And in undercurrents, violence against women

Some of the things I read today. Sometimes you look at the news and, damn.

Famous dude doxxes some trolls

* Former MLB pitcher, 38 Studios founder doxes his daughter’s online abusers
* Curt S.’s blog post about it all
* Daily mail article about the same thing

I would like to add to Gabby Schilling’s statement that ‘No one should be able to get away with saying those things to a father about his daughter.’ OK I can roll with that if I translate it 8 different ways in my head, but no one should get away with saying those things to anyone about anyone. And this should happen to exactly no one, nowhere, ever, in public or private.

Plenty more to say about how Curt Schilling handled this. Short version: Compare what happens when this dude doxxes people who say misogynist shit, to what happens when women report harassment against themselves. Extra bonus, all the framing of ownership and protectiveness and patriarchy and threats and jokes just makes it worse in some ways, even though I appreciate anyone fighting misogyny and harassment, it’s like, oh did the entire history of women defending themselves and each other just never happen? And I’m supposed to care more about this girl more than other girls because she has a dad and a boyfriend? Oh ok. OK whatever man.

Oh also noting that news article give the real names of two of the harassers, and it should not be hard at all to find the names of the rest of them. It isn’t like they tried to be anonymous or anything, it was just routine behavior for the lot of them.

University health records aren’t private

* University of Oregon doubles down on a rape survivor who sued them for mishandling her case. Educational institution medical records aren’t covered by HIPAA. I had no idea. Horrible on top of horribleness.

Students: Don’t go to your college counseling center to seek therapy. Go to an off-site counseling center. If, God forbid, you’ve been sexually assaulted, try to find a rape-crisis center.

So that pissed me off.

Ferguson Police Department are horrible

* Surprising no one, Ferguson Police dept. shows some very racist patterns of behavior and sends some stupid racist emails.

Smokin’ in the Girl’s Room

Some a-hole named Michael Rosner (who has not heard of the Streisand Effect) in Baltimore has apparently started a civil liberties complaint. Not sure what this means. An actual lawsuit? If so then I look forward to reading this ridiculousness in PACER and putting it straight into RECAP. He seems to be part of Baltimore Node, a local hackerspace, and is one of those people who are the self-appointed photographers of tech events. In a sadly now deleted post on some Baltimore tech group’s Facebook page, he compared himself to Rosa Parks. A+ drama and ludicrousness.

The repugnant thing of course is the chilling effect this kind of thing can have on other groups who want to hold events. I have certainly spent years hearing people say in meetings, “Oh but what if someone sues us for being reverse sexist/racist” etc. and not only can they fuck off, the people who actually get to the point of litigation can fuck right off and go start their own damn coding club.

First prize for douchebaggery goes to a poet

You would think that is enough for one day. And yet we have more!
* Poet Greg Frankson sues peers for more than $300,000 for libel and defamation
Dude, Ritallin, this isn’t how it works. You aren’t supposed to piss off the bard because the bard can write a scornful poem about you. Go write a scathing spoken word piece! Lawyers? Really?! Weak. Oh well! This is why the 21 women wanted to be anonymous in the first place. So that your punitive and extra harassing lawsuits wouldn’t screw up their emails with subpoenas from now till forever. So, apparently he was banned from some poetry organizations and events because 21 different women reported incidents of sexual harassment and assault. Frankson is now suing some of the people involved, and they’re now fundraising for their legal defense.

Politics and policy

I strongly think that reporting and witnessing harassment and sexual assault is political speech and should be protected as such. Anti-SLAPP law should protect us from these punitive defamation lawsuits. At the least it seems a reasonable defense. There is a long history, not over obviously, of violence against women and in particular sexualized violence against women, and backlash against reporting it. (Or prior restraint stops anyone from publishing it for fear of being sued, even when it’s true.)

It is extremely important that we fight on a legal and policy level against chilling effects to our free speech. I also see these lawsuits as having an effect on our ability and right to organize politically. If we can’t tell each other who raped us, how can we fight? In order to protect that right I think we also will need organizations and legal help that will keep our right to communicate privileged information to each other. But that is not all since we also need public disclosure for our activism. The legal definitions of harassment are centered around work environments and the responsibilities of employers to protect their employees.

While I am ranting, I see this as part of a horrible trend to privatize all the functions of a civil society. Having a job in a particular way should not be the precondition for having health care, a hope of a sustainable life in old age aka “retirement”, other basic needs of life, or, legal protection from abusive behavior. Our right to participate in public spaces should be protected. Not just in “workplaces”.

India’s Daughter

Let us look at one more spectacularly hideous example of pushing women out of the right to public life. All the content warnings or trigger warnings possible on this one….

I also read Leslee Udwin’s statement about interviewing some of the men from Delhi who raped and murdered a woman on a bus. There is heartening protest and activism against this sort of attitude as you can see in the many other articles about “India’s Daughter” but it is clearly also not just the rapists who think this way about their right to do whatever they want to women.

I am not trying to equate harassing people on twitter with rape and murder, I am saying that they are facets of the same oppressive attitude and power dynamic reflected. And that one underpins the other. We need to fight all of it.

A good book if you like books

On that note I have a book recommendation: Framing the Rape Victim: Gender and Agency Reconsidered by Carine M. Mardorossian. About the book:

Contesting the notion that rape is the result of deviant behaviors of victims or perpetrators, Mardorossian argues that rape saturates our culture and defines masculinity’s relation to femininity, both of which are structural positions rather than biologically derived ones.

And a bit I highlighted from the book:

We need to understand that the will to dominate is not an expression of free will or of a subject bound to gendered expectations that have turned the will to dominate into identity itself. Indeed, the failure to dominate produces a “terror machine” because it threatens the subject with complete annihilation: once one subscribes to the tenets of this identity-making machine, one is nothing if one does not dominate.

This book connects and clarifies sexualized violence and its role in many forms of oppression. “All violence is sexualized violence.” Food for thought.

1 thought on “And in undercurrents, violence against women

  1. The university thing may vary depending on the school (and possibly whether it’s public or private). I know at my alma mater, there was a (unsuccessful) push to have the university’s sexual assault prevention educator position created under either the student health center or the counseling center (I forget which) because that would have put them under HIPAA and prevented them from being subpoenaed. Instead, they were put under the university’s Wellness Center, which doesn’t have the same protections.

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