rape

Full disclosure: I have had misgivings about Slutwalk from day one. "Slut" has never been a term used against me. Though the idea of reclaiming the word seems to resonate with many young, white heterosexual women, it is not clear to me that it's something that can unify all women. It felt alienating and exclusionary to me from the start.

Last night's episode of True Blood contained the usual outrageous plot twists and soap opera-levels of drama, which is great and which is why I (and probably you if you're reading this) look forward to summer Sunday nights. However, it also contained a totally fucked-up gang rape scene which the show's creators (and many media outlets) are calling anything but.

Bringing you fine, feminist work from around the web!

• Bitch YA Blogger Jessica Stites follows up on police response to Ms.' petition demanding they apologize for having a woman who reported her rape fined.
• Queerty shares a video and list, "Just In Case You Forgot Why The Family Research Council Is A Hate Group."
• Monica at TransGriot provides a history lesson about the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. (Trigger warning for discussion of racism and physical violence.)
• Bitch contributor Sady Doyle reports on Friday's protest of last week's shameful "not guilty" verdict at the Raw Story.
• Shakesville's Melissa McEwan comments on the latest fail by the New York Times. (Quotable: "This column smells like barf.")
• Tom at Original Plumbing talks about the Lambda Literary Awards and being an out artist.
• Check out V-Girls' latest project: collecting photo, video and text submissions for the I Am an Emotional Creature workshops they'll be leading with Eve Ensler in South Africa.
• The Guardian reports on author Naipaul's eyeroll-inducing insistence that no woman could write as well as him.
• Feministe's Clarisse gives us the rundown on feminist sci-fi awards!
• Bitch contributor Emily Manuel blurbs about the "fauxtreversy" around baby Storm's biological sex being a secret and the "imposing their ideology" accusation at Tiger Beatdown.
• At AlterNet, Laura Rena Murray explains the wrongheaded practice of police pointing to condom-carrying as evidence of being a sex worker... and the oft-dismissed bill that would prevent it.
• Mother Jones reports on the FIFA soccer scandal.
• WTF? Feministing discusses Cadbury's new ad, which compares Naomi Campbell and a chocolate bar.

Any reactions to the pieces we've shared? What else have you been reading?

To five-year-old me, Counsellor Troi was more appealing than Disney princesses: beautiful and serene and intuitive, but also she got to go on cool missions and sit on the bridge of the Enterprise and tell the Captain the truth about his own motivations. Troi was the first action figure in my Trek collection, and when I started reading Star Trek novels in grade 6, I always went for the ones featuring her.

So as an adult feminist re-watching TNG and reflecting, I feel the need to complain about how Troi was treated, particularly around the instances when Troi was psychically raped.

Sometimes a situation is so horrible that a Douchebag Decree just doesn't cut it. However, I can think of nothing douchier today than the NYPD trial verdict, which found the two accused officers not guilty of rape.

Looks like some members of the GOP must have seen The Daily Show last night, because they've decided to give up on their ridiculous crusade to redefine rape in a bill banning taxpayer subsidies for abortions. Of course, they still want to ban taxpayer subsidies for abortions in most cases, so it's not exactly time to break out the champagne, but at least women who have been raped will not have to prove that the rape they experienced was "forcible" in order to get government assistance for abortions. (You know, because a lack of consent is what defines rape. We know you know.) We'd like to thank Kristen Schaal for tipping the scales in favor of women's rights in this instance. We're sure that her report on last night's Daily Show on the "rape loophole" in our government had something to do with today's decision:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rape Victim Abortion Funding
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

Writer and Douchebag Decree-recipient Naomi Wolf debated Jaclyn Friedman (executive director of Women, Action & the Media) about the sexual assault allegations against Julian Assange today on Democracy Now!. It's in two parts. Anna Overseas has provided a transcript of the first part.

TRIGGER WARNING: These conversations deal heavily with rape and consent and may be triggering (it was for Friedman).


There's a lot that goes on in this talk, but I wanted to link to the "Let's Talk About It" campaign Friedman (and some of our Twitter followers) have mentioned, which was started by Swedish women to talk about their own sexual assault experiences. If you're on Twitter, make sure to check out both the #talkaboutit and #Mooreandme campaigns still happening! (What's #Mooreandme? Read here and check Tigerbeatdown for updates). Click through for Part II!

Feminists of the blogosphere, if you haven't been tweeting the #MooreandMe hashtag, it's time to start.

I'll hazard that many of Bitch's core readership grew up during the 1990s, potentially influenced by the mainstream success of alternative rock. Based on the recent success of Sara Marcus' Girls to the Front: The True Story of Riot Grrrl Revolution and Marisa Meltzer's Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, as well as the possible relaunch of Sassy Magazine, it's clear that the merging of punk's DIY ethos and radical gender and sexual politics that helped define mainstream feminism in the first half of the decade still resonate for many feminists.



Jim McKay's 1996 feature Girls Town came out at an interesting time. It was released a few years after riot grrrl was co-opted by the mainstream and Sassy folded, but a year before Spin Magazine attempted to capitalize on a cultural moment with their problematic Girl Issue and Alex Sichel's coming-of-age drama All Over Me received a limited theatrical release. It made its stateside cinematic debut two days before Annette Haywood-Carter's Foxfire, an adaptation of Joyce Carrol Oates' novel that also focused on a teenage girl gang, which helped launch Angelina Jolie's career, attempted to do the same for Calvin Klein model Jenny Shimizu, and represented a liminal period for former child actress and Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis. While Foxfire is better-known, I'd argue that Girls Town evinces more progressive gender and racial politics.

Relative to Breillat's other movies, 2001's Fat Girl is fairly tame until its problematic conclusion. Documenting the misadventures of fifteen-year-old Elena (Roxane Mesquida) and her younger sister Anaïs (Reboux) while on a family vacation, the movie highlights the disparity between the girls' attitudes toward sex despite their shared virginity. The older sister, who is slender and conventionally attractive, is interested in entertaining men's spirited advances and harbors a romantic naïveté when embarking on a dalliance with Italian law student Fernando (Libero De Rienzo) that she mistakes as more than a fling. Though only twelve, Anaïs, whose beauty is often ignored because of her size, is far more cynical. She wants her first time to be with someone she does not love and watches in horror as her sister gets played, her warnings ignored.