victim-blaming

Friday is linkday!

• Bitch Leadership Council member and Feminist Coming Out Day organizer Lena Chen shares her experiences writing a popular sex blog as a college student on Salon.
• RH Reality Check passes on a video of parents of a killed gay soldier speaking out for marriage equality in Minnesota.
• Marcia Herring evaluates Degrassi's surprisingly (and infuriatingly) poor recent address of date rape at Feministing and Bitch Flicks.
• Bitch contributor Alyx Vesey reviews BrassBastardz' Timeline for Scratched Vinyl.
• HuffPo discusses the argument of whether Facebook postings can constitute fireable offenses.
• Over at Jezebel, Dodai Stewart talks about those ridiculous "Are white people being discriminated against?" polls and shares a powerful clip from the upcoming documentary, Dark Girls, about being black with dark skin in the USA.
• Also at Jezebel, Jenna Sauers reports on Miley Cyrus' recent tweets against Urban Outfitters' anti-gay politics and knock-off fashions.
• Mounia talks about the media's continued depiction of Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the victim on Feministe. ColorLines rounds up the implicit messages of this coverage.
• Also at ColorLines, Thoai Lu reports on a shocking incident by the D.C. Metro Police against an elder in a wheelchair. Trigger warning for video and description of physical violence.
• Bitch contributor Jarrah Hodge reviews Feminism for Real, which is now for sale at Bitch Mart, for her blog, Gender Focus.
• Bitch contributor Emily Manuel talks about that Rapture that didn't happen, and why we're compelled to joke about it, at GlobalComment.
• AfterEllen gives us the news on The United States of Tara and Nurse Jackie. Preview: Only one of these shows is getting another season.
• Cross-posted at Her Blueprint and Racialicious, Simba Russeau writes of Algerian activist Randa and her book of interviews, Memoirs of Randa the Trans.
• Also at Racialicious: "No, Joan Walsh, racial criticism does not equal 'identity politics.'"

Thoughts? What else have you been reading online?

Links, links, links!

• Salon explores the implications of the fate of the Wonder Woman show described in Jennifer K. Stuller's podcast. (Spoiler alert: It's not going to air.)
• Muslimah Media Watch writes of Arab women and democracy.
• ColorLines speaks of CNN anchor Don Lemon's coming-out (good for him!) and their hopes that analysis of the intersection of racism and homophobia will go further.
• In the gross-but-perhaps-unsurprising file: ColorLines also discusses Ron Paul's stance against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Meanwhile, Mother Jones compiles his "15 Most Extreme Positions."
• In better news, Truth Wins Out founder Wayne Besen provides numbers indicating increasing support for QUILTBAG rights, even in conservative circles, for HuffPo.
• Liz of Our Turn proposes a Bechdel Test for politics.
• On AlterNet, Bitch contributor Brittany Shoot interviews Will Potter on his new book about the law's disproportionate punishments for environmental activists like himself.
• TransGriot shares author Janet Mock's "It Gets Better" video.
• Bitch contributor s.e. smith unpacks the victim-blaming media surrounding the leader of the International Monetary Fund's arrest for sexual assault on Tiger Beatdown.
• The divine Kate Harding blogs about this same IMF coverage, the media surrounding Schwarzenegger, and what it all implies about the USA's troubling confusion between consensual affairs and assault. (via AlterNet)
• AfterEllen relates Tegan and Sara member Sara Quin's response to rapper Tyler the Creator's misogyny and homophobia.
• Ms. speculates on why vibrators still aren't mainstream.
• Are you in NYC? Mark your calendar for next weekend's release party for Original Plumbing's Green Issue!

Et tu?

I don’t have to tell you that this week has been a total Wikileaks shitshow. But would anyone have guessed that the honoree for Douchebag Decree: Wikileaks Edition would be famed power feminist Naomi Wolf?

Me neither. After all, plenty of media have taken the low road in theorizing about the convenient timing of Interpol’s arrest warrant for Wikileaks head Julian Assange on two incidents of, as the official charges read, "rape, sexual molestation, and unlawful coercion." From using facetious quotes around the word "rape" to referencing one accuser’s CIA connections to making creepy jokes about the Swedish rape dismissal/descriptor "sex by surprise,"  it’s a veritable douche parade out there in blogland.

But Wolf’s supposedly humorous Huffington Post piece, "Julian Assange Captured By World’s Dating Police," proved that, despite not knowing any more about the series of incidents that led to Assange’s Dec. 7 arrest by Interpol than the rest of us (and perhaps knowing significantly less, seeing as how the sole source she linked to in the piece was Britain’s Daily Mail), she was all ready to assert her feminist cred and use it to trivialize what could indeed be valid, actionable incidents of sexual misconduct.