Rad Geek People's Daily

In the news the past couple weeks:

A perfect opportunity for hilarity:

LAFAYETTE — A 21-year-old man was accidentally shot by his 17-year-old girlfriend last night while they were hunting for raccoons near his farmhouse.

Josh Kayser, who lives just north of the Lafayette city limits, was taken to Avista Hospital in Louisville after a bullet grazed his right ear and left forearm, according to a report by Boulder County Sheriff's Commander Phil West. He is in good condition this morning.

The couple was hunting raccoons that had been preying on the family's chickens and as Kayser crouched to peer under a shed for a wounded raccoon, he was shot, West said.

His girlfriend, whose name wasn't released, was holding the .22-caliber rifle for him and it unintentionally discharged.

— Rocky Mountain News (2006-02-14): Lafayette man shot during raccoon hunt

A veritable laugh riot:

A 10-year-old was listed in critical condition Sunday night after being shot with a shotgun. Hampton Police say the boy and his friends were playing with it when it went off.

It happened around 7:30 at the Lincoln Park Apartments off of LaSalle Avenue. Police said the little boy was shot in the head and hand. Neighbors tell us it was a horrifying sight.

He was in a chair and there was blood on his head and stuff,> said Tanya Smallwood.

Police said there was an adult in the apartment when the shotgun fired. It’s unclear if the shooting victim lived there or was visiting. It’s also unknown if the gun belonged to one of the adults who lived in that unit.

Joanne Smith also watched on as the boy was put into the ambulance. She said he was conscious. She has two kids of her own. She wants to know how the gun got into the hands of a child. She said she always reminds her children never to treat guns like toys.

—WTKR Norfolk, Virginia (2006-02-20): Ten Year Old Accidentally Shot In Hampton

An investigation revealed that the victim was visiting relatives, when he was accidentally shot by another juvenile inside the home. The victim and two other juveniles were in a bedroom when the suspect retrieved the weapon.

The suspect was showing off the weapon, and the gun discharged striking the victim.

— WAVY Hampton Roads, Virginia (2006-02-20): Child Accidentally Shot in Hampton, Teen Charged

So funny it hurts:

The Modesto teenager, a Johansen High School freshman, was hunting Nov. 12 with his father and friends when he was hit in the chest, arm and head with a shotgun blast. …

Blake had a punctured lung from one of the pellets, but his heart was protected by his shotgun. Blake’s eyes were the most seriously injured. In December, after multiple surgeries, he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to see clearly again. He could see light from one eye, but not the other.

Since then, said his mother, Robin Searls, his vision has improved, but doctors had to remove the lenses from both eyes because Blake was developing cataracts. At Easter or during summer vacation, she said, doctors will remove the oil they injected to keep the retina in his best eye in place and determine at that time whether to implant new lenses or give Blake contact lenses.

He went back to school last month, she said. We were able to get a bifocal prescription for him, and when he’s holding the book close he can read with his good eye.

We’re not sure at this point (what his prognosis will be). His eyes are still healing. He has bad scarring going on, and they’re keeping a close eye on that.

— Modesto Bee (2006-02-19): Teen knows about being shot

You see, there’s this one dude, and there’s this other dude, and one of the dudes shot the other dude. The injury may not be lethal but the victim’s going to need close medical care, possibly for the next several years. Har har har.

How much funnier can you get? What more perfect opportunity could you have for some chuckles, and making some snide little funny at the shooter’s expense? Maybe you can retread an old song from the 1990s to imply the shooter is dangerous. Maybe you could even write a nasty little shoot-em-up game featuring the the shooter and his other buddies!. Ho ho ho.

There’s nothing like a good laugh. It might all seem a little pointless; it might even seem a little mean. But hey, lighten up; it’s not like anybody got hurt or anything.

This just in…

• Catharine MacKinnon never said that all heterosexual intercourse is rape.

• Andrea Dworkin never said that all heterosexual intercourse is rape, either.

Quotations to that effect have been incorrectly attributed to both Dworkin or MacKinnon, who never said those words and denied that they believed it when asked. Interpretations of their extensive and nuanced work on intercourse, rape, patriarchy, consent, coercion, men, women, and sexual ethics (which you can find elaborated in detail in, among other places, Dworkin’s book Intercourse and Chapter 9 of MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State) that claim to find the view written between the lines have repeatedly been made on the basis of selective quotation, wilful misreading, and downright gossip. These facts have been repeatedly pointed out, not least by the authors themselves, but also by a lot of other people, over and over again. And yet the charade goes on.

Today, Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors (2006-02-19) took notice of the New York Times Book Review’s uncritical publication of a fabricated quotation from Catharine MacKinnon, repeated by Kate O’Beirne in her anti-feminist tract, Women Who Make the World Worse, and reported as if the quotation were fact by Ana Marie Cox in her review of O’Beirne’s book. The book review, in spite of having itself published a letter by Dworkin and MacKinnon in 1995 on the topic, and in spite of printed treatments of this in the media in the pages of the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere throughout the print media over Cal Thomas’s misquotation of MacKinnon in March 1999, went ahead and published Cox’s review without so much as noting that it contained a plain error of fact that any idiot with access to Google could have discovered in the few seconds it took to type out the obvious search request. Three days later, Elizabeth Anderson (2006-01-18): Bashing Feminists pointed out the error. The Times just got around to publishing an Editor’s Note correcting the error on February 6, which went into print on February 12, nearly a month after the review was published.

Readers may remember that back in January, Salon also ran an interview with O’Beirne by Rebecca Traister back in January, where Traister casually reported the fabricated “quote” not only as fact, but in fact as old news. As it happens, two different people wrote them back within a day of when the story was published — Anonymous 2006-01-16 and Mike Connell 2006-01-17. I posted about it here at GT 2006-01-31: Memo to Rebecca Traister a couple of weeks later. As of 6:39pm on February 19, 2006, they have not even so much as published a correction. I just sent them a third letter about the topic; we’ll see whether this produces any effect or not.

Why does this continue to happen? I’m not worried so much about Rebecca Traister or Ana Marie Cox — the lie is widespread, the challenges to it are evidently not widely known (in spite of being repeatedly made in public forums), and their primary job was to discuss O’Beirne’s book, not to fact-check every claim and citation made in it. Or even about O’Beirne herself — like most professional antifeminists, she makes her living on dishonest hatchet pieces, and while that needs to be exposed, it’s not much of a surprise. What I do want to know, though, is why professional publications that claim a reputation for accuracy and honesty so easily allow blatant, known falsehoods like these into print. Who fact-checked these articles? Who let them through without even minimal research on the quotations in it, and why has it taken a month to get even one correction?

Anderson puts it this way:

Here’s a measure of how much a group is despised: how much malicious absurdity can one ascribe to its members and still be taken as a credible source on what they say and do? With respect to feminists, the answer is quite a lot. Christina Hoff Sommers, former philosopher and professional feminist basher, has been widely and credulously cited for her critique of the American Association of University Women‘s report, How Schools Shortchange Girls, although my fact-checking finds her critique riddled with errors, inconsistencies, and misleading claims. Many academic critics of feminist philosophers are just as bad, often to the point of ascribing claims to feminists that are exactly the opposite of what they say. Feminists, it seems, are not entitled to a minimally charitable or even literate reading of what they say.

Andrea Dworkin wrote something similar in the editorial notes of Letters from a War Zone, on her essay Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea (p. 110):

… One problem is that this piece, like others in this book, has no cultural presence: no one hs to know about it or take it into account to appear less than ignorant; no one will be held accountable for ignoring it. Usually critics and political adversaries have to reckon with the published work of male authors whom they wish to malign. No such rules protect girls. One pro-pornography “feminist” published an article in which she claimed I was anti-abortion, this in the face of decades of work for abortion rights and membership in many pro-choice groups. No one even checked her allegation; the periodical would not publish a retraction. One’s published work counts as nothing, and so do years of one’s political life.

Whether or not you agree with Catharine MacKinnon’s or Andrea Dworkin’s views, and whether or not you are even interested in discussing them or finding out precisely what they are, you do have a responsibility to make sure that articles published under your authority and with the imprimatur of your reputation don’t repeat exposed fabrications about them or about what they said. The pages of the Grey Lady or even of Salon shouldn’t read like the Horror File page of a Men’s Rights bully-boy. Professional journalists are paid to do a lot better than that, and it’s long past time that we hold them accountable for it.

You can write a public letter to the editor of Salon in response to Traister’s interview, or write privately, to let them know that they are printing documented falsehoods and that you expect better of them.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-02-17: Over My Shoulder #11: Andrea Dworkin, Preface to the 1995 edition of Intercourse
• GT 2006-01-31: Memo to Rebecca Traister
• GT 2005-10-06: Andrea Dworkin Was Right #5
• GT 2005-03-26: Fathers for Lies: Selective Quotation and Distortion of Catharine MacKinnon’s position
• GT 2005-01-10: Andrea Dworkin does not believe that all heterosexual sex is rape
• GT 2004-10-28: The rumors of feminism’s demise have been greatly exaggerated
• GT 2004-03-03: She Said, She Said: the misinterpretation of Susan Brownmiller on anatomy and rape

What is it that so unsettles me about Alberto Gonzales? Is it the coziness with torture and indifference to minimal norms of civilization? Or is it the haughty and contemptuous defense of Caesarian executive power? The rapid turns he routinely makes between dissembling, palavering, and baring the sharpened fangs in a grin or a snarl?

Yes, of course that all worries me. But there’s something else, a certain I-cannot-say-what. It’s in the hair, the eyes, the posture, the facial expression, the shape of the head… I’ve seen it before. But where? Oh, yeah.

I’m just sayin’.

(No personal jabs at Ron Perlman intended, by the way–if you don’t recognize the film and the character from the still, this almost certainly won’t be funny to you, but for the record, it’s from The Last Supper (1995). Just so you know.)

You know the rules. Here’s the quote. After last week’s entry I’m running the risk of seeming as if I intend to use this gimmick as an outlet for all the Andrea Dworkin quotes that I find particularly apropos at the end of the week. I already have a running feature for that, but the fact is that other than fiction and material that I’m already transcribing for the Fair Use Repository, Dworkin’s most of what I’ve been reading for the past two weeks — in part as a result of a sometimes rather combative editing process over at WikiPedia:Andrea Dworkin, and in part because the stuff is nearly impossible to put down for long once you start reading parts of it. So rather than break the rules by picking up some item just to read it at the last minute to pick out another quote in the name of avoiding repetition, here we have some bus reading from earlier this afternoon: a passage from the Preface to the 1995 edition of Intercourse (first edition 1987).

My colleagues, of course, had been right; but their advice offended me. I have never written for a cowardly or passive or stupid reader, the precise characteristics of most reviewers–overeducated but functionally illiterate, members of a gang, a pack, who do their drive-by shootings in print and experience what they call the street at cocktail parties. I heard it onthe street, they say, meaning a penthouse closer to heaven. It is no accident that most of the books published in the last few years about the decline and fall of Anglo-European culture because of the polluting effect of women of all races and some men of color–and there are a slew of such books–have been written by white-boy journalists. Abandoning the J-school ethic of who, what, where, when, how and the discipline of Hemingway’s lean, masculine prose, they now try to answer why. That decline and fall, they say, is because talentless, uppity women infest literature; or because militant feminists are an obstacle to the prorape, prodominance art of talented living or dead men; or because the multicultural reader–likely to be female and/or not white–values Alice Walker and Toni Morrison above Aristotle and the Marquis de Sade. Hallelujah, I say.

Intercourse is a book that moves through the sexed world of dominance and submission. It moves in descending circles, not in a straight line, and as in a vortex each spiral goes down deeper. Its formal model is Dante’s Inferno; its lyrical debt is to Rimbaud; the equality it envisions is rooted in the dreams of women, silent generations, pioneer voices, lone rebels, and masses who agitated, demanded, cried out, broke laws, and even begged. The begging was a substitute for retaliatory violence: doing bodily harm back to those who use or injure you. I want women to be done with begging.

The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to women’s words–speaking and writing–as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men–control, violence, insult, contempt–that no threat seems empty.

Intercourse does not say, forgive me and love me. It does not say, I forgive you, I love you. For a woman writer to thrive (or, arguably, to survive) in these current hard times, forgiveness and love must be subtext. No. I say no.

Can a man read Intercourse? Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she uses language without its ever becoming decorative or pretty? Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she, the author, has a direct relationship to experience, ideas, literature, life, including fucking, without mediation–such that what she says and how she says it are not determined by boundaries men have set for her? Can a man read a woman’s work if it does not say what he already knows? Can a man let in a challenge not just to his dominance but to his cognition? And, specifically, am I saying that I know more than men about fucking? Yes, I am. Not just different: more and better, deeper and wider, the way anyone used knows the user.

Intercourse does not narrate my experience to measure it against Norman Mailer’s or D. H. Lawrence’s. The first-person is embedded in the way the book is built. I use Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Flaubert not as authorities but as examples. I use them; I cut and slie into them in order to exhibit them; but the authority behind the book–behind each and every choice–is mine. In formal terms, then, Intercourse is arrogant, cold, and remorseless. You, the reader, will not be looking at me, the girl; you will be looking at them. In Intercourse I created an intellectual and imaginative environment in which you can see them. The very fact that I usurp their place–make them my characters–lessens the unexamined authority that goes not with their art but with their gender. I love the literature these men created; but I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not. Nor will I tolerate the continuing assumption that they know more about women than we know about ourselves. And I do not believe that they know more about intercourse. Habits of deference can be broken, and it is up to writers to break them. Submission can be refused; and I refuse it.

Of course, men have read and do read Intercourse. Many like it and understand it. Some few have been thrilled by it–it suggests to them a new possibility of freedom, a new sexual ethic: and they do not want to be users. Some men respond to the radicalism of Intercourse: the ideas, the prose, the structure, the questions that both underlie and intentionally subvert meaning. But if one’s sexual experience has always and without exception been based on dominance–not only overt acts but also metaphysical and ontological assumptions–how can one read this book? The end of male dominance would mean–in the understanding of such a man–the end of sex. If one has eroticized a differential in power that allows for force as a natural and inevitable part of intercourse, how could one understand that this book does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape? Equality in the realm of sex is an antisexual idea if sex requires dominance in order to register as sensation. As said as I am to say it, the limits of the old Adam–and the material power he still has, especially in publishing and media–have set limits on the public discourse (by both men and women) about this book.

In general women get to say yea or nay to intercourse, which is taken to be a synonym for sex, echt sex. In this reductive brave new world, women like sex or we do not. We are loyal to sex or we are not. The range of emotions and ideas expressed by Tolstoy et al. is literally forbidden to contemporary women. Remorse, sadness, despair, alienation, obsession, fear, greed, hate–all of which men, especially male artists, express–are simple no votes for women. Compliance means yes; a simplistic rah-rah means yes; affirming the implicit right of men to get laid regardless of the consequences to women is a yes. Reacting against force or exploitation means no; affirming pornography and prostitution means yes. I like it is the standard for citizenship, and I want it pretty much exhausts the First Amendment’s meaning for women. Critical thought or deep feeling puts one into the Puritan camp, that hallucinated place of exile where women with complaints are dumped, after which we can be abandoned. Why–socially speaking–feed a woman you can’t fuck? Why fuck a woman who might ask questions let alone have a complex emotional life or a political idea? I refuse to tolerate this loyalty-oath approach to women and intercourse or women and sexuality or, more to the point, women and men. …

–Andrea Dworkin (1995), Preface to the 1995 edition of Intercourse, pp. vii-x.

This may help to shed some light, from a few different directions, on long-standing discussions on this site and elsewhere.

(Via Philobiblon (2006-02-13): Weep for Australia. Weep.)

There’s been some debate in the Ozzie parliament lately over abortion, mostly focusing on abortifacient drugs, and whether to approve the use of Mifepristone (RU-486) in particular. On Tuesday, MP Danna Vale decided that it was time that the real issue in this debate — how many Australians are Muslim and how many are Christian — got a hearing.

AUSTRALIA could become a Muslim nation within 50 years because we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence, a Government backbencher says.

The former minister Danna Vale is one of five Coalition women proposing an amendment to the private member’s bill that seeks to remove ministerial veto over abortion drugs such as RU486. At a news conference called by the five yesterday, she said it was important politicians considered the ramifications for the community and the nation we become in the future.

I have read ... comments by a certain imam from the Lakemba Mosque [who] actually said that Australia is going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years’ time, said Mrs Vale, MP for the southern Sydney seat of Hughes.

I didn’t believe him at the time. But ... look at the birthrates and you look at the fact that we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence by 100,000 abortions every year ... You multiply that by 50 years. That’s 5 million potential Australians we won’t have here.

… The Liberal member for the Sydney seat of Greenway, Louise Markus, said no one wants as many abortions as there are now. The other two women supporting the amendment are the South Australian Liberal Trish Draper and the Queensland National De-Anne Kelly.

— Stephanie Peatling, Sydney Morning Herald (2006-02-14): Abortion will lead to Muslim nation: MP

In an unexpected development, Ms. Vale, Ms. Markus, Ms. Draper, and Ms. Kelly. did not volunteer to bear the 5,000,000 potential [non-Muslim] Australians that they think it’s so overwhelmingly important to bring into the world.

But there’s always the advantage of sitting in Parliament: if you’re unable or unwilling to volunteer your own womb for the sake of the demographic cause, you can always volunteer other women’s wombs — whether the other women like it or not.

For example, by using bureaucratic red tape and parliamentary stall tactics to force women not to buy abortifacient drugs when they want them.

The Senate has already voted to remove the minister’s veto, but if the amendment succeeded, it would have to be returned to the Senate to be voted on again.

Debate on the bill will begin in the House of Representatives today. Jackie Kelly said she was confident her amendment would be successful.

Another amendment is being proposed by the Queensland Liberal Andrew Laming.

But members are understood to be concerned that the amendment would mean Parliament would be forced into a de facto debate on abortion every time an application was received.

— Stephanie Peatling, Sydney Morning Herald (2006-02-14): Abortion will lead to Muslim nation: MP

Nay-sayers might call that forced pregnancy; they might even cast aspersions on the high-minded public spiritedness of volunteering other women to bear the children you’re not willing to, and making them do it when they’re not willing to. But you could also think of it as a sort of Reproductive Eminent Domain — a sort of polite request that women who don’t want to be pregnant put aside their selfish interests and petty little lives for a while in the name of a Christian Australia. A request which will, of course, be enforced if necessary. All for the good of The People, of course.

Pro-choice feminism is the radical notion that a woman’s uterus is not public property.