Desk Space Available in SE Portland, $135-$185 a month

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Ampersand

(Bumping this back to the top, because we’re once again seeking new co-spacers!)

I draw my comics at a shared office space in Portland (Oregon), on SE Foster and Holgate.

We’re currently looking for mild-mannered, friendly writers, cartoonists, visual artists, programmers and anyone else who wants a affordable workplace, to share a quiet, heated, air conditioned work space.

shared-space-storefront

– Large desks (approximately 5 x 2.5 feet).
– High speed internet and utilities included.
– 24/7 access.
– Microwave, refrigerator and half bath.
– Close to food, gaming shop and other assorted awesomeness.
– On the 14 and 17 bus lines.
– $135 or $185 month (depending on the size of the desk) — incredibly affordable.

There are currently a few desks available.

I can say from experience, working from a place that’s not a desk in my bedroom is totes gratifying and boosts productivity. If you’d be interested, drop me an email.

Posted in Whatever | 2 Comments  

Two Opportunities for Writers I Thought Worth Publicizing Here

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I subscribe to the Creative Writing Opportunities List. It’s a Yahoo group called CRWROPPS-B. These two opportunities showed up in my inbox today that I thought would be worth letting people here know about. Since they do not concern the kind of writing I do, or the venues where I usually publish, I have not done any due diligence regarding them. The list is reputable and, as far as I know, generally reliable in the opportunities it publicizes. If it turns out that they are not worthwhile, I apologize, but I also hope the people who find this out will comment and explain why so that we all can learn something.

Time Traveling is Not for Everyone

The lack of diversity in the time traveling world is the reason filmmaker Koji Sakai and  New York Times best-selling author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky Heidi Durrow are putting together an anthology, Time Traveling is Not for Everyone, that explores the other side of time traveling.

We want to hear your time traveling story. From your perspective—whatever that might be. We are looking for writers to submit proposals for short stories (five to ten thousand words) featuring a character from an underrepresented community traveling to some time period before this one.

The deadline for proposals is February 14, 2015. EXTENDED TO MARCH 1, 2015.

What we are looking for in your proposal:

  • One page proposal featuring a main character from an underrepresented community going back to a time period other than ours
  • Writer biography or resume
  • Writing sample

Please send your proposals or questions to: Time.Traveling.4.All.of.UsATgmailDOTcom

The Creative Team behind: Time Traveling is Not for Everyone.

Heidi Durrow is the New York Times best-selling author of the The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, the winner of the PEN/Bellwether prize. She is the founder of the premiere book, film and performance festival, the Mixed Remixed Festival, which features stories of the Mixed and multiracial experience.

Koji Steven Sakai has written four feature films that have been produced, Haunted Highway,The People I’ve Slept With, Monster & Me, and #1 Serial Killer. His screenplay, Romeo, Juliet, & Rosaline, was optioned by Amazon Studios. His debut novel, Romeo & Juliet Vs. Zombies, will be released in the spring.

The SLF Working-Class / Impoverished Writers’ $750 Grant

Working class, blue-collar, poor, and homeless writers have been historically underrepresented in speculative fiction, due to financial barriers which have made it much harder for them to have access to the writing world. Such lack of access might include an inability to attend conventions, to purchase a computer, to buy books, to attend college or high school, to have the time to write (if, for example, you must work two jobs simply to pay rent and feed a family, or if you must spend all your waking hours job-hunting for months on end). The SLF would like to assist in finding more of these marginalized voices and bringing them into speculative fiction.

You are eligible for this grant if you come from a background such as described above, if you grew up (or are growing up) in homelessness, poverty, or a blue collar / working-class household, or if you have lived for a significant portion of your life in such conditions, especially if you had limited access to relatives/friends who could assist you financially. We will give preference to members of that larger pool who are currently in financial need (given our limited funds). Please note that while we are based in America, and some of our language below reflects that perspective, this grant is available to international writers; please assess your own situation as appropriate for your home country.Please note that, unlike our other grants, you may receive this grant anonymously or pseudonymously. Application materials will be kept confidential to the grant committee and SLF staff.

What Do We Mean By Working-Class / Impoverished?

Here are some examples; they are not meant to be comprehensive, but rather to offer some guidelines to help you determine if you might be eligible. We mean to cast a wide net for this grant, so if you think you might be eligible, you probably are. If you have specific questions about your financial situation’s applicability, please don’t hesitate to write to us and ask.

You would potentially be eligible for this grant if any of the following apply:

  • you’re American, and qualify for the earned income credit,
  • you’ve qualified for food stamps and/or Medicaid for a significant period of time,
  • you live paycheck to paycheck,
  • your parents did not go to college,
  • you rely on payday loans,
  • your children qualified for free school lunch,
  • you’re currently being raised in a single parent household,
  • you’re supporting yourself and paying your own way through college,
  • you’ve lived at or below 200% of the poverty line for your state for at least one year,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment  

Reading The Veil and The Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, by Fatima Mernissi

Posted on January 24, 2015 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

On and off over the past year or so, I have gotten into some pretty heated discussions here about Islam. In August of 2014, I wrote a two-part post called “Trying to Be an Ally: Thinking About Hejab, Muslim Invisibility, and the Casual Hatred that is Cultural Appropriation.” (Part 1 and Part 2)1 I wrote those posts in response to this one on Ms. Muslamic about “hijab tourism.” I put this one up about Sahar Amer’s book What Is Veiling? in response to some of the discussion on the other two posts; and I posted this one , about Reza Aslan’s response to what Bill Maher said in this clip because I was tired of listening to Maher trying to pass off his anti-intellectual Islam-bashing as some kind of crusade for justice.

 

For me, perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the discussions on Alas that these posts engendered was what I perceived to be some people’s inability to distinguish between criticizing the oppressive behaviors of Muslims–whether as individuals or governments–and characterizing Islam itself as somehow inherently “barbaric,” which is not the word they used, but is consistent with the emotional tone of Maher’s (and some of Sam Harris’) rhetoric.

One of the points I kept trying to make in these discussion was that there are already Muslims addressing on Muslim terms many of the critiques that we in the West have of religion. There was some not insignificant pushback against this point. So, for example, when I linked to evidence that there is at least one Muslim scholar, Dr. Amanullah De Sondy, who argues that being gay might in fact be compatible with Islam, G&W responded with this:

In all seriousness: so what? Who cares that there are some people who are deliberately promoting a view that contradicts the plain language of the text? Why on earth are they relevant in a general conversation, since they are a tiny fraction of all Muslims?

To be fair, I have taken G&W’s comment a little bit out of context because I am not really interested in reopening the precise conversation that was going on at that point. Rather, I have quoted him here because it was this comment that brought home to me my own ignorance about the very discussion within Islam that I was insisting we had to acknowledge and respect. Obviously, unless we are reading the Quran in Arabic, and also have access to the necessary and appropriate etymological, historical and other commentaries, we have to be very careful about what we actually mean by the phrase “plain language.” Nonetheless, granting for the sake of argument the aptness of G&W’s question and phrasing, the fact is that I had no idea, and I still don’t know, if Dr. De Sondy’s argument is or is not based on the Quran’s “plain language.”

Realizing this, I decided that I would take down from my shelf a book that I have owned for more than twenty years but never read: The Veil and The Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, by Fatima Mernissi. My plan was to read her book and post a kind of reading journal as I went, but a host of circumstances intervened, making my reading a far more disjointed experience than such a project would have required. It’s only now, two or three months after I first picked the book up, that I have finally finished it. One of the things I learned as I read was that, even if I’d been able to devote the time to the book that I’d wanted, a single reading would not have been enough for me to post in the way I originally had in mind. Mernissi’s argument is subtle and complex and relies not only on a textual analysis of passages in the Quran, which I have never read, not even in English, but also on a body of religious and historical research and commentary with which I am completely unfamiliar. I simply don’t know enough to do what I originally wanted to do in the way that I wanted to do it.

Continue reading →

  1. The images in Part 1 are a little messed up on Alas, so if you want to see the post with the images, here’s a link to the post on my blog. [↩]
Posted in Islam, Islamaphobia | 40 Comments  

13 Notes About #GamerGate

Posted on January 24, 2015 by Ampersand

ethics

1) Gamergate started out with a huge misogynist outburst against (female and feminist) game developer Zoe Quinn. The term “gamergate” itself was coined by right-wing actor Adam Baldwin (of Firefly fame), endorsing a Youtube video which falsely accused Quinn of sleeping with a male journalist in exchange for a good write-up of her game. The misogyny was not subtle.

2) On the other hand, it seems likely that Zoe Quinn was, in fact, emotionally abusing her boyfriend Eron Gjoni.1

3) But that in no way excuses Gjoni’s abusive acts against his ex-girlfriend (publishing tons of private correspondence and encouraging gamergate), or the huge misogynist flood against Quinn, which Gjoni encouraged while maintaining a very thin shell of deniability.2

4) I don’t see how it’s possible to look at something like the wildly disproportionate, almost incomprehensibly numerous, violent,3 misogynistic overreaction to Anita Sarkeesian criticizing sexism in games, and not conclude that there’s a misogyny problem in the gaming community. And yet, many gamergaters deny that there’s a misogyny problem there at all. To me, this saps them of credibility.

anita-sarkeesian

5) Gamergate got huge – too huge to be any one thing. I think there genuinely are gamergaters who aren’t misogynists, don’t participate in abuse, report abuse when they see it, etc.. I’ve met some Gamergaters who seem to be not at all woman-hating (although imo they are making the wrong call by associating themselves with GG). There are tens of thousands of gamergaters, and I’m not comfortable with painting them all with a single brush.

6) But on the other hand, it’s not like Gamergaters couldn’t simply choose another label. They could very easily disassociate themselves from their misogynistic beginnings, if they wanted to, just by creating a new name for “anti-corruption-in-gaming-journalism-but-not-rooted-in-misogyny.” Instead, they choose to associate themselves with a name that is obviously rooted in large-scale misogyny.4

7) There’s abuse from both sides. The death threats referred to in my previous post almost certainly came from anti-gamergaters. Less seriously (because not threats) but more seriously (because thousands of times more common), I’ve seen a huge amount of mean and dehumanizing tweets from both sides.

8) But it’s my strong impression (albeit one I cannot prove) that the abuse and death threats are more extreme for female, feminist developers in gaming than for anyone else involved in gaming.5

9) But after a certain point of mindless and mean tweets becoming commonplace on both sides, as well as death threats and the like being used repeatedly by the outliers on both sides, I no longer want to associate myself with either side, even if one side is worse.

10) On the substantive issues that they claim to be concerned about, Gamergaters are, imo, mostly wrong. It is not corrupt for critics to discuss sexism in their written criticism of a game. It is not corrupt for an award for indy game design to go to a game that most gamergaters don’t like. Etc, etc.

10½ ) I think gamergaters are also wrong to say that it’s corrupt for a critic or reporter to write about work by someone whose patreon or kickstarter they’ve supported. Supporting a patreon is not a friendship relationship, or an investor relationship; it’s more like supporting someone’s zine by subscribing to it. There is nothing corrupt about critics writing about work that they passionately support. However, this is a somewhat grayer area, and what gamergaters are asking for here – disclosure – seems harmless.

11) The gamergaters I’ve spoken to have a truly terrifying lack of depth in how they view art and art criticism.

12) Some Gamergate actions are – although not literally censorship – doing pragmatic harm to freedom of speech. Gamergaters attempt to use economic coercion to shut up reporters and publications with opposing views. This is contemptible. I have not seen a single gamergater disagree with this common and much-publicized gamergate tactic.6

13) I think gamergate has vastly increased the number of feminists and nerds who parse these issues as “feminists vs nerds” conflicts. Unfortunately, this parsing erases the existence of feminist nerds, who comprise approximately 99% of everyone I’m friends with ever, so I’m really annoyed by this.

  1. I’m a little bothered by the conflation of “cheating on your lover and lying about it” with “abuse.” There is a big difference between what a cheating liar does and what someone who beats up their lover does, even though both of them are doing great harm. There is a good reason only one of these two things is a crime. But probably I’m trying to stop a train that actually left the station years ago. [↩]
  2. I’m in agreement with people who say “Quinn was emotionally abusive and grossly unethical and we shouldn’t make her a hero.” I’m not in agreement with people who deny that Gjoni was also emotionally abusive and grossly unethical, or who say that what happened to Quinn is in any way justified by what she did to Gjoni. [↩]
  3. If you don’t think that counts as violent, there’s also this. [↩]
  4. It is true, as I’ve seen some pro-GG folks argue, that the Democrats began as a racist party and we’re mostly willing to overlook that now. But there’s a difference between overlooking a group’s origins in 1782, versus overlooking a group’s origins this past August. [↩]
  5. Adam Baldwin will not be forced to cancel any public appearances by threats of a repeat of the Montreal Massacre. [↩]
  6. And yes, I have looked. I’m sure there are some out there – there are, after all, so many thousands of gamergaters – but any gamergater who questions these economic-strongarm tactics must be an extreme outlier. [↩]
Posted in Civility & norms of discourse, Feminism, sexism, etc, Free speech, censorship, copyright law, etc., norms of discourse | 63 Comments  

Rachel Swirsky’s 2014 Publications & Award Reading

Posted on January 22, 2015 by Mandolin

This was two separate posts on my own blog, but condensed here for convenience.

First, my 2014 work:

“Grand Jete“ (or “The Great Leap”) came out in the last issue of Subterranean Online. I am honored to have been part of the magazine and saddened to lose it. “Grand Jete” is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, and among the longest, at novella length. I started it during the first February when I was living in Iowa, when it felt like the snow had been there forever, and would always be there, and that didn’t feel so much oppressive as just… like stasis.

I wanted to write about the ways that love can cause pain. It became a story about the ballet Coppelia, Judaism, and Winter. “Grand Jete” is being reprinted in year’s best anthologies from Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois.

“Endless” came out in the British anthology SOLARIS RISING 3. The extremely patient editor Ian Whates was more than generous in dealing with my (seemingly also endless) writer’s block. I wrote a short draft of this story several years ago with the vague aim of selling it to Nature’s Futures, but it didn’t really work at that length; it was just a dry sort of letter thing without any background or character. The published version is five times the length of the original, and I think it really needed the extra word count. It’s about a post-singularity world and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

“Tender” came out in Neil Clarke’s anthology UPGRADED which is about the physical merging of humans with robotic technology. For months, I was working on a story for this about a kidnapped battle robot, but I was just never able to make anything happen. Then, one morning when I couldn’t sleep, I wrote this piece more or less entire (I did revise, later, but the whole structure was there). I love it when that happens; I wish it could happen more. The story is told from the perspective of a mad scientist’s wife whose husband is deploying increasingly desperate mechanical interventions to keep her alive.

If anyone would like to get access to one of these stories, please let me know, and I’ll send you a copy. (This offer is intended for Hugo and Nebula voters, but if someone else who isn’t either wants a copy anyway, do ping–within reason, I’ll try to accommodate.)

And a brief note on my 2014 award reading (slightly modified for clarity to an audience of people who aren’t necessarily immersed in science fiction and fantasy publishing):

Most years, I try to read as widely as possible before award nominations. I like to be an informed nominator, but more than that, I like being an informed reader of the genre; I like knowing what’s going on. I love discovering writers who are new to me which I almost always do, and I love being able to recommend and talk about fiction.

This year, I’m on the jury for an award given to young adult novels. This means I need to read many, many young adult novels. On the one hand–yay! Young adult novels! On the other hand, ouch. Less time for reading anything else.

I will try to blitz-read some short fiction. But it won’t be as much, and it won’t be drawn from as widely, and I’m sorry for that.

However, if you have a piece of fiction that you think I should read, or that you’d like me to read, please link me, or (for attachments) contact me so that we can set it up by email. Recommend me your fiction, or someone else’s. I can’t guarantee what I’ll be able to read, but I’ll try. (This offer is meant to cover fiction published in 2014 that’s eligible for the Nebulas or the Hugos, but I’m always happy to read other good fiction, too. Just please note if you’re recommending ineligible stuff so I know I’m not on a deadline to read it.)

Posted in Mandolin's fiction & poems | 3 Comments  

Proportions and Death Threats, and Blockbots, and Men Policing Women’s Responses

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Ampersand

small-dog-large-dog

I think this is a good argument, and a good thing for both sides of any large internet dispute to keep in mind. (And something that I have sometimes failed to keep in mind.) The writer is Chris, who is (if I’m following this correctly) an expert on statistics.

I’m fortunate, however, because I’ve been blessed with a pretty good grasp of numbers. I know, for instance, that while a hundred or so threatening messages are a lot, they came from a dozen or so different persons at most. I know that a dozen is, really, an insignificant fraction of people in the context of this debate. There were almost 150,000 distinct tweeters discussing #Gamergate, and almost as many discussing opposition thereto. I am not going to go out and tar such a huge group of people with the brush that would at best fit a handful.

When you get 150,000 people together, it’s impossible to do so without having a handful of people who are very enthusiastic, very passionate and very much lacking the ability to express themselves without being offensive. Equally, there will be some who join in just so they can let their primal desires out. Proportions matter. They matter even where a single instance of something is unforgivable, such as in the case of harassment.

Of course, while Chris received “a hundred or so” threats, there are other people who receive thousands. There are people for whom the harassment drags on for years. And presumably Chris’ “hundred or so” doesn’t count messages that aren’t actual threats but are still abusive, which I suspect are much more numerous than threats. I’m glad those who make literal threats are only a tiny portion of the whole, but I want to be able to keep that in mind without forgetting that abusive harassment, including but not limited to threats, is a real problem. (I don’t mean to imply that Chris would disagree with me about any of this.)

2014-09-19-1062sea

Unfortunately, Chris’ clear head is lost when his post moves on to an over-the-top rant about a program some Twitter users made to block pro-gamergate people from their twitter feeds (so if I used this bot, I would not see any tweets from anyone on the blocked list), which according to Chris is “a McCarthyesque blacklist.” (McCarthyesque? Seriously? If police gave out tickets for historically ignorant hyperbole, Chris would owe a fine.)

In the comments of Ozy’s blog, Veronica writes a good response:

Do I need an open channel to literally every person on Earth? I follow hundreds on Twitter. Hundreds follow me. I see good variety of interesting stuff from interesting people. I do not need to see *everything* from *everyone*.

I lock my door. I wear headphones on the train. I don’t display my phone number emblazoned on my shirt. I get to have some control of who I interact with.

And honestly, unless someone offers some better way to avoid the Twitter mobs, I don’t really care if they like the bot. They aren’t going to maintain my Twitter account for me.

You use the term “guilt by association,” but that is a loaded phrase. To block someone on Twitter says nothing more than you don’t want to see their tweets nor have them see yours, nor do you want to receive notifications from them. This does not prevent them from tweeting to others. It is nothing more than a boundary. I can build any boundary I want on social networks and no one else gets to say boo.

Well, they can, but I will not hear them. Which is a lovely thing.

Indeed, both philosophically and legally, Veronica has a free speech right to choose not to listen.

I have no idea what Chris’ politics are, but I’ve seen similar frenzied overreactions to the blockbot coming from anti-feminists and MRAs.

Some anti-feminists and MRAs act as if their job is to police how women respond to abuse and harassment.1 Thus we are told that if a man is harassing a woman at a bar, she is a terrible person if she calls him creepy;2 and we are told that twitter users like Veronica are wrong to use whatever tools they want to block users they don’t want to read; and Lena Dunham is called a liar when she wrote about having been raped, even though she made it clear the event was a little ambiguous and changed the name and identifying details of the man.

Obviously, the very minor abuse of an annoying tweet is in no way equivalent to a rape. But these very disparate things form a pattern of anti-feminists (mostly men) thinking it’s their business to police how women respond to harassment and abuse.

If someone is being harassed, she doesn’t have to put her harasser’s feelings above her own safety and comfort. And if someone doesn’t want to read tweets, they don’t have to. It’s that simple.

  1. I don’t know the demographics of the blockbot user base, but I suspect that blockbot users are disproportionately female, and those blocked, disproportionately male. [↩]
  2. Calling someone a creep who has in fact not done anything offensive, or gotten in someone else’s space, could be a different matter. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. [↩]
Posted in Civility & norms of discourse | 57 Comments  

Red Pills and Ants

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Louise de Rênal's Left Shoulder

Recent events at a blog that rhymes with Shmetal-Moptimized reminded me of the existence of sociobiology and of people who imagine that human beings – and ants and bonobos and every other species — are driven primarily by biological imperatives, meaning the things you have to do to stay alive and shove your genes down the road a piece. As you might expect, the “staying alive” part gets short shrift (which is too bad, really) and the “my genes!” part gets rather long shrift (also too bad). The people who discuss these things are busy swapping propositions like “women are irrational because they don’t need to use their brains for anything but mate selection” and “men are better at spatial reasoning because they stalked gazelles through gazelle-mazes in ancient forests, even before the creation of dodecahedral dice” and “unattended male horniness leads to suicidality at the prospect of gene extinction, so the empathetic liberal, if rational, would vote for sex stamps as well as food stamps (both to be humane in the face of sex-having inequality and to cut down on hypothetical lifesaving rape).” Continue reading →

Posted in Anti-feminists and their pals, Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc., Economics and the like, Feminism, sexism, etc, Fiction, Gender and the Body, Homophobic zaniness/more LGBTQ issues, literature, Men and masculinity, Popular (and unpopular) culture, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues, Sex | 13 Comments  

Don’t Call Trans Women “men who identify as women”

Posted on January 17, 2015 by Ampersand

I’m sure that there are a few “Alas” readers who will leap on this to say “but, Amp! You call people racists! You’re such a hypocrite!”

Actually, I work to avoid calling people racists, just as I never called Yvonne transphobic. I do call certain policies and actions racists, but I almost never call a person racist. Please try and keep that distinction in mind when you comment. But otherwise, have at it. :-) I am large, I contain multitudes.

I would also ask you to “have at it,” on the specific subject of “Amp’s hypocrisy because he uses the word racist,” in the open thread, rather than discussing it in this thread (because I don’t want it taking over this thread).

You can also use this thread to discuss the Mt. Holyoke issue, if you want. You can get an idea of what happened at Mt. Holyoke from Yvonne’s article (warning for transphobic language, obviously), but I’d also recommend Carolyn Cox’s more positive take at The Mary Sue, and also this blog post for Eve Ensler’s very sensible take. (Ensler is the author of “The Vagina Monologues.”)

Posted in Transsexual and Transgender related issues | Comments Off  

The Politics of Being a Man Who Survived Childhood Sexual Violence

Posted on January 17, 2015 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

As I said in the blog post I wrote about the artist’s grant I received this year from the Queens Council on the Arts, I plan to use the blogging I do, as well as my newsletter (click to sign up), to share with you the process of preparing for publication my second book of poetry, Words for What Those Men Have Done, which continues my exploration of how being a survivor of childhood sexual violence has shaped my life. At the heart of the book, for me, is “For My Son, A Kind of Prayer,” which weaves together four different narratives: of my son’s birth, of my own sexual abuse, of the rape of a young girl in the Congo, and of a visit to the urologist. (The link will take you to a draft of the poem on my blog. It has also been published at The Good Men Project, in Voice Mail magazine, and is forthcoming in the anthology Veils, Halos and Shackles: International Poetry on the Abuse and Oppression of Women, which will be edited by Charles Fishman and Smita Sahay.)

One of the longest poems I’ve ever written, this piece presented some very specific challenges, not least of which was finding language that would work as poetry to describe precisely how the abuser I mention in the poem violated me. While this challenge raises the very interesting, and I think importan, question of what it means to make art out of such ugliness, it was not the most difficult challenge that I faced. Rather, the hardest part of writing “For My Son, A Kind of Prayer,” was resisting the temptation to wear my violation as an essentalizing badge of difference, as if the experience of being abused had emptied me of everything I might have in common with the man who assaulted me.

I’ve written elsewhere, and in some detail, about the paradox of being both a man who has been sexually violated by other men and a man socialized to embody, whether I choose to act on them or not, precisely the values of manhood and masculinity that legitimize that kind of violation. I plan to write more about this paradox as my work on Words for What Those Men Have Done progresses–especially, I think, as I prepare the public presentation I need to do in order to fulfill the terms of my grant. Here, for now, I will simply say that my understanding of this paradox first took root in me, as did the process of my own healing, when I was in my twenties and discovered in feminism a language that I could use to name what my abusers did to me as abuse.

“For My Son, A Kind of Prayer” does not try to resolve this paradox, but rather to illuminate what if feels like to live within it, which is something poetry can do–that art can do; that I hope Words for What Those Men Have Done will do–that other forms of expression cannot. As I said, I’ll be writing more about this as my work on the book progresses. Meanwhile, I’d like to share with you links to two organizations that provide education, support, resources, and advocacy for men who have survived sexual violence: MaleSurvivor and 1in6. I hope you’ll check them out.

Cross-posted on my blog.

Posted in Men and masculinity, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 2 Comments  

Sexism Hurts Men

Posted on January 17, 2015 by Ampersand

Kind of an extreme case:

“If you see anyone from about sixteen to sixty-five and they’re male, shoot ‘em. Kill every male you see.”

–Chris Kyle, “the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history,” in his autobiography, describing the effective (although not official) rules of engagement for a US sniper in Iraq.

Posted in Iraq, Sexism hurts men | 5 Comments