"...followed by a brisk mauling."
| Alhamdulillah |
| Adopt this trustmark on Trustmarker |
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I need feminism because other people shouldn’t shame me for wanting to be a single mom
This. Fucking this. Always.
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Love this! It’s so true & perfect!
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This is why gender neutral bathrooms are necessary
Some places around here have gender neutral bathrooms...
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All things truly wicked start from innocence.
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His shirt reads “They gave me a medal for killing two men, and a discharge for loving one.”
You are a bad-ass.
I am over rape.
I am over rape culture, rape mentality, rape pages on Facebook.
I am over the thousands of people who signed those pages with their real names without shame.
I am over people demanding their right to rape pages, and calling it freedom of speech or justifying it as a joke.
I am over people not understanding that rape is not a joke and I am over being told I don’t have a sense of humor, and women don’t have a sense of humor, when most women I know (and I know a lot) are really fucking funny. We just don’t think that uninvited penises up our anus, or our vagina is a laugh riot.
I am over how long it seems to take anyone to ever respond to rape.
I am over Facebook taking weeks to take down rape pages.
I am over the hundreds of thousands of women in Congo still waiting for the rapes to end and the rapists to be held accountable.
I am over the thousands of women in Bosnia, Burma, Pakistan, South Africa, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya, you name a place, still waiting for justice.
I am over rape happening in broad daylight.
I am over the 207 clinics in Ecuador supported by the government that are capturing, raping, and torturing lesbians to make them straight.
I am over one in three women in the U.S military (Happy Veterans Day!) getting raped by their so-called “comrades.”
I am over the forces that deny women who have been raped the right to have an abortion.
I am over the fact that after four women came forward with allegations that Herman Cain groped them and grabbed them and humiliated them, he is still running for the President of the United States.
And I’m over CNBC debate host Maria Bartiromo getting booed when she asked him about it. She was booed, not Herman Cain.
Which reminds me, I am so over the students at Penn State who protested the justice system instead of the alleged rapist pedophile of at least 8 boys, or his boss Joe Paterno, who did nothing to protect those children after knowing what was happening to them.
I am over rape victims becoming re-raped when they go public.
I am over starving Somalian women being raped at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, and I am over women getting raped at Occupy Wall Street and being quiet about it because they were protecting a movement which is fighting to end the pillaging and raping of the economy and the earth, as if the rape of their bodies was something separate.
I am over women still being silent about rape, because they are made to believe it’s their fault or they did something to make it happen.
I am over violence against women not being a #1 international priority when one out of three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime — the destruction and muting and undermining of women is the destruction of life itself.
No women, no future, duh.
I am over this rape culture where the privileged with political and physical and economic might, take what and who they want, when they want it, as much as they want, any time they want it.
I am over the endless resurrection of the careers of rapists and sexual exploiters — film directors, world leaders, corporate executives, movie stars, athletes — while the lives of the women they violated are permanently destroyed, often forcing them to live in social and emotional exile.
I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you?
You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us? Why aren’t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?
I am over years and years of being over rape.
And thinking about rape every day of my life since I was 5-years-old.
And getting sick from rape, and depressed from rape, and enraged by rape.
And reading my insanely crowded inbox of rape horror stories every hour of every single day.
I am over being polite about rape. It’s been too long now, we have been too understanding.
We need to OCCUPYRAPE in every school, park, radio, TV station, household, office, factory, refugee camp, military base, back room, night club, alleyway, courtroom, UN office. We need people to truly try and imagine — once and for all — what it feels like to have your body invaded, your mind splintered, your soul shattered. We need to let our rage and our compassion connect us so we can change the paradigm of global rape.
There are approximately one billion women on the planet who have been violated.
ONE BILLION WOMEN.
The time is now. Prepare for the escalation.
Today it begins, moving toward February 14, 2013, when one billion women will rise to end rape.
Because we are over it.
^This. A thousand fucking times, this.
I want to be over it. I need to be over it. I’m not. I may never be. I am incomplete, and perhaps always will be, because a man decided that his want was more important than my right to my own body.
A thousand fucking times, over and over, this.
I’ve been listening to “Goodnight Saigon” a lot this week. There’s something about that song that reaches straight past evocative—hits something deeper, something infinitely stronger and sadder and much more permanent than even the scars of our own petty wars.
It’s fairly clear that Bert Jacobs was touched indelibly by Vietnam; in many very real ways, the war changed his life—and changed him, too, even though he never left the US.
I remember him telling us a week or so ago about this program they had at UMF during the war, where soldiers would step on a plane to leave Asia on Friday night, and by Sunday morning they’d be in Farmington, ready to start school Monday. I remember him saying how strange it was.
I worked here, with the veterans, then. No one wanted them here, mostly. There were a few of us, of course. But mostly people didn’t want them here. I mean, we’re talking soldiers fresh from the front. They had their guns with them, many of them, in their footlockers. And the girls—I imagine it must have been very hard being a female student here at that time. I mean, you’ve got these guys who have killed, been trained to kill. They’d kill you if you looked at them wrong, because that’s what they been taught. Their eyes—we called them “wild” eyes. Crazy. It was… it was a wild time here then.
But it was something. It was something, and for many of them that was the only positive thing that ever came out of this, was getting an education. Because America’s never really cared about our veterans. We really never have, we’ve never cared and never treated them well, with the possible exception of WWII. We’ve never cared about the ones who were injured or died, or about the ones who came back whole. Which is a stupid way to talk about them.
Because no matter what happens, the person someone is when they leave for war, that person dies. The body might come back, but that person has changed, in a way that we can’t begin to understand and imagine.
Remember that. Remember that about the people you know who’ve gone off to Afghanistan or Iraq.
A man was gunned down by police in Maine earlier last week after apparently pulling a gun near his local VA center. Neighbors said he was a good man, a veteran the US should have been proud of—but the lack of sufficient care he received for his cancer diagnosis through the VA had apparently caused him so much despair that he’d acted that much out of character.
At least ten people I know have either been deployed or will be in the future—to fight, to kill, and to die.
And none of them will come back. None of them have. No one goes through something like that without being changed.
I’m a pacifist. I want to live—and try very hard to live—in a world where violence isn’t even thought of as an option. But I think we should do something. I think there has to be a way. There has to be a way to actually keep the promises we’ve made to our veterans. Education ought to be the first step. If we can open up our colleges to them, then we’re opening up the possibilities of a better world.
“Vasiyeh, age 16, shows the scars from burns she inflicted on herself two years ago, April 6, 2010 in Herat, Afghanistan. The issue of female self immolation - attributed to living in poverty, isolation, abusive households, and/or forced marriages - is increasing in prevalence in the region close to the border with Iran, as tensions rise between the traditional subordinate role of women and the increased awareness of women’s rights in the wider world. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)”
This woman is beautiful. Afghanistan. Click for more.
