"Yes, false rape accusations happen. Run the protocol anyway. I’ve heard that perhaps the military has the highest number of ‘em. True or not, RUN THE PROTOCOL ANYWAY. Because in 15 years of investigating rape accusations, I can count those that panned out as false on one hand. Meanwhile, the one time I almost skipped the protocol, the one time I almost didn’t believe a petty officer, because I was naive as an investigator and a young woman, because her commanding officer described her as “a party girl, always late, always out drinking, don’t bother with this one”, she turned out to be the victim of one of the most brutal assaults I’ve ever investigated. She shouldn’t have still been -alive-, let alone up and making the accusation. So let me repeat: five false accounts in fifteen years. And one time I almost failed a woman ‘cause of the bullshit way it’s normal to talk about us. Take your shipmates’ word, and then run the protocol. Every. Single. Time."
 - JAG lawyer, speaking to my husband’s plant during Sexual Assault Prevention Month. (via circusbones)
"My legitimacy is not dependant on my relationships. I’m bisexual with or without the relationships I’m in. If the LGBTQ community can’t accept that, then that’s an error that the community needs to fix."
My friend, Alon Zivony (bisexual activist, who is a cis man married to a straight cis woman)

REAL Lesbians React to Lesbian Porn!

fromonesurvivortoanother:

Pointlessly Gendered Items - by Sociological Images (click link for more)

"Women are afraid of meeting a serial killer. Men are afraid of meeting someone fat."

When Strangers Click, a 2011 documentary about online dating.

It reminds me of that famous Margaret Atwood quote: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” It also reminds me of something written by one of the mods of Sex Worker Problems: “Misandry irritates. Misogyny kills.”

I mean, it’s just true.

(via tealeafprincess)

“Misandry irritates. Misogyny kills.”

That’s it.  That’s it right there.

(via oddpicturesoddpeople)

"I wrote a poem about it, and then threw it away, because that’s the last thing I need right now: More words dedicated to people who will never dedicate a single thing to me."

assbutt-in-the-garrison:

This is the kind of shit that just really gets to me and pisses me off. How can you support the gay and lesbian community but then not us? It’s not that difficult to go educate yourself on bisexuality and what it means, and it is really not that difficult to understand. This is not some crazy kinky thing that people choose to do. We’re not some crazy attention whores who are confused and don’t know what we want. Are there some people out there who are confused? Sure. Are there some annoying immature girls out there who just want attention? Sure. Are there bisexual people out there who are promiscuous and jump from one to the other constantly? There are. But that doesn’t give anyone the right to generalize and stereotype all bisexuals as one. You are pegging an entire community of people as something bad, and something not to be taken seriously or even considered “real”, based upon the few who give us a bad reputation.

Generalizing entire communities of people is wrong. Don’t sit there and think you know what kind of person I am because you once witnessed a couple 13 year old girls that claimed to be bi and made out with one another at a party. Those aren’t the faces of bisexuality and that kind of behavior certainly does not represent me or what it means to be bisexual. This is a STEREOTYPE. And it’s WRONG and should NEVER be used as some kind of evidence against why you do not support or accept an entire group/community of people. 

Just admit that you are a close-minded and ignorant bigot.

amaeza:

untruc:

amaeza:

you know, i’m a raging lesbian and i was never distracted by what other girls in my classes were wearing in high school. this is a male problem, not an “attracted to women” problem.

This is an “inability to respect women” problem.

Which is a male problem.

rosalarian:

Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy, in case you hadn’t heard. How dare she remove those ticking time bombs from her chest, amiright? Like, hasn’t she learned by now that her body is public domain and we all get to vote on what she does with it? Sheesh, how selfish can ya get.

dorothy-snarker:

Angelina Jolie writes about her preventative double mastectomy in an essay for The New York Times.

But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action. ….
I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer. ….
I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be will able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options. Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

Read the whole piece here. 

dorothy-snarker:

Angelina Jolie writes about her preventative double mastectomy in an essay for The New York Times.

But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action. ….

I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer. ….

I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be will able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options. Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

Read the whole piece here. 

"What are you doing to combat piracy?
One of the things is we get ISPs to publicise their connection speeds – and when we launch in a territory the Bittorrent traffic drops as the Netflix traffic grows. So I think people do want a great experience and they want access – people are mostly honest. The best way to combat piracy isn’t legislatively or criminally but by giving good options. One of the side effects of growth of content is an expectation to have access to it. You can’t use the internet as a marketing vehicle and then not as a delivery vehicle."

Netflix’s Ted Sarandos talks Arrested Development, 4K and reviving old shows | Stuff magazine

Jesus, every single line in there could serve as an article headline in and of itself. This, right here, is almost a tl;dr of why Netflix is becoming the dominant player in television.

(via spytap)

…it’s almost like they KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING.

(via mikerugnetta)

"You guys know about vampires? You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might seem themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it."
Love Is All Around
Joan Jett & The Blackhearts

stuffaboutminneapolis:

Love Is All Around - Joan Jett And The Blackhearts

Today Minnesota became the 12th state to permit same-sex marriage in the United States. So, appropriate Joan Jett cover of the Mary Tyler Moore theme song “Love Is All Around”, is appropriate

I am not your wife, sister or daughter

believermag:

image

One of the most incisive responses to some of the rhetoric we’ve been hearing in the wake of the Steubenville rape verdict is this blog post over at The Belle Jar. It articulates a discomfort many of us have with the sentiment (invoked in many contexts), “Imagine if the victim was your sister, or your daughter, or your wife.” Read the whole piece. This is what impassioned cultural criticism can do.

Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt:

The “wives, sisters, daughters” line of argument comes up all the fucking time. President Obama even used it in his State of the Union address this year, saying,

“We know our economy is stronger when our wives, mothers, and daughters can live their lives free from discrimination in the workplace, and free from the fear of domestic violence.”

This device, which Obama has used on more than one occasion, is reductive as hell. It defines women by their relationships to other people, rather than as people themselves. It says that women are only important when they are married to, have given birth to, or have been fathered by other people. It says that women are only important because of who they belong to.

Women are not possessions.

Women are people.

I seriously cannot believe that I have to say this in 2013.

On top of all of this, I want you to think of a few other implications this rhetorical device has. For one thing, what does it say about the women who aren’t anyone’s wife, mother or daughter? What does it say about the kids who are stuck in the foster system, the kids who are shuffled from one set of foster parents to another or else living in a group home? What does it say about the little girls whose mothers surrender them, willingly or not, to the state? What does it say about the people who turn their back on their biological families for one reason or another?

That they deserve to be raped? That they are not worthy of protection? That they are not deserving of sympathy, empathy or love?

And when we frame all women as being someone’s wife, mother or daughter, what are we teaching young girls?

We are teaching them that in order to have the law on their side, they need to be loved by men. 

Read the whole thing at The Belle Jar.

Photograph of Gloria Steinem and Flo Kennedy.