It's like we're regressing instead of progressing.

Oi people.

So, first off, it's been a while, hasn't it?  Yup. I've got no excuses, only a dearth of things I feel qualified to talk about, and blogging about the day-to-day is well.. Meh.

But every so often, a story catches my eye that is so mind-blowing in it's ridiculousness that I really have to wonder about humanity.

My source of ire stems from a story of an 8-year-old girl who was at a public pool with her parents, and in her excitement of "holy shit, SWIMMING!', threw her top off and jumped in.  Because 8-year-olds, they LOVE that shit.

The pool attendants told the parents to get a top on that kid, pronto, and the parents were all "Why?? To cover our child's likely non-existent breasts?" They were pretty pissed, and in my humble opinion, rightly so.  Because frankly, if the little boys are not required to wear a top, then it's kinda discriminatory for the girls to have to wear one, is it not?

You know how people always tell you not to read the comments on news stories? It's good advice. Because people are all kinds of awful.  You know how I know this?  I read the comments.  And the comments basically boil down to a few key pro-pool and pro-parent arguments:

Pro-Pool arguments:

- Rules are Rules!
- But, pedophiles!
- Also, more rules! and more pedophiles!
- Leftists, amiright??
- Girls are developing earlier and earlier these days, and also, pedophiles.

Pro-Parent arguments:

- It's been legal to be topless in public in Ontario for literally years.
- *most* boys and girls at that age are built pretty much the same
- The pedo argument is pretty much victim-blaming at its finest
- Boobs are boobs and not a Big Freaking Deal™.
- Also, she probably didn't even HAVE boobs, because eight-year-old.

The way I see it is this;  It's pretty damn disturbing that our culture has such a fucked-up relationship with breasts that we even flip the fuck out over the suggestion of a girl who DOES NOT EVEN HAVE BREASTS BUT OMG MIGHT SOME DAY enjoying the sun without a shirt or top, as the boys do.

Rules are rules, yes. But some rules are stupid and born of outdated ideals and morals that are not relevant in this day and age.  These rules need to be changed.

There have always been pedophiles lurking about. Pedophiles and sex offenders are not a new thing and they're not going to magically go away because your kid is wearing a shirt. A shirt is not a force-field, and a pedophile is not likely to strike at a public pool because the key word is public and most child sexual abuse tends to happen behind closed doors, not at public swimming pools.

And yes, suggesting that not wearing a shirt to a public pool will lead to a child being targeted by a pedophile is victim-blaming. Sorry, but really, not at all sorry.

The thing that gets me is not only this is a particularly US/Canada-centric attitude but relatively new! Not the weird breast-squeamishness, but putting this fear of breasts on children.  I remember being a kid, a scant 30ish years ago, and I remember seeing both little boys and girls on the beach without shirts on (myself included) and nobody batted an eyelash. In fact, some found it more bizarre that people would put their little girls in bikinis and other two piece bathing suits, due to the sexualization factor - making the suggestion of breasts where there were none.

So it seems that not only is our society incapable of looking at breasts in a non-sexualized manner (see almost EVERY debate about public breast-feeding), but people will actually freak the fuck out about potential breasts.

Are we actually getting more repressed? Sometimes it seems that way.

PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN! - SOURCE

P.S. There's a really fantastic image that I saw on Tumblr a while ago that I wanted to use here, but as per usual, I fail on the image search front, and SafeSearch (or alternately, the sheer wrongness of the internet at large) foils my efforts again.

Some small justice, or, Depressingly, comment sections fail to surprise me. (TW Sexual Assault)

Source

I read a blog post this evening.  It was a post from Dennis Canning, the father of Rehteah Parsons.  You may remember her.  She killed herself two years after some guys she was drinking with raped her, took pictures and circulated them around her school and community.  One of the guys involved recently plead guilty to producing child pornography, as the who took the pictures of Rehtaeh and the catalyst to the images being disseminated

If you click on that link, just don't read the comments.

I read the comments.  I have the rage.  All of the rage, and the anger, and the bilious, spitting, horrible "fuck this world and the people in it" disgust.

Most of the comments were sympathetic.  But who in the bloody-minded hell goes onto the blog of a grieving parent, who sought justice for his daughter and was so utterly failed by the authorities involved as they basically shrugged off a gross violation, who now will share with Rehteah's mother the everlasting grief of losing a child, especially one who could have been saved if only someone, anyone, gave a flying shit... 

What vile creature tells this grieving father that he MUST forgive the boys whose callousness and cruelty cost his daughter her life?

Who tells this family that by seeking justice for these wrongs, they will be ruining a kids life? The kids involved were old enough to know what they did was wrong.  The fallout is theirs to deal with.

What kind of person quibbles over the semantics of saying that Rehtaeh's death was a result of her rape and subsequent humiliation, by pointing out that sometimes people who DON'T have something so horrendous happen to them may also commit suicide? 

If Rehtaeh had mental health issues, I'm sure they were not helped by two years of reoccurring humiliation and a lack of compassion from institutions - the police, her school - that were supposed to help, not turn a blind eye.

And who, I ask, thinks it appropriate to pull out the "Where were this girls PARENTS??" card, when I am sure that Glen Canning and Leah Parsons wonder on a daily basis what THEY could have done different.

I know I would. 

I would bet Vegas odds that the jackass anon who made THAT comment probably lied to their parents at some point in their life.  Probably drank before they were legal age as well.

There but for the grace of something, go you, anon.

I'm a parent of two girls on the cusp of adolescence.  If this was one of my children it would take everything in me not to want to track down these kids and tear them apart with my bare hands.

I cannot fathom what a bitter victory this guilty plea must seem.  Small consolation for a family that will never have their daughter back. 

Crowdsurfing, like so many other things, does NOT justify sexual assault.

Trigger Warning, because obviously.

Full disclosure:  I do not know who Iggy Azalea is, nor do I really want to.

I'm old.  I'm not hip.  I'm not cool.  I'm okay with this.

I am told this is an Iggy Azalea.  Source

Ye old Facebook feed is chock-full of debate over an interview she gave with the Huffington Post where she talks about how she had to stop crowd-surfing because people, both male and female, were using this as an opportunity to sexually assault her.

Gross, right?

Just as gross as the load of people who are using this to spew the same old rape-apologist B.S. about how women, when going certain places and doing certain things, should expect to be assaulted, even though it's totally bad and wrong and of course no one is saying it's okay, but that still, we should expect these kinds of things.  Cue shrug.

Nope, sorry.  No one should expect to be sexually assaulted in any context and nobody should shrug it off like it's just one of those things.

The two popular arguments seem to be A) Men are disgusting, so we should just expect them to be disgusting and violate us; or B) People who are crowd-surfing should expect to be touched because duh! Women like Azalea are just being over sensitive.

The A crowd are doing both women and men a huge disservice because they basically imply that a man's default setting is rapist, and that women need to suck it up and just not go anywhere.  It's patently untrue.  Most men are capable of controlling themselves in almost any situation.  We call these men 'decent people who fucking get that you don't assault others'.    This argument also ignores that she said that BOTH men and women have done this.

I believe the B crowd probably haven't bothered to read the actual article.

There's a big difference between someone brushing or palming your boob or ass to support you as you're passed overhead, and what Azalea described in her interview.  Not sure what the lingo in other places is, but where I come from, "fingering" refers pretty blatantly to digital penetration of the vagina. Which is something that is pretty damn difficult to do by accident.  Not to mention that in her interview she cites people actually tweeting her saying that they were going to try and 'finger' her while she's surfing the crowd.

I will get lurk tweets for like a week before my show, like 'I'm about to go to the Iggy Azalea show and I'm going to finger her,' and I'll see it and be like, please don't!," she said. "That's a violation. I don't actually like that stuff."

If you tweet a celebrity to tell them outright that you plan to assault them at a show, then all arguments about "accidental" grabs and brushes being blown out of proportion flies right out the window.

Silencing Survivors, or, "I Need To Screen Cap More Often" (Content Warning: Rape/Sex Abuse)

So I grew up in a wee village that was, at one point, a thriving logging town. So, lots of history and such. The Book of the Face, being what it is, of course has a few groups and pages dedicated to this history. I happened to come across one such group through my newsfeed and stumbled onto an interesting thread where an old, early 50's class picture with as many names as could be identified captioned below.

One of the comments on the photograph was from a gentleman who spoke of suffering sexual abuse at the hands of the teacher in said picture. A few other commenters alluded to hearing of this particular teachers proclivities and many on the thread commiserated on the oft-used, especially in previous generations, method of shuffling teachers around to different schools when allegations of abuse came to light.

The commenter who had experienced the abuse himself notified the rest of the thread that an admin had contacted him and asked him not to post "defamatory" comments in the group. Later, the photo had been deleted and the thread was gone.

Now first off, don't get me wrong. Group admins get to moderate as they see fit and if one doesn't like how they choose to moderate, there are other places on the Internet to be. Do they have the right to delete comments and pull photos? Sure they do. Just like bloggers have the right to moderate comments and social platforms have a right to enforce their terms of service. Not giving someone a platform is not the same as actively suppressing someone's right to speak.

However, silencing is a tactic that gets used against rape survivors and childhood sex abuse survivors all too often. In this case, the gentleman's comments were described as "defamatory" when what they were were fucking brave. It takes a lot of guts to speak openly about sex abuse, given the way survivors tend to be doubted, or victim-blamed or have their abuse minimized in a "I'm sure it wasn't that bad" head-patty kind of way.

Calling the comments "defamatory" would have been fitting if this guy was repeating a rumour he had heard, rather than speaking of his own experiences. Referring to someone speaking of their lived experiences as "defamatory" implies that the survivor is to be doubted and that protecting the name of the abuser is more important than the need for the survivor to speak openly about abuse they have suffered.

Which is, to put it succinctly, bullshit. It's silencing and it's fucking Wrong. It takes guts to speak up about abuse, when often there is much more to lose than to gain, personally, from speaking up. When someone does speak up, we owe it to them to listen, not silence.