The perfect surveillance device is the one you carry yourself | Photo: Johan Larsson, CC BY 2.0

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For the most part, I am very pro-technology. I don’t think I would have half of the friends that I do now if the internet existed—partly because I would never have met some of them, partly because I am legitimately terrible at keeping in touch with people if they don’t have Facebook. I don’t do phone calls very well. This website obviously couldn’t exist without technology, which would mean that I’d be screaming into an actual void each week instead of getting to be angry on the internet where (some) people actually read what I do. But technology also frightens me sometimes. It takes the worst parts of human nature and amplifies them, so that sexists suddenly can harass their victims in new and interesting ways, or domestic abusers can track down their victims. Or, you know, people can send targeted advertising to women in abortion clinics, and potentially even start tracking them in real time. Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen. We’re getting a little bit 1984 in here.

In today’s edition of “stuff I really never wanted to admit was real,” we have the story of Jon Flynn, a Boston entrepreneur (I expected better of you, Boston) who had a crazy idea: what if instead of just sending people annoying-but-mostly-harmless advertisements based on their location and browsing history, you could send women anti-choice propaganda while they are sitting in the waiting room of an abortion clinic? And what if you could make money by doing so? What if you were actually the worst person?
Flynn uses a technique called “geo-fencing” which lets you send messages to mobile devices within a defined geographical area… like say the walls of an abortion clinic. And, surprise surprise, the types of people who think it’s a good idea to hold signs showing aborted fetuses and shout at women that they’re going to go to hell think it is an awesome plan, because now they can be even more effective at harassing women:

Anti-choice groups were tantalized by the ability to hone in on the women they think will be most susceptible to their message.

“Marketing for pregnancy help centers has always been a needle in a haystack approach—cast a wide net and hope for the best,” said Bethany [a Christian adoption organization] Regional Marketing Manager Jennie VanHorn, according to the report. “With geo fencing, we can reach women who we know are looking for or in need of someone to talk to.”

Yes, now it is easier to find women who “need someone to talk to,” because obviously they put basically no thought into their life choices before walking into the clinic. The ads that Flynn provides for these intrusive acts of “help” are pretty typical for Crisis Pregnancy Center (also known as CPCs, also known as “homes of lies and deceit”) advertising. A pensive/sad woman  looks off into the distance next to wording that says “Pregnant? It’s your choice. You have time… be informed. RealOptions Pregnancy Medical Clinic.” Because the assumption is that the abortion clinic is the one who is going to be lying to you and presenting you with all of those “fake” options.

Like pretty much any CPC that claims that it is going to provide information about women’s choices, RealOptions is full of it, and pretty clearly does not intend to provide women with information on any option besides “keep the baby because that’s what Jesus would want”: “in federal tax filings, the organization explains its mission as: ‘empowering and equipping women and men to choose life for their unborn children through the love of Jesus Christ in accordance with his word regarding the sanctity of human life.’”  So don’t listen to that medical professional, ladies and gentlemen. Come hear about the “real options” you can have by choosing between the distinct options of keeping the baby or…. Keeping the baby for a while, and then giving it to a nice Christian home. In addition to redirecting women to CPCs, Flynn’s plan also sends women information on adoption services, and he claims that over 10,000 people have clicked on ads for Bethany Christian Services that he sent to women in abortion clinics.

Sadly enough, this super-invasive advertising is not the most terrifying aspect of Flynn’s efforts. No, the terrifying part is what information the anti-choice groups can learn about women in return:

The Powerpoint included a slide titled “Targets for Pro-Life,” in which Flynn said he could also reach abortion clinics, hospitals, doctors’ offices, colleges, and high schools in the United States and Canada, and then “[d]rill down to age and sex.”

“We can gather a tremendous amount of information from the [smartphone] ID,” he wrote. “Some of the break outs include: Gender, age, race, pet owners, Honda owners, online purchases and much more.”

I basically would never want anyone who is not a close friend or family member to know my demographic information AND the fact that I’m a pet-owning Honda driver AND that I’m seeking an abortion. While “affirmative consent” is needed for advertisers to use information gained from mobile devices, that consent can be pretty easily obtained: in the fine print of apps like Yelp, or from individuals logging onto various services. And while there is currently no evidence that Flynn’s customers are using the capabilities of mobile devices to track women physically, there’s a short step from writing down the license plate numbers of women going to abortion clinics and using smartphone data to track said women. While Flynn’s clients technically only have access to what is called an “advertiser ID,” it’s very simple for that ID to get linked to an actual person. I’m re-posting this part in full, because it’s freaking terrifying:

Both RealOptions and Bethany Christian Services require a person’s name and contact information in order to receive information online. Once a woman enters her name, email, home address, phone number, or ZIP code, that information is tied to her advertising ID, and Flynn could potentially marry that ID to all data associated with it and store it in what he calls his databank.

There are, however, plenty of less aboveboard methods to learn the name attached to an anonymous ID.

Any site or app that uses a profile with your name and any other information—Facebook, dating services, banking apps—can link your device, and your advertising ID, to the real you.

Legitimate services would not hand over personally identifying information willingly, but there are many instances of such information being made widely available. The cyber attack on Ashley Madison, the dating site for married people seeking extramarital partners, resulted in the release by hackers of the personal information of 32 million of the site’s users, revealing the potential for profile-based sites to be targeted.

Even without sophisticated hacks on established sites, bad actors can use techniques known as “social engineering” to learn the personal identities associated with advertising IDs.

For instance, if an anti-choice group wanted to learn the identity of women seeking abortions, instead of sending them ads for CPCs, they could send ads that seemed unrelated to abortion—for a competition to win $500, or for help with student loans—that tricked women into entering their names, email addresses, and any other information required by the form. Any woman who filled out the form would have unwittingly handed her name to anti-choice activists.

Since some marketing software also allows marketers to track individuals whose information they’ve gathered, this also means that some women could be tracked to their homes, to their place of work… you get the idea. The employees in the clinic could likewise be tracked in this fashion, but I’m sure that Flynn and his cohorts are going to be completely reasonable people and not do something like that. I mean it’s not like anti-abortionists are known for putting together “kill lists” that provide personal information about abortion providers, associate abortion providers with Nazis and celebrate abortion providers’ demise if they are killed… oh wait, no, that’s exactly what they’re known for. 

Currently the best advice for women to avoid this geo-fencing harassment is to leave their phone in their vehicle or log out of absolutely all apps before they walk into the clinic, neither of which is probably terribly likely to happen. And like most things in our culture, it puts the emphasis on the victims, rather than the harassers, to adjust their behavior. So in lieu of treating an abortion clinic like a prison where you leave your cell phone in a little tray at the door, I suggest a counter-offensive—using the same technology to push messages about actual choices and options, messages that reassure women that they are secure in whatever choice they make, and telling them  please, for the love of all that is holy, do not sign up for that sweepstakes while you’re sitting inside the clinic. It’s a trap.

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not trying to explain all the things wrong with firing teachers for talking about rather common body parts, she studies gender in  popular culture.

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Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

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So it’s been a very, very long week, and I’ve had a couple of days where the bad news just keeps coming. I’m filled with more rage than I can stand at the entire Brock Turner debacle, but one thing that the terrible rapist, and the terrible judge, and the terrible father kept reminding me of is the broken distribution system for placing the burden of rape. Turner’s father, and Turner’s judge, both act as if the rape Turner committed is something that happened to him, not to his victim. His “20 minutes of action” shouldn’t be held against him. The poor dear. His victim delivered a powerful statement, one in which she makes it clear that at many points it was her actions that were on trial, not his. She recounted the questions she was asked about herself, and her actions, the night of her assault:

Another battleground for gender equality | Image: US Government / Selective Service Publications, CC0 (Public Domain)

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In September, I wrote about how particular brands of bad people like to point out all of the “privileges” women have. The one “privilege” that MRAs like to think of as the their trump card (or perhaps more accurately, their Drumpf card)  is obligatory service in the military. “But if women are equal,” they say, their eyes already promising the “gotcha” that is coming, “shouldn’t they register for the draft?” It takes some of the wind out of their sails when I say, “Yeah, they should.” And now we’re one step closer to that happening, as the latest defense authorization bill to pass the Senate includes a provision that requires women to register for the Selective Services.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not pro-draft. I think that basically any time you have a fighting service made up of people who seriously don’t want to be there, you’re in trouble before you even get started. And that’s not even touching on my many, many objections to the military-industrial complex. But I am pro-equality. And “equal” doesn’t mean “protecting the gentle women-folk from wars and fighting.” I think that women should be able to fill all roles in the military, and I think it is only fair that women face the same potential call-to-service that men face. Women have long been considered unfit for certain roles or for the draft thanks to sexist stereotypes about women being weaker and needing protection. And while I’ll admit that the average woman has less muscle mass than the average man, I dare you to tell Serena Williams that she isn’t strong to her face. Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver proved that women are capable of being Rangers, which means they’re capable of being just about anything else in the military, too.

Now there’s no guarantee that this bill will make it into law; the House also looked at requiring women to register for the draft in the House version of the defense authorization bill, and decided against it. So even if it moves forward, the two different bills will have to be made to align, which might mean the draft provision leaves. (Not to mention the fact that Obama will probably veto the bill because it says he can’t do things like close Guantanamo Bay. Because our politicians are terrible, terrible people.) But I would like this provision to make it into law, if only because it will make Ted Cruz really, really angry and that is basically the best thing that can happen in my life right now.

I’m an unlikely individual to be a cheerleader for military service, but I see this as a step forward for women. The fewer artificial barriers we have between what is “men’s” work and what is “women’s” work, the sooner we’ll achieve actual gender equality. A draft that only affects 50% of the population is one of those barriers, and I’m happy to see it come down.

But really, for serious, can we not have the draft at all?  Because it is a super bad idea.

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Poison Ivy | Photo: Cliff, CC BY 2.0

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In case you hadn’t noticed by now, I have a love/hate relationship with pop culture. It has given me some of the best things in my life—fandoms that I am passionate about, connections to my friends, and the source material for all of the academic papers I could ever hope to write. It also makes me explode in rage and/or disappointment on a regular basis. Guess which one I’m talking about today? (Warning: Spoilers for the show Gotham ahead.)

So if you haven’t been watching Gotham, the basic premise is that we get to see wee!Bruce Wayne progress on his way to becoming Batman, while a block of wood with the inability to emote in anything besides “earnest growl” (Jim Gordon) fights the corrupt system of Gotham. The show plays with the ages of most of the characters—Bruce Wayne starts off the series as a twelve-year-old (played by an actor who is currently fifteen,  young Selina Kyle is somewhere in her teens (played by a 17-year-old actress), while the Penguin and the man who will become the Riddler are adults. In something that I thought at the time was an interesting move, Ivy Pepper (the future Poison Ivy) was also cast as a preteen/teen, and played by a fourteen-year-old actress. Emphasis on was. For the upcoming season, Ivy has been recast with a 28-year-old actress named Maggie Geha, and her storyline is going to get…. Uncomfortable.

The blurb for the show goes thusly: ‘“Following an encounter with a monster from Indian Hill, Ivy Pepper finds herself reborn, and one step closer to the DC villain she is destined to become: Poison Ivy. Now a 19-year-old woman who’s harnessed the full power of her charms, she sets her sights on Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz).”’ This is… all kinds of not okay.

First of all, “full power of her charms” sounds like something a creepy old man says about the young woman he’s lusting after. It is a really weird way to try to be coy about the fact that they are going to be sexualizing Poison Ivy in a way that they haven’t for the previous seasons. Now I know that Poison Ivy is well-known for using her sexuality as part of her schtick, but you could also say that about most of the Batman villains that happen to be women. Female Batman villains basically only come in one flavor, and that flavor is “femme fatale.” Don’t believe me? Check out this list and count the number of women who don’t have an hourglass figure. You might, might have to use the fingers on both hands.  And for me, one of the points of Gotham was that it allowed the creators to rethink characters. Poison Ivy as a sexy femme-fatale is not new, nor is it interesting. Poison Ivy as an awkward but potentially sociopathic teenager who hangs out with young Catwoman? New and interesting. And now they’re taking it away from us.

Let’s also go with the basic facts. Even if Poison Ivy’s body is now 19, there’s no guarantee that her mind is now also 19. So best case scenario, you have something like Big, where we conveniently forget the fact that the brain occupying the body is not to the age of consent yet. But on the outside, it looks like a 19-year-old trying to get it on with someone who is probably, at most, 14 or 15, and they have a word for that. More of a phrase, really. And remember that the actual actress who is performing the role is 28, and the actor playing Bruce Wayne is 15. Age gaps between leading men and ladies are not unusual in Hollywood (and they frequently actually go in the other direction, which makes this.. somewhat novel? I guess?) but they (usually) don’t involve teenagers.

The whole thing reminds me of one of the weirder aspects of our culture, where a woman (usually a teacher) preys on a young man and the boy is congratulated for winning the attention of an older woman. You usually see at least one comment along the lines of “I wish my teachers had ‘molested’ me like that, har har har.” These reactions absolve the women of much of the responsibility for their actions, and send a message that it is a thing to be celebrated when an older woman pursues a teenage boy. This situation feels very similar to me. It seems as if we are supposed to celebrate the fact that Bruce Wayne, who has been portrayed as the shyer partner in his flirtations with Selina Kyle, is now the focus of Poison Ivy’s (presumably sexual) attentions.

Without having yet seen the episodes in which this will occur, Poison Ivy’s mysterious aging-up feels as if it is a convenient plot device to indicate that Bruce Wayne is growing up. But there are a lot of indicators for maturity that don’t involve a young woman going through a magical super-puberty.

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not trying to understand creepy double standards in age-gap relationships, she studies gender in  popular culture.

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Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

If you like our posts and want to support our site, please share it with others, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit — anywhere you think people might want to read what we’ve written. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great week.

Good news! | Photo: Timothy Krause, CC BY 2.0

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I don’t often write happy posts. This is partly because I have a bitter, cynical soul in which happiness roosts uneasily. It’s mostly because it just generally sucks to be a woman. But occasionally I get to be happy about something going on in the world. Or at least relieved that the world isn’t backsliding, even if it’s not exactly progressing. This week is one of those occasions, because this week the Supreme Court declared Texas’ horrible HB2 unconstitutional.

I wrote a few months ago about HB2, and how it is a terrible, ridiculous law, and how Ruth Bader Ginsburg tore through the state’s “women’s health” justification like it was tissue paper. In a fantastic 5-3 decision, the Supreme Court made it clear that the whole premise is not only ridiculous, it is unconstitutional. Of course, a lot of the damage is already done; over half of Texas’ abortion clinics have already closed. But now the remaining clinics will not be forced to meet onerous, expensive, and (often in the case of receiving admitting privileges) impossible demands. And some of those closed clinics may be able to reopen.

What is more encouraging is that this decision will likely be far-reaching. Seven states are currently facing legal challenges over their abortion laws that either require abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges, require abortion clinics to be ambulatory surgical centers, or both.  Both of these types of restrictions were declared unconstitutional:

We conclude that neither of these provisions offers medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens upon access that each imposes. Each places a substantial obstacle in the path of women seeking a previability abortion, each constitutes an undue burden on abortion access… and each violates the Federal Constitution.

Even more states have similar restrictions that haven’t been legally challenged yet, though I certainly hope they will be now.

Now because I’m me, I won’t let myself celebrate for too long. After all, this decision doesn’t so much progress abortion rights as it returns abortion rights to where they were supposed to be since the freaking 1970s. But regaining ground is regaining ground. Conservatives have wholeheartedly embraced TRAP laws as a seemingly fool-proof strategy; after all, it combines the beloved national pastimes of “concern-trolling women,” “telling women what to do with their bodies,” and “being as hypocritical as humanly possible.” Now that the Supreme Court has gouged out two of the most-used justifications of these laws, people might have to start accepting that abortion is actually legal. Like for realsies.

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not celebrating every hard-earned victory, she studies gender in  popular culture.

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Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

If you like our posts and want to support our site, please share it with others, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit — anywhere you think people might want to read what we’ve written. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great week.

There’s an interesting conflict happening in my brain right now. One that shows that even as a feminist, I can sometimes have the problem of wishing the “right” victim is involved in a case. See, on the one hand, I’m (again) a feminist. It’s my automatic instinct to be on the side of the female victim in any dispute regarding sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual assault, etc. But on the other hand, I hate Gretchen Carlson. Or as she is classified in my brain, “one of the blonde ladies on Fox News who isn’t Megyn Kelly” (which actually, is a fairly imprecise classification system, seeing as we’re talking about Fox News). I think that she’s spent most of her career putting a pretty, civilized veneer on conservative hatred and histrionics. Despite graduating summa cum laude from Stanford, she apparently either plays dumb or has had her brain slowly liquefied by the general ambience of the Fox studio. Of course she’d have to play dumb to the point of catatonia to be as bad as Brian Kilmeade, but I’m generally not a fan of women being forced to hide their intelligence (or choosing to hide their intelligence). In my heart of hearts, I don’t really think that she’s a good person.

But she is a victim of sexual harassment. In fact, she’s been sexually harassed multiple times in her career, and even spoke up about the early incidents in an essay last year. Now she’s officially filed a sexual harassment complaint against Roger Ailes, the mound of tapioca pudding begrudgingly poured into a somewhat-human-shaped Jello mold who runs Fox News. The complaint also covers her former Fox and Friends cohost Steve Doocy.

Frankly, the behavior of both men is disgusting. Doocy did everything he could to marginalize her, including shushing her on air and belittling her during breaks. When she complained about this behavior to Ailes, he called her a “‘man-hater”’ and eventually moved her from Fox and Friends to her own show in a worse time slot and with less pay. But sadly, that’s the least of Ailes’s bad behavior. In addition to punishing Carlson for complaining about sexist treatment (like the fact that women on Fox and Friends aren’t allowed to wear pants) Ailes just acted like an all-around sleezeball. He’d watch Carlson in her office, comment on her figure and her legs, and asked her to turn around so he could see her ass. He also suggested that all of her problems could have been solved easily if Carlson had just been having sex with Ailes. Ailes has a long history of being sexist scum, but somehow has managed to get away with it for multiple years.  Ultimately Carlson’s contract was not renewed, which Carlson claims is a result of her complaints.

I know how I should react to this news. I know how I would react, in nearly any other situation. Yet when I first read about the lawsuit, my initial instinct wasn’t towards sympathy, but towards schadenfreude. It was perfectly encapsulated by a comment made to me at dinner a couple nights ago: “What did she think was going to happen?” What kind of environment did Carlson think she was entering when she signed up with Fox News? In the words of Christina Cauterucci:

Here, Carlson confirms what many have suspected of the network that’s made its name by blaming women for men’s problems, lying about abortion, characterizing rape as “regret sex,” and reducing female soldiers to their breasts: that its day-to-day functioning is just as hostile to women as its programming.

My first thoughts on the matter were something along the lines of a sarcastic “quelle surprise.” But this thought is unfair to Carlson, and not much different, ideologically speaking, from “well what did she think was going to happen when she wore that?” Carlson is involved in an institution I don’t approve of, but that doesn’t mean that she is responsible for, or “deserved” her treatment, any more than a woman wearing a miniskirt “deserves” to get catcalled. Carlson’s lawsuit has revealed some fault lines in my feminism that I didn’t know I had.

We can, and should, question Carlson’s decisions to support a network based on fear, hate, and misogyny (choices, after all, don’t take place in a vacuum.) But these choices don’t discount her experiences, or place Carlson in any way at fault for her treatment. I hope that Carlson’s lawsuit causes a major shift in the way that women are treated at Fox News. At the very least, I hope she takes Roger Ailes for every bloodstained dollar he has.

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not coming to terms with the flaws even in her own feminism, she studies gender in  popular culture.

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Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

If you like our posts and want to support our site, please share it with others, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit — anywhere you think people might want to read what we’ve written. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great week.

Photo: Adikos, CC BY 2.0

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Before I start this week’s post, I want to take a moment to express my deep grief over the passing of Dr. Kiara Kharpertian. Kiara was an amazing woman, and had the brightest spirit of anyone I have ever met. In every encounter with her I was awed by her kindness, generosity, and passion. I strongly encourage you to read her incredible blog, Words From Ward Four.

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One of the most frustrating parts of being a woman is the amount of hate, vitriol, and abuse we’re supposed to just put up with as part of our daily existence. That we are supposed to not only accept, but accept quietly, without complaint, without pointing it out, and certainly without anyone doing anything about it. When something we say (especially something we say on the internet) is met with horrible language and threats, we are A, told that we invited this abuse ourselves by saying A Thing in the World while “knowing that this could happen,” and B, that it is impossible to stop, arrest, or otherwise punish those who say terrible things because it is “the internet,” which is apparently like the Wild West only instead of street duels there are rape threats and doxxing. Since we live in the modern age of unprecedented technology and surveillance, where I’m pretty sure that the government could track me down using solely my pizza preferences, it’s pretty tempting to cry “bullshit” on the idea that something happening on the internet makes it an untraceable crime with no clear intentions. This week, law enforcement proved that it totally can track down those who engage in violent or threatening internet speech; it just seems that in most cases that involve women, it doesn’t want to.

First, some background info. The right to free speech, and the limitations thereof, is one of our most hotly contested and least understood civil issues. In a Jezebel article regarding online harassment, Anna Merlan writes:

The best overall guide we have is the “true threat doctrine,” which defines threats as statements that “a reasonable person would interpret as a real and serious communication of an intent to inflict harm.” But that’s vague, to put it mildly, and it has been inconsistently applied by different courts. Danielle Citron, an attorney and law professor who has called for better enforcement of online harassment laws, says she hopes the Elonis case will clarify what a “true threat” actually means.

“We bend over backwards in the United States—and we should—to protect and provide breathing space for free speech of all sorts: offensive, profane, irritating,” she says. “We want to provide breathing room for public conversation. But when it comes to expression whose raison d’ etre is to silence other people, to ruin reputations, to terrorize, we should be less anxious about silencing that.”

And when Merlan writes that the doctrine has been applied inconsistently… ooh boy, she is not kidding. And in many cases “inconsistently” can be seen as synonymous with “in a way that marginalizes the fears and experiences of women while prioritizing the fears and experiences of police officers who are actually trained to protect themselves.”

Take the case of Anthony Elonis. This charmer was eventually convicted of a federal crime, making threats across state lines. And the threats in this case were some truly disturbing Facebook posts:

Elonis wrote a series of Facebook posts—”rap lyrics,” by his account—in which he fantasized about killing his ex-wife. One said he “wouldn’t rest” until she was dead, “Soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts.” Later, after she’d gotten a protective order, Elonis wrote: “Fold up your protective order and put in your pocket. Is it thick enough to stop a bullet?”

In addition to fantasizing about killing his ex-wife slowly, he also threatened gun violence towards an elementary school, and even fantasized about killing the female FBI agent who was investigating his threat against the school. Jesus Christ. I’m not sure at what point you go from “seriously psychotic” to “seriously psychotic with no sense of self-preservation,” but I’m pretty sure Elonis passed that point a couple dozen violent fantasies ago. Elonis appealed his conviction, saying that he was exercising his First Amendment rights and that the fantasies he posted were “rap lyrics” from a persona named Tone Dougie.  I’m sure that knowing that it was “Tone Dougie” and not her psychopath of an ex-husband that wanted her to die slowly from thousands of tiny cuts really made the former Mrs. Elonis feel much better. Downright safe, even.

The Supreme Court, an august body that values First Amendment rights so dearly that there is a protest-free buffer zone in front of the courthouse and that cameras and video recording equipment are forbidden in the courtroom… voted in favor of Elonis in an 8-1 ruling, with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting. I find myself on the same side as Justice Clarence Thomas. That is a sentence I have never had to think, let alone write, before.  The Supreme Court overturned the appellate court’s ruling, and basically said that prosecutors should have been able to read Elonis’ mind: “But Chief Justice Roberts said a criminal conviction requires more than consideration of how the posts would be understood by a reasonable person (the legal standard lawyers call negligence). Rather, he said, prosecutors had to prove that Mr. Elonis was aware of his wrongdoing.” According to this ruling, it doesn’t matter that Elonis’ ex-wife was terrified of him. It doesn’t matter that she interpreted his violent postings aimed at her as a threat. It doesn’t matter that a reasonable person could have looked at those posts and interpreted them as threats. It only matters if Elonis meant them as threats. To put this into context, “Stand Your Ground” laws allow you to actually shoot and kill someone if they are doing something that you, the victim, reasonably perceive to be a threat. You are allowed to actually end someone’s life based on your reasonable interpretation of the threat presented by that person, whether or not that person intended to be threatening. So the Supreme Court is actually demanding a higher burden of proof in favor of someone who has threatened to murder an FBI agent than it demands in favor of a teenager holding a bag of Skittles.

In some ways, the former Mrs. Elonis was lucky in that her case actually went to trial. In the vast majority of cases, law enforcement officials don’t take online threats seriously enough to investigate, even if they involve threats of rape and murder or an acknowledgement that the perpetrator knows where the victim lives. Women can receive very specific, very violent threats from identifiable sources, and still have the police do nothing. A complete underestimation of the gravity and effects of online threats, a widespread misunderstanding of the internet and its various crevices, and a good, ol’ fashioned belief that any complaining woman is acting hysterically come together in the perfect storm of police Not Giving a Fuck when it comes to online harassment.

Or at least, that’s the case until it is the police who are being harassed.

As Merlan points out, and as we are seeing again recently, the police become miraculously capable of tracking down and stopping harassers when the object of harassment is the police force itself. The FBI and police reacted within a week and within a day, respectively, to various threats against police officers after two NYC policemen were killed.  Recently, four Detroit men were arrested for making social media posts threatening cops or praising the shooter in the attack on Dallas police officers. Additional individuals were arrested in Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, and Louisiana. While the men in Detroit haven’t been charged yet, the others have been charged with everything from “disorderly conduct” to “public intimidation” to “inciting injury to persons or property.” Suddenly the police understood the internet pretty well.

Now I’m not a legal scholar, and certainly not an expert on the First Amendment. I think it’s pretty clear that I consider online threats to be one of the many exceptions to free speech, but hey, I could be wrong about that. What I’m not wrong about is the fact that it is highly unfair and inappropriate that the police only take online threats seriously, or see them as a crime, when it is the police force itself that is being threatened. As our own dear Richard put it, “If you’re going to go there, you have to go there uniformly or not at all.” If online threats of rape and murder aren’t credible or worthy of criminal charges when they’re aimed at women, they shouldn’t magically become so when they’re aimed at police.

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not lamenting yet another privilege-of-power-based double standard in our society, she studies gender in  popular culture.

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Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

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Catcalling | Photo: Michael, CC BY 2.0

So believe it or not, I can occasionally be in a good mood. This week happens to be one of those occasions. Partly because in order to deal with the RNC, I’ve decided to detach the parts of my brain that feel anger and fear, lest I die of a premature heart attack or have a brain aneurysm. But also partly because I have read some genuinely good news. Friend M pointed me towards a story about Nottinghamshire, England, where harassment of women is now going to be recorded as a hate crime. This means that catcalling, sexual harassment, unwanted photographs, and other forms of daily abuse that women are usually supposed to just shrug and accept will actually be taken seriously by police.

In recording harassment in this way, a few very important things are able to happen. First, the police will actually investigate the harassment, and second, there will be support for the victims. Third, the police will be able to collect data on harassment and form an analysis of the places and times that it happens in order to (hopefully) do more things to combat it. This is much better than the current state of affairs for most police forces, which is reactive rather than proactive. Yes, that man might have been staring up your skirt for the last fifteen minutes and muttering to you about how good he thinks you’d feel, but it’s not a crime until he actually puts his hand up your skirt. So why bother the police with the simple fact that you feel incredibly uncomfortable and unsafe in public places that are supposed to be welcoming to anyone?

There’s a fairly common misconception that street harassment or sexual harassment only happens to “pretty” women. It’s supposed to be a “compliment” that a total stranger has remarked on your looks, told you to smile, or invited you to perform a sexual act with them. Or in my case, be told by a stranger twenty years older than me that he “likes [my] dark hair” which in addition to being vaguely creepy, is so generic that as far as compliments go it’s one step above “I like the fact that you have skin.” (Really. So flattering.) But harassment is so pervasive, it is harder to find women who haven’t been harassed than women who have. In reporting on the Nottinghamshire case, Nadia Khomami presents a source with some seriously depressing statistics.

Rachel Krys, co-director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, said: “It is great that police in Nottingham will be capturing the way a lot of harassment in public spaces is targeted at women and girls. In a recent poll we found that 85% of women aged 18-24 have experienced unwanted sexual attention in public places and 45% have experienced unwanted sexual touching, which can amount to sexual assault.

“This level of harassment is having an enormous impact on women’s freedom to move about in the public space as it makes women feel a lot less safe. The women we spoke to do a lot of work to feel safer, including avoiding parts of the city they live in, taking taxis and leaving events in groups.”

That means if you took a random sampling of ten British women, one of them would have never experienced unwanted sexual attention, and one of them would be only half certain that she’d experienced unwanted sexual attention.

People ignore street harassment because they see it as a “victimless” crime. So someone remarks on your looks? So what? But as Krys notes, this type of attention has real, physical effects on women’s lives. They change how they dress, where they go, how they move about the city, and various other things in order to feel more safe, and less harassed. Jessica Williams points this out to comedic (and tragic) effect when she discusses street harassment in what might be one of my favorite Daily Show segments of all time.

Harassment is able to continue because no one takes it seriously. Hopefully Nottinghamshire is only the first of many police forces to take these steps to address harassment. Or will at least make a few more men think twice before they shout something about how they want to touch random women.

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not celebrating on small islands of victory in the vast sea of misogyny, she studies gender in  popular culture.

***

Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

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Photo: Quinn Dombrowski, CC BY-SA 2.0

For the most part I’ve been trying to ignore the DNC about as much as I ignore the RNC. Not so much because the DNC folks say the same crazy stuff as the RNC folks (though really, can’t we all just get along?) but because I find the constant picking over of talking points exhausting, and because I’m very certain that conservative reactions to most of what is said will just make me sad for humanity. (If you are startled/upset/angry/clutching your pearls because someone pointed out that slaves helped build an important building in the slavery-happy post-Revolutionary South… just… sit down. You’re making me tired. Maybe listen to the Hamilton soundtrack and think quietly for a minute.) But one story about the DNC did raise my interest; a discussion of pro-life Democrats.

Now, as you know, I’ve been upset before about the term “pro-life” because I think it’s a creative way to mislabel “anti-abortion,” and downright false in most cases, as most people who employ “pro-life” rhetoric are really “pro-forcing-women-to-incubate-a-fetus-and-then-conveniently-forgetting-to-care-about-the-child-once-it’s-born-not-to-mention-criticizing-the-mother-for-having-a-child-she-can’t-afford.”  But in the case of these Democrats, I think that to a certain extent they actually deserve the term “pro-life.”  (They don’t totally deserve it, as you’ll see later. But they get closer than most.)

The group is called Democrats for Life of America, (and I will keep calling them that because I think the acronym DFLA is stupid and their awkward name amuses me) and at the DNC they honored the Governor of Louisiana, John Bel Edwards, for his pro-life stances. At the DNC meeting, Bel Edwards pointed out the ways that “pro-life” and “anti-abortion” are not synonymous, and the ways in which improving social services can likely decrease abortions:

“There is a difference between being anti-abortion and being pro-life, because the two are not synonymous… Now, I don’t think you can be pro-life without being anti-abortion, but being anti-abortion does not make you pro-life, because there are so many other issues that affect people, whether it’s access to healthcare, to housing, to nutrition, you name it.”

“By the way, if a young lady who’s expecting a baby knows that there’s gonna be help when that baby’s delivered and they’re not gonna be on their own, they’re much more likely to deliver that baby.”

This focus on assistance in care and providing basic health and housing needs lines up fairly well with the reasons many women give for actually having abortions. Financial concerns or worries over single-motherhood are among the most prevalent reasons that women give for having an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute: “The reasons most frequently cited were that having a child would interfere with a woman’s education, work or ability to care for dependents (74%); that she could not afford a baby now (73%); and that she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems (48%).”

It’s clear that financial concerns and desires to avoid social stigma or hardship are major factors for many women in their choice to have an abortion, and that addressing these concerns could help decrease the number of abortions. And as Joanna Rothkopf points out, the goals of the Democrats for Life of America and the goals of the Democratic party neatly align in their mutual desire for “providing healthcare, child care, and educational resources.” So you know… good job guys. Way to care about good stuff.

But after that… things get murky. The Democrats for Life of America are upset by the language in the current Democratic platform that advocates repealing any laws that obstruct access to abortion, such as the Hyde Amendment.  Presumably they are now super happy with Tim Kaine, who backtracked statements from his spokespeople that said he was dedicated to repealing the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal money being used for abortion services. I’m not super happy right now. The Democrats for Life of America are worried that Democratic party is losing votes from pro-life Democrats who don’t want to see things like the Hyde Amendment go away. I’m worried that we’re inviting people who support the Hyde Amendment to our parties.

Some of the goals of the Democrats for Life of America are laudable. But they also conveniently overlook a major aspect of the issue: not all women who get abortions do so because of financial or support reasons. Again, as Rothkopf writes, “The unspoken counterargument would discuss women who don’t seek abortions for financial reasons, but for reasons more emotionally difficult, and unsolvable by after-school care.”

Notice that none of the numbers I reprinted from the Guttmacher institute were that nice triple digit number, “100.” Financial and support concerns do not make up all reasons for women to get abortions, and the reasons for getting abortions are often complex. You can even have, like, two reasons at once. (I know. Math is hard for me too guys, but stay focused.) In the Guttmacher report, one third of women reported that they simply weren’t ready to have a child, a number that must overlap at least somewhat with the number of women who said they couldn’t financially support a child or thought the child would interfere with their ability to work, go to school, or care for other dependents. 13% of women were concerned about fetal health issues, and 12% of women were concerned with maternal health issues. 25% of women didn’t want anyone to know they had sex or had gotten pregnant, 14% felt pressured by a husband or partner to get the abortion, 6% felt pressured by their parents to get an abortion, and 1% of women reported they were getting an abortion because they were the victim of rape. The Guttmacher questionnaire didn’t have an option for “I just don’t wanna have kids,” but I’m pretty sure that option would overlap with a lot of the others.

The point is, abortion is not a binary choice between “not having the financial and support resources necessary to have a child and thus having an abortion” and “having the financial and support resources necessary to have a child and thus not having an abortion.” I’m certain that increasing housing, education, childcare, and healthcare options would, in fact, drastically reduce abortions, and I’m all for that. Women should have as many resources as possible in order to make choices that are truly what they want, and not simply the end result of dire circumstances. But having all of those resources is not going to prevent all abortions, and the women who do decide to have an abortion, whether for health reasons, family reasons, or just because they don’t flipping want children, also need resources. They need abortion to receive federal funding. They need abortion to be accessible. They need abortion to be seen as a normal medical procedure. They need abortion to be seen as a perfectly fine choice. They need their choices, their needs, their desires, and their lives to be seen as more important than the potential for life that exists in a cluster of cells. (Just so you know, people often look very horrified when I say this, but I’m gonna double down. The life of an existing, breathing human woman is more important than a fetus. Come at me, bro.)

You can’t truly call yourselves “pro-life” if you are only concerned for the life of the mother in very constrained circumstances that fit your worldview. That just makes you a slightly nicer version of anti-abortion advocates.

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not coming to terms with the flaws even in her own feminism, she studies gender in  popular culture.

***

Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

If you like our posts and want to support our site, please share it with others, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit — anywhere you think people might want to read what we’ve written. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great week.

Image: Adapted by This Week In Tomorrow, from Thoth God of Knowledge, CC BY 2.0 (based on the original logo, which is probably © Columbia Pictures)

SPOILERS AHEAD.

(Also, forgive me if any of the following information is slightly incorrect—I’m working off of my immediate recollections of the film, rather than the film itself, as people frown at you for scribbling madly in the theater. Also it’s hard to eat popcorn that way. I’m hoping to revisit all of this once the film comes out on DVD, but I don’t have another $20 to spend to make sure I’m quoting things with exact accuracy.)

When they first announced that they were doing a Ghostbusters reboot, I was skeptical. Not because it was an all-female cast, because anyone who is upset about that is stupid. (I’m looking at you, internet.) Instead, I was skeptical because do we really need another Ghostbusters movie? I know the original is an insanely good classic. I also know that Ghostbusters 2 exists, and parts of that movie should be set on fire. If your plan for raising the stakes in a film are “include a baby, make the bad guy a scary living painting, and have Peter MacNicol do a silly foreigner voice” then you need to just never make that movie. Ever. I know that some of our current nostalgia boom has created amazing things (Pokemon GO exists! YOU CAN BE A POKEMON TRAINER) but it has also created terrible things (Michael Bay’s version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles exists. You can… stare into the nightmare valley of the turtles’ innie-belly-button-faces).

I remained tentatively hopeful. I lost some hope when I saw the cast list. While I appreciate the contributions that Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig have made for women in comedy, I never totally latched onto them the way I did with Tina Fey, Margaret Cho, Aisha Tyler, or Janeane Garofolo. I’m often nonplussed by Wiig’s variety of “strange girls who talk fast/weird” characters, and as a bigger woman I always felt somewhat affronted that basically every comedic role McCarthy has ever obtained involved at least one crack about her weight. (Watch her appearances on SNL, and count the number of times that the characters she plays are anything besides “weird/unattractive larger woman.” Did you count higher than 0? Are you counting correctly?) Likewise, Leslie Jones’ appearances on SNL never seemed to let her explore the role of anything besides “tall angry woman who vaguely acts like a sexual predator towards male cast members and guests.” My one redeeming hope was Kate McKinnon, who has always been, and will always be, a goddess in human form and one of my all-time favorite SNL cast members.

My hopes plummeted even more when I found out that Jones’ character, Patty, would be the only non-scientist of the bunch, a “streetwise” black MTA worker palling along with all the white lady scientists.  It seemed a cruel echo of the original, in which Ernie Hudson’s character of Winston Zeddemore was cut down from being a member of the Air Force and founding member of the Ghostbusters to being a guy who says the line “If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say” and ambles in halfway through the film. Hudson was also not included in most of the promotional materials (or, to a certain extent, the memories of many Ghostbusters fans.)  Thirty years later and the only character of color gets to be, in the words of Janessa E. Robinson, the “seemingly intellectually inferior token black woman with street sense and a Cadillac”?  My intersectional feminism was super unhappy.

Now, having actually seen the movie, I can tell you that I was wrong to be so skeptical. Sure, it suffers from some problems. As with any current reboot/sequel it feels it has to make callbacks to the original that sometimes work and sometimes don’t. There’s a tired joke about “Haha that male villain must be a virgin. Get it? Because the fact that he hasn’t had sex makes him less of a man.” There are some incredible themes that, as Alyssa Rosenberg points out, end up as pulled punches.  Someone in power heard the Fall Out Boy/Missy Elliot version of the classic theme song and still let it be in the movie. Fall Out Boy… Missy…. I love you both too much to let you do this to yourselves.

But overall, I really liked it. The cast works amazingly well together. McCarthy and Jones are allowed to transcend their “bigger woman” tropes for the most part (and when Jones isn’t, she makes it a chance to either save the day through over-the-topness or makes it a shout out to racism and sexism). Wiig saves her weird talking skills for key moments, and otherwise does very well as the earnest and anxious Erin. And any time Kate McKinnon is onscreen is a time that is magical, because even when she doesn’t have lines, she does wonders. Watch the scene where literally all she is doing is sipping a soda while listening to Kristen Wiig talk. It’s amazing. The CGI is mostly engaging, as is the pacing. The cameos by original Ghostbusters cast members are fun but don’t go on for too long (with one exception, but we’ll get to you later, Bill Murray) Chris Hemsworth marries chiseled abs to the usually-reserved-for-manic-pixie-dreamgirls characteristic of adorkability. It’s genuinely funny. There is a ghost-punching glove. It’s like if the Nintendo Power Glove was as cool as it was supposed to be, and also could punch ghosts in the face.

And all those whiny man-children who were certain that the film was going to be terrible? Who put on a concentrated effort into making the trailer for the film the most-disliked YouTube movie trailer of all time?  Who declared that the movie had “raped their childhood”? (Which, by the way, isn’t even a thing that can happen, Jesus Christ, stop diminishing the meaning of that word.) Well, all of those men should be super happy, because the film was totally about them. Kinda.

See the heart of the new Ghostbusters isn’t the cool new tech. It isn’t merely proving the existence of the supernatural or the evils of government bureaucracy as in the original. (Damn the EPA and their evil… mistrust of a leaking nuclear reactor and doubts regarding the eternal imprisonment of lost souls…. Why was the EPA the bad guy in the first one again?)  It isn’t “the spirit of New York City,” as it was the most ham-handed symbolism I have ever seen in Ghostbusters 2.  Instead, the main theme running through the newest film is pretty simple: men don’t like not having power, and they really, really don’t like women having power. My friend Vrai Kaiser puts it quite well:

Shaped seemingly from the ground up by the reactions to its production, Ghostbusters has ended up being a movie about women struggling to be heard. The villain is a completely boldfaced commentary on male privilege, opining on how being bullying pushed him into vengeful fantasies while the heroes are constantly beaten down and kicked day in and out and still struggle to do good.

It’s impossible not to notice the trilby hats, the sneering figures of males in power telling the women heroes that their opinion doesn’t count, that nobody cares about them, or that yes these girls have done a real nice job but it’s really for the greater good if they recede into the background and let other (male) characters take credit for things. It’s baked into the movie at every turn, and while it’s the farthest thing from subtle that there could possibly be, I think it’s ultimately to the film’s benefit.

Vrai very kindly did not spoil much of the movie in this discussion; I’m not as nice as they are. So here we go down the super-spoilery rabbit hole of the feminism of the new Ghostbusters.

From the beginning of the movie, the feelings of men are pretty clear: we’ve gotta do something to control all these women-folk. The film starts with a guide giving a group of remarkably well-behaved group of tourists a view of the Totally Not the Rockefeller Aldridge Mansion. He tells the tale of the day that Portrait Man (I forget his name) Aldridge’s servants did not answer his summons, mainly because they had all been murdered by his daughter, Gertrude. (You can tell this is in the past and that she is a bad person because she has an “ugly” name like Gertrude.) You can also tell that she is evil because her father apparently wrote in his diary, “God makes no mistakes, but he may have been drunk when he constructed Gertrude’s personality.” Get it? Because his daughter’s personality is so heinous, it makes her father doubt God’s infallibility. (Notably, besides the whole “murdering” people thing, we don’t learn much more about Gertrude’s personality. Also, if someone is evil, “personality” is an odd thing to complain about. Usually we attribute evil to one’s soul, but instead her dad is basically saying “Gertrude is such a bitch that God must have been drunk.”) Rather than face public disgrace over the fact that his socialite daughter murdered a bunch of poors, her dad decides to lock her in the basement forever. You know. Like a rational person would. So within the first five minutes of the movie, we literally get a man locking up an overly-powerful woman. It kind of sets the tone.

Later we see Wiig’s character, Erin, as she frets over her chances at gaining tenure at Columbia. Her supervisor, Stuffy McAcademia, (I don’t think he had a name. Just elbow patches.) tells her that she should probably have references from someplace more “prestigious” than Princeton, and makes dismissive comments regarding her clothing. It’s not clear what his problem is—is her clothing too sexual? Not sexual enough? Is it the weird shirt/bow thing? In what might be the best-ever encapsulation of a woman’s experience in academia, an elderly man tells a younger woman struggling to be taken seriously in the field that something is wrong with her, then refuses to tell her what precisely is wrong. Erin is left to anxiously tug at her clothing, wondering what it is that she has done to upset the patriarchal powers-that-be.

The hits keep coming. Patty, far from simply being a “streetwise,” non-educated everywoman, is in fact a nonfiction buff with an excellent knowledge of New York City’s history. The Ghostbusters react to mean internet comments. Bill Murray, in the longest cameo of all of the original ‘Busters, plays Martin Heiss, a paranormal debunker. Erin, who is used to academia and the urgent need for patriarchal approval that comes with it, is eager to prove herself, and her fellow Ghostbusters, to the nonplussed Heiss. Abby, who pretty much thinks Heiss is a jackass (which he is) tries to subtly keep Erin from falling all over herself to get Heiss’ approval and validation, and leads Erin to eventually stand up for herself. The main villain, Rowan, is basically a Men’s Rights Advocate. He is a lonely and “misunderstood” man who is upset that the world has never understood or appreciated his genius. Also the waitresses don’t like him and are mean and that hurts his feelings. He essentially decides to destroy the world because he feels he is not receiving what he feels the world owes him. (Sound familiar?) The villain is essentially the same type of entitled, “wounded” individual who would accuse a film of raping his childhood because his characters of his gender are not the focus of it.  The “public and officials disbelieve the Ghostbusters” scenes have an extra twist of the knife as the women are essentially accused of being hysterical, lonely souls who are making up stories to get attention. (Again, sound familiar?)

But, ironically for a feminist analysis, the character that I want to pay particular attention to is Kevin, the beefcake secretary played brilliantly by Chris Hemsworth. As Vrai says, Kevin is in many ways the male version of Ulla from the Producers (if possibly a little bit less self-aware of what his looks actually accomplish for him). I want to pay attention to his character not only because he is the one most likely to be met with cries of “reverse sexism!” but because I think that his character has been somewhat misunderstood, and that he actually becomes a focus from which to understand how certain issues should be treated in the movies.

So first of all, reverse sexism isn’t a thing, any more than reverse racism is a thing. Sexism is just sexism, but sometimes it is aimed at disenfranchising women and sometimes it is aimed at disenfranchising men. Now, in general, I don’t think “they get to do it so I should get to do it!” is a very productive argument, nor is “they make us do it so we should make them do it!” Thus I don’t find “solutions” like balancing the objectification of the female body with objectifications of the male body to be very useful. Though I suppose balanced is somewhat better than imbalanced, it’s all still objectification. On the surface level, Kevin provides a chance for critics to say, “well if women don’t like it when they are objectified, why are they objectifying men?” which would be a fair critique if that was Kevin’s only purpose in the film. But it’s really, really not.

Now this is where I’m going to do something I rarely do, which is take issue with the work of another feminist critic. But when I read a critique of the movie by Madeline Lane-McKinley, something about the way she described Kevin’s role in the film rubbed me the wrong way:

Kevin more specifically caricatures the inadequacies and anxieties of a male work force in the face of feminized labor conditions. With the body of a manicured lumberjack, Kevin sits behind a desk, bewildered by the seemingly simple task of answering the phone and little else. Yet he is continually forgiven for his ineptitude based on his handsomeness. The joke is ultimately on the ghostbusters, as they accommodate him to the bitter end.

Now, part of this is accurate. Kevin does in many ways represent the anxieties of a male workforce being asked to take on female roles. He is, in fact, completely inept. (Though he is also sometimes an accidental philosopher—at one place in the film he points out that aquariums are like submarines for fish. I will never look at an aquarium in the same way again.) But he is not forgiven for his ineptitude due to his handsomeness, and he is not a “joke” on the Ghostbusters at the end. There are a few things about Kevin to keep in mind that counteract this concept.

First, Kevin isn’t hired just because he is handsome, a longstanding trope when the genders are reversed. He is hired because he is the only person who applied. His handsomeness notwithstanding, he is the only candidate. Despite Erin’s obvious lust for him, that’s not what wins him the job; the scarcity of administrative assistants willing to work for a supernatural investigation service is. Second, Kevin isn’t kept around because he is handsome. Ultimately, Kevin is kept around because the others become fond of him, and in his own way, he becomes part of the Ghostbusters family. He is earnest in his attempts to fit in, even buying a jumpsuit to match theirs and trying to echo their supernatural techno-babble on the phone to a client. He tries, to the best of his (limited) abilities, to do his job and take part in the team. When the Ghostbusters rescue him, it is not (or at least mostly not) about trying to get into his pants or sweeping him into a kiss (*cough* Dana *cough*),  but about rescuing a team member who has been put in danger by the activities of his teammates. Yes, the Ghostbusters keep him around even after they could hire a more efficient secretary, but again, at this point he has proven himself, ever-so-clumsily, to be part of the team.

Finally, in a move that very much helps to justify the gender bent Ghostbusters movie’s existence, Kevin helps illustrate just how goddamn creepy the original Ghostbusters could be, and also illustrates what should happen when there is a confluence of an imbalance of power and sexual attraction. If you remember, the original Ghostbusters begins with Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman doing a “psychic power” test with two students, one a nerdy male and the other a blonde bombshell. He’s supposedly testing the effects of negative reinforcement on ESP. He holds up cards and tells them to guess what the shape is. When the boy gets them wrong (and even when he gets them right) Peter shocks him. He gives the girl sultry stares, kind smiles, winks, and paternalistic encouragement. She’s always wrong, and he always tells her that she’s right. He’s invalidating his own goddamn research because he thinks that the student that he is testing is attractive. This. Is. Creepy. (And very, very bad science, which is a direct contrast to the new movie, in which the women are not only attempting to prove the existence of the supernatural but trying to find a way to study it comprehensively). He tries to put the moves on her, touching her arm and staring soulfully at her while comforting her about how the world will react to her “powers,” and is violently upset when Ray interrupts him. Doesn’t it suck when your coworkers interrupt your attempted sexual harassment? Ray, interestingly enough, doesn’t even really react to the situation, too concerned instead with his new scientific opportunities. Yeah bro, don’t bother saying something when your colleague is hitting on an undergrad. I’m sure that’ll work itself out.

But Kevin re-establishes the fact that creeping on someone is still creeping on someone, even if they’re handsome. And creeping on someone that you work with is just not okay. As soon as Kevin comes on screen, Erin is tongue-tied and in instantaneous lust. She holds onto his hand for way too long, stumbles over her words, and won’t stop staring at him. If she were Peter Venkman, this behavior would be rewarded. She’s not Peter Venkman. When she haltingly asks Kevin if he is seeing anyone, Abby says that Erin didn’t really mean to ask that question, because doing so would be illegal. When Erin persists, Abby informs her that she is a walking lawsuit waiting to happen. This is how people should react when their coworkers are being creepy to subordinates. Hell, this is how people should react when their coworkers are being creepy to anyone. Erin has awkward moments with Kevin throughout the movie, but they remain awkward. They remain the subject of scorn and worry from her coworkers. And most importantly, she is not “rewarded” with Kevin at the end of the film, as Peter is rewarded with Dana. She may be keeping Kevin around partly because he is pretty, but at every point the inappropriate nature of her lust is brought to the fore.

Now, you can argue that this is maybe an unfair double standard (another one of those “if men can do it why can’t I?” scenarios) but I think that this aspect of the film displays exactly why men should not be doing it either, and why this trope should not be continuing in narratives, film or otherwise. Likely partly because of the novelty of the situation, the interaction between Erin and Kevin highlights how much the “charms” of Peter Venkman, and fictional figures like him, are reliant on sexually predatory behavior. Erin is on the edge, if not over the edge, of sexually harassing Kevin. She is exemplifying the ways in which the oppressed can, in turn, become oppressors. It is not “more okay” for Erin to be inappropriate to Kevin just because she herself was the victim of a patriarchal system that dismissed her worth. The fact that men are awful to Erin does not mean it is okay for her to be awful to Kevin. It’s kind of an amazing revelation to see happening on the screen.

Again, I’m by no means saying that this is a perfect movie. I’m saying it’s way better than people gave it credit for, or give it credit for now. And while the feminism it displays is also not perfect, it packages really important feminist messages into a franchise reboot, which guarantees that millions of people will at least passively receive them. That is, roughly, a bajillion more people than will ever read this blog. It is a film that turns its critics into its villains, and rips away some of the rose-tinted nostalgia from the original film while also mocking a trope that hurts women as well as men. All in all, not a bad day’s work. A few dozen more movies like Ghostbusters every year, and maybe the idea that women can be the focus of excellent movies will seem a little bit less like a novelty.

Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not picking apart (and generally endorsing) a much-needed dose of feminism in film, she studies gender in popular culture.

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Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

If you like our posts and want to support our site, please share it with others, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit — anywhere you think people might want to read what we’ve written. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great week.

 Someone who is probably not joking. Photo: Gage Skidmore CC BY 2.0

I’ve had a pretty bad headache for three out of the last four days, so today’s post is going to be a bit shorter, and way more of a rant, than usual. Today’s topic? How Trump is terrible (again) and how anyone who is willing to handwave his behavior seriously doesn’t understand the world that an average woman lives in.

In case you missed it (in which case, how? What is your secret?) on Tuesday, Donald Trump advocated for the assassination of Hillary Clinton. In his exact words,

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment—by the way, and if she gets to pick [the crowd boos] if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I dunno.”

For those of us playing at home, that pretty clearly sounds like Trump is saying that people with guns are the only ones who can stop Hillary. Get it? Get it? Because they can shoot her with their guns. Or have an armed revolution? Something with guns. Of course, Trump has since denied that he meant anything violent by his comments. A very sympathetic Sean Hannity said that it was “obvious” that Trump was discussing the political power that Second Amendment advocates have and the way they can be mobilized against Hillary. Yeah. Obviously.

Paul Ryan sold off another small part of his soul by insisting that Trump had told ‘”a joke gone bad.'” This particular interpretation had a brilliant takedown by Jason P. Steed, who points out that him joking about this doesn’t actually make it better.

But all of this avoids addressing the violent elephant in the room: Hillary Clinton does not have the luxury of thinking that Trump was joking. Hillary Clinton doesn’t have the privilege of believing that Trump’s followers will interpret his comments to mean their “political power.” Not just because Hillary Clinton is a public figure with a low “likeability” score. But because Hillary Clinton is a woman. And when you’re a woman, you never have the privilege of assuming that a man who is threatening violence against you is “just joking.” Because frequently, they’re not.

In the same way that women can’t assume that men threatening violence on the internet don’t actually mean it, women can’t assume that men threatening violence in the real world don’t mean it, either. It’s entirely possible that the reason women are assumed to be less funny than men is not just sexism (which it definitely is) but also the sheer fact that we don’t have the luxury of finding as many things funny as men do. Worldwide, 1 in 3 women “have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime.” That’s not counting non-partner, non-sexual violence as far as I can tell. Like the kind that happens when you make fun of a man, or say no to a man, or basically do or say anything the man doesn’t want. The stakes are too high, and the statistics too real, for any woman to give a violent comment the benefit of the doubt.

Whether or not Trump was joking about killing Hillary, whether or not he was talking about the political power of gun advocates (note: he probably wasn’t, and he definitely wasn’t) it doesn’t matter. Hillary Clinton has to see these words as a threat. Any woman in her position would.

God only knows what Trump will “joke” about once Clinton beats him in the first debate.

Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not pointing out that women don’t have the luxury of assuming people are being funny, she studies gender in popular culture.

***

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A special, extended Saturday edition on what we saw at the 2016 Olympics in Rio | Photo: Pierre de Coubertin, CC0; and Hector Garcia, CC BY-SA 2.0

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Last week (before the Headaches of Doom descended) Richard had suggested that I write about the Olympics, as at that point a few weird sex/gender/sexuality-related things had happened. I happily agreed, then descended into the world of wishing that decapitation was a valid pain-relief option, and ended up with last week’s post about Trump.

This turned out to be a good thing in some ways, in that the ensuing week has resulted in many more weird incidents. And it was also a bad thing, in that Oh my God so many weird sex/gender/sexuality things happened at the Olympics. It got so bad that I had to call upon my friends and family on Facebook to help me collect all of the stories. They rose to the occasion.

And rose.

And rose.

And kept rising. I waited until Wednesday night to start writing, as the links kept coming in. So when I settled myself down to begin writing, I first had to open all of the links as new tabs. Around tab number 10, I started thinking “Oh my God, this is a lot of links.” When I got to tab number 15, with my computer starting to slow and without even having finished going through all of the links that my friends and family had collected, let alone the ones I knew I wanted to include from my own research, I thought “….this is terrible…. I wonder how many tabs my computer can handle….. I wonder how many tabs I can handle.”

Thus determined to “do science” to both my laptop and myself, I cracked open a beer, and devoted myself to spending the next half hour opening links and despairing over humanity. So now, separated into the good and the bad/ugly (I refuse to try to differentiate between the two) I present you the stories associated with the 38 tabs I had open between four windows on my laptop. And then some more that got added in the intervening days. I’ll talk about them after the list.

The List

All the Good, Bad, and/or also Ugly at the Rio Olympics.

The Good:

• The general domination of US women at the Olympics (just US women have won more gold medals than some countries).
• Adorable human being Fu Yuanhui breaking taboos about menstruation by talking about the effect her period had on her Olympic performance. (I love you, Fu Yuanhui.)
• Kimiah Alizadeh Zenoorin becoming the first woman from Iran ever to win a medal. She is eighteen and won in taekwondo. I love her.
• Simone Biles being so awesome that news outlets started having to stretch to find new ways to describe how awesome she is.
• Simone Biles firmly rejecting having her awesomeness being compared to men’s awesomeness as if their awesomeness is dominant/as if she is a vagina’d version of a male athlete: “I’m not the next Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps. I’m the first Simone Biles.”
• Sarah Robles winning a bronze medal and becoming the first person from the United States to win a medal in lifting in the last sixteen years (the last one, a gold, went to Tara Nott in 2000. US men last won a lifting medal in ’84. Just sayin’) and also speaking explicitly about the importance of the representation of Latinx women and non-normative/larger women in sports.
• Michelle Carter being the first American woman to win gold at the shot put, and talking about how she wants girls to be themselves and consider themselves as girls even if they are not considered to be traditionally “girly.”
• Gymnast Chusovitina still competing at the Olympics level at age 41 in a sport where women old enough to drink are considered ancient.
• Simone Manuel becoming the first black woman from the US to win an individual gold medal in swimming, tying with Canadian Penny Oleksiak.   This is an even more important achievement given the fraught history of segregation regarding pools.
• Katie Ledecky breaking the 800-meter freestyle record by two seconds and leading to one of the best photos of the Olympics (I genuinely can’t decide a winner between this photo and the Road Runner-esque one of Usain Bolt.)
• Katie Ledecky being so goddamn amazing at swimming that she breaks the weak egos of male swimmers, who have to be pulled out of practices with her because it hurts their spirits when she beats them.
• Lindy West explaining in explicit detail why women ogling male swimmers doesn’t have the same social meaning or impact as men objectifying women.
• (Speaking of, I don’t know if this technically belongs in the “good” column, seeing as I’m generally distrustful of the “equal opportunity objectification” argument, but I find it kind of hysterical, and thus qualifying as “good,” that male gymnasts really, really want us to objectify them—so that they start getting as much attention as the female gymnasts, and so that we can see how swole they are and realize they aren’t wusses.)
• This article refocusing all of the “Simone Biles fangirls over Zac Efron” narrative.
• The Tab making fun of the way that everyone else has been talking about Olympic athletes. (Aka, making fun of all the things I’m about to talk about. This might also not fully count as “good,” because it’s one of those “hahahaha….aw….” things.)

The Bad and/or also Ugly:

• NBC blaming their fairly ridiculous decision to time-delay broadcasts of very popular events (ensuring that they show up in primetime to all the way at 11 PM, those jerks, and also ensuring that the internet has pretty thoroughly spoiled the results of said events before you even sit down in front of your TV) on the fact that more women watch the Olympics than men, and, according to them, women don’t care about the results of sports, just the story. Right. They probably also use that to explain why they have fifty freaking “human interest” bits before and after events, instead of, I don’t know, showing more athletes and sporting events.
• Despite messing with broadcasts because the majority-women fans like the “story” so much, deciding to air every. Freaking. Michael Phelps medal ceremony as soon as they happened, deciding to delay airing Simone Manuel’s historic medal ceremony and instead air more gymnastics footage that only needed to air then in the first place because NBC made the effing decision to delay it. If NBC had decided to air the gymnastics footage earlier, they would have been more than capable of showing Manuel’s medal ceremony. Or, and this might be a crazy idea, they could have cut one of the damn filler pieces they insist on airing. I. Don’t. Care. What Matt Lauer has to say about any athlete. Ever.
• A headline that puts Michael Phelps silver medal tie in larger font, on top of the smaller font announcement that Katie Ledecky won a gold medal and broke a freaking world record.
• The Chicago Tribune deciding to omit mention of trap-shooter Corey Cogdell-Unrein’s previous medals, her full name, and, you know, her sport in their headline about her new bronze medal, in favor of mentioning that she is having marital relations with a player for the Bears. The headline does take care to note her husband’s first and last name and his position in the headline.  Prioritize the important stuff, guys.
• The Mercury News declaring “Olympics: Michael Phelps Shares Historic Night With African American.” First, this is literally referring to Simone Manuel by just her race. Second, this makes it sound like Michael Phelps and Simone Manuel were boning. Third, the article is at least half about Manuel. It’s like if someone retitled Thelma and Louise as Thelma and White Woman Take Unforgettable Car Ride.
• An NBC commentator saying that the women’s gymnastics team looked like they could be chilling in a mall.
• An NBC commentator attributing Katinka Hosszu’s success and gold medal in swimming to her husband/coach.
• NBC suddenly not caring about human interest stories and the spouses of athletes when it comes to homosexual partners.
• NBC not being able to understand that your parents don’t have to be the people that donated their genetic material to you.
• The BBC writing about the fact that Chinese diver (and bronze medalist) Quin Zai proposed to his girlfriend, diver He Zi, right after she won a silver medal. (Please, never, ever do a super public proposal. I’ll talk about that later. But definitely don’t do so in a way that attempts to overshadow your would-be spouse’s incredible achievements.) The BBC article A, didn’t even mention Zi in the headline, and B, called the proposal ‘“an even bigger prize.”’ Now, as Rachel Vorona Cote points out, Zi might consider the proposal a bigger prize than winning silver. But she didn’t say such. The BBC decided such, which continues narratives about how women should consider domestic achievements more important that career achievements. And is just generally freaking presumptive. (Also, while Cote is very careful to say that Zi could consider marriage more important than a silver medal, I’m going to be presumptive on my own and say no, it’s not. Marriage is awesome and cool and wonderful for many, many people. But that’s just the point. Lots and lots of folks can get married. Statistically speaking, only a few women can win a silver medal in the Olympics. That’s just math.)
• The ridiculous pearl clutching over the fact that Simone Biles made a very human mistake and “only” won bronze on the beam. Dude. She made a fairly big mistake and still won bronze. Don’t worry, she’s still incredible.
• People bringing Gabby Douglas to tears because of their criticism of her performance, and even their determination that she’s not patriotic enough. I’m sorry, are we having the McCarthy-era patriotism tests again? Because I will probably not pass. Richard will have to smuggle me into Canada. This is likely due at least partly (largely) to racism, seeing as Ryan Lochte is getting less negative attention for lying about vandalism and trying to create an international incident than gabby Douglas got for not putting her hand over her heart during the national anthem.
• The endless. Fucking. Debate. About Caster Semenya’s gender. An argument that is about “fairness” as much as Gamergate was about ethics in gaming journalism. An argument that relies on essentialist notions of gender and only has one participant whose opinion really matters, and that’s Semenya’s.
• The internet harassing Alexa Moreno for being “fat.” Moreno weighs less than 100 pounds and is 4 feet, 10 inches tall. Fun fact, for every inch that I’m taller than Moreno, I’m roughly 11 pounds heavier than she is. If Moreno is fat, then I’m Jabba Desilijic Tiure. And since I don’t speak Huttese, I suppose that just makes the internet full of mean idiots. That’s right, I just schooled internet trolls with Star Wars knowledge. Come at me, internet.
• The fact that the super-amazing US women’s soccer team is having to fight in court to be paid as much as their male counterparts, who weren’t even good enough to qualify for the Olympics. At all. The women make less for a win than the men do for a loss.
• Conservatives trying to make a story that probably has more to do with sexism and the general unpopularity of shooting sports into a story about how liberal America Hates Guns.
• Fox News commentators talking about how female Olympians should be forced to look pretty and wear makeup.
• This. Just…. All of this: 
• When Andy Murray had to point out to the man interviewing him that Venus and Serena Williams had four times as many gold medals as he did. (I almost put this in the “good” category, because good on Andy Murray for being honest, knowing math, and acknowledging the incredible women who hit a milestone before he did. But it goes in the bad/ugly category because a man whose job it is to talk to athletes, specifically tennis players, didn’t consider two of the most incredible tennis players of all time. Because nothing matters until a guy does it.)
• Nico Hines doing one of the sleaziest things I’ve ever heard of a journalist doing, and posing as a gay male on Grindr in the Olympic Village to lure gay Olympians into wanting to have sex with him, then describing them in enough detail in the piece to out them. Some of the men are, as Hines admits, from homophobic countries. There will be much, much more on this later. It will involve curse words.

So that’s… a lot. To be fair, a little more than a third of the stories I found were good. The fact that so many stories are very much not good is… yeah. Fun fact, this post is already 12 pages long, and I haven’t even gotten to most of the analysis part. There’s a reason that this post ended up happening on a Saturday.

There are a couple of these stories that I want to focus on. These are of course two of the bad ones, because what would this post be if I’m not getting angry about stuff? And so:

An Inconvenient Proposal

The first I want to talk about is the public proposal. Now, the “stealing the silver” proposal was not the first public proposal at the Olympics, but as Sunny Singh points out, the other proposals weren’t stealing attention away from a medal ceremony. It’s worth reprinting a large portion of Tom Spender’s recitation of London-based author Sunny Singh’s points:

…Singh tweeted that the proposal revealed a sense of male entitlement. She described it to the BBC as “a dick move, and definitely not romantic”.

“It’s a control mechanism, a way of saying ‘You may just have won an Olympic medal, or be a CEO or have designed a spacecraft, but really the most important thing is you’re my wife’,” she said. “Imagine if it was someone like Michael Phelps receiving a medal and a woman came up and proposed – people would laugh at her. When men experience success, women are expected to stand aside and cheer from the background.”

Mr Qin had also taken advantage of what must already have been an emotional moment, Ms Singh said.

“You would also have to be extremely brave to say no at that point. You’ve won a medal, you’re in public, you’ve worked your whole life for this. Even the best human being is likely to be emotionally shaky and vulnerable at such a moment. And women are taught from an early age to be nice and not to say no,” she added.

To all of which I say: yeeeeeep. As a general rule, I hate forced displays of public affection, from kiss cams to public proposals. Public proposals I find are especially emotionally manipulative (and I include “promposals” in that. Seriously, screw those things).  As Singh points out, women are conditioned to be nice, to avoid public embarrassment, to avoid causing a scene, to avoid causing pain.

Proposing in a public place raises the odds that the woman will say yes, if only to avoid the painful spectacle of a public refusal. It’s bad enough when the proposal happens in front of 100 people at a restaurant. What happens when it is in front of a stadium full of people, on global television? He Zi would be castigated by millions of people if she refused under such conditions, even though the man who supposedly loves her more than anything essentially usurped one of the largest moments of her life to make everything about him. What would it have hurt if Quin Kai had waited until after the ceremony? If he had congratulated his girlfriend on her stupendous achievement, celebrated her with everyone else, and then, in private, proposed to her, to cap off an amazing day? Nothing, except for Quin Kai’s sense of importance.

So there’s that. And then there’s this:

Nico Hines’s “Gay Baiting”

Words can’t actually express how disgusted I am by what Nico Hines did. Or how disgusted I am by the Daily Beast for letting it run, letting it run in an edited form after the first outcry, and waiting a really fucking long time before taking it down at all.

Of course, since the internet is forever, the damage had already been done. I compared their halfheated attempts at editing to standing a horse up after it has already been shot; yes, technically it is on its feet, but it’s not exactly in good shape, now is it? Hines acted recklessly, stupidly, and homophobically.

People much more talented than me have already raked him pretty effectively across the coals, but I want to reiterate here: Nico Hines is a disgusting excuse for a human being, who turned a juvenile game of “gay chicken” into a publicity stunt with no journalistic merit, and purely for his own titillation. He’s supposedly been recalled from Rio, but if he, and whatever editor thought this would be a good idea, don’t face further consequences (at the very least a goddamn education program) then there’s really nothing resembling journalistic integrity at the Daily Beast.

Parting Thoughts

A final thought, on much of what went wrong in Rio: it may seem hypocritical to decry the judgement of people, and of athletes’ bodies, in what is the most competitive physical event in the world. But there are different types of judgment. Judging someone’s ability to pole vault is different from judging whether someone is “woman” enough. Judging someone’s speed is different from decreeing that a woman should wear makeup or put her hand over her heart while receiving a medal. The eyes of the world are on the Olympics, for good or for ill. I’d really like it if we actually saw something good.

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not exhaustively detailing All The Things that happened at Rio, she studies gender in popular culture.

***

Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

If you like our posts and want to support our site, please share it with others, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit — anywhere you think people might want to read what we’ve written. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great week.

Time for some parenting! | Photo: Chris Dlugosz, CC BY 2.0

If you believe young adult novels and television, every child or teen in America has had a similar experience when it comes to sex ed: the teacher pairs two classmates (usually sworn enemies) and they must “parent” a bag of flour, or an egg, or a crying baby doll from the uncanny valley. There is a series of mishaps and sleepless nights, and the two classmates Grow as People, and also realize that being a parent is Super Hard.

Every child in America that is, except me. For whatever reason, my schools never did the flour/egg thing, and the uncanny-valley dolls were reserved for high school students in an advanced Family and Consumer Science (aka, home ec) class. I felt weirdly cheated, as if I was missing out on a communal experience of growth. Didn’t anyone care if I became a teenage pregnancy statistic? (I was in no danger of becoming a teenage pregnancy statistic, and they probably knew that. Teenage Elle did not bring all the boys to the yard.)

However, according to a new study coming out of Australia, it turns out that it’s a good thing that I didn’t get this experience, as it actually would have likely increased my chances of becoming a teenage pregnancy statistic. The study found that girls who are in programs that use the electronic baby dolls are actually thirty-six percent more likely to become pregnant by the time they are twenty. The dolls are meant to simulate “real” parenthood in that they cry, need attention for changing and feeding, and also sometimes just fuss for NO GODDAMN REASON OH MY GOD, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? (According to the kids in the advanced FACS class in my school, they also recorded your reaction times and other reactions– they keep track of how long it takes you to respond to a cry, and shaking the baby in frustration leads to an instant F.) The concept is somewhat similar to a “Scared Straight” program, where stress and intimidation are used as motivating factors to show students what life is like in the “real world.”

I haven’t read the original study, because I am poor and don’t have $30 to blow on a Lancet article, but a synopsis by Paige Cornwell explains that the researchers believe that the failure of the fake baby program probably comes from a variety of reasons, including the fact that the Australian program did not involve boys (even though having a baby the “old fashioned way” rather strongly requires male participation and ideally so would parenthood in a heterosexual pairing), the idea that many students may have already made up their minds about parenthood by the time they reach secondary school (if so… how?/why?), and the fact that the students with the dolls get positive attention from peers, which accentuates the positive aspects of parenthood while decreasing the negative aspects.

To these I would add: Scared Straight programs don’t work. It’s been repeatedly shown that positive prevention works better than negative reinforcement. Teaching teenagers that having babies is terrifying is not the same thing as preparing teenagers for life. And really, a doll can’t possibly be as terrifying as an actual child anyway. The doll can’t develop whooping cough from an unvaccinated classmate. A doll can’t inherit a genetic disorder you didn’t even realize you had, leading to multiple doctor visits where the doctor doesn’t believe you because you’re a “hysterical mother.” A crying doll, no matter how annoying, cannot possibly equal the experience of having a real child. But if a teenage girl thinks that it does, and thinks that managing to get a good grade with a fake doll is the same thing as being a parent? She might think she’s totally prepared to be a parent. She would be wrong, but this is what she might think.

But guess what totally does help avoid teenage pregnancy? Accurate sex education, and access to contraception! (Weird, right?)  In the neighboring square state of Colorado, providing free long-term contraception made both the teen pregnancy rate and the abortion rate drop by roughly 40%. (Which, of course, is why the Republican legislature decided to celebrate the success of the program by denying funding to that program. At least partly because they didn’t like the fact that providing contraception helped teenagers avoid some of the risks of sex. Like pregnancy. Goddamnit.) In a similar vein, the GOP will probably block Obama’s budget plan that deprives abstinence-only programs of government funding because said programs don’t effing work. But why take a realistic approach to teen pregnancy when you can toss a $1000 fake baby at a teenager and tell her to keep an aspirin between her knees?

In an ideal world, conservative lawmakers will see all of their cherished bastions of “morally decent” anti-pregnancy measures (abstinence-only education, fake dolls, scary sex talks) continue to fail and will come to their senses and fund contraception/education-focused pregnancy prevention programs.

Since we don’t live in that world, and they will never come to their senses, will you all do me a favor and freaking vote in your local elections? Because it’s pretty clear that painting a face on an egg isn’t cutting it.

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not trying to convince everyone of the ways that do and don’t work to prevent teen pregnancy, she studies gender in popular culture.

***

Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

If you like our posts and want to support our site, please share it with others, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit — anywhere you think people might want to read what we’ve written. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great week.

Dear Lena… | Image: Gabriël Metsu, CC0 (Public Domain)

[Author’s note: I wrote this right after the brouhaha in question. Internet culture being what it is, it’s already Old News to most people, but I thought it was still worth saying.]

Dear Lena Dunham,

I really hate being That Person Who Jumps on the Bandwagon After Everyone Else Has Already Jumped Off (seriously, internet culture can be dizzying) but I wanted to say a few words, not just because I was initially super disappointed in you (I was) but because in various incarnations I have been you (in terms of having bad self-confidence and sometimes getting called out for problematic behavior, not in terms of being a remarkably successful actor/director/writer person). The internet has already gotten enraged about your remarks that imagined what Odell Beckham Jr. thought about you when you were seated at his table at the Met Ball, and the way that they both projected super misogynist thoughts emerging from the brain of a person who you don’t even know and also replicated harmful racial stereotypes about over-sexualized black men (and also about the other part in your remarks where you objectified another black man, Michael B Jordan, and then how you later removed the online record where you admit to leaving the met Ball early, but not the part where you imply Odell Beckham Jr. is a sexist. You were kinda having a banner day.) The internet has also already pointed out the irony of internet outrage, when in the same week that feminists destroyed a writer for assuming that men are entitled to attention from females who clearly don’t want to talk to them, a feminist posts about how upset she was when a man clearly didn’t want to talk to her  (which, I know you had no control of the timing of the first story, but girl, take the cultural temperature of the internet before you publish things, okay? You do not have to hit “post” when it is clear it will only end in pain. Post one of those backup pieces that I know you have handy. I know it’s not your best work, but it also won’t lead you to be the most hated person on the internet for a news cycle.)

In the time since I have become aware of this story (roughly 24 hours, damn the internet is fast) you have both posted an apology that was mostly a non-apology that said that your story was “clearly (to [you])” about your “insecurities as an average-bodied woman,” (if you have to use parentheses when you say that something is clear then it was obviously not clear) and claimed that it was “not an assumption about who he is or an expectation of sexual attention” (honey. Please. It so was.) and said it was just “your sense of humor” (just because something is meant to be a joke doesn’t mean that people aren’t allowed to be upset with you over it) and then tweeted “Glad the outrage machine roars on though, right @amyschumer?” (because the problem is obviously “outrage culture” pointing out when you’re an asshole, not the things you said or did.) Then you posted an actual, legit apology that managed to discuss your insecurities without using them as an excuse for your behavior, included a direct apology to Odell Beckham Jr., acknowledged the fact that your actions were somewhat narcissistic, apologized for your (hopefully) inadvertent contribution to a racist history of sexualizing black men and problematizing the relationship between black men and white women.

So roughly fifteen minutes after I read your first apology I read your second apology, and had this really disconcerting vertigo when I went from super-annoyed and eye-rolly to being really proud of you. Like, if I ever teach a class on “how to respond when someone calls you out for being a bad ally and acting problematically” I will probably use this second apology, because it was that good.

Which is what brings us to why I’m writing today. Because what I’ve seen in the last twenty-four hours is not just the “outrage cycle.” It is an example of what happens when someone who has both privilege and reasons to have a chip on one’s shoulder, someone who is trying to be a good person, fucks up anyway. It is what happens every day, constantly, as people try to navigate between feeling privileged and feeling oppressed, between speaking out for themselves and accidentally speaking over others, between feeling vindicated for yourself and feeling vindicated at the expense of someone else. It is what happens when you engage in a global, electronic, intersectional arena, and it is admittedly really fucking hard.

I have been where you are. Literally. I have, as an “average-bodied woman” (something I am able to call myself if I’m having a really good day) sat next to a male of our species, been surrounded by women I consider prettier than me, and had hateful, petty thoughts about basically everyone and anyone because it was the only thing that made me feel better about feeling utterly unwanted. “Maybe he just isn’t used to girls who don’t try so fucking hard,” I thought at this anonymous person who had no reason to think anything about me at all. “It’s just because I’m not your average brainless Barbie doll. I’m not a size six and I speak my mind, oooh, scary.” I stared covetously at the women sitting near me, wishing that I could fit into a dress like them, that I could dress like them, that I could put on makeup like them, that I could be like them, and tried to think of a million reasons that I could be considered better than them, if only guys weren’t such sexist pigs who only gave the time of day to conventionally pretty girls. I wavered between self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, and absolutely none of it was okay. Not the terrible things I was thinking about myself, not the terrible motives I was ascribing to the man near me, and definitely not the terrible things I was thinking about the women around me. What I felt then, and what you felt at the Met Ball, were valid feelings. We have a messed up cultural norm of beauty, it’s painful when people don’t acknowledge you or seem to be sexually interested in you, and it is hard to keep your chin up when you feel like the ugliest person in the room. But what I shouldn’t have done, and what you shouldn’t have done, is let that translate into anger, projection, or entitlement. Precisely no one is entitled to sexual attention from anyone else. Dudes are not entitled to sexual attention from girls wearing headphones, you were not entitled to sexual attention from Odell Beckham Jr., and I was not entitled to sexual attention from the dude that I was really, really wishing would pay attention to me. We want it, but we’re not entitled to it. And we shouldn’t air our self-confidence issues in a way that makes it seem like we are.

It can be really, really hard to be a good person when you don’t feel good about yourself. I’ll admit that I sang along joyfully to “All About that Bass” for a few repetitions, thinking vicious things about skinny people, before I started to feel bad for body shaming (and started to see the truly retrograde notions that are the basis of almost every Meghan Trainor song). But feeling better about yourself should never come at the expense of someone else. And when you are someone who tries to do good, it can then feel almost twice as bad when someone calls you out for messing up. As far as I can figure it, the 5 Stages of Getting Called Out are a lot like the 5 Stages of Grief.

1. Denial: “But I’m a feminist/social activist/vegan/whatever! I would never say/do something that is racist/sexist/able-ist/transphobic/homophobic/whatever! I’m an ally, I don’t do things like that!”
2. Anger: “How dare they say that about me? This is just PC culture run amok. Don’t they understand how much work I do for their causes? Can’t they see I’m trying? Well fuck them, no one is ever satisfied.”
3. Bargaining: “Isn’t it enough that I do (X) activism? Doesn’t that mean I deserve a break for messing up sometimes for (Y)? Can’t we just ignore (Y) for a minute and focus on more important stuff?”
4. Depression: “God, I can’t believe I said/did that. I feel terrible about myself. This is so difficult, sometimes I just want to give up… I’m going to be kicking myself for this one for days.”
5. Acceptance: “Welp…. That sucked. I better do some more research before I say something stupid like that again. I guess I can use this as a learning opportunity, and apologize to the people I hurt.”

It’s a painful process. It sucks really badly sometimes. None of us see ourselves as bad people, and thus none of us see ourselves as being capable of bad things. And when you feel like you’re already having to overcome things (the bullshit that automatically comes with being a woman, sizeism, sexism, feelings of poor self-worth) it can be especially hard to acknowledge that you are becoming something similar to the things that you hate. But it is vital that we do so. If we’re not willing to apologize when we realize (or are forced to realize) that we are being assholes, we lose ground when we call other people out for being assholes. Being a feminist does not mean you get to be a racist, or to call someone a sexist for imagined thoughts. Social activism is not a carbon credit system, where our good deeds in one arena are meant to offset our bad behavior elsewhere. Trying to be good means trying to be good in all areas, and sometimes we will mess up, and it won’t matter if we just saved a kitten or donated to a woman’s shelter or called out sexism in the media. We will deserve to get called out, and we will have to reflect, apologize, and adjust our behavior. You’ve done the first two. Please don’t let me down for the last one.

Your compatriot in the 5 stages,

Elle the occasionally-average-bodied

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not trying really hard to navigate the minefield that is Other People Being Real People, she studies gender in popular culture.

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No, not even Ann Coulter | Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0

One morning last week, I woke up to a message from my friend L.

L: “I just felt sympathy for Ann Coulter…”

Me: “…Did it hurt?”

L: “Yes…. Yes it did.”

He was referring to Coulter’s recent appearance on the roast of Rob Lowe on Comedy Central. He wasn’t sympathetic to her because she bombed (which she did. Hard.) or because others pointed out her racist, xenophobic, and downright backwards ideas (which they did). But rather, because many of the comedians decided to go after Coulter for an entirely different reason: her appearance. And then media outlets decided that these body-based insults were among the “best” of the night.  And now, it is officially the end of the world, because I’m about to defend Ann Coulter. I feel a little dizzy.

Now, before we go further, I feel the need to clarify: I hate Ann Coulter. I hate her with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. I hate the fact that she denies the positive impact that feminism has had on her life, and that she even goes so far as to say that women shouldn’t vote. I hate that she is shoddy, manipulative, and downright dishonest in her books, most of which have “clever” titles like Why Liberals Are Wrong About Everything. (And I’m not going to link to said book, because every time someone visits Ann Coulter’s Amazon page, a white supremacist gets his swastika forehead tattoo.) I hate the fact that her particular brand of delusional vitriol is now so commonplace and almost boring that she is having to go to even further heights (or rather, depths) to get attention. I think she is a bad, bad person, and that if Hell exists, Phyllis Schlafly is saving her a seat in it.

But Ann Coulter still does not deserve to have her body and her appearance serve as the basis for jokes about her. Because (say it with me): no one deserves to have jokes made about their appearance.

In a roundup of insults by Vulture, Ann Coulter is compared to a scarecrow, Beetlejuice, a ghost, a skeleton, a horse, a “truck stop transvestite whore” (which manages to mix transphobia and misogyny, way to go, Jimmy Carr), and an abortion. She is called “hatchet-faced,” and it is implied that she can’t get a husband. Because we all know that the ultimate proof of our desirability as women is that someone “puts a ring on it”!

I’m gonna let you in on a little secret that liberals seem to forget sometimes: misogyny is always misogyny, even when it is aimed at people we don’t like. We don’t magically obtain “get out of jail free” cards for doing sexist actions when they are geared towards people who are sexist themselves. The fact that Ann Coulter is a hateful woman does not mean that it is okay to mock her appearance, her sexuality, or her body. Most importantly, just because the other side is doing it, doesn’t mean that we should. “She/he did it first” is an excuse that doesn’t fly on the playground, let alone in supposedly progressive circles. If you would get mad at Ann Coulter for saying something about another woman, then you shouldn’t say it about Ann Coulter.

There are many, many mockable things about Ann Coulter. Her appearance shouldn’t be one of them.

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not reminding us that as progressives we need to be better, she studies gender in popular culture.

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Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

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This might be the most hipster thing I’ll ever say: I liked Harley Quinn before she was cool. I was an early convert to her character on Batman the Animated Series (and by early I mean “I didn’t have that whole “reading” thing down quite yet but dang, I knew it would be cool when I did”). She stood out on the show, not just for her almost-overwpowering NYC accent but because of her choices. In a rogue’s gallery largely populated by the victims of lab accidents, artificial and natural disfigurements, and tragic back stories, Harley Quinn was a pretty normal doctor with a pretty terrible name until she fell for the Joker and decided to be evil. She was almost as cool as Catwoman, who did basically the same thing, only to save animals, making her what PETA wishes it could be when it grows up.

The relationship between Harley Quinn and the Joker can be described in a lot of ways: intense, complex, abusive, codependent… the list goes on. A word that’s not on that list? Aspirational. So why in the name of spandex do I keep seeing memes like this?

…no. Just no.

Say it with me again: no. No one should want a relationship like Harley and Joker have. Almost every episode of the animated series that featured Harley Quinn also featured how seriously messed up her relationship with the Joker is.  The Joker is mentally, emotionally, and physically abusive. He preys on her insecurities, warps her mind, and even rats on her to the police. (Not cool, man.) Yes, Harley Quinn goes back to him every time, but — oh hey article talking about how domestic abuse survivors leave their partner roughly seven times before leaving for good, what are you doing here?

Their abusive dynamic gets worse in other iterations of their backstory, with my least favorite being her New 52 origin, where the Joker forcibly throws Harley into a vat of chemicals, which apparently simultaneously bleaches her skin, makes her super sexy, and makes her (more) crazy. This origin entirely defeats the purpose of Harley Quinn and her agency, but we’ll set that aside for now and instead mark it down as more evidence in the “abusive as hell” category for Harley and Joker’s relationship.

The relationship between Harley Quinn and Joker makes for great storytelling, and a really good fictional example of the complexities of an abusive relationship. But that doesn’t mean that they have a good relationship. “Interesting narrative” and “relationship goals” are frequently not the same thing, and being intrigued by a character’s relationship doesn’t mean you should want to imitate it.

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not reminding us that maybe we should set higher standards for ourselves, she studies gender in popular culture.

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Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

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The bill, sponsored by State Sen. Connie Leyva (D-Chino), was signed into law 28 Sept. | Photo: Jon Connell, CC BY 2.0 

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So the original plan for this week was to watch the debate, and then discuss the gender dynamics in the debate. Then I missed most of the debate. But in the 45 minutes I did get to watch, I made 11 angry Facebook posts and used Caps Lock twice, so I decided rather than actually send myself into stress-induced heart failure before the age of 30, I would write about something that actually made me happy. Then I waited three days while trying to come up with something, because the world is kinda sucky right now.

Then, as if the world heeded my call for good news, I saw that California, prompted by the wave of accusations against Bill Cosby that will never see the light of a courtroom, had passed a bill removing the statute of limitations on some sex crimes, most notably rape and child molestation.

I’ve written before about the ridiculous range of statutes of limitations in various states when it comes to sexual assault. Prior to now, California had one of the more “sexual assault survivor friendly” ones, in that the statute of limitations for rape was 10 years unless new DNA evidence was found (meaning that if California ever gets around to testing their rape kit backlog, which sits at somewhere between 8,998 and “we have no fucking clue,” the cases that result from DNA evidence in the kit would be exceptions to the statute) and molestation cases had to be prosecuted before the survivor turned 40, giving the survivor roughly 22 years of adulthood in which to consider bringing an accusation to the police.

But statutes of limitations only really work with a pattern of crime, punishment, and plaintiff behavior that doesn’t mesh with sexual assault cases. The assumption is that a plaintiff will bring a complaint against the person who has done something wrong within a “reasonable” amount of time, because if they have a valid complaint they will want to work hard to see it addressed. So if someone steals your car, you will want that addressed pronto; you’re not going to take the bus for twenty years and then suddenly walk into the police station and announce that your car has been stolen. However, sexual assault cases frequently don’t follow that pattern. Many sexual assault survivors don’t want to press charges until years later, for a variety of reasons. As Jazmine Uloa writes,

[S]upporters said the new law would help victims who are often reluctant to report the abuse to police until many years later. Rape and sexual assault are typically committed by someone victims know, making it difficult to speak out, lawyers and advocates said. Many victims also often experience shame, fear and extreme anxiety and don’t come forward until they have the confidence or a support system later in life.

When someone’s car is stolen, that person is usually not asked what they were wearing when the car was stolen. They aren’t asked why they drove their car at all if they knew it could be stolen. They aren’t asked why they’re claiming their car was stolen this time if they’ve let someone borrow their car before. They aren’t lambasted for renting a new car while the report of the last car’s theft is being processed, or for being seen smiling in photographs a few days after their car was stolen. They aren’t asked why they’re trying to ruin the life of the person they are accusing of stealing their car. They aren’t asked why they didn’t bite the thief while the thief was stealing their car. Their car (usually) isn’t stolen by someone they trust, like their romantic partner, or their relative, or their religious leader, or their long-time friend. No one tries to convince them that stealing their car is actually a sign of affection. The thief usually doesn’t text the person they stole from the next morning saying, “Hey, thanks so much for giving me your car, I had a great time. Wanna get coffee sometime?” Basically what I’m saying is that there are a loooooot of reasons a sexual assault survivor might take a long time to come to the point where he or she is confident in coming forward. As in, “longer than ten years” a long time.

Now if my internet/Law and Order marathon-based understanding of the legal system is correct, the change will only affect crimes that occur starting next year, or crimes whose current statutes of limitations wouldn’t have expired by January 1^st, as California can’t make the law retroactive because of a little thing called clause 1, Article I, Section 10 of the US Constitution. So if you raped someone 11 years ago and there’s no DNA evidence, congrats scumbag, you’re safe. If you rape someone on January 2^nd and they catch you January 2^nd, 2028, you’re hosed.

Of course, just abolishing the statute of limitations won’t magically improve the chances that a rapist is brought to justice; as Megan Reynolds points out, just two out of every hundred rapists are actually convicted and see jail time (or one out of every fifty for those simplified fraction enthusiasts in the audience). I sincerely doubt that the ninety-eight rapists who never see jail time are walking free just because they benefit from a strict statute of limitations. Still, it’s a step forward, and a legal precedent for other states to hopefully do similar things. The fewer barriers there are between a sexual assault survivor sharing his or her story and his or her rapist seeing punishment, the more likely it is that survivors will come forward.

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Elle Irise is a regular contributor to This Week In Tomorrow. When she’s not trying to find the good in an otherwise abysmal week, she studies gender in popular culture.

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Thanks for reading! We only get paid in our own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site!

If you like our posts and want to support our site, please share it with others, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit — anywhere you think people might want to read what we’ve written. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great week.