turning through the years; minutes into hours and the hours into years. Nothing changes, nothing ever can. Round and round the roundabout and back where you began.

Violence today has taken over the media; bombs went off in Boston at the finish line of the marathon, exploding bodies and changing and ending lives. Got me thinking about violence, and how we react to it as a society. Sudden violence brings sudden attention; everyone is asking whether the people they know in Boston are OK, clarifying the situation on the news. But not all violence is as explosive. People talk about rape how they talk about faraway violence in faraway wars - distant, abstract, a crime against bodies that are not our own. Civilian war casualties and rape survivors are unknown, anonymous, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time; implicitly, people who did something wrong. Ten years ago, I hid my pain, my shame, my fear. I pushed it away from my mind for as long as I can. I talked about SARS, the illness that was terrifying Toronto, and not about the social ills that had hurt me. I talked about the war in Iraq, and not about the war and violence that is wrought daily on people closer to home. I had no words to talk about how I was hurting, and could only talk allegorically, abstractly.

Shootings, bombings, even natural disasters bring dialogue. It strikes at people that it could have been them, somebody they knew. And people talk about that. Rape is different. We hear about teens who have had their lives torn apart, but if people are thinking, "that could have been me," we don't say so. People talk about an abstract girl, usually one who did something wrong, a girl who should have, could have, done something differently. That girl is also me, could also be you. We are surrounded every day by people who have experienced horrible violence, and we are silent. Around the world, people die in wars with nary a mention in the media. But there is a war on our own soil, in every country in the world, and it's not the "war on terror." We are at war, in terror, changing our lives to avoid rape, averting our gaze while talking about rape in the assumption that it always happens to someone else, never to me, never to you. Invisible, silent, anonymous, insidious violence. It is probably eating somebody near you, consuming from within.

We see the blood, the physical manifestations of violence in Boston. But the explosions in the heart of a survivor, the daily amputations of parts of the soul - those are invisible. The marathon runners who witnessed and experienced trauma in Boston today will have a venue to talk about their fears, their pain. All violence is horrible, yet some violence is privileged in its social reception.

I do not mean here to silence the violence experienced by civilians targeted in war or terrorism, but there are parallels. We are abstract and silent on the massacres of people of colour in places far away. We are abstract and silent on the sexual violence faced primarily by women in places close to home. The emotional rawness that we see in discourses of non-sexual violence affecting people of privilege is absent when violence affects us at our most marginalized. Rape culture is silencing survivors, enabling and perpetuating violence. I have not lived in a war-torn nation. I fear that it may be appropriative to suggest that rape culture is a war, so this parallel is certainly problematic. Yet, with the barrage of abuses it entails, rape culture situates women's bodies, and other bodies that don't conform to hegemonic masculinity, in an abstract nation, far away. Like war, rape culture normalizes violence that happens in a far-away, abstract place. Like war, rape culture gives a louder voice to the perpetrators of violence than to its victims.

I've survived the past ten years. Personally, I've moved a long ways. I've won a battle. I am, and we are, still at war.

Must we always be at war?

Round and round and back where you began.

This morning, this appeared on my Facebook:

"The Day I Taught How Not to Rape"

I had several amazing teachers in high school. But this was not a conversation that we had. Ever. It was something that didn't happen to "people like us."

I can't help but wonder if this sort of discussion could have saved me from so many years of struggle.

Latest Case in the News...

I've been meaning for a few days now to post about the Steubenville case. I have, however, been too overwhelmed by other things to put my thoughts together coherently.

Other bloggers have done it, and quite well. See, for instance, this powerful post: http://rantagainsttherandom.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/so-youre-tired-of-hearing-about-rape-culture/

Of course she doesn't touch on everything - rape culture is far more exhaustive than any one post can portray it as. It is so insidious it is hard to sum up in writing.

I think the thing that hits me, when I read about Steubenville in the media, is that it's so much more than this case. This is the case that went public. These dramas are playing out around the world in courtrooms...and those are the minority that ever make it to court. Rape culture surrounds us. This is just its latest public manifestation, and we can watch people be outraged for a couple of weeks before it is slipped back under the rug, invisible, insidious, omnipresent, and hurtful.

A few more links...and corresponding ranting

I haven't written much of my own stuff lately, although I have something in the works.

In the meantime, here are a few things to read/see:

This graphic shows the magnitude of rape, and how often it is for rapists to actually be jailed...as well as showing those who are falsely accused (hint: very few!). I can't comment on the accuracy of the statistics, and indeed lots of comments on the Washington Post, where I have linked to (comments have huge potential to be triggering due to victim blaming and sheer dismissal of rape survivors), dispute the numbers. OK, so the quantitative picture may not be exact. But qualitatively speaking, it's pretty clear what the general trend is here.

Another recent must-read is Soraya Chemaly's latest post. Again, a huge potential for triggering as it talks about rape unreservedly, and with a few graphic bits. But she eloquently pulls together what's happened in India recently with rape culture as a more global issue, that recognizes India's tremendous problem with rape culture without giving an undeserved cookie to other countries that have perhaps less dramatic, but nonetheless heinous, examples of rape. The absence of justice for rape survivors is globally pervasive, and the situation is worst in countries with a more patriarchal political and judiciary system. And perhaps culture...I hesitate to talk about "culture" as I am not an anthropologist and it's hard to talk about culture without seeming racist. And India has such a diverse group of cultures. So I don't know whether the issue of "Eve-teasing" (read: everything ranging from garden-variety sexual harassment, down to fetal gang rape, smooshed together under one blanket that suffocates and minimizes the issue as something natural for men to do) is cultural, terminologically speaking. But the vary idea that there is one singular thing of "Eve-teasing" is symptomatic of something being very, very wrong.

I digress. On the flipside to Chemaly's piece, there is Doug Saunders' recent commentary, looking at the same issue. He makes a good point, but I feel like he exaggerates the extent to which Canadian and other "western" (problematic concept...) feminists dismiss the movement in India as just part of a global trend. One could read that into what Chemaly's post argues, but she has more nuance than that. India is an extreme example, yes - but it's not an exception to an otherwise feminist, well-behaved world.

A few more articles/blog posts for tonight. Kate Adach at Higher Unlearning (might be triggering for sexism and some violence, although it's not specifically about rape "jokes") blogs about sexist "humour" and why it sucks. She makes some good insights; I'll leave that for you to read. She also touches on issues of silencing, which led me to think of this piece on xoJane about everyday sexual assault/harassment in a bar setting. The author, who was groped in a bar by a drunk stranger, talks about how she wasn't sure how to interpret his actions, even to herself, so ended up mostly keeping silent and justifying it with light humour, as though it's no big deal. And perhaps for her, his touch wasn't a huge deal - but it's symptomatic of systemic issues that are a huge, huge deal. Silence is political. Humour is political. I don't mean to condemn her for keeping silent; whenever this happens to me, I don't usually bother telling people either (and, of course, she went along to blog about it; while she says she was silent and "did nothing about it," she did quasi-anonymously tell the internet. I'm sure most of us respond in ways fairly similar to hers (minus the blogging, presumably, for most folks?)...and in doing so, we perpetrate rape culture while being at the receiving end of it. It's a horrible place to be put in. If we speak out, we are "those women" who can't take a joke, who make everything in to such a big deal, who are unable to cope with the realities of our world. But if we are silent, it keeps happening. Do we let it keep happening, or are we tacitly forced to sweep it under the rug as a survival mechanism? Perhaps that's a blog post for some other night... (in the meantime, for some middle ground and a way to anonymously break the silence, there is always the Everyday Sexism Project [some posts there may trigger]).

Silence...violence...silence...violence...it's time for chocolate cake.

Another link to share

[potentially triggering] http://yeahisaiditmagazine.com/?p=391

Why can't we get beyond the body-shutting-down trope here? Grumble.

Taking back underwear and video games

I'm taking a break from the monotony of marking undergraduate exam papers to share a couple of feminist projects that I learned about today and found incredibly exciting.

In this video on Upworthy, Anita Sarkeesian tells of the harassment she faced at the hands of a cyber-mob after proposing to fundraise for creating a project exposing misogynistic tropes in video gaming. Her response to her experiences and the success she has had since then is inspiring. It's a long-ish video, but worth every minute.

Here, the Baltimore Fishbowl interviews two women who started a parody on Victoria's Secret underwear which is far, far cooler than any underwear I've seen in a mainstream market.

Plans for when I'm finished marking? Watch all of Anita's videos, and browse the net (Etsy, perhaps?) for underwear with this sort of awesome factor.

In which I post someone else's poetry, for a change...

A friend linked to this on Facebook a couple of days ago. It's not often one sees this perspective so clearly. Note that it's likely triggering.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22557

Musings on a friend's article...

I'm a bit stuck on this article - have been for a few days really. One the one hand, I agree with Robyn that mandatory women's studies courses are probably not likely to work at York University. On the other hand...her commentary neglects the insidiousness of rape culture, and even furthers it by comparing rape with robbery. 

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/09/26/robyn-urback-york-students-solve-sex-crimes-with-mandatory-womens-studies/

The poor security on York's campus is certainly a problem. But it's not the biggest problem. I would argue that the reason for these rapes is rape culture, and how normalized it has become for women to be raped there. Security would become nearly obsolete if respect towards women was a basic part of campus life.

To some extent of course I'll give York credit for reporting rapes to the media. That's a start. It shows what's happening, and doesn't push it under the rug. But it makes it sound like being raped is almost a normal experience for York students, rather than a trauma. Two months ago, a co-worker joked that the reason for York's athletics facilities being so cheap is because of the risk of getting raped in the showers (the triggering nature of her comments are in queue for another post, once I am done emotionally processing them). These jokes and the idea of York as a campus of rape and rapists is unhelpful. Understatement...I could go so far as to argue that the sensationalist reports of the mainstream media make the situation worse. So in that sense, Robyn's commentary, despite its shortcomings, is extremely useful in changing the character of the dialogue about the York campus.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this post, or whether my argument is even vaguely coherent. But here it is.

Guardian "who is a rapist?" article

Megan Carpentier's work isn't always my thing.  Usually, her use of humour - even though she justifies it as part of her own experience - stings. This article, however, about Reddit's rape threads, is different.

Note that it links to things that might be quite triggering.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/29/rapist-confessions-reddit?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038

Kensington Market assaults

I've been on my guard a bit lately because of several sexual assaults in Kensington Market, an area which I enjoy spending time in. Here's an article by a freelance writer which so well summed up my thoughts about having to stay alert, and how unfair it all seems. (link is not especially likely to be triggering)

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1229896--women-always-have-to-be-alert-to-the-threat-of-sexual-assault

In short: I shouldn't have to watch my back when I walk alone at night. He should have to watch his penis.

Don't read the comments...some of them are nasty. While this article is a bit rigid in its assumptions about men and women (men do get raped too, and men also certainly are offended and hurt by rape jokes!) it is indeed a pretty good response to the Daniel Tosh incident that seems to be all over the internet lately.

http://austin.culturemap.com/newsdetail/07-12-12-14-37-the-best-response-weve-heard-to-daniel-toshs-misquoted-rape-jokes/