This AlterNet article got me thinking about reproductive rights. Often, when we talk about reproductive rights, we talk only about how reproductive rights affect cis women. The ability of cis women to decide whether or not to have a child and to control their own uteruses. The availability of birth control as healthcare to treat…
What Is The Prison-Industrial Complex?
It’s America’s biggest issue that nobody quite wants to talk about. Ozy Frantz unpacks the structure of getting paid to keep a lock on freedom.
Rape Jokes Prevent Drunk Driving? IMPORTANT CORRECTION
Trigger warning for rape Important correction: Ack. I was fooled by a bad source! I woke up today to a nice email from the Michigan Licensed Beverage Association, which was rather displeased to discover their groundbreaking anti-drunk-driving program was being reported as having a rape joke in it. Apparently the talking urinal cakes do not make a…
Link post!
Note: Fixed broken links. Sorry, everyone. An article asks if we need real men– or real people. Frank Deford dislikes the Olympics because it’s all obscure sports. By a complete coincidence, all the obscure sports are sports that are gendered feminine, like gymnastics. Funny how that sort of thing works out. I’m wrong about a…
Part Two of the Fucking Ridiculous Article
Article here. Part one here. When Barry Schwartz started teaching at Swarthmore in the ’70s and would pose a question to a class, “Someone was always interrupting before the question was finished,” he recalls, “and it was always a male.” Now, he says, guys aren’t doing that. Men aren’t acting like privileged douchebags anymore! OH…
Virgin Airlines: Men Can’t Sit Near Unaccompanied Minors
TW for pedophilia. Virgin Airlines apparently does not allow men to sit next to unaccompanied minor children, but does allow women to do so, apparently out of fear of pedophilia. Talk about pedophile hysteria. Planes are fucking crowded; you can’t even talk without everyone accidentally overhearing about the time your toddler put Aunt Jenna’s goldfish in…
Obituary Post
RIP Ramarley Graham, an unarmed 18-year-old man of color killed by a cop, who apparently had “no choice” but to shoot him. He is another casualty of the prison-industrial complex’s bias against young men of color. Graham was assumed to have a gun because, you know, young black man in a bad neighborhood. He died…
How Did I Miss This Article?
Isn’t it someone’s job to inform me when something that stupid is going down? Because this article is the quintessence of End of Men hysteria. How bad is it? It says, in all seriousness, this paragraph: Something, it seems, is sucking the life out of guys quite literally. One-third of male college students say they’ve experienced…
Locked Up But Innocent
This post is dedicated to Marvin Wilson, a severely mentally disabled man who has been executed in Texas. RIP. Dozens of men have apparently been locked up for something that is not a crime. Now, I’m not a lawyer. But it seems pretty simple to me that if something is not illegal, then people should…
Why Don’t We Have Male Birth Control?
As the joke goes, male birth control is ten years away– and it has been for decades. Of course, that’s inaccurate. In fact, some estimates say that, if one counts the male condom, vasectomies, and withdrawal, a third of birth control is currently practiced by (cis) men. It’s not that people with penises don’t have…
Mitt Romney’s “Wimp Factor”
Seriously, Newsweek? Are you so low on negative traits to describe Romney that you had to choose ‘wimp’? Do I have to make a list of negative things about him? Even if you ignore, you know, his policies (which should be the key point of any presidential race), there’s his abuse of his dog, his history…
Boy Scouts Covered Up Child Abuse of Boys
From the Associated Press: Internal documents from the Boy Scouts of America reveal more than 125 cases in which men suspected of molestation allegedly continued to abuse Scouts, despite a blacklist meant to protect boys from sexual predators. So, uh, that whole “no gay men in order to protect kids from child molestation” plan is…
The Criminalization of Mental Illness in Black America
This article is super-important. I advise that everyone go read it. Literally, I have spent like fifteen minutes trying to come up with something to say about it that wasn’t mentioned in the article, and I’ve come up short. Excerpt: “Black men don’t go to therapy, they go to the barbershop.” I can’t count the…
Worst Person in the World Competition Continues
TW for rape-apologist bullshit about the Penn State cases. Dennis Prager has a strong entry! Mr. Prager wishes to inform us that the really important bit about Penn State covering up the rape of children is not, you know, Penn State covering up the rape of children. No! The really important bit is that California…
Open Thread, Late Edition
This Open Thread has been brought to you by Aperture Science.
Condoms, Part Two!
Okay, a surprising number of people object to the, in my opinion, fairly uncontroversial notion that you have to use condoms. About the whole “it’s my body, you can’t tell me what to do with it” thing? It’s true, I do not have a bunch of condom ninjas that kidnap everyone who has unsafe sex…