this auld wan that's up the duff (2 Viewers)

[mazzyianne]

rape jokes = not funny

 

[broken arm]

rape jokes = not funny

LOL

 

[La La]

Jane says
I'm done with sergio
He treats me like a ragdoll
She hides
The television
Says 'i don't owe him nothing,
But if he comes back again
Tell him to wait right here for me or,
Try again tomorrow'

'I'm gonna kick tomorrow...'
'I'm gonna kick tomorrow...'

Jane says
'Have you seen my wig around?
I feel naked without it'
She knows
They all want her to go
But that's ok man
She don't like them anyway
Jane says
'I'm going away to spain when i get my money saved
I'm gonna start tomorrow'

'I'm gonna kick tomorrow...'
'I'm gonna kick tomorrow...'

She gets mad
And she starts to cry
Takes a swing but she can't hit!
She don't mean no harm
She just don't know...
What else to do about it

Jane goes
To the store at eight
She walks up on st. andrews
She waits
And gets her dinner there
She pulls her dinner
From her pocket

Jane says
'I've never been in love - no'
She don't know what it is
She only knows if someone wants her

'I only want 'em if they want me,...'
'I only know they want me...'

Jane says...
Jane says...

 

[glen]

Come back Jane!

Come back Ro!

 

[La La]

TaRozan and Jane

Ro Ro Ro your boat

Janey Mack

 

[1000smurfs]

glen , your avatar ... those pictures... are you registered?

 

[glen]

I'm registered alright. Glen®.

 

[taubstumm]

yo... i want to jump in with one point here that's got absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the thread, it's just a pet hate...

I assure you Jane, it's been proven that biology causes social inequality.

science - in this case biology, but the point is general - doesn't 'prove' anything. it demonstrates things beyond a reasonable doubt.

science can demonstrate over and over again that water freezes at a zero degrees, or that gravity makes things fall towards the earth, or whatever. but it can never guarantee that these things are absolute. it can't prove them.

science, broadly speaking, is a process of observing an event and drawing conjectures about why it might have happened the way it did. people do experiments to test the conjecture, and conjectures which are reinforced by experiment are formulated into a theory. nothing is proven.

and the relation of this point to the general stuff being said is that people shouldn't attempt to reinforce an point by saying that science has 'proven' it, because it's not only a bad rhetorical device, it's also bad science.

right, as you were, carry on.

 

[oh shit]

myra hindley's an interesting example of the way deviant women are viewed by the general public. although evidence suggested she had fallen under the influence of ian brady (trial judge: "Though I believe Brady is wicked beyond belief without hope of redemption, I cannot feel that the same is necessarily true of Hindley once she is removed from his influence"), and hindley later would convert to catholicism, get a degree in prison, and help police locate more of the victims, she was never released and died in prison. successive home secretaries continued to raise her minimum tarriff. by the time she died she had served over twice the normal tarriff for a male lifer.

it's true that the moors murders were particularly horrific, and that the british penal system is unusually punitive among western european states. however the idea that female offenders are "mad" rather than "bad" is a popular one and continues to shape the differences in sentencing and detention between genders.

pete, while you say that pro-lifers are concerned with the life of the foetus, you are correct. but that includes an inescapable moral judgement upon those who seek abortion, support the right to choose, and carry out the procedures. medical staff have been murdered by those who feel they are protecting the foetus. you only have to take up an argument with those who hold up grotesque placards outside family planning clinics to get a whiff of the hatred and prejudice they cling to.

the sun's headline when hindley died kinda says it all: Hooray, old Hindley's gone to hell

 

[jane]

Come back Jane!

Glen, I looked at the URL where you got this image, and I have to say -- and I won't apologise for this -- that I'm extremely offended you chose to depict me as this creature, when I feel I would be better represented by another from the SAME PAGE, which clearly reflects my values and abilities.

Because it's sexist of you NOT to think of me as:

ROBOSAURUS

Yes, Folks, that's 10 feet of FLAME coming out of the creature's nostrils!
AND those shiny stainless steel TEETH can clamp down with 20,000 pounds of force

ROBOSAURUS is the most incredible man made monster ever conceived. He was designed to grip, lift, crush, burn, bite and throw his victims - full size cars and airplanes around with ease! ROBOSAURUS is the largest fully articulated, fully mobile entertainment robot ever built.
This 40 foot tall electrohydromechanical monster robot weighs 58,000 pounds and is totally controlled by a human pilot strapped inside the monster's head - just like the imaginary TRANSFORMER and GOBOT toys.

This is a clear example of how women are seen as bestial sexpots when we should also be allowed to define ourselves as MONSTER ROBOTS. ​

 

[ICUH8N]

robosaurus is sort of what I imagined when kirstie was talking about dual-sex robo-dolls. I'll need a pair of marigolds, a can of WD-40, and five stout men...

 

[jane]

robosaurus is sort of what I imagined when kirstie was talking about dual-sex robo-dolls. I'll need a pair of marigolds, a can of WD-40, and five stout men...

Will one of these do?

 

[ICUH8N]

^^ That opens up a whole raft of terrifying and erotic possibilities

 

[pete]

myra hindley's an interesting example of the way deviant women are viewed by the general public.

by the time she died she had served over twice the normal tarriff for a male lifer.

the idea that female offenders are "mad" rather than "bad" is a popular one and continues to shape the differences in sentencing and detention between genders.

Wouldn't a direct comparison with Ian Brady's sentencing be more relevant? According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, he got three life sentences for three murders he was charged with; she got two life sentences for two murders she was charged with + 7 years as an accessory to the third. Both went to prison. Hindley died there, Brady's still there, waiting to die. Not exactly a huge difference in their treatment.

Not really sure where you're going with this though, to be honest.

pete, while you say that pro-lifers are concerned with the life of the foetus, you are correct. but that includes an inescapable moral judgement upon those who seek abortion, support the right to choose, and carry out the procedures.

Of course it does - think about what they're being accused of doing!

medical staff have been murdered by those who feel they are protecting the foetus.

Well, yes, but the actions of a tiny handful of extremist nutjobs aren't really indicative of anything.

 

[jane]

ok, i've missed a lot of this thread but i get the impression that readin about half of it has given me the general gist of a circular argument revolving on the fuel of age old disputes, chronic missunderstandings, and humour.

i interject to tell you all about something i learned a few weeks ago re the legal system and misogynistic hangovers.

apparently rape cases in ireland are the only criminal trials where the judge specifically directs the jury to not base their verdict solely on the evidence of the victim/survivor. as we are all probably aware, legal conventions such as this are based on precedence. this particular convention can apparently be traced back to a direction made by lord hale to a jury in a rape trial a couple of centuries ago, which was something along the lines of "women and little boys make up accusations of rape". since then jurys have been told to be careful about believing the testomony of a rape victim.

This is a really good point, and I would hope that people would also realise that while -- as usual I will point this out again -- the specific people who are involved in these cases may not think women are all 'whores and liars' (though I'm troubled as to why people are still demanding more and more explanation for why these terms were used, and on semantics, than on a willingness to accept what the use of the terms was intended to express), but the fact that rape cases are still able to be dealt with in this way is facilitated by a failure to challenge some of the fundamental assumptions in the way the legal system applies its laws to rape cases.

I also think mazzyianne's comment about the Constitution is a really good point. We can try to compartmentalise what we want about things being a 'product of their time', but first of all, the constitution was written not that long ago. The US Constitution is older still, and there are huge issues about how things get interpreted because of the historical context in which it was written -- which are conveniently ignored by people on all sides (because there are more than two) in the case of the second amendment (dealing with 'the right to bear arms').

The problem of conveniently ignoring the context in which things were written means that you're stuck between rewriting the whole thing every time things change, which is probably not very workable, or dealing with reintepreting something that is no longer relevant at face value. I guess my understanding would be that I would see the constitution as an artefact, but one that is different because it still holds political and legislative weight.

Another problem of just chalking things up to being part of a particular historical context is that it doesn't leave enough room to think about how its ideas have influenced subsequent thinking. And the understandings of what a woman's role were then have not really gone away. There are lots and lots of people arguing that women who don't remain in the domestic sphere are somehow doing a disservice to the country. You hear it on the radio every day. Whether you like it or not, there is still a sense of women having power or duties outside of the domestic sphere somehow threatens the moral fabric of society. And we don't always get to pick and choose the historical or cultural ideas that come down to us from the past. We highlight the ones we like, but they don't exist in isolation, and so others are reproduced in attitudes and behaviours that we sometimes don't even see because we can't always make a direct correlation between actual events and the attitudes that influenced them.

The people who argue for this DO NOT only confine their statements to 'it's just not good for the children', but frequently do underline how things like underage drinking and teenage pregnancy and all sorts of bad shit seemed to increase soon after women started working outside the home. They draw a very easy connection, without looking at how a number of factors actually influenced the changes (and the changes were not actually as great as they seem -- there was always underage drinking and teenage pregnancy, it's just understood differently today).

The fact that they can make these easy connections is partly due to the fact that people only want one answer. They want to know one 'why' and one 'how' and that's it, when there is never an easy explanation.

So yes, sure, lots of anti-choice people are out there arguing for the rights of the foetus, but actually, there are other issues involved, working at all sorts of levels. They, too, may not believe that women are whores and liars, or even that women should be submissive wives and virginal flowers, but they can avoid addressing the question of how they can reconcile 'facing the consequences' (which is what they often say when responding to why they would force a woman to carry a child she didn't want) with their care and concern for the foetus as a human. They can, therefore easily dismiss the questions surrounding the woman's worth by highlighting the importance of the foetus. This does not mean that they believe the woman is a whore and should be punished (even if they do use the word 'consequences') but the fact that they are not challenged more on their perceptions of the mother is facilitated by the underlying and rarely-spoken idea that women need to be protected from their own unruly nature.
When challenged, we often hear that they are looking to 'protect women' from the impact of abortion, or from making bad decisions.

That they are rarely asked why they are trying to override the personal agency of an individual who has not asked for their protection is also facilitated by another underlying perception that women require protection from themselves. Because when they say 'protect', they don't often mean to dredge up all of the historical weight of the term, and even if people don't widely acknowledge that they have done so, the idea of 'protection' has another, deeper and little-discussed sense that people continue to take for granted by virtue of being hesitant to discuss it at all.

 

[nlgbbbblth]

the sun's headline when hindley died kinda says it all: Hooray, old Hindley's gone to hell

The Sun is for pricks.

 

[pete]

This is a really good point, and I would hope that people would also realise that while -- as usual I will point this out again -- the specific people who are involved in these cases may not think women are all 'whores and liars' (though I'm troubled as to why people are still demanding more and more explanation for why these terms were used, and on semantics, than on a willingness to accept what the use of the terms was intended to express), but the fact that rape cases are still able to be dealt with in this way is facilitated by a failure to challenge some of the fundamental assumptions in the way the legal system applies its laws to rape cases.

As far as I can tell, back in the 17th century Matthew Hale made two famous comments about rape, both of which found their was into common law precedent.

1. There's no such thing as marital rape, because the woman has already given her consent.

Hale famously said in the Eighteenth Century that "the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract."

Fucked up? Yes. Women are lying and / or whores? No - your wife is your property!

2. It's hard to prove an uncorroborated rape accusation, and even harder to disprove a false one.

rape is an accusation easily to be made, hard to be proved, and harder yet to be defended by the party accused, tho' never so innocent

As far as I've read (not much, admittedly), this statement was subsequently referred to by rape trial judges during their summation in relation to the jury's duty to question the veracity of the witness (/victim) testimony.

It can certainly be argued that this signifies an automatic suspicion of women on the part of the entire legal system. Alternatively you could see it as merely being reflective of the difficulty rape prosecutions face within the framework of our existing adversarial legal system (vs the inquisitorial system found elsewhere in europe).

 

[pete]

That they are rarely asked why they are trying to override the personal agency of an individual who has not asked for their protection

But isn't that the basis of the pro-choice argument? I wouldn't really consider it a "rarely asked" question.

 

[jane]

But isn't that the basis of the pro-choice argument? I wouldn't really consider it a "rarely asked" question.

Fine, it's not rarely asked, but it's never answered.

 

[oh shit]

Wouldn't a direct comparison with Ian Brady's sentencing be more relevant?

no. most people familiar with the facts of the case accept that brady is psychotic. he's been recommended for release no sooner than last year (i think) but he himself never wants to be released. hindley was an accomplice. that's why i included the point about the judge's statement.

Both went to prison. Hindley died there, Brady's still there, waiting to die. Not exactly a huge difference in their treatment.

a life sentence in english penal law only means life where there is a persistent danger to the public. brady presents that. hindley most certainly did not, especially compared to other male offenders who have been released early and gone on to reoffend, or indeed, haven't. comparing their sentences completely overlooks the facts of the case, the opinions of the experts and judges, the philosophy of the english penal system (which is admittedly confused), and the wider context of how women in general are treated by the system compared to men.

Not really sure where you're going with this though, to be honest.

it's an extreme example of how when a woman commits a crime she is treated completely differently from men, in this case not so much by the system but by the media and the successive governments who campaigned for her to continue to be detained.
the tendency to call women 'mad' rather than 'bad' is documented much better elsewhere. it's an extension of what jane is talking about when she says 'whores/liars'.
when a man commits a crime, the idea is generally that he is a free rational individual who chose to break the law, and will be fairly punished.
when a woman breaks the same law, the tendency is, historically and still today, to treat her as 'irrational', in need of treatment or demonisation.

Of course it does - think about what they're being accused of doing!

right, so there is a judgement being made about women who want an abortion, we all agree now.

Well, yes, but the actions of a tiny handful of extremist nutjobs aren't really indicative of anything.

other than the dangers of dehumanising and condemning people that all absolutist moral discourses bring about. pro-lifers are not solely concerned with the life of the foetus, so let's not say they are in order to avoid discussing what their views mean about gender and sexual politics in society.
if someone objects to abortion solely on the life of the foetus, fine. but if they then put that in a wider context they might at least want to discuss things rather than blank them out.