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

Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Any Gay Marriage Appeals – In Effect, A Big Victory For Equality

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Ampersand

With not a single dependable hint of its own constitutional view of same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court in one fell swoop on Monday cleared the way for gays and lesbians to wed in a batch of new states — starting first in five more states, and probably adding six more in the coming weeks. If that happens in all eleven, it will mean that same-sex marriages would then be legal in thirty states and Washington, D.C.

In seven one-line orders, released without explanation and with no report on how any Justice voted, the Court surprisingly refused to review any same-sex marriage case now before it and, in the process, prepared to lift a series of orders that had delayed such marriages while the issue remained in the Court. Almost no one had expected that to happen.

It may take a few weeks for the Court’s action to take effect in real-world terms, in the geographic areas where federal appeals courts have struck down bans in five states — the decisions that the Justices have now left intact. Because those appeals court rulings are binding on all federal courts in their regions, those decisions almost certainly dictate the outcome in six more states.

According to Huffpo, this will mean that about 60% of Americans will live in states with legal marriage equality.

So what happens next? Well, it’s probable that one of the right-wing leaning circuit courts (the Sixth or Fifth circuits seem likely) will issue a decision saying that state bans on marriage equality are Constitutional. This will create a split in the circuit courts, all but forcing the Supreme Court to decide the issue next term. But before that happens, more decision in other circuit courts could bring the total to 35 or more states, making it even harder to imagine any route to victory for anti-SSM folks.

I’d rather vote for a Democratic slimeball than a Republican saint

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Ampersand

(Fortunately for my preference, Democratic slimeballs don’t seem to be in short supply.)

In the comments at Ethics Alarms, “Michael R” writes:

How to tell if you are infected [with “partyism”]: if there is an election where the candidate for your party is known to be incompetent, corrupt, or a bigot but you vote for them anyway because you “can’t let …. have more seats in the ….”. I know a lot of people who refused to vote for someone in one local election that they admitted was intelligent, hardworking, and dedicated to bettering their community. They refused to vote for him because of his party, instead voting for someone that they admitted had none of the attributes above. The same people voted for someone with felony fraud convictions rather than his opponent, a man who only ran because he felt someone needed to run in opposition to said ex-felon.

Jack agreed, saying that he’d rather have a non-slimeball regardless of party affiliation.

I don’t agree. Michael appears to be talking about a member of the legislature (“you can’t let… have more seats”). When it comes to members of Congress, what’s important is how they’re going to vote, and which party they’ll caucus with. When it comes to Congress, I’d rather vote for a drunk puppy-kicking sidewalk spitter than vote for the nicest, most moral Republican on Earth.

Because when Republicans are in power, they do things like defund the UN Population Fund, leading to tens of thousands of women in the developing world dying for lack of good maternity care, and thousands more suffering needlessly from treatable fistula. Democrats reverse this.

The UNFPA is one example, but it’s not the only example. From food stamps, to climate change, to health care, the policies supported by the Democrats (as lousy as they often are) will kill fewer people than the policies supported by the Republicans. Even if you don’t believe that, at least believe that I believe that.

All else being equal, I’d rather have a good person who is a Republican in office than a Democratic slimeball. But all else is NOT equal. In the legislature, a good person with bad polices does infinitely more harm than a bad person with good policies. Votes based on “character” are, in my view, self-indulgent and unethical; it is voting to make the voter feel good, rather than voting to do the most good. Especially when it comes to Congress, the only ethical vote is a vote based on policy.

Posted in Elections and politics | 15 Comments

Reza Aslan Makes a Lot of Sense Defending Islam. The CNN Anchors Sound Like Islamaphobic Bigots.

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Author’s note: I’ve edited the title of this post to reflect more accurately the point I wanted to make.

Reza Aslan is responding here to this rant by Bill Maher:

It’s important to point out that Maher is right: Muslims who engage in offensive practices—whether they are individuals, governments, or groups like ISIS—should not get a pass just because they are Muslim and people are afraid to criticize them for fear of being called racist. Nonetheless, Maher’s critique of Islam is narrow and bigoted in exactly the way Aslan describes. And, frankly, the CNN news anchors are not much different.

Posted in Religion | 53 Comments

What Do You Do When Your Student Tells You Her Father Threatened Her Life? 2

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

In my last post, I told you about a former student who came to my office distraught because her father had threatened her life. It’s now more than two weeks since I walked her over to the counseling center on my campus, and I hope the fact that she has not contacted me since then means that she is somewhere safe, where she can start to figure out how to live the rest of her life. What struck me most about this student’s situation, I said, was less her father’s threat, which was of course bad enough, than the network of men he was able to enlist, or simply count on, to help him keep his daughter in line. Those men, I went on, made me think of these lines from Sa’di’s Golestan:

To please the king who eats a single apple
from a subject’s garden, his slaves will pull
the tree up whole to plant in the palace yard;
and if he lets five eggs be taken by force,
his army will put to the spit a thousand birds.

“There’s always someone willing to ride the coattails of someone else’s power and authority,” I wrote, but what makes these lines particularly powerful for me is the story that gives them their full context. Here it is:

The hunting party had stopped to eat, but there was no salt to season the meat they were roasting for [King] Nushirvan, and no one wanted to serve him an improperly seasoned meal. So they sent one of the boys who was with them to get some salt from a nearby village. Before the boy left, however, Nushirvan told him, “Make sure you pay for what you take. Otherwise, the village will be ruined.” Surprised and more than a little incredulous, those who were standing nearby asked how such a simple thing as bringing some salt to the king could have such profound consequences. Nushirvan replied, “When the world began, oppression was a small hut that few people entered, but as more and more people chose to go inside, they built it up, and look how high it reaches now.”

To please the king who eats a single apple
from a subject’s garden, his slaves will pull
the tree up whole to plant in the palace yard;
and if he lets five eggs be taken by force,
his army will put to the spit a thousand birds.

As the king, Nushirvan was very aware that he could have ordered the boy to take the salt without paying for it, and he understood well the dire consequences such privilege could have for those he ruled, if he allowed it to be taken to its logical conclusion. By telling the boy to pay, Nushirvan was taking responsibility for that privilege. What interests me is whether the boy would have paid for the salt even if Nushirvan had said nothing. If not, he would have turned the king’s privilege into an admittedly minor but nonetheless naked display of power. More to the point, by refusing in the name of the king to pay for that salt, the boy would have been claiming some of that power for himself, and he would have been doing so by choice. In other words, he would have done so knowing full well he could’ve done otherwise.

The men who spied on my student for her father, whether he asked them to or not, were in the same position as that boy was before Nushirvan told him to make sure he paid. They knew full well that they could have chosen not to inform on her, but they did so anyway. Similarly, in the wake of the recent nude-celebrity-photo hacking scandal, we were all in that position. Every single person who looked at those photos, tweeted about them, linked to them, posted them on Reddit, or otherwise treated them as anything other than the stolen private property they were, could have chosen to do otherwise, but didn’t. On the other hand, those of us who didn’t chose not to enforce an idea about women’s place in society that is, in its essence, no different from the one my student’s father was enforcing when he beat her for being (in his estimation) inappropriately alone with a young male acquaintance.

I have no doubt that few of the people who looked at those pictures would openly declare themselves that father’s ally. Nonetheles, just like he valued his idea of family, and particularly women’s honor more than the flesh-and-blood woman his daughter is, the people who looked at those pictures chose their salacious value, and the power they could feel in viewing them, over the human value of the flesh-and-blood people whose pictures they were. Neither of which is very much different from the dynamic Sa’di describes, in which people who work for the king value the slice of the king’s power that they are licensed to exercise more than the humanity, to use the examples in Sa’di’s verse, of the people whose trees they are uprooting or whose chickens they are stealing.

Pick your cause. Whether it’s in the context of racism or environmentalism, militarism or poverty, sexism (including heterosexism), transphobia, Islamophobia, homophobia, unionism, or antisemitism, we all face this kind of choice every day, in ways both big and small. Do we value the human beings whose lives are materially at stake or do we value the power that creates the imbalance that turns these issues into causes in the first place? No one makes the right choice all the time. I certainly don’t, but understanding that the choice is, first and always, mine to make has made my life a lot more meaningful.

Cross-posted.

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Iran, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 76 Comments

Embarrassments – Trans People and Surgery

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Grace Annam

Not too long ago, I went through a series of surgeries involving intercontinental travel to an unfamiliar country, general anaesthesia, significant trauma, and extended recovery time, including the usual post-anaesthesia depression. I was out of work for over a month. At work, I let it be known that the purpose of my absence was surgeries, but I did not specify what they were, or give any other details. A small number of my coworkers have not acted well toward me since the start of my transition, passing misinformation amongst themselves, a process which later bit me in the rear. I did not want to fuel that dynamic.

I am blessed with a tight and supportive family, and with many superbly good friends whom I have accumulated over the years. Most of them reached out with supportive messages. Some rendered assistance with travel and out-of-the-blue expenses.

None of my co-workers contacted me. ((Contact methods available to all of my co-workers included work email, personal email, texting, cell phone, home phone, Google Voice mail which gets transcribed to my e-mail address, and of course, a letter to my home address. This was not a problem of access. In the end, technically, one did contact me, though not one I am close with. He sent me a single text, which I did not receive until I landed again in the US, and 99% of the expense, travel, recovery and general terror were done.))

During my time out of the country, while I was in early convalescence, I corresponded with friends, one of whom was another trans woman, older and wiser than I, who transitioned a couple of decades ago. I mentioned at one point that I felt down that none of my co-workers had contacted me. Her response, paraphrased: “You expected them to? Kids these days. We’re an embarrassment, hon. That’s why we stick together and help each other out. No one else is going to do it. Support from your co-workers? As if.” She told me a story about another woman she met when she, herself, was recovering from similar surgeries, a trans woman who had scrimped and saved and travelled alone to a city she didn’t know to go under the knife of a doctor she had met maybe once before, a woman who planned to recover alone, doling out her pain medications alone, mashing up her food alone so that she could slip it past her healing gums and nourish her healing body, getting up to do her clot-preventing walks down the hall of her rented single-room apartment alone, working through the post-anaesthesia depression and despair and “what have I done?” alone.

Except that it turned out that she wasn’t alone, because my friend was there, then, and afterward, for months, when the daily e-mails my friend sent were the only communications this woman received from another human being.

It was a familiar story. Almost every trans woman I know who has had significant surgery has a friend she met in the hospital, a friend whom she still touches base with regularly.

What are the ODDS?

Pretty good, actually, that you’re going to form bonds like that when you find that there there is one other person who understands, who knows, and you find that there are no other bonds, when you discover that no one in your life can find it in themselves to send you an e-mail to say that they hope you’re okay.

I’m more fortunate than most. I have my entire family, and all of my close friends. So I didn’t need a hospital friend like that, which turned out to be a good thing, since I ended up not sharing a recovery room with anyone.

Sometimes I wonder: what about the people like me who didn’t meet anyone in the hospital, but who, unlike me, had no one else? We don’t hear about them. Partly, obviously, because they don’t have a friend to tell the story about how they met in the surgery suite. But I suspect that a lot of them die in the post-anaesthesia depression, which can rear up and bite you weeks after the actual surgery, long after you’ve flown home and the surgeon is busy with other patients and chalks you up as a success. Some probably kill themselves deliberately, having made it that far but having hit their limit. Some probably just… fade. It would be easy. Just get home, collapse behind your front door, and … don’t follow the post-surgical instructions well.

My friend is right. We are an embarrassment. People don’t know what to do with us, even sometimes people who would seem to be close to us, and so rather than risk the wrong thing, they do nothing. At the same time, she’s wrong. Times are changing. People still screw up a lot toward trans people, but there has never been a better time in modern Western society to be trans; the general population is learning. And, theoretically, police organizations are supposed to be tight and self-supportive, a result which flows from the simple fact that we get critiqued, constantly, from all sides, and so we look to each other for understanding. In theory, this is particularly true of tactical teams, which tend to be very tight.

And, despite my professional calling, I’m an optimist. I want to be able to say, “Yes, people did the right thing. On their own.”

But, of course, in order to be able to say that truthfully, you have to make room for it to be true, which means that you also have to give people the opportunity to demonstrate that it’s false.

For my tiny corner of the world, my optimism turned out to be misplaced. My friend was right. Even though my transition in police work was wildly successful when measured against most previous such transitions… it turns out that I’m an embarrassment. ((With that one belated exception.))

I have another friend, a teenager (call her Teena). We met her when her mother read about my transition in social media and reached out, saying, “Can I talk to you? My kid is trans, and I need information and advice.” Teena is already socially transitioned and needs to access medical care, but her family is overextended handling other, unrelated, emergencies. I offered to help Teena get access to the puberty-blockers she so badly needs, and the therapy which is probably useful in itself and definitely required to access cross-hormone therapy eventually. Her mother accepted. I met with Teena to find out exactly what she wanted to do. She told me. I digested, and then suggested a plan of action. She agreed to it. At the end, she hugged me and said, “Thank you.”

“You bet, hon,” I said. “We have to watch out for each other. No one else is going to. We’re an embarrassment.”

She smiled, safe in a moment of support. Sixteen years old with her body going wrong on her and inexpensive treatment extant which she had not been able to access. There was not a trace of surprise on her face. “Yeah,” she said. “We are.”

Grace

[edited to correct a generalization]

Posted in Transsexual and Transgender related issues | 8 Comments

Steve Salaida’s Controversial Tweets About Anti-Semitism, With Context

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Ampersand

View the story “Steve Salaita’s Controversial Tweets about Anti-Semitism, With Context” on Storify

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Free speech, censorship, copyright law, etc. | 54 Comments

What do you do when your student tells you her father threatened her life?

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Well, if you’re a K–12 teacher and you believe the student is at all credible (or maybe her credibility doesn’t matter), you have very specific reporting requirements, and there are protocols for that reporting that you have to follow, and there are individuals and agencies that will–all else being equal–respond to what you report, and, if all goes well, all the different components of this protective infrastructure will work together seamlessly so that student ends up safe and sound. If you’re a college teacher like I am, however, that infrastructure is not available to you. All you can do is what I did: talk with the student, find out as much as you can, be as supportive as you can, and try to persuade her to go to the counseling center, where she can talk to people who are trained to handle, and who have access to relevant resources in, situations like this. That last part doesn’t always work, but, thankfully, this time it did, because I have every reason to believe that the threat my student’s father made was credible.

For just that reason, obviously, and for others that will become clear in a minute, I don’t want to give here any potentially identifying details, and those details I do give are at least blurred, if not changed outright. So I will just say that this student is not enrolled in any of my classes this semester and that, when she was in my class several semesters ago, she told me enough of her story for me to know that her father’s threat fit a pattern of abuse that she’d been dealing with for years. In this particular instance, the way she described it, her father became enraged because he found out she’d been (non-sexually, non-romantically, not even as part of an ongoing friendship) alone in an enclosed space with a young male acquaintance. When her father found out about this, he started beating her, and it was during that beating that he made his death threat. I have to leave the specific details of the threat unstated because they could be used to identify her, so I will simply say that this woman comes from a country where so-called “honor killings”–a misnomer if there ever was one, since there is nothing honorable about them–are all too common, and that her father made clear to her that he was perfectly willing to murder her under that pretext.

Once the student had calmed down enough that she could talk about something other than the specifics of what she had been through, I suggested she go to counseling and she agreed. I walked her over with her and then went about the rest of my day, going to meetings, teaching my classes, and somehow it all seemed not exactly trivial, but a little bit beside the point. When I got back to my office, there was a voicemail from my student. She and the counselors, she said, had figured the situation out. She thanked me for my help and hung up. That’s it. I have neither seen nor heard from her since. I hope that means she and the counselors figured out a way for her not to go back home and that it is better, therefore, for me not to know anything that might give even the slightest hint about where she is. I hope, but there’s no way I can know for sure.

This is not the first time I’ve written about students of mine in similar, or potentially similar situations. In one case, I helped a woman escape from her husband and, in another, a student confided in me that she was thinking of running away so that she wouldn’t have to marry the man, or the kind of man, her parents wanted her to marry, but she wanted to go in such a way that her parents would think she was dead. What struck me in this case, however, was the way my student’s father openly used a network of other men to try to “keep his daughter in line.” She told me about one instance from a while back when she and a young man from her neighborhood were sitting together in a nearby park. The situation was, again, according to her, absolutely non-romantic and non-sexual, but a male acquaintance of the family saw them, took a picture with his phone, and sent it to her father. When she got home, her father confronted her with it and would not let her leave the house for two weeks. On this more recent occasion, when he threatened her life, he told her there would be people watching her every move, that he would know if she did anything “inappropriate.”

Those other people, the watchers, the informants, put me in mind of these lines from Sa’di’s Golestan:

To please the king who eats a single apple
from a subject’s garden, his slaves will pull
the tree up whole to plant in the palace yard;
and if he lets five eggs be taken by force,
his army will put to the spit a thousand birds.

There’s always someone willing to ride the coattails of someone else’s power and authority, but it’s the text that precedes these lines that gives them their real significance: “When the world began, oppression was a small hut that few people entered, but as more and more people chose to go inside, they built it up, and look how high it reaches now.” People choose, in ways both big and small, to become oppressors. Next week, I want to share with you the story these lines come from and talk about what it means to make that choice, or not.

Cross-posted.

Posted in Iran, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues, Writing | 1 Comment

Why I doubt that “63 percent of young men between the ages of 11 and 20 who are imprisoned for homicide have killed their mothers’ batterers.”

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Ampersand

I’m posting this here on “Alas” so that, two or three years from now, when I run into this statistic again and think “oh, yeah, I wrote a thing on that, didn’t I?” I can search for here it and find it.

“An estimated 63 percent of young men between the ages of 11 and 20 who are imprisoned for homicide have killed their mothers’ batterers.”
— Kimberle Crenshaw, in her article Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from Violence Against Women of Color.

Someone posted this on a Tumblr blog I read and asked if there were any sources for that statistic.

Someone else posted a link to the 1997 book in which Crenshaw said that; Crenshaw did not include a citation.

I found two older sources, neither of which I have any confidence in.

In this 1994 academic article, the 63% statistic is cited to a 1991 resolution voted for by the Texas Senate. ((The citation says “Tex. S. Con. Res. 26, 72d Leg., 1st Sess. 1 (1991)”))

And in another academic article, also from 1994, the 63% figure is cited to the 1991 testimony of Susan Kelly-Dreiss, who is a feminist activist (now retired) but was never, as far as I know, someone who did original research. ((The citation: “See Women and Violence: Hearings Before the Senate Comm. on the Judiciary on Legislation to Reduce the Growing Problem of Violence Crime Against Women, 101st Cong. 131 (1991) (statement of Susan Kelly-Dreiss).”))

I really doubt that this statistic is reliable.

1) At best, it comes from data gathered in the 1980s, so it’s of questionable relevance nowadays.

2) But also, although some congressional reports are very conscientious when they use statistics, many just grab any statistics that support whatever point they want to make, without any attention paid to quality.

3) I also think it’s unlikely to be true because the 1980s was a peak for drug gang violence in the USA (it leveled off in the 1990s and has dropped enormously since). In a decade famous for gangs hiring young men to shoot each other, it seems implausible that the majority of murders committed by young men and boys were about abuse in their family. [Deleted for being wrong wrong wrong, see comments.]

4) Also, the Bureau of Justice Statistics divides its age groups, when it releases statistics, into “under 14,” “14-17,” and “18-24.” Most researchers follow suit. So the age range given in this statistic – “11-20” – is extremely oddball, and would require either an original data source, or doing a lot of extra work.

5) It just doesn’t seem likely, and it’s reasonable to treat unlikely claims with skepticism until they are proven.

Maybe this is a true statistic, but I won’t believe it until I can read the original source and see how the numbers were gathered and calculated.

Posted in Prisons and Justice and Police, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 12 Comments

Dear The Stranger, Free Speech Is A Thing (UPDATED)

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Ampersand

Dear The Stranger, Free Speech is a thing – even for off-duty cops.

Unless you have real evidence that this person is letting his politics interfere with his work, or spending time on Facebook when he’s on the public clock, then this really shouldn’t be a story.

The idea of employers – or the press – monitoring worker’s Facebook pages for “wrong” political opinions is far more horrifying, and far more of a threat to freedom, then anything some jerk cop writes on Facebook.

UPDATE

Let me note that in this post, when I refer to “freedom of speech” I’m referring not to First Amendment law, but to what I’d call a “free speech culture,” by which I mean a culture in which people can feel free to speak out on controversial issues without facing unreasonable and disproportionate reprisals. I worry that in our current culture – in which partisan hatred and fury has become so ordinary (on both sides) – only those with the thick skins and secure positions will feel comfortable speaking out.

Although there’s no government censorship going on here, we can and should want more for free speech than just “no one was thrown in jail.”

An example of what I mean by a “unreasonable and disproportionate reprisal” is having a well-known newspaper comb through your Facebook feed in order to cherry-pick the worst-sounding quotes. ((For example, reporter Ansel Herz highlighted two ugly-sounding quotes from a Facebook comment Hall wrote, but didn’t highlight this much more reasonable quote, although it’s in the same comment: “If it turns out that Officer Darren Wilson shot Michel Brown while he was surrendering, then he should be prosecuted for murder. I don’t think that will be the case, but I’m willing to see it as a possibility.”)) This reporting includes calling your bosses to inform them of what you’ve been writing on your Facebook page, and getting them to “consider… a formal investigation into” you.

Suddenly your Facebook activity is exposed to thousands of people you never expected to be scrutinizing your words, the pages you’ve linked, and what you “liked.” Total strangers on social media and in the Stranger’s comments are questioning your intelligence, your competence, and your worth as a human being.

It’s a seriously unkind thing to do, and newspapers like the Stranger shouldn’t do this lightly. There are obviously cases where someone is enough of a public figure so that any political opinion they express, regardless of context, is a reasonable news story. But “police Sergeant”simply isn’t in that category.

Now, there are cases in which reporting on the political opinions of a police officer might be important because they directly call into question if Hall is a suitable person to be a police officer. For example, if Sergeant Hall had called for police to engage in illegal beatdowns of civilians. But Hall didn’t say anything of the sort; he just spouted the typical opinions one hears every day from law-and-order Republicans. And just being a right-winger is not enough to mean someone can’t be a cop.

I really can’t think of any reason why it’s the public’s business to know what Hall’s opinion of Obama is (a point the Stranger emphasized in the headline). I don’t want that sort of thing reported about right-wing cops in newspapers, any more than I want that a left-wing cop hates George Bush to be reported in the National Review.

I’m not saying that free speech can or should mean freedom from consequence. But the consequences should be proportional. If the people who read Hall’s Facebook feed criticize him, think less of him, argue with him, or even decide they don’t want to be friends with him anymore, that’s fine. I’ve seen conservatives treat criticism as if it were censorship, and that’s ridiculous.

But when ordinary citizens – including midlevel cops – can’t yak about politics on Facebook without worrying that reporters will be searching for cherry-picked quotes or calling their bosses, that’s unreasonable. It’s disproportionate. And it’s not helpful to a free speech society.

Posted in Free speech, censorship, copyright law, etc. | 133 Comments

Female Comic Book Store Employee Fired After Complaining About Rape Jokes

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Ampersand

Window display at Harrison’s Comics in Salem, MA

Ick. What a horrible situation. And if the information we have now is accurate – and obviously, it’s possible we don’t have the complete story – it so needlessly escalated. (Bleeding Cool has a bunch of the tweets, mostly from Jennifer Williams, the fired employee).

The manager who made the “we call this the rape room” joke could have apologized. Or the owner of the story could have been taken the manager aside and told him very firmly that jokes about rape are never acceptable in the workplace, and extra-double aren’t appropriate for a nervous new female employee on her first day. Either way, the new employee could have walked away with a feeling that her objection had been taken seriously and there would be no more rape jokes.

No need to fire anyone. The manager could have learned some basic etiquette that he should already have known, and Jennifer Williams could have felt like the store’s owner will support her and be willing to listen if harassment occurs. And Harrison’s Comics would not now be known as that comic book store where the manager jokes about a rape room.

Instead, Jennifer Williams was fired for no clear reason – which sure looks like she was fired for reporting a hostile workplace environment. And not only this store but all of comics culture looks – not for the first time – like a misogynist boy’s club culture full of guys who don’t have the basic social skills needed to understand “maybe I shouldn’t be telling rape jokes to the brand-new female employee who I barely even know.”

Aaargh. So much fail.

In the comments of the Jezebel story, a reader related a similar story about racism in a comic book store:

Shared this with a friend from across the country who actually works at a comics shop and also happens to be black, and has many amusing stories about casual nerd racism. He had a pretty good comment I’m going to paraphrase here.

Him: “Okay, so if my shop had a room that everyone called ‘dead nigger storage’, think they’d fire me if I complained? No. Because that’s fucked up if you have employees dropping n-bombs casually. Nobody cares if its just a Pulp Fiction reference, you don’t say that shit casually, especially around a black dude who’s a co-worker you don’t really know that well. This kind of the same idea.”

Me: “Did that actually happen to you?”

Him: “Yup.”

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Feminism, sexism, etc | Comments Off