Skinny White Hipster Girl: *recommends Craig Thompson’s Habibi in mass email*

Me:

1.
Lisbeth Salander is always willing to fuck you. That’s what makes her Lisbeth Salander. You know it, from the first page. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

2.
My old boss used to compare me to Lisbeth Salander. My old boss never understood why I did not take this as a compliment. After all, Lisbeth Salander is hot. “Not that you’re a sociopath!” she would say. “Just, you know, you’re thin, and you have so many tattoos. And your clothes.” If I remember correctly—it’s been a long time, since I read the Lisbeth Salander book—Lisbeth Salander only has one tattoo, a dragon, placed in a becoming manner upon her bony shoulder. Lisbeth Salander definitely does not have a stick-and-poke banner (empty) from the night she drank a fifth of Wild Turkey with her friend Matt and decided to commemorate the occasion, or a procession of wobbly broken hearts up the inside of her calf from the time she let her friend’s ex-junkie lover practice on her with his new tattoo gun. Lisbeth Salander does not have her dead cat’s name inside a heart over her hip, or a flight of shorebirds winging their way from her knees to her hipbones—the first tattoo I paid real money for, and the best tattoo I have ever seen, if I do say so myself. Stick and poke banners: not sexy. At all. Believe me. It’s tiny, at least. My old boss used to compare me to Lisbeth Salander, and then she would make me go get her coffee. Small latte, not too hot, two sugars. Look at me: I still remember.

3.
Lisbeth Salander is skinny. Frail-skinny, bird-boned skinny, so that when you fuck Lisbeth Salander you think: Not so tough. I could break you. Fuckable damaged girls are always skinny in books by men; fat girls are a different kind of damaged. Which is to say, unlovable. Remember that, the next time you tell someone Lisbeth Salander is strong.

4.
Here’s what most women I know who have been raped did to the person who raped them: Nothing. There’s not much you can do. If there were, most women I know probably wouldn’t have been raped. I worked once, more than ten years ago now, with a woman who shot her abuser. She’s still in jail. He’s fine.

5.
You’re the only one who sees it, the woman inside the monster. Like Beauty and the Beast. Give her a rose and she’s yours. Lisbeth Salander will never look for the beauty in herself. That’s your job, tiger.

6.
The posters are up for the Lisbeth Salander movie. They’re everywhere, in all the subway tunnels. Not the famously controversial one, where Lisbeth Salander is naked and gazes defiantly at the camera as James Bond grabs her boobs. This one is just the side of her head, with James Bond inside it. I don’t think it’s supposed to be symbolic, that there’s a dude in there.

7.
The Lisbeth Salander clothes store on Gansevoort is only open for three days. I went yesterday, the first day. It was full of Italian girls in Uggs. The store has a fake library and flashing lights and a dj. Real comprehensive look. In New York they call this a curated environment. I got some pretty sick plastic pants even though I keep telling myself no more sweatshop clothes. They’re not very well-made. I’m kind of thinking about going back today and getting another pair, for when they fall apart. Is that weird? Maybe that’s weird. It’s just that they look so good.

8.
Lisbeth Salander is not an actual person, although she reminds me a lot of Lara Croft.

9.
Lisbeth Salander is crazy, Lisbeth Salander is broken. Lisbeth Salander doesn’t know kindness. Until you come along. You. Yes, you. Lisbeth Salander is waiting for you, to show her the mysteries of her own heart. Lisbeth Salander: incomplete without you. You’ll find yourself attracted to her, despite her prickly demeanor; underneath it all, she’s really rather pretty, although she doesn’t think so. Tell her she’s a babe! She’ll growl, but secretly she’ll be pleased. There’s a soft spot in there, just waiting for you to find it. Draw it out, with your compassion. Feed her a square meal. Lisbeth Salander is a stray you can take home. Pick the burrs out of her matted coat and brush her until her fur shines. Lisbeth Salander is cleverer than you but by the end of the book that won’t matter. Lisbeth Salander just needs to fall in love. You—yes, you—can be the only man who makes her real.

10.
I’ve known some strong women. Feral, my friend Dirt’s forest-activist girlfriend, who u-locked herself by the neck to a bulldozer on a forest stand that was about to be clearcut and lived on a platform in the trees for months at a time. Later she went to work on the Greenpeace boat and after that she sailed around the world. I had a brief delusional moment where I considered forest activism, until Dirt told me you have to poop in a bucket. In front of other people. That’s the thing about the platform: You can’t come down. My friend Noélia, who grew up in the middle of the desert with a dad who beat the shit out of her and brothers who did other, worse things, who was hooked on meth by the time she was fifteen, which is around when she met the boyfriend who spent the next ten years trying to kill her. Now she is a lawyer who does pro bono work for undocumented women; in her free time, she started a social justice organization. My friends who have hopped trains alone across the country, hitchhiked solo from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, bicycled alone from Morocco to Ulaan Bataar, my friends who are social workers and activists and artists and revolutionaries and lovers and fighters, fighters, fighters. Me. Not to toot my own horn, but I am pretty fucking strong. I guess “Is awesome, loves self, probably won’t have sex with you” would make for a pretty short book, though. Or at least, not a compelling one. Because it wouldn’t be about men.

11.
My friend Meg and I are looking for an intern, to go see the Lisbeth Salander movie and take screenshots of Lisbeth Salander’s clothes. Not during the rape or torture scenes, please. If you’re interested, let me know.

got-to-stop-spinning:

[TW: Rape Culture]

Someone wrote a post about this once before, and it’s very true.

I recently settled on nonbinary as my gender. Agender most of the time, but just in general, nonbinary.

And feminism doesn’t really include nonbinary individuals.

It makes me sad. People read me as female all…

hells-bells-trudy:

I should not have to apologize for being an “angry feminist.”

I am angry.

I’m angry that I have to hide pictures from my mother because she’ll think the fact my boobs had “SLUT” written on them in giant red letters has something to say about my character.

I’m mad that when I wear dresses on…

fearandwar:

In response to a string of at least 10 unsolved sexual assaults in Brooklyn, New York police are reportedly stopping women on the street who are wearing clothing they say is revealing and advising them to cover up if they don’t want to be raped. The Wall Street Journal reports on the disturbing message police officers are allegedly spreading:

Lauren, a South Slope resident, was walking home three blocks from the gym on Monday when she was stopped. The 25-year-old, who did not want her last name to be used, was wearing shorts and a T-shirt when she claims a police officer asked if she would stop and talk to him. He also stopped two other women wearing dresses. […]

“He pointed at my outfit and said, ‘Don’t you think your shorts are a little short?‘” she recalled. “He pointed at their dresses and said they were showing a lot of skin.”

He said that such clothing could make the suspect think he had “easy access,” said Lauren. She said the officer explained that “you’re exactly the kind of girl this guy is targeting.”

The New York City Police Department did not deny that officers were stopping women to talk to them about their clothing, but reasoned, “They are simply pointing out that as part of the pattern involving one or more men that the assailant(s) have targeted women wearing skirts.” But however well-intentioned, focusing on women’s choices — rather than the attackers’ — is just another way of blaming potential victims. It’s wrong to suggest that women are responsible for the actions of the attacker, or can somehow control whether they are targeted or raped.

I’m beginning to think that NYPD cops are trained to be assholes.

timecodereading:

Women’s rights activists in Britain and the US have accused Facebook of promoting rape and “rape culture” after the social networking site refused to take down pages on which users made jokes and apparent confessions about sexual assault.

Petitions urging the site to remove pages such as “You know she’s playing hard to get when your [sic] chasing her down an alley” have been signed by more than 3,600 people in the UK and 175,000 people on the US website Change.org.

They say the material found on the pages is a clear violation of Facebook’s terms and conditions, which bar hateful or threatening content. “This is hate speech,” said Jane Osmond, who has campaigned on behalf of the UK petition. “I find it very disturbing that Facebook don’t appear to see the connection between pages such as this and the prevailing rape culture we have in our society.”

Facebook has refused to take the offending pages down, insisting they are intended to be “a place where people can openly discuss issues and express their views”.

Facebook and the people who “like” this type of pages should stop pretending they don’t know that hate speech is not an opinion, it’s an offense. And freedom of speech will never change that.

scotchandpancakes:

I recently learned about the SlutWalk, and it’s gotten me thinking a lot about the experiences of certain people in my life with sexual assault and how we can change the cultural norms, mindsets, or attitudes that propagate violence against women.  Though I am fully aware that men also experience sexual assault, because I am a woman and I also know that women are more often the victims of – or, rather, survivors of – sexual violence, my focus here is on women.

In the U.S., 1 out of 4 women will experience sexual assault in their lifetimes, and many are taken advantage of simply because they choose to wear what they want, drink what they want, or socialize in the places and with the people they want.  It is incredibly sad to me that we live in a world where making simple choices with the goal of having “fun” opens women up to dangerous situations, whereas men rarely have to wonder about such things as, “If I go drinking with my friends/if I wear this outfit/if I try to have a friendly conversation with this person – is someone going to force themselves upon me sexually?”   What’s worse is that many men who commit acts of sexual violence don’t even realize what they’ve done.  They’ll have no idea that their actions deeply affected another human being.  They won’t be able to understand how a single encounter, a relatively fleeting moment in their lives, will actually stay in that woman’s mind – probably vividly – forever.  

The SlutWalk got its start this year in Toronto after a Toronto police officer stated that, in order to avoid being sexually assaulted, “…women should avoid dressing like sluts…”  Sonya Barnett and Heather Jarvis, the founders of SlutWalk, were outraged by this flagrant victim-blaming and decided to organize a march wherein women can come together dressed in whatever manner they please and protest the idea that the way a woman decides to dress can be an invitation for sexual violence – a seeming reality in our culture, and one which men almost never have to take into account when they open their closet doors.  The goal of the SlutWalk is twofold:

1. Raise awareness as to the fact that the decision on the part of the perpetrator to sexually assault a woman is his and his alone – he is actively choosing to commit an act of violence against another human being, a decision that cannot be attributed to the victim of that crime.
2. Redeem the word “slut” and other derogatory, anti-female terms such that they can no longer be used to tear woman down but, instead, can be owned by women (much like the LGBT community did with the word “queer”).

As Barnett and Jarvis have stated, they are “…tired of being oppressed by slut-shaming; of being judged by our sexuality and feeling unsafe as a result…Being in charge of our sexual lives should not mean that we are opening ourselves to an expectation of violence…No one should equate enjoying sex with attracting sexual assault.”

 The inaugural SlutWalk in Toronto this past April attracted nearly 3,000 participants and has quickly spread to other major cities around the world, such as Washington, D.C. and Dallas.  In fact, some people have gone so far as to describe this event as the “…most successful feminist action of the past 20 years,” as it has quickly brought together thousands of people to protest sexual violence and engage in critical discourse regarding the identity of women and male/female gender roles in the 21^st century.

The SlutWalks have also been the source of intense criticism.  Certain commentators – many of them men – have said that guidance on how to dress is simply “risk management,” even drawing analogies between sexual assault and home invasion:

I have a perfect right to leave my windows open when I nip to the shops for some fags, without being burgled. It doesn’t lessen the guilt of the burglar that I’ve left my window open, or even remotely suggest that I was deserving of being burgled. Just that it was more likely to happen. – Rod Liddle

Despite Liddle’s assertion that a woman’s personal choices do not make her “deserving” of having a sex crime committed against her, according to statistics posted in a British newspaper, a survey taken in London in 2009 showed that:

• 27% of people believe a woman is responsible for her assaults if she was “flirting”
• 26% of people believe a woman is responsible for her assaults if she was walking alone in a dark place
• 17% of people believe a woman is responsible for her assaults if she was dressed in “sexy clothing”

These are incredible statistics.  It blows my mind to know that people believe that a women essentially “deserves” to be assaulted simply based on the clothing she wears or the path home she chooses.  As Elizabeth Webb, organizer of the SlutWalk Dallas pointed out, “If someone breaks into a house, do you blame the owner for having a house that looks appetizing?” 

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