Alcohol, consent, double-standards and why I wouldn't want to be THAT judge.

Oi. The Book of Face is a frustrating place sometimes.

I've been agonizing over whether to respond to shitty things I see on Facebook or just to take a deep breath and exercise my 'hide-button' finger when I see egregious shit being posted by people I otherwise love and respect.

It's a tough call, sometimes.  Do I risk being piled on or alienating people by playing the role of feminist (or anti-racist, or pro-LGBT, or otherwise anti-oppression) killjoy? Or do I quietly keep scrolling and secretly hate myself a little as I click the 'hide' button?

It's hard.

Someone I especially love and respect posted this image* the other day:

I agonized over whether to comment on this, to the point that I had a bit of an anxiety attack and ended up deactivating my account for a few days.

But here goes:

Yes, loved one.  Neither party in this particular infographic could legally consent.

I'll be quite honest, I would hate like hell to be the judge or jury in the rather unlikely event that the charges went to trial, because that person would be in the uncomfortable position of calling someone a rapist,or calling someone else a liar (and also, possibly, a rapist as well).

I say unlikely, because a very small percentage of rape cases actually go to trial.  Most charges are dropped or dismissed due to lack of evidence.  This case here would be a prime candidate to get dropped, mainly because of the he said/she said position and the fact that they were both drinking.  Many a rape survivor has heard the chorus of "If they didn't want it, why did they go with/drink with/get in a car with/flirt with/building a fucking sand castle with them?"  Seriously, anything to discredit the charges.

Don't believe me? Not only did over 40 women come out against Bill Cosby, he is also on tape admitting to purchasing Quaaludes to incapacitate women for the purposes of having sex with them.  And people will STILL perform mental gymnastics of Olympic Gold proportions to discredit the victims and give Cosby the benefit of the doubt. FORTY.

In a similar vein, Jake is also in a terrible position, were he to try and press charges.  He's be assumed to have consented based on the fact he's a dude.  Because male victims of rape only count when it's in prison. It sucks.  People DO need to get over the idea that women are incapable of raping men, whether through force, coercion, or incapacitation. 

Anyone (male, female, nonbinary folk) who is drunk cannot consent to sex.

It's pretty simple.  Don't have sex with people who have been drinking if you don't want to be accused of rape.  People will argue that "So what, if my partner has a glass of wine, I shouldn't have sex with them?"

Don't be silly.

Having a glass of wine is not the same as being drunk. That being said, some people can drink until the cows come home and be a clear as bell.  There are also situations (medications, not having eaten enough that day) that can cause one drink to hit someone like a ton of bricks.

If you know for sure your partner is totally into it and fully consenting - ie. they are tearing your clothes off and is maybe only one drink in; maybe you have been in a relationship for years - and you know they are not operating under the influence of outside substances, then knock yourself out!

Consent! A fun, sexy time for all!

If you are unsure the person you are with is able to fully consent, maybe don't have sex with them.

If they *seem* fine, but you know they've killed a case of beer or a bottle of wine or a 26er that day, maybe don't have sex with them.  Hell, if you're NOT sure they DIDN'T kill a 26er, or a case of beer or a magnum of wine, maybe don't have sex with them.

If the person you are with is exhibiting any behaviour that might suggest that they are not totally into having sex with you - for example, freezing up, zoning out, making weird whimpering noises, expressing doubt ("Maybe we shouldn't.. this isn't a good idea.."), even seeming bored or distracted, use your words and say something to the effect of "Are you okay with this? We can do something else."  Give them a safe out, and if they don't take it, then proceed.  If you're still not sure they're into it, maybe don't have sex with them.

If you fear that the person you are about to have otherwise consensual sex with might turn around and accuse you of rape, then maybe don't have sex with them.

If you fear that the person you are with is going to mock you, or call you a pussy, or a cock-tease or otherwise disrespect your "No," then they are a boundary-disrespecting douchebag and maybe don't have sex with them.

You'll notice that I'm using a lot of gender-neutral terms here.  A lot of "they" and "them".  That's because these are rules that should apply to ANYONE.  No one is entitled to the sexual use of anyone else's body, male, female, genderfluid, or otherwise.

Note to my ladies:  We are also capable of victimizing men. I cannot emphasize this enough.  Please remember that. Climbing on a passed-out dude and going for a ride, that's rape.  Threatening, coercing, until you get your way... same deal.  We need to hold ourselves to a standard of consent as well.

So yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and yes, my dear loved one, that is how equality should work.  We're working on it.  In the meantime, make sure the consent you get (and the consent you give) is sober, un-coerced, and enthusiastic and things will probably be okay.

* I do want to add that the initial ad that the meme is predicated on is a problem, in the fact that it only states that Josie couldn't consent, not that neither of them could. This denies agency to women while simultaneously perpetuating the stereotype that men are always good to go, anywhere, anytime.

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.

FYI (If you're a nosy asshole)

This post. I mean, this friggin post.  

Had the *ahem* pleasure of reading Mrs. Hall's lengthy missive to the teenaged girls who have Facebook friended her precious wee boys regarding the seemingly scandalous selfies young girls seem to like to take of themselves.  Mrs. Hall is quite concerned that her boys may be exposed to these wanton adolescent hussies, posing in their pajamas in sultry poses.  Some of these girls are even (gasp!) not wearing bras!

Mrs. Hall is trying to raise young men with a strong moral compass, who don't "linger over pictures of scantily clad ladies."  Which is apparently quite impossible to do when there are pictures of teenaged girls posing for selfies on the Internet.  Any female friend of the Hall boys who thinks of posting a vaguely sexy picture of herself online should consider themselves as good as blocked because Mrs. Hall only wants her boys thinking of girls respectfully and Gord knows, being a sexual being and being a human being worthy of respect are two mutually exclusive things.  Well, if you're a girl.. Isn't that right Mrs. Hall?

Mrs. Hall, I noticed that your boys are posted all over your blog in beachwear, which some would argue is much more revealing than pajamas or even a towel.  I guess girls (or non-hetero boys) can easily un-see that, though can they? And still think of your kids as people worthy of respect?  But you said yourself, once a boy sees a girl naked (or in towel, or in pajamas or without a bra) he can't unsee that.  You seem to have a high level of confidence in your boys' ability to behave like gentleman and not like rutting animals.  Or maybe not.  Because if you did, the spectre of some silly, pouty pictures wouldn't loom such a threat.

There are a dozen good reasons to be careful of what you post online.  Surveillance, online weirdos and pedophiles, and the fact that stuff you post does NOT GO AWAY are all things we should be concerned about and I agree that we should be encouraging kids (and adults, of any gender) to be extra self-critical of what they post.  These safety and privacy issues don't seem to be on your radar, however.  You seem more concerned about not letting these girls sully your preciouses virginal little minds.

I find the attitude that in order for men to respect and cherish women they must not think of them sexually is a harmful one.  The implication you've made here is that a girl or woman cannot be sexual while still being worthy of respect.  That is what we call, in feminist circles, slut shaming.  And it is harmful.  Girls are continually sexualized and objectified by our culture, while simultaneously being shamed if they dare to be sexual on their own terms.  A girl's history or perceived history can be used against her in sexual assault cases.  

Mrs. Hall, if you want your sons to be men of integrity who eventually meet and possibly marry women of character, teach them that a woman's worth is about more than her sexuality.  Teach them that being sexual and being a person worthy of respect.  Teach them their respect for someone should not be predicated on their sexual history or whether or not they're wearing a bra in their profile picture.  If you can't teach them that, I think my soon-to-be teenaged girls would be better off blocked.

Just some scattered thoughts on the Stuebenville case, if anyone was interested.

First, I'm glad the little shits are going to jail.  Frankly, I think the combined sentence of three years is pretty goddamned lenient.

Let's get some perspective here on just how lenient a sentence this was (and how lightly courts take rape cases)

• Patrick Lashung King got sentenced to 15 years in prison for pirating five movies and a CD
• Tanya McDowell was sentenced to five years for sending her child to school out-of-district

So yeah, there's that.  Pirating CDs and attempting to obtain an education for your child warrant a worse punishment than sexually assaulting and degrading someone AND video recoding it for good measure.

Second, for those who have treated this like a harmless prank, stop yourselves right there's for I do not think you know what the word "Prank" entails.

Drawing on someone's face with a Sharpie is a Prank.

Pictured: Prank Victim. Not Pictured: Jane Doe.

Similarly, placing one's brassiere in the freezer would fit the definition of a prank, provided the victim had already divested him or herself of said brassiere.

As for the asshats who are calling out the victim on being drunk and calling this a case of "Buyer's Remorse?" and implying, or hell, outright saying that the victim cried rape out of embarrassment, I have a few things to say:
* Fuck off
* we're having trouble with word meanings again. Embarrassment is what you feel when you dance with a lampshade on your head, or you smush a grape jello shooter into a white carpet at a party (Sorry K!). Jane Doe was carried from party to party, raped repeatedly and urinated on. I think the word you were looking for was Violated. Or hell, Raped. Raped works.
* Want to cut down on all those "false accusations" that everyone gets so worked up about? (All 0.6 percent of them, so i'm basically throwing the rape apologists a bone here) Don't shame women (or anybody) for enjoying, actively seeking and participating in sexual activity. Don't base someone's worth and how you treat them on how many people they have or haven't fucked.

Lastly, to the media. Once a conviction has been handed down, it's time to drop "allegedly" from your vocabulary. After a certain point, it just makes you look like an asshole.

I'm looking at you, CNN.