Kyle Payne continues to be an ass

A whole lot of us posted about the squickiness that is Kyle Payne. The fellow is now facing sentencing for the sexual assault he admits to committing. But first, he'd like us all to hear all about his pain and his anguish. I consider myself fortunate for not posting my web address so I never got the form e-mail he sent. Suffice it to say, it was all about Kyle, Kyle, Kyle. Ugh!

Of the many wonderful responses, I've been enjoying Purtek's excellent post. Be sure to read the comments, too.

So as not to clog up her blog, there is something about this whole episode that makes me think about personal weaknesses.

Each and every one of us suffers from a weakness in regard to one thing or another. For whatever reason, we can't handle certain experiences and circumstances. For me, it happens to be cops with guns. I've had some real bad experiences with guns and I've had some real bad experiences with cops. Combine the two and I'm pretty much unable to respond effectively. Think of the concept of "triggering" and multiply it a few times.

So I avoid situations that put me into contact with cops who wield guns. Which shouldn't be all that difficult for a law-abiding white woman. Except that, in the activist community, there are a lot of good people, friends of mine, who practice the tactic of non-violent civil disobedience. They break bad laws in order to make a point. They get arrested, spend time in jail and use their court cases to argue for a greater good. This is a valuable and useful political activity.

I won't do it. I would be ineffective at it. It would be about my personal fears, my issues with guns and cops. I could really blow it if I wasn't able to contain the impulses and the alligator-brain responses that I learned as a child. It's important that I protect other activists from having to deal with my inappropriate responses.

Guess what? That is not a huge sacrifice on my part. It is basic common sense. It is honest self-assessment. It is basic respect for the goals and ideals of activists who are working to change the world for the better.

If Kyle has a problem with abuse issues, then he needs to protect other abuse survivors from his inappropriate responses and actions. That's simple common sense. That's basic decency.

But he won't do it. Because everyone has to deal with the problems of Kyle, Kyle, Kyle. Except for Kyle, of course.

Local man busted for trying to have his wife killed

You can read the article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press. An interesting twist is the guy has some writing up on an MRA website:

A man listed by the Web site (I'm not gonna link) as "Terrence DeChaney" of Coon Rapids describes in a posted entry as being frustrated with the court system and living "in a county that does and will not believe in joint custody." The Web site promotes custody rights issues.

The posting details how the man's wife went to a women's shelter, where she was instructed on how to kick him out of their home by claiming domestic abuse. She now lives in the house that he built "by hand." And he pays her more than $3,100 in child support (or 60 percent of his income) each month. The posting continues by voicing concern about his limited visitation and custody rights, claiming, "This is basically legal theft and legal child abuse."

He ended the nine-paragraph diatribe by noting, "Father's [sic] going through this lopsided process snap."

Lovely little tidbit from his posting:

... the women's shelter instructed my ex to say she was afraid of me and to kick me out of the house with a DV charge, even though she had just told her that I had never threatened her or and she was not afraid of me. I have this recorded from my personal telephone, but can not use it because I was not part of the conversation.

Notice that? He was bugging his wife's phone conversations!

On the internets, everyone knows your an asshole.

Blessings be to the volunteer librarians among us

Malcolm at Malcolmgin has a metapost collecting blog posts that talk about What Rachel Moss Did after attending Wiscon, a popular feminist science fiction conference. I love it when a blogger takes time to put together all relevant links to an issue. It's a common practice and I've done it once or twice. Always volunteer. Always appreciated.

As to the issue of Rachel Moss' inability to appreciate women who look different from herself, I feel something between pity and disgust. Pity that she is so shackled by mainstream ideas about who is worth listening to and disgust that she lacks any creativity at all in her choice of victims.

OTOH, I am amazed by some of the awesome writing I've discovered because of this issue. Via, The F-Word I find the link to Charlotte Cooper's posts on headless fatties. Admit it, you've seen dozens if not more images of fat people in the news with their heads cropped out of the picture. I have and I never noticed how common it is before Charlotte pointed it out to me.

Dismissing somebody for their looks? Too damn easy and too popular in this world.

Choose to be a better person. Choose to have a decent reason for disagreeing with somebody. Stand above the common crowd that follows the lead of the mainstream media by pissing on anyone who doesn't follow their dictates on size, dress, make-up, etc. Distinguish yourself as someone who thinks for herself and decides for herself the worth of others based on something more than superficiality.

Shirley Chisholm presente!



Sylvia has an awesome post about Shirley Chisholm. Go. Read. Enjoy!

Don't miss it!

This awesome video is from the fabulous Sudy! Enjoy!

Carnival of Radical Action

Elle, Ph.D. and Vox ex Machina are hosting the next edition of the Carnival of Radical Action.

Here's the premise for #6:

Please get in your submissions for the Carnival of Radical Action.


...for the sixth edition of the Carnival of Radical Action, Vox and I want you to explore making radical history. How do we create and participate in radical history? And how do we chronicle it?

Some food for thought:
• How do radical activists incorporate history into their activism?
• What are the processes involved in forming radical, history-shaping movements in our day and age (i.e. how do we initiate, shape, translate into action our responses to injustice and violence against and within our communities)?
• How do we learn from the past and incorporate radical themes in our work?
Deadline for submissions is Thursday, November 29.

Women of Color bloggers want you to know

The amazing turnout for Jena 6 and the fact that it finally hit the mainstream media after months of work by WOC bloggers, reminds us that there are more issues out there that are just as worthy of attention. And if Jena tells us anything, the way to get the real truth is to avoid the nonsense put forth by money-making enterprises like cable news, and go straight to the grassroots.

FIERCE (Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment) in New York City, is just such an organization. They are leading the struggle to highlight the cause of four lesbian and black women who are imprisoned after confronting a sexist homophobic thug in the West Village of New York.

Imani Henry has written a terrific summary of the events leading to their prosecution that bfp posted in June here:

Lesbians sentenced for self-defense
All-white jury convicts Black women

By Imani Henry
New York
Published Jun 21, 2007 2:58 AM

On June 14, four African-American women—Venice Brown (19), Terrain Dandridge (20), Patreese Johnson (20) and Renata Hill (24)—received sentences ranging from three-and-a-half to 11 years in prison. None of them had previous criminal records. Two of them are parents of small children.

Their crime? Defending themselves from a physical attack by a man who held them down and choked them, ripped hair from their scalps, spat on them, and threatened to sexually assault them—all because they are lesbians.

Read the entire article.

Beautiful, Also, Are The Souls of My Black Sisters has a beautiful call to action:

That these women could not go to this area of town as if they had no right to be there (per the district attorney who prosecuted their case) reeks of society’s desire to segregate and suffocate these women for what they are. Lesbians.

That these women who sought to harm no one, but, instead, were vilified and castigated because of their attacker’s hatred, while he still walks free, and they languish in prison, is unconscionable. Deemed a so-called “hate crime” against this straight male, every possible racist, anti-woman, anti-LGBT and anti-youth tactic was hurled against these women by the state of New York, and that they lived in a working-class black-majority city of Newark, N.J., and their gender expressions and body structures, was dehumanized, and demonized, in the eyes of the public, and ultimately, the jury that decided against them, is concrete proof that LGBT people have rights that no heterosexual is bound to respect.

The organization, FIERCE!, (http://www.fiercenyc.org ) is fighting a campaign to free these women who have been unjustly imprisoned for having the temerity to be themselves in a lesbian, homosexual-hating society.

Please do not forget the Newark Women.

Contact FIRECE! to lend your help for these unjustly accused women in their fight for justice.

Give them your solidarity, your support, and let them know that they are not forgotten. Let them know that respect and dignity are the rights of all people: black, white, male, female, heterosexual—and lesbian and homosexual.

Nice Guy(TM) thinking explained

Little Light has a post up discussing an entry at Craig's List (since removed, but you can read the post at Little Light's place) by a creep who helped out a woman in trouble and then was pissed off that she didn't respond to him in the way he believed he had earned. Which led to another discussion of Nice Guy Syndrome. And this wonderful description from Dw3t-Hthr:

It's the "you're not entitled to anything" that has always, in my experience, been the sticking point for the Nice Guy.

The ones I've actually talked with (generally whining on the internet about how they can't get a girlfriend) seem to have this notion of Woman As Vending Machine / Arcade Game. If they just figure out which buttons to push, then Woman will Put Out. And they're pushing the buttons that they're supposed to, but Woman is not lighting up the right little "Score!" buttons. That asshole over there is pushing buttons and lighting the whole system up! Damnit, this Woman is broken! They tried up-down-up-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-stat, too, did someone give them the wrong cheat code? The last woman said that she liked this, why doesn't this woman respond to it?

None of the Nice Guys I've ever tried to talk to seem capable of believing that women aren't issued with a standard cheat code that will open them up to whoever gets the button sequence right. And the cheat code is Their Right, Damnit. The woman is incidental.

Beautifully explained!

Privilege

There's been some great posts about racism among white feminists lately. Click just about any of the blogs on my favorites list and you'll encounter one or more of them.

Privilege is like a powerful drug that some of us get to indulge in while the rest of the world looks at us in disbelief. I'm sure there are people who have written wonderfully about this and I should probably have a handy list of links to help us recognize the behaviors we engage in when we either deny or fail to recognize our own privilege. That's for another post.

This is personal, so no links, footnotes or asterisks will be harmed in the creation of this post.

I have a mixed up background. I grew up in the city and in the country. I grew up with a wealthy parent and a poor parent. I had a loving parent and a sociopathic parent. Privilege and the lack thereof surrounded me, but in mixed up ways.

For instance, I spent large parts of my life on my grandparent's dairy farm in Michigan. This was a huge house -- nine bedrooms -- surrounded by 160 acres of fertile land. We had plenty of food and clothing.

However, only one room was heated with an oil-powered stove. This is Michigan. It's a northern state. It gets fricking cold there. The strange thing is, nobody had central heat back then. I'd never been in a house that had central heat. We lived in apartments whenever my parents got work in other cities. So until I was 8 or 9, I believed central heat was possible only in apartment buildings and nowhere else.

The farm had a shallow well, we had little running water during the summer and none (the pipes froze) in the winter. That meant chamberpots. It meant an outhouse or the shovel and walk in the orchard. It meant collecting rainwater and melting snow for morning coffee.

There was a lot of work on the farm. More work, dirtier and harder work, than I've ever had to engage in as an adult. There was also a whole lot of love there from my Mom and my Grandmother, the neighbors and my other relatives.

I also spent large parts of my childhood visiting my father. He was a college administrator with beautiful showcase houses, trophy wives (at least five of them that we know of), a private airplane, etc. He was a scam artist and a charmer. He was that jerk at work who never does anything or, worse, seals your ideas and takes full credit for them.

He was also a sociopath who hated women. He hated me with a passion. As far as I can tell, my birth is the trigger that sent him over the edge. He saw the creation of a female child as a horrible and personal betrayal. For me, every visit to this life of privilege also included a vicious expression of this hatred.

My two older brothers, on the other hand, were spared this side of the man. Dad's crap was always hidden from them as well as from the authorities. I kept the secrets, too. I never told my brothers what happened until I was 20 years old. Guess what? They didn't believe it. Later they did -- when Dad escaped from prison and moved in with them, then stole and sold their belongings for the money he heeded.

At the same time, my mother was a college professor with intelligence and respect. But she was making less than the janitors at her college. That was the way things were for a woman in the 1960s and 70s. Our community was full of upper middle class academics, while my Mom was barely making ends meet, bringing up three children alone with no support coming from Dad. He simply refused to pay it.

So my eyes were open early to the unfairness of privilege and its misapplication. Somehow, I got it. I saw through a lot of the lies and bullshit. I saw that privilege was handed out in unfair ways. I saw that you couldn't trust the "good guys" to be good and you couldn't believe the downtrodden were there as a result of laziness or lack of effort.

I also learned very early to never trust the authorities. In every case that the cops were called or a social worker made an attempt to intervene, my father was believed and my mother and the other wives were considered hysterical whiners.

I wouldn't wish my childhood on anyone else, but I am grateful for what it taught me. Even though I hated my father and I'm glad he's dead and I am safe from his cruelty, I also love him and admire some of the marvelous grifts he managed to pull off.

My life now is wonderful and full of friends and good people who care and do good in the world. And maybe that's because I learned early when to recognize unfair privilege. Maybe having a mixed up childhood has benefits that other folks miss out on.

One of my brothers is still pretty messed up because of his relationship with Dad. I am glad that he was there at Dad's funeral, because he saw the corpse and confirmed the death. The chances were 50/50 it was just another elaborate scam of his to get out of something he didn't want to do. I'm pretty sure my brother still doesn't really believe what happened to me and thinks the man was just grossly misunderstood.

The last time I talked to Dad, before I cut off all relations with him and moved away to avoid contact, was when he was on trial for assaulting his fourth wife. I was 21 or so. He called and begged me to testify for him at his trial. I told him there wasn't anything I could say. He said, "Don't worry: I've got your testimony all typed up for you. I can send it to you and you can memorize it on the plane." Seriously, this is the kind of shit he'd pull and he usually got away with it.

He begged me to come. He told me he'd kill himself if I didn't come and it would be my fault. He could play me and I actually worried about that. I called the psychiatric hospital where he'd been committed and spoke to his doctor. The doctor could reveal nothing, of course, but he tipped me off in not so subtle ways that, first, my father was too damn selfish to kill himself, and that second, I needed to be worried about myself and not my father. He was one of many strangers who have helped me when I needed it.

In my life, then, privilege wasn't something inherent: it was pretty arbitrary and based on a whole lot of myths. It's not difficult to see when I benefit from unfair privileges. I recognize it and I'm loathe to benefit from it because it is so reminiscent of my Dad's scams. He benefitted unfairly because too many people were unwilling to believe a privileged, white, intelligent man could do the things he did. It was just way too easy for him and it's way to easy for us white women, too.

I want to continue to feel uncomfortable when I notice my privilege. I want to continue to remember what I knew so early in life from the contrast between my mother's life and my father's life. I learned a lot way too early and, at the very least, I want to honor that brave little girl I was by keeping the lessons she learned close to heart and in my mind as I make my way through life.