links for 2010-03-19

  • Sady sez: "The thing is, we can talk about how trans stuff is handled in this video (badly), and how race stuff is handled in this video (also badly), and we can talk about how Lady Gaga’s ongoing project of unpacking female sexuality like it is a suitcase the size of a train station is handled in this video (occasionally well??) but one thing we HAVE to talk about is how VERY INTERNET this video happens to be. You seriously cannot show this video on television! It was not designed to be shown on television, ever! It is ten minutes long, and it has more dialogue than music, and it has the “fuck” word and naked breasts and vaginas and girl-on-girl action and basically everybody gets murdered. At no point did anyone making this video think, “I’m still pretty sure we could get this on television, though.” No. It was made to be on the Internet. And you can tell because this affects the form itself, like the actual decisions of how to shoot and edit the damn thing."
  • "The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data."
  • "I could go on, but you get the point. Finding gun lovers in the pro-life movement is like shooting fish in a barrel with a semiautomatic weapon. That includes the people behind the "endangered species" ads. That doesn't mean their opposition to abortion or gun control is insincere. It's totally sincere. What's insincere is their rhetoric about higher fatality rates among blacks. If they really cared about that, you'd see it in the way they talk and think about gun control. Instead, they've talked and thought about gun control exactly as you'd expect from white politicians in rural north Georgia. The contrary opinions of black people, the black fatality rate from firearms, and the carnage of gun violence in Atlanta have made no difference."
  • "Guys with rigid views of gender roles and an axe to grind against women in general are overrepresented among rapists. That won’t come as a surprise to most readers here, I expect. But it is important confirmation. Guys who seem to hate women … do. If they sound like they don’t like or respect women and see women as impediments to be overcome … they’re telling the truth. That’s what they think, and they will abuse if they think they can get away with it. Bystanders can look for the pattern and interfere with the pattern. If a guy is antagonistic towards women and places a lot of emphasis on sex as scoring or conquest, and he’s violating a woman’s boundaries and trying to end up with her drunk and alone, we don’t have to be sure what he’s doing to be concerned, and to start trying to give her exit ramps from his predatory slide. Get in the middle, get in the way, and block the stalk. It’s concrete and it’s doable. It doesn’t take a hero. It takes a human."
  • "[Lisak] found them by, over a 20-year period, asking some 2,000 men in college questions like this: “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?” About 1 in 16 men answered “yes” to these or similar questions."
  • "4000 Years for Choice develops visual narratives about the practices of contraception and abortion from around the world for the past 4000 years in order to celebrate, inspire, and empower women and men in their reproductive lives."

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