Now they figure this out? Now, when it’s too late? After years of putting women on a par with rocks — in a purely egalitarian sense, of course. Not like the Taliban.

Exiting U.S. general says Afghan women’s rights are key.

And businesses. And everything else. That is the inescapable implication of the following findings from:

The Mere Anticipation of an Interaction with a Woman Can Impair Men’s Cognitive Performance, Nauts et al. 2012.

Recent research suggests that heterosexual men’s but not heterosexual women’s cognitive performance is impaired after an interaction with someone of the opposite sex Karremans et al., 2009. These findings have been interpreted in terms of the cognitive costs of trying to make a good impression during the interaction. In everyday life, people frequently engage in pseudo-interactions with women e.g., through the phone or the internet or anticipate interacting with a woman later on. The goal of the present research was to investigate if men’s cognitive performance decreased in these types of situations, in which men have little to no opportunity to impress her and, moreover, have little to no information about the mate value of their interaction partner. Two studies demonstrated that men’s but not women’s cognitive performance declined if they were led to believe that they interacted with a woman via a computer Study 1 or even if they merely anticipated an interaction with a woman Study 2. Together, these results suggest that an actual interaction is not a necessary prerequisite for the cognitive impairment effect to occur. Moreover, these effects occur even if men do not get information about the woman’s attractiveness. This latter finding is discussed in terms of error management theory.[Emphasis added.]

Men need to start hoping that biology is not destiny at least as much as feminists have always insisted it isn’t.

Nonfunctional yet self-destructive constructs

(Rube Goldberg)

(The article by psychologists was critiqued by a computational scientist for its terminology. (No link due to complete paywall.) The authors’ response is here.)

Women either want sex or they don’t. They’re either equal partners in desire — and biology says they very much are — or they aren’t.

If they want sex, if it’s a desire and not a fungible commodity, then women would no more withhold sex to get something they want than men would.

If, for men, sex is something more than a compulsory sneeze, then withholding sex wouldn’t have much effect on them in any case.

Which says that the Lysistrata option is really rather crap. (You know the story. Ancient Greek woman who organized the ladies to withhold sex from their husbands until the guys agreed to whatever it was.) The story requires the whole patriarchal poison pot of sex as masturbation for men that women put up with for reasons of their own.

Could we all stop buying into that?

It is not some kind of empowerfulling for women (or men) to see how much they can get in the market for sex. It’s stupid.

Sex isn’t some kind of candy you buy or consume. It’s not something you use. It’s a conversation. It’s something you do.

I don’t mean McQueary. I mean everybody who makes this necessary:

Man who testified against Sandusky leaving courthouse with a black bag covering his head.

And also everybody who makes this necessary: Sandusky trial sketch artists offer a blurred view of accusers.

The people who can’t show their faces have withstood wrongs and are even fighting against them. That’s the definition of heroism. Why would they want to hide? They should have nothing to expect but admiration and praise, right?

(By the way, that image has been pulled from the web, as far as I can tell. Only the thumbnail is left. Everywhere, it’s been replaced with pictures of Sandusky’s smiling mug. What does it say when shame about the shame is so strong we’re ashamed even to see it?)

There is something wrong here, and it’s not Sandusky, vomit-worthy as he is.

The people who want to be invisible aren’t hiding from him. They’re hiding from everyone else. They’re hiding from the millions of “innocent” bystanders. From those who did nothing, which allowed him to do everything.

It’s bystanders who provide the air for predators.

It’s the millions of kids on playgrounds who don’t stop the bully, the guys at frat houses who don’t stop the rapists, the voters who re-elect leaders that sign off on torture.

In my world, those millions aren’t bigger criminals than the perp. But just being anonymous doesn’t make them that much smaller either.

There are many articles out and about just now, wondering how predators keep escaping notice when we ought to have learned by now. How many powerful pedophiles does it take? How many celebrity athlete rapists? How many executive sharks?

It’s pretty obvious, I think. As many as it takes for bystanders to leave their safe anonymity, to suffer the embarrassment of calling out the high or mighty, and to stop committing the crime of going along.

The two headlines below appeared in Memeorandum (May 23rd, 2012, at 10:23 AM).

On one side is the most basic right of all, control over your own self, over what can be done to your body. Without it, there’s no freedom, no rights, nothing. Without it, you could, for instance, be compelled to donate a lobe of your liver because somebody else would die without it.

On the other side is giving more people the legal benefits associated with marriage. That is a good thing. But it amounts to nothing in a world where anyone could be violated whenever it served someone’s purposes. Marriage would be worth as much as it was for black slaves in the old South.

So which one do people see as more worthy? Why, marriage equality, of course.

This is what happens after thirty years of hearing politicians say women have no rights compared to a fetus.

This is what happens after a few years of leaders and voters saying that marriage rights are for all, not just for some.

This phrase set me off: “a UK initiative established to raise awareness of the plight of workers trafficked into the sex industry.” (1)

Why “trafficked”? What’s with this terminology? You see it all the time. “Tantamount to slavery.” “Conditions indistinguishable from slavery.” Why “tantamount”? Why “indistinguishable from”?

It IS slavery. It is slavery of the worst and most disgusting sort. Even hard labor does not involve body invasion. It is slavery with every possible revolting humiliation included. It is slavery with physical torture, disease, and early death, just like “real” slavery. It is human beings carrying a price tag, bought by men. That isn’t “tantamount” to slavery. It IS slavery.

Why do so many people work so hard to call it something else? Look at the terminology in that first sentence: “workers,” “trafficked,” “industry.” Workers is what we all are. Nothing special there. Traffic is just a term for buying and selling stuff, with connotations of a busy bazaar, borderline deals, and smuggling. Maybe bricks of cocaine are being moved around. And “industry,” well, that’s positively good. Hard work, salt of the earth. Admittedly, it’s qualified as being the “sex industry,” but still. It feels like they’re talking about regular economic transactions.

What they’re talking about without euphemisms is the plight of women and children sold to men.

Slaves aren’t “workers” unless workers are now locked up and beaten. The women aren’t bricks on a conveyor belt, shunted to new buildings. Lies and kidnapping keep the pipeline full of new slaves, just as they did in the bad old days. Unless you want to call selling organs an industry, that’s the wrong word for it. It’s a crime.

In our free and enlightened time, there are more people enslaved than ever before. The estimate is some twenty seven million living in slavery (1999). That includes only forced labor, not workers struggling with appalling conditions. Of those 27,000,000, over 70%, three quarters, the vast majority, most, are women or girls. Fifty percent of all slaves are children, most of them girls. Female slaves are generally violated, even when suffering sexual torture isn’t their primary function.

Slavery is no longer focused on a class or a race. Now it’s not whites who think blacks don’t feel pain the way real people do. Now it’s men who think buying women is okay because who cares what they think and anyway they like it.

Slavery is not okay. Everybody knows that. Maybe, if we called it by its right name, there’d be no way to continue pretending it is.

Seriously. It’s time. The whole Republican birth control bullshit (and I do mean bull) has brought the issue to levels of absurdity that require action.

First, notice one thing about the sex issues of the last few decades. They’ve been about birth control (1950s), then abortion (1980s onward), now, God help us, birth control again. Supposedly, it’s all about life, but there are also plenty of outbursts that sex is irresponsible, thoughtless, and no longer “special” when there are no “consequences.”

But sex has always been that way. For men. They’re famous for it, or at least they try to be.

The problem isn’t thoughtless sex. Only thoughtless sex by women. That was the only thing that changed. Women could have sex without terror.

It’s also the only case where a reduction in terror is supposed to usher in the end of civilization as we know it. Antibiotics interfere with God’s will, but nobody complains. Superpower nuclear war is less likely these days, but we don’t get lectures on the lamentable loss of character-building fear.

There has to be a reason why women, specifically, are best terrified.

Terrorized people don’t talk. They do their best to be invisible. So women are silenced, out of the public square, out of public life. And should a few of them forget their place and make a public mark, the Great Forgetting disappears it. Their concerns are unheard, individual, unimportant, personal, private, something for them to deal with on their own, without help.

Which is especially ironic when it concerns something like birth control. If that’s a “women’s issue,” virgin birth must be more common than I realized.

(While I’ve been working on this post, off and on, I see Zunguzungu has made some of the same points. “He is defending his [privilege] for that to be a woman’s problem, one [with] which he … doesn’t need to be concerned.” “[By] making it about her, personally — [he] changes the subject from a generalizable woman’s public concern” to a personal one. “[P]olicing the boundaries … of whose concern gets to be publicly voiced and heard….)

Sara Robinson put it very clearly: control over reproduction brings “a louder and prouder female voice into the running of the world’s affairs at every level, creating new conversations and new priorities.”

But female voices and their new conversations and new priorities and the subsequent unavoidability of acknowledging sex and reproduction and children in public are exactly what people in the patriarchy have been desperate to silence.

The goal of the whole blob of sex-related issues, whether they’re called “pro-life” or “personhood” or “traditional values,” is to deny women their rights. It’s never explicit (at least not in the West), but that would be the effect if the legislative or cultural goals were achieved.

That back door approach is essential because equal rights in law have become dogma. Nobody could suggest women should be unable to speak by law. The repressives can only do their best to get women to disappear in fact. The tried and tested method of silencing women is terror, so they’re desperate to go back to the days when women had “consequences.”

Those of us on the other side need to address the real subject, the denial of rights. We need to stop being polite about taking the con job on its own terms. None of this is about “life” or “values.” It’s about denying women their rights.

We have to aim at the real subject every time. When girls are deprived of Plan B because ‘what about the children!?’ it’s tangential that the medical evidence supports its use. The real point is the fundamental right to control your body. When birth control for women is attacked because it enables female sluthood, the real defense is not the specifics of hormonal treatment for polycystic ovarian syndrome. The point is that women’s sex is nobody’s business but their own. When abortion opponents are upset over the loss of “life,” it is irrelevant that there are no cellular markers indicative of personhood or soul. The point is that nobody’s body can be requisitioned against that person’s will. Forced pregnancy is a loss of rights exactly equal to forced kidney donation.

Separation of sex and state makes it simple to see when the state should be involved. Sex, like religion, is a private matter. Same as with religion, when nobody is hurt or coerced or exploited or bamboozled, it’s nobody’s business except the people involved. (The presence of embryos changes nothing, because their status is a matter of personal belief that can guide only personal actions.) On the other hand, if anyone is harmed, then whatever happened is a crime and is neither sex nor religion. It’s very much the state’s business to stop and punish crimes. And the state also has a legitimate function in ensuring children are cared for. But that’s where it ends if the need to separate sex and state is understood. The state does not actually need to tell people how or when to have sex. Really. It doesn’t. People can have sex without any input from the state. It is possible to separate sex and state. It is possible to mind one’s own business.

Separation of sex and state does not mean that people must change their attitudes any more than it does in the parallel case of religion. A Christian can go on being a Christian. They just can’t make anyone else be a Christian. If you’re against gay marriage, you can go on avoiding a same-sex partnership. If you’re anti-abortion, you can avoid having an abortion.

If we want to have actual democracies with equal rights, we have to start insisting on the broad principle that people’s private business is no business of government. There was a time when we’d figured that out for religion, although we seem to be losing the insight now. It was great while it lasted. The holy wars collapsed and boatloads of blood did not get spilled in many places for many years.

If we separated sex and state, we’d get the same massive release of energy for useful purposes as when the holy wars stopped. We’d get the same reduction in casualties, too, when women stopped dying from botched abortions, pregnancy-related suicides, unwanted childbirths, and caring for too many children, and when everybody’s lives improved as population pressures let up. Even children and men would not die as often before their time.

And the separation of sex and state means women can be citizens in fact as well as on paper. That is what is at stake here. If the two are separate, women are citizens. If not, they are for all practical purposes incubators. Never lose sight of that. Anyone who waffles on it, even if they make polite noises while doing it, even if they make polite noises while being President of the United States, is on the side of the Dark Ages and against human rights. No, that is not hyperbole. Not if you understand that women are, in fact, humans.

Sex and state must be separate.

I wrote on that topic several times, but now it’s everywhere.

Chatblu makes the point that “this whole ‘person’ thing is becoming a wildly overpopulated ‘hood.’ … A person can be as tiny as a sperm or as large as Microsoft.”

However, the membership of women in the category remains unclear, although they are within the size range.

The most lucid explanation to date came just recently. Jessica Winter finally answers the question for us.

All my adult life, I’ve been pretty sure I’m a sentient, even semi-competent human being. I have a job and an apartment; I know how to read and vote; I make regular, mostly autonomous decisions about what to eat for lunch and which cat videos I will watch whilst eating my lunch. But in the past couple of months, certain powerful figures in media and politics have cracked open that certitude.

Read on for the thrilling conclusion!

The discussion about the birth control pill fiasco has boggled my mind. I’ll explain the title toward the end, but let me start with my bogglement. There are whole swathes of blogland who feel that so long as the pills are available, it’s all good. They don’t see a problem with the fact that, as Charles Pierce puts it:

The Church has claimed — and the president has tacitly accepted — the right to deny even its employees of other faiths the health-care services of which it doesn’t approve on strictly doctrinal grounds. That is not an issue of “religious liberty.” That’s the enshrinement of religious thuggery in the secular law.

That’s also a remarkable departure in a country founded on the separation of church and state, a country where as recently as twenty years ago even the most conservative of Supreme Court justices asserted that religious practices cannot conflict with the law of the land. Dakinikat quoted a few days ago:

The free exercise [of religion] clause and its meaning is well established. There is very little ambiguity about what it is and what it is not.

“In 1878, the Supreme Court was first called to interpret the extent of the Free Exercise Clause in Reynolds v. United States, as related to the prosecution of polygamy under federal law. The Supreme Court upheld Reynolds’ conviction for bigamy, deciding that to do otherwise would provide constitutional protection for a gamut of religious beliefs, including those as extreme as human sacrifice.”(1)

The Court stated that “Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious beliefs and opinions, they may with practices.”

Or, as the Reclusive Leftist says:

“[I]n 2000, the EEOC ruled that employers who failed to include birth control coverage in their prescription healthcare plans were in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That’s because the Civil Rights Act forbids discrimination on the basis of sex. The EEOC allowed no exceptions for religious institutions.

What the Obama Administration has done now is to basically reverse that. They’ve said, “You know what? Never mind. That clause in the Civil Rights Act about discrimination on the basis of sex? Forget it.”

So, yes, the pills will still be there for women who need them. But not because the government says women have the same right as everybody else to make their own decisions about their own health care.

The pills are still there, but not because you have a right to them. It’s because nobody has taken them away yet.

Losing your rights is not a win. Getting birth control pills by the grace of Obama is not a win. Unless you mean a win for him. Now this is something that’s his to bestow … or for those bogeyman Republicans to take away. Or, given Obama’s past actions in non-election years, his to bargain away.

That is why rights are important. Having rights means people who violate them can be held accountable. Receiving dispensations means constantly asking (begging?) for what you need, and tough luck when you don’t get it.

We’ve seen that movie play out in abortion rights. Riverdaughter summarizes:

The same thing happened with abortion. It was merely a few workarounds, a few inconveniences. If you really need an abortion, it will still be there for you. You just need to assuage the consciences of a few religious people. That’s how it started. But how has it ended? In some states, there is only a single provider and women have to risk losing their jobs to get an abortion. It’s no longer just a few workarounds. Now, it’s a major ordeal.

And that progression happened because for too many people it wasn’t about the right to decide your own medical procedures. So long as they still had some kind of escape from forced pregnancy, it was just too difficult to argue about rights. The result is that here we are. Too many people are just glad they can still get birth control pills. Arguing about rights is divisive, difficult, aids and abets Republicans (see above, re “bogeyman”), and time-consuming. And it’s physically nauseating to realize that you’re not a human being in other people’s, including the President’s, mind.

Because the subhuman status of women is an unavoidable consequence of not acknowledging their right to make their own medical decisions. It’s a logical consequence of putting a religion, any belief, ahead of the civil rights of citizens, any citizens.

I’ll go through the steps. There aren’t many. Read more »

There’s a bit of a flap going on because a famous person named Cynthia Nixon said she’s gay by choice. (Full disclosure: I’ve never heard of her. I only visit this planet now and again)

Saying it’s a choice is supposed to be very bad because it falls into a “right wing trap.” Everybody must say gays are born that way, that they can’t help themselves, that it’s-not-their-fault-they-found-it-that-way. Otherwise wingnuts can insist that re-education could work.

Bullshit.

Any kind of sex between any kind of people who can freely and knowledgeably consent is nobody’s business but their own.

The point isn’t whether you have a choice or not. That has nothing to do with it. The only point that matters is that nobody gets to tell you what kind of sex to have. Or not to have.

The only real “right wing trap” is granting the crazy premise that it’s okay to meddle in somebody else’s sex life if you can. Because that’s what the Aravosises of the world are doing. They’re saying it’s genetic, so they can’t help it, so give up already. Which means that if they could help it, then meddle away.

Again: bullshit.

People who freely and knowledgeably consent and are doing nothing to hurt others have a right to do anything they damn well please. Genetics and choice have nothing to do with the basic right to mind your own business.

Just because some gay people have made their stand on illogical ground is not Nixon’s fault. All she’s done is shine a light on it.

(I’d tell you to go read my chapter on Rights, but you know that already, don’t you?)

Whoever wins the vote in 2012, as Dak points out women have lost. The only thing politicians are arguing about is who can barter away more of women’s fundamental rights. It’s become a given that rights for female people are an optional frill, to be indulged only if there’s really nothing else that needs doing. They’re a “pet rock.”

Among the many brilliant discoveries by Douglas Adams, perhaps the most insightful is the one showing how to make anything invisible. It’s really easy. You just surround it with the Somebody Else’s Problem field. Something as vast as the inalienable rights of half the entire country can disappear almost overnight. Men are convinced it’s women’s problem. Women are convinced it’s poor women’s problem. Or teenagers’. Or somebody else’s. Anybody else’s. It doesn’t matter. That’s all it takes for invisibility.

The only way to destroy the field is to make it their problem, which, in this particular case, means making politicians pay a price when they try to turn women into fungible incubators.

Well, the only hold we voters have over politicians is our vote. Nothing else.

They’re convinced, and with good reason, that everything else can be bought. Advertising to try to get votes depends on money. Cushy post-government jobs depend on networking. Voters can’t influence any of that. The actual vote is the only thing a voter controls.

So it’s our one and only tool, our one and only leverage. Nor is it a minor thing. As madamab notes, “The bottom line is this: Women. Win. Elections. Not only do we make up the majority of volunteers for political campaigns in general, not only do we donate in droves, but we also vote. A lot. And wherever we go en masse, is wherever the winning candidate goes.”

But if you can’t withhold your vote from a politician, you have zero leverage. You don’t count.

If something else is more important, dead wedding guests to take Ian Welsh’s example, then you have to ask yourself a couple of things.

As a matter of practical fact, have the dead innocents stopped piling up under Obama? No. The talk is prettier, but the walk is the same.

The other question is whether ignoring your own rights actually solves anybody else’s problems. Does trampling women’s human rights result in a better world? Does it end war? Stop poverty? Eradicate ignorance? Stop global warming? Transition us all to sustainable energy? Provide prosperity and military supremacy? No. No, no, no, and no. So, by putting yourself second, nobody else gets a better life and everybody loses.

Trampling women’s human rights makes no sense in any universe. Not in principle, where compromising those inalienable rights leads only to greater compromises because trampling rights is habit-forming. Not in practical politics, where the extortioners take your vote but don’t have the honesty of a common criminal and don’t even hand over whatever mess of pottage your vote was supposed to buy.

So vote for Obama if you feel you have to because the other Republicans talk like bigger sociopaths, but do it without illusions. Things will continue to get worse. Your rights will continue to vaporize. However, otherwise things might become as bad sooner.

Or they might not. Some people might make feeble cries of protest when Republicans impoverished and killed people.

Or, maybe, the 2%-less-evil-Republicans (aka “Democrats”) will be the difference that saves us from the apocalypse. I can’t say that I see that last possibility myself. All I see is that voting for Obama means active participation in our own destruction. That’s worse than refusing to help. It’s worse even when the end is the same.

There is another choice. Own your vote. Refuse coercion, extortion, and hostage-taking. Vote third party or write someone in. Sure, we’ll lose this time. But if enough of us lose together, it’s the first step to not losing.

It’s true of the pill. If that’s not obvious to you, you’re not paying attention. Or you have an agenda. One that does not include making the lives of girls healthier and easier. That’s been made clear by loads of people. Just one example, Violet at Reclusive Leftist in several posts.

What I want to add is: REMEMBER IN NOVEMBER!

Do not vote for the Current Occupant. Do not vote for him, no matter what. Do not enable your own abuse.

Seriously.

Obama does the classic abuse crap. Slam! Oh, quit yer snivelling. Where ya gonna go? (A bit of time goes by.) Gee, honey, I’ll do better, just give me one more vote. Slam! (Rinse and repeat.)

For those of us favored enough to be safe from direct hits, the line is “The other guy will beat the kids up even worse.”

Do you know what that’s called? Extortion.

When it happens to someone else, we’re all super-clear that the victim should leave. Get the hell out. Stop putting up with it. GO!

But when it happens to us, suddenly we’re the ones on the floor with a broken jaw saying to ourselves, “God help me, if I leave, what’ll happen to us? What’ll I do? Somebody else’ll beat us up even worse.”

Never again pretend you don’t know how abuse victims feel.

And for yourselves: Get the hell out. Stop putting up with it. GO!

Do not vote for Obama in November. It doesn’t matter who the Republicans run. It doesn’t matter if one of them becomes President for four years. The only thing that matters right now is not being part of your own destruction.

Get it through your heads that you will not be bullied, and you will not be held hostage, and you will not knuckle under to extortion.

Do not buy the story that you have no choice. Vote for somebody else, anybody else. Or nobody. Follow Plan B and get rid of the lying, two-faced, pandering toady.

Update: I wrote a post pointing it out back when, but BAR puts it more clearly: Obama: the lesser evil or the more effective evil?

But the most lucid summary of all is Vastleft’s:

Good for Mississippi for voting that garbage down.

But it’s a bit flabbergasting that a question of basic rights is being voted on at all. What’s next? A vote on keeping slaves?

Because, you know, the right to your own life is fairly basic. It’s why you can kill someone in self-defense.

Except, apparently, if you make the mistake of living while female. Think about ectopic pregnancy for a minute. It occurs when the fertilized egg starts to develop outside the womb. It has a very high fatality rate without treatment, higher than most forms of untreated plague, for instance. According to our Christian Taliban, if someone saves your life in that case, they’ve committed murder. In their minds, it’s like removing the feeding tube from a dependent patient.

Women are feeding tubes to them. And we, in all seriousness, go around voting on whether women are more than that or not.

Cry, the not-so-beloved country.

The story so far: Some idiot decides to photograph attractive women demonstrating in Occupy Everywhere events. They probably think they’re part of a narrative on all the great ideas happening in the movement.

What he publishes on youtube is something he calls “Hot Chicks of Wall Street.”

Okay. So far it’s just a bog-standard sad tale of a male who says he has no idea how revolting he is. Jill wrote about it. Now comes the bad part.

Does everyone in Occupy Wall Street rise up to say That Is Not Cool? To say that the knob is no longer welcome in any part of the movement? To ask everyone in it not to give the tripe any air? To affirm that women and men are partners in the movement, not decorations rated on fuckability?

No.

Instead there are complaints about how it’s not an official video from the officially official representatives of OccupyWallStreet so it doesn’t count. (E.g. comments here.) It’s just some lone jerk. He’s no part of the “brand.”

Really? Here’s MarketWatch, not a site otherwise much concerned with OWS. This, however, did catch their eye. (click to enlarge)

You know what? OWS didn’t officially kick him out. And don’t tell me, “It’s leaderless. There are no officials.” If the video doesn’t count because it’s not official, then there’s somebody who could officially repudiate it. You can’t have it both ways. Now the knob’s work is the mainstream face of OWS. Deal with it.

Furthermore, the knob is getting plenty of air. So much so that Jill had to write a follow-up post about his rape jokes.

Did OWS shut down the jerks whining about how this is nothing but healthy men liking healthy sex and you just have no sense of fun?

No.

They could have pointed out that women like sex too. That doesn’t mean everyone has to listen to endless talk on the size of men’s packages. You keep that stuff to yourself, and to your partner(s). And if you’re a rude jerk to the 99% — any of the 99% — they could have said they don’t want you in the movement.

Then it gets steeply worse. There have been reports of rapes. Did OWS affirm strong support for the women in their ranks, and provide what they could in the way of medical, legal, and police resources?

No.

One group said such reports should go through an OWS committee of some kind, which would vet it for report-worthiness. If they passed it, then it was okay to go to the police.

Uh, hello? Earth calling Dude Nation. Those are the tactics of KBR. They were the military contractors in Iraq who imprisoned a worker after she’d been gang-raped to prevent her from talking about the crime. OWS isn’t imprisoning anyone, but they do seem more worried about reporting than they are about the crime. The tactics differ in degree, not in kind. That is wrong.

Apparently, the official officials at OWS don’t know that. Apparently, they can’t figure out that the way to have enough credibility to fight false accusations of rape is to take the crime seriously. Because I suspect that’s the real issue. They’re terrified of fabricated charges being used to discredit the whole movement.

So they’ve decided to beat everyone else to the punch and discredit the whole movement themselves.

Don’t try to tell me these are just individuals who don’t represent the movement. If they don’t represent the movement, then tell me this:

Where is the outrage shutting them down?

This picture hit me. Like a wet fish slapped in my face.

It’s part of a BBC photoessay about the poorest of boys in Nigeria finding something to love in their lives in the game of football (what the US calls soccer).

Nothing wrong with that. Good for them!

But this was the second picture in the series:

What I saw was this:

The caption says nothing about the black-shrouded ghost in the picture. She’s closer than a hand’s breadth away from the nearest boys because she’s trying to stay on the dirt road and out of the open sewer that is the gutter. They don’t seem to see her. They don’t give her any space. She doesn’t ask for any. She doesn’t exist.

Nor does the photographer see her. “Ibadan’s youngsters file into teams wearing different jerseys.” (No. Ibadan’s boys file into teams.) “Their goal is simple. … [T]o improve their standard of living and that of their families.” “Akeeb Kareem, chairman of Ibadan’s Sango Community Youth Forum, says the street game is invaluable in keeping the city’s young men constructively occupied.” But the woman, swaddled in black when it’s sweltering, couldn’t play outside even if such an idea occurred to her. Nobody’s worrying about how to make it easier for her to be constructively occupied. She already is, carrying a bag of food home, by the look of it.

Women do nearly three quarters of the work in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s good that the boys are trying to beat poverty. If that’s good, the people already doing 70% of the work to help their families are even more worthy of focus. Helping them in their constructive occupations will lead to even better results. Assuming anyone is interested in results.

I think this is the saddest story I’ve read. Amy Ernst writes about the rare Congolese men who stand by their wives, despite rape.

My mind’s eye sees these headlines, too: “Man’s family says he’s not a loser, even though his son was murdered.” “Grandparents adopt child, even though parents abused him.” “Sister gives brother a place to stay, even though his house was destroyed by war.”

And people are glad to hear about such generosity and kindness.

?

I’m not wondering about the rare men. They’re taking steps away from horror. But in what universe does the most basic smidgen of humanity sound like an accomplishment?

We live in hell.

(Go read all of Amy Ernst’s writing, also on her own blog. There’s one story in particular about one of the planet’s most amazing fighters and heroes, Maman Marie.)