Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Blogs discussing the "strip search" case

Posted on April 24, 2009 by Ampersand

Other blogs discussing the oral arguments in the case I blogged about yesterday.

You’re Reading Too Much Into It, an interesting blog about politics and pop culture, starts by discussing Breyer’s infamous remarks and segways into critiquing the Daily Show’s sexist reporting from Sweden and a comedian who badgered her into performing on stage. What connects all of this is how our society treats women as objects to be looked at. (Plus there’s a clip from “Coupling” that I really enjoyed, less for the political relevance than for the clever use of 90’s phone technology as a prop for farce.) Hard to summarize, well worth reading.
Amanda at Pandagon gets to the heart of the matter:

What’s traumatic about strip searches and sexual assault isn’t that someone touched or saw something previously untouched or unseen. It’s the horror of having someone use your nudity and your sexuality as a weapon to degrade and humiliate you. And anyone who’s been subject to the routine degradation and humiliation dished out by sadistic school administrators has a pretty damn good idea of what was going on here.
So was the goal really degradation and humiliation, or was it to find contraband? Jacob at Hit & Run points out something I didn’t know: school officials didn’t even search the student’s desk or locker before strip-searching her. The strip-search wasn’t a last resort, it was a first resort.
Also from Jacob at Hit and Run:

Wright, the school district’s lawyer, initially suggested it would unconstitutional for schools to enforce their zero-tolerance policies with body cavity searches, because there is no record of students’ hiding drugs in their vaginas or rectums. But later he backtracked, saying the real problem is that school officials are not properly trained to conduct such searches. When Souter asked him whether body cavity searches would be OK once administrators and teachers had undergone the requisite training, Wright said “that’s to be left up to the local governments.”
Scott at Tapped has several good points that defy a one-sentence summary, so go read his post. And then go read Scott at Lawyers Guns and Money, where he breaks down how the Justices are likely to vote.
The Agitator, responding to a comment by Justice Souter, writes:

Can anyone think of a single incident in the last 30 years in which several children have died after ingesting drugs distributed by one of their classmates on school grounds? Before we let school principals go rummaging through the panties of underage girls, shouldn’t we be at least be able to cite a few examples?
It’s pretty obvious to most “Alas” readers, I think, that part of this story is that eight of nine Supreme Court Justices are male. Historiann points out that this aspect has seemingly escaped the notice of most mainstream newsmedia. (Via Feminist Law Profs.)
Rad Geek expresses a thought similar to what my all-too-infrequent co-blogger Myca said in comments.
TechnologyWoman argues that what happened to Redding was an assault.
SCOTUSblog has a useful summary of the background of this case.

Jake Squid Narrates an Escape Pod Episode

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Myca

Our very own commenter, the snarky and perspicacious Jake Squid, has narrated ‘Chump Change‘, a just-aired episode of Escape Pod. His reading is stellar, and if you listen to it, you’ll be that much more able to imagine his comments in his voice, which adds something, I think.

Escape Pod is the science-fictional sister podcast to PodCastle, Mandolin’s excellent podcast of fantasy short fiction. Over the past year or so, I’ve worked my way through every single episode in the the archives of PodCastle, Escape Pod, and Pseudopod, their horror affiliate, and I can say with conviction that if you’re not listening to them regularly, your life is empty and meaningless.

Posted in Whatever | 5 Comments

Fox's "Glee," the stereotyping of fat black women, and making friends with the loser kid in the wheelchair

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Ampersand

I’m getting sick of the-popular-kids-are-better-at-geek-stuff-than-the-geeks trope, which stinks of noblesse oblige. And there are a zillion other things wrong here. But I’ll still be giving this show a try, because I’m that much of a sucker for anything resembling a musical.

But about that preview: Note the unwritten rule in TV that it’s okay to cast a fat actress if she’s black (and especially if she’s black and sings). On the one hand, of course it’s great that some talented fat black actresses are getting work. On the other hand, these actresses are often typecast as sassy, strong-willed types.

I’d rather see fat black women cast in the wide variety of roles white thin men are cast in — when, for example, will we see a fat black female captain of a starship, playing gravitas instead of sass?

ETA: And also, what’s with the kid in the wheelchair? Is it even a speaking role? If it is, you’d never know it from this preview.

It seems to me I’ve seen this a few times — the character of the high school loser in a wheelchair, whose primary narrative purpose — other than being an icon of loserness — is to establish the evilness of the people who reject the kid in the wheelchair, and/or to establish the openminded goodness of the thin, good-looking protagonists who befriend wheelchair loser. (Examples: Heathers, Adams Family Values, Wicked.) ((At least the part in Wicked is a speaking, and singing, part, and there’s a bit more to the character. But I want to vomit every time I hear the able-bodied guy blow the wheelchair girl’s mind by suggesting that she can dance — it’s played as if she’s spent her entire life waiting for some able-bodied guy to legitimize her by finding her attractive. As if no one in a wheelchair ever knew that she could dance before the ablebodied came along to let them know.))

Diversity consists of real parts, not just tokenism. Given how very rare characters in wheelchairs are, it’s a shame that a high proportion are done badly.

And why are the thin, ablebodied, pretty, white people always the leads? It’s like, it’s okay to have a bit of diversity in a friend group, so long as we remember who’s really important.

(Via Roz Kaveney — congrats on the agent, Roz! — and a hip tip-with-a-quip ripped from the lip of Kip.)

Posted in Disabled Rights & Issues, Fat, fat and more fat, Popular (and unpopular) culture, Race, racism and related issues | 57 Comments

Have your comments been caught in our spam trap frequently?

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Ampersand

I’m trying to create a list of “Alas” comment-writers whose comments have been caught by our spam trap multiple times. If this has happened to you more than just once or twice, please leave a comment on this post. (And I’m now checking the spam trap a few times a day, so even if it gets considered spam I’ll see the comment eventually.)

Thanks in advance for your help.

Posted in Site and Admin Stuff | 9 Comments

Supreme Court Seems Poised to Okay Schools Strip-Searching 13-year-old for Ibuprofen; also, Stephen Breyer needs to stop rewatching that scene in "Porky's"

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Ampersand

Dahlia Lithwick reports on the oral arguments at the Supreme Court, involving a 13 year old girl stripped-searched because she had been falsely accused of giving ibuprofen to other students:

Adam Wolf, the ACLU lawyer who represents Redding, explains that “the Fourth Amendment does not countenance the rummaging on or around a 13-year-old girl’s naked body.” Wolf explains that he is arguing for a “two-step framework,” wherein schools can use a lower standard to search “backpacks, pencil cases, bookbags” but a higher standard when you “require a 13-year-old girl to take off her pants, her shirt, move around her bra so she reveals her breasts, and the same thing with her underpants to reveal her pelvic area.” This leads Justice Stephen Breyer to query whether this is all that different from asking Redding to “change into a swimming suit or your gym clothes,” because, “why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym?”

This leads Ginsburg to sputter—in what I have come to think of as her Lilly Ledbetter voice—”what was done in the case … it wasn’t just that they were stripped to their underwear! They were asked to shake their bra out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out!” Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts.

But Breyer just isn’t letting go. “In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.”

Shocked silence, followed by explosive laughter. In fact, I have never seen Justice Clarence Thomas laugh harder. Breyer tries to recover: “Or not my underwear. Whatever. Whatever. I was the one who did it? I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think it’s beyond human experience.” […]

You see, we now have school districts all around the country finding naked photos of teens and immediately calling in the police for possession of kiddie porn. Yet schools see nothing wrong with stripping these same kids naked to search for drugs. Evidently teenage nakedness is only a problem when the children choose to be naked.

Scott at Lawyers Guns and Money breaks down how the vote is likely to go (Scalia is likely to vote for student’s privacy rights, incidentally, while this will probably be the second time Alito has favored the state strip-searching little girls).

Three points:

1) Yet anther example of how the drug war has eroded sanity.

2) Yet another example of why a Court with only one woman on it is a court that’s unable to fairly administrate justice. ((Yes, women aren’t always more connected to reality on these issues than men; I’m sure Camille Paglia, for example, would see nothing wrong with Breyer’s logic. But this isn’t a question of absolute difference; it’s a question of odds. A Court with 4 or 5 women on it would be substantially less likely to have Ginsburg be the only Justice appalled by Breyer’s rationalization.))

3) Yet another example of why Democratic presidents appointing “centrist: judges while Republicans appoint far-right judges creates right-wing outcomes, not balance.

Posted in In the news, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues, Supreme Court Issues | 60 Comments

We Are America! We Do Not F—ing Torture!

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Jeff Fecke

Shep Smith appears to still have a soul:

For the YouTube impaired, Shep says, “We are America! I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps. We are America! We do not fucking torture!”

It used to be that Smith’s comment would have been uncontroversial, even on a conservative station like Fox News. Oh, the profanity would have gotten him into trouble, I suppose, but the comment itself, or his comment in another segment that, “We are America, we don’t torture! And the moment that is not the case, I want off the train! This government is of, by, and for the people — that means it’s mine. That means — I’m not saying what is torture, and what is not torture, but I’m saying, whatever it is, you don’t do it for me! I want off the train when the government starts — I want off, next stop, now!” — that was just what America was, and everyone agreed on it.

Sadly, today we have the dead-enders arguing over whether there aren’t legitimate policy disagreements regarding torture, and whether we oughtn’t just sweep things under the rug, let a new day dawn and all that. Because for too many Americans, torture is A-OK.

Incidentally, a newly-spreading meme on the right is that if there are hearings into torture, things could get uncomfortable for some Democrats. To which I say: good. Those Democrats who signed off on torture are no less culpable than the Republicans who signed off on torture, and I have no sympathy for them. If Sen. Feinstein ends up in the dock alongside Gov. Bush and Secy. Cheney, I won’t shed any tears. You see, for me this isn’t a partisan issue; it’s a moral issue. Like Shep Smith, I want us either not to torture, or I want off the ride. Because pace the Republican mantra, I love my country, and love what it once stood for, even as I acknowledge that we often failed to live up to the standards we set for ourselves. And I hate like sin the fact that so many of the things I love about America were cast aside by the Bush Administration in a fit of paranoia and terror.

Posted in Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc., Media criticism | 40 Comments

Orson Scott Card is on the board of NOM

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Mandolin

Mandolin is on board with laughing at him.

Posted in Whatever | 19 Comments

Happy Earth Day!

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Jeff Fecke

Sorry I’m fat. I mean, yeah, sure, I try to stay away from beef, and I’m raising my daughter vegetarian, and I drive a small car, and turn out the lights when I leave home, and okay, I’m supportive of plans to reduce greenhouse emissions. But I’m fat, so I’m destroying the world.

Again, I’m sorry.

Posted in Fat, fat and more fat | 9 Comments

Why We Tortured

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Jeff Fecke

One of the things I failed to note in the disquieting series of revelations about our national torture program was the timing of it; it seems that quite a bit of the ramping-up was occurring in late 2002 and 2003. That’s odd, of course. One would expect that if we were terrified of additional terror attacks in the wake of 9/11, we would have been looking into torture in late 2001. What was going on in late 2002 that suddenly made us turn to forms of interrogation that shock the senses?

What indeed?

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

So to summarize, we tortured prisoners so we could find the non-existent Iraq-al Qaeda link, which would justify the war against Iraq that the Bush Administration desperately wanted to wage.

I don’t even know how to express how depraved that is.

Of course, we daresn’t do anything about it. Karl Rove says that investigating war crimes would make us into a “Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses,” as if torturing prisoners to justify a war of choice hasn’t already taken us far beyond that moral event horizon.

These people are evil. They are sick. And history will not treat them — or us — kindly.

Posted in Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc., Iraq | 18 Comments