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Here is a response from BlackWomen’s Blueprint, with many fancy signatories. They write, in part:
We are deeply concerned. As Black women and girls we find no space in SlutWalk, no space for participation and to unequivocally denounce rape and sexual assault as we have experienced it. We are perplexed by the use of the term “slut” and by any implication that this word, much like the word “Ho” or the “N” word should be re-appropriated. The way in which we are perceived and what happens to us before, during and after sexual assault crosses the boundaries of our mode of dress. Much of this is tied to our particular history. In the United States, where slavery constructed Black female sexualities, Jim Crow kidnappings, rape and lynchings, gender misrepresentations, and more recently, where the Black female immigrant struggle combine, “slut” has different associations for Black women. We do not recognize ourselves nor do we see our lived experiences reflected within SlutWalk and especially not in its brand and its label.
Here is a response from AF3IRM, whose membership includes “transnational women who are im/migrants or whose families are im/migrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa”. In part:
We realize that we are the ones who compose the majority of sex trafficking victims in this country, who comprise the majority of those sold in the mail-order-bride system, who are the commodities offered in brothel houses ringing US military bases in and out of this country, who are the goods offered for sexual violation in prostitution. We who are and historically have been the “sluts” from whom traffickers, pimps, and other “authorities” of the global corporate sex trade realize $20 billion in earnings annually cannot, with a clear conscience, accept the term in reference to ourselves and our struggle against sexual violence and for women’s liberation.
We therefore feel it is our responsibility to address the organizers and participants of SlutWalk and remind them that Women’s Struggle Cannot and Should not Be Monochromatic.
A response from the insightful Harsha Walia.
Slutwalk — in its slick branding — runs the risk of facilitating the dominant discourse of “liberated” women as only those women wearing mini-skirts and high heels in/on their way to professional jobs. In reality, capitalism mediates the feminist façade of choice by creating an entire industry that commodifies women’s sexuality and links a woman’s self-esteem and self-worth to fashion and beauty. Slutwalk itself consistently refuses any connection to feminism and fixates solely around liberal questions of individual choice — the palatable “I can wear what I want” feminism that is intentionally devoid of an analysis of power dynamics.
In other news, intrepid Brooklyn police officers are responding to a spate of unsolved rapes by advising women on the street that their outfits are a little slutty.
I just learned this from the Students Active for Ending Rape website.
Whereas 80-90% of rapes are committed by someone of the same racial background as the victim, for American Indians, 90% of survivors report that their rapist is either white or black.
(US Dept. of Justice 1994, 1997)
Colonialism in action. 519 years later, this kind of rape is STILL happening.
“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls–the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of [hu]man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”
-Henry David Thoreau, Slavery in Massachusetts, 1854
Here is a totally reasonable mainstream media photo gallery of the Occupy Wall Street protests. It’s still going! Get out there and join up if you can!
Protestors in front of Federal Hall. (AP Photo/Louis Lanzano)
Some people's fancy dinners were even interrupted! (Reuters/Eric Thayer)
The police visually demonstrate their priorities and those of the government.
A report on the Occupation of Wall Street by the Bail Out the People Movement:
In the wake of the outrageous murder of Troy Davis, on Saturday the NYPD violently attacked the Occupy Wall Street protesters for doing nothing but taking to the streets against racism, unemployment and bank bailouts. The
latest word is they will not be released until tomorrow.
With the police arresting over a hundred people, the anti-Wall Street demonstration ended a week where it was made crystal clear that the so-called justice system exists for oppressing, intimidating and silencing the people – killing us if need be – while the real criminals go free.
Carrying signs that said, “Justice For Troy Davis,” and “Jobs and Justice, not War and Racism,” the Occupy Wall Street protesters held a dynamic protest that started at Zucotti Park, went to the stock exchange, then
charged up Broadway to Union Square.
No sooner did protesters start up Broadway than the NYPD began picking off people to arrest, one by one. Many were tackled as they were simply walking in the march.
After the demostration started back south from Union Square, the police moved violently to shut the protest down: bloodying people’s heads, macing people in the face and using gigantic orange nets to seal off 12th Street between University Street and Fifth Avenue and arresting people en masse.
As the cops loaded people into an MTA bus – commandeered by the NYPD for the sole purpose of mass arrests – protesters chanted, “Let them go,” and “Cops serve the billionaires!”
The suffering caused by Wall Street and the for-profit system – whether through unemployment, foreclosure or the racist prison-industrial complex – has forced people onto the streets this week in cities all over the country.
This is what the start of a peoples’ movement looks like. But it is in its infancy. The police, media and courts will continue to harass and attack us while the balance of forces – i.e., how many people we have on our side and what they have on theirs – is in their favor.
Come to Zucotti Park at Broadway and Liberty Street in downtown Manhattan! We need forces! The more who join this dynamic campaign against the banks and billionaires, the more we will be able to defend this growing movement.
Call your friends, get whatever group you belong to involved, and stay tuned to the Occupy Wall Street Facebook page for updates on how to pack the court and support those who were arrested.
-Bail Out the People Movement
Here is the Occupy Wall Street website.
The Facebook ’cause’. (As opposed to ‘page’.)
Watch #occupywallst on Twitter or follow @OccupyWallSt.
Dear Friends & Comrades,
On Monday, September 26th, prisoners at Pelican Bay & Calipatria State prisons will resume the hunger strike that started on July 1st.
The strike lasted nearly four weeks, as thousands of prisoners refused food to protest the torturous conditions and practices of the California Department of Corrections (CDCR).
After weeks of inadequate & bad-faith negotiations with CDCR officials, prisoners have decided the only way to get the changes they need is to risk their lives again.
CDCR officials have been preemptively cracking down on support & participation for the hunger strike.
Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity is calling on supporters everywhere to help amplify the voices of prisoners on hunger strike once again. Please help us use any & all forms of social media to make the voices of the hunger strikers loud & clear.
In Solidarity,
Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
-Abraham Lincoln, at his First Inaugural Address
Ireland has long allowed itself to be a bit of a theocracy, ruled in part from afar by the Vatican. Why a country would allow its social policy to be so thoroughly controlled by a distant clique of elderly (mostly white) men, supposedly celibate but obsessed with sex, is beyond me, but it happened.
But, and I am honestly surprised to discover this, it turns out Ireland had a line. A line the Vatican should not have crossed. And it took decades, it took an international outcry, and it took thousands of cases of abuse, but finally, finally Ireland is starting to say ‘no’ to child abuse veiled by religion.
The Vatican and the Catholic hierarchy have a long and cherished tradition of sexual abuse of children. Priests and other authority figures have for centuries cultivated situations in which they manipulated the religious faith of believers into trusting them with their children, and then sexually assaulted the children. The Church has been well aware of this at the highest levels, and instead of moving to stop the abuse, it has moved to shelter it. It has shuffled abusers around to prevent exposure, it has frustrated private and public investigations, and it has intimidated survivors into silence. This pattern of behavior makes it clear that this order of “celibate” men is intent on preserving the tradition of child sex abuse, because if the intention were otherwise, the actions would reflect as much. Child sex abuse seems to have been considered a bit of a privilege for those Church leaders who found themselves so inclined.
But the Church’s own rhetoric around sexual morality (for others, not priests) may have led to this confrontation with Ireland’s leadership. The Church’s hierarchy of family-less, supposedly non-sexual men also have a centuries-long tradition of dictating the sexual behavior of others. They have preached many strange things about sexuality, but a major message has been that of the primacy of the nuclear family.
Decades of “family” messaging have encouraged heavily Catholic cultures to idealize and worship the perfect family unit: father, mother and children. And children are the only reason to have sex- any sex that is absent the intent to procreate is sinful. So CHILDREN!!! are very important. This is supported by lots of cute pictures of Jesus hanging out with children and the frequent repetition of Bible verses discussing children. There are also lots of cultural messages in general about the importance of children, and, reflecting the general fear of sex, the need to protect children from any knowledge of sexuality to keep them on the pure, narrow, straight path to heterosexual marriage.
BOOM! CONFLICT! The Vatican cherishes the sexually repressed family unit and encourages the cult of sexually-innocent childhood, yet also cherishes its ingrained tradition of child sex abuse. After years of being barraged with overwhelming evidence of this contradiction, finally Irish society decided to take a stand. And they choose to stand against child abuse. Though this seems like an obvious conclusion to make and so basic that it hardly merits praise, it is actually much more commendable than you would think given their deeply-held tradition of respecting Catholic authority, even to the detriment of their own sovereignty as a nation. And generally speaking, sexual abuse of the weak by the strong is condoned by societies worldwide, and so a Prime Minister taking the time to publicly rebuke it and form real measures to combat it, as Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny recently did, is really a sight to behold.
From the New York Times:
“For the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposed an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry into a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago,” Mr. Kenny said, referring to the Cloyne Report, which detailed abuse and cover-ups by church officials in southern Ireland through 2009.
…“The rape and torture of children were downplayed, or ‘managed,’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution — its power, its standing and its reputation.” Instead of listening with humility to the heartbreaking evidence of “humiliation and betrayal,” he said, “the Vatican’s response was to parse and analyze it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer.”
Naturally, the Vatican and its vassals reacted grumpily to this attack on what they believe is their right and privilege. It withdrew its ambassador to Ireland and had the gumption to claim that the reports of sexual abuse were “unsubstantiated” and that Kenny’s concern with their abuse was “excessive”. There was concern that we are all forgetting about the true victims: the poor, so often wrongly accused priests.
[Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos] warned against “obsessive” pursuit of accused priests by bishops because of the damage it can do to the priests, whose souls, he said, were “at the center of the affair.”
Rarely is the right of powerful men to sexually abuse others challenged so publicly. It’s almost fun to watch the Vatican & co. squirm with indignation at this attack upon their sexual privileges. Thanks for that Ireland.
Read the entire, hilariously/depressingly-horrible official Vatican response to Kenny’s remarks and the Cloyne Report.
Read the Cloyne Report.
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell will be over on Tuesday. Fortunately, the military has been preparing for this earth-shattering event:
More than 2 million troops have undergone courses on how to deal with possible scenarios for personnel who may, as examples, witness same-sex partners kissing after a deployed ship comes home or see a gay service member hold hands with someone at the mall.
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