Re-stating our support for the victim/survivor in the Dana McCallum case

[Content warning: rape]

Back in April, we published a statement of support for the victim in the Dana McCallum rape case. In the letter — written by Liz Henry and co-signed by Leigh Honeywell, Valerie Aurora, Brenda Wallace, Tim Chevalier (me), Annalee Flower Horne, and Beth Flanagan — we stated our empathy and support for the victim/survivor — who is McCallum’s wife (they are in the process of divorcing) — in this case as well as for her family.

This month, McCallum accepted a guilty plea for two misdemeanors in this case: one count of domestic violence with corporal injury to the spouse and one count of false imprisonment. McCallum will serve probation, community service, and will have to undergo counseling. We already included this link in a linkspam, but given our previous statement of support for McCallum’s victim, I want to reiterate that support.

As Liz wrote in our statement of support back in April, “Rape is a horrible violent crime no matter who the rapist is.” McCallum’s wife read a statement that says, in part:

I must say that it deeply saddens me that as a victim, my only public support has been from hate groups. I expected more from the LGBT and feminist community. It’s a shame that they can’t do the emotional work it requires to process that someone they love is capable of such an awful crime. That is their burden to carry, though.

In April, we also expressed disappointment in the transmisogynistic response to McCallum’s crime. As geek feminists, we believed then, and do now, that we can and must accept that someone in our community is capable of the crime of rape. Hard as it may be to accept, self-identified feminists can sustain rape culture — up to and including actually committing rape — too. We also believe that at the same time, we must resist the narrative that would use this crime to de-gender or misgender McCallum and, by extension, trans women. Rape can be committed by anyone, regardless of their assigned sex at birth or their self-affirmed sex or gender. Structural power dynamics and rape culture mean it’s far more likely to be committed by cis men than by people in any other group, but that is a fact that needs to inform anti-rape organizing — it does not make rapes committed by specific non-cis, non-male people less damaging.

McCallum’s wife also said that she still loves McCallum and wants “forgiveness” to prevail. The Revolution Starts at Home (PDF link) is recommended reading for anyone curious about what that might look like.

Edited to add: McCallum’s ex has also written a public blog post, as a guest post on Helen Boyd’s blog, about her experience:

The transphobic radical feminists and other transphobic people will continue to rage over the state of my wife’s genitals, and I can’t stop them. But I hope more intelligent and thoughtful people will rise to the occasion to steer the conversation to what really matters.

I want her to be accountable. I want this to never happen again. I want to forgive her. I want this story to be about forgiveness and redemption. I need it to be. I need others to let it be that, too – to be my story, my trauma, my choice, my agency.

I recommend reading the post, but not the comments.

Madison Young, rape apologism, and HackerMoms

[Content warning: sexual assault, rape apologism, victim-blaming]

Madison Young describes herself as “a sex positive Tasmanian devil”; she’s been active in the feminist porn community for some time, and founded the Femina Potens art space in San Francisco. She’s also on the steering committee for Mothership HackerMoms, serving as their director of programming. Mothership HackerMoms describes themselves as “the first-ever women’s hackerspace in the world”.

Last week, a video resurfaced that Young, along with Billie Sweet, made after the filming of their movie “Heartland: a Woman’s POV”. “Heartland” was nominated for a Feminist Porn Award, but the clip (which appears to no longer be available online) probably wouldn’t win any feminist awards. In it, Young — an alum of Antioch College — discusses having sex with another student at Antioch while both women were drunk. She observes that this encounter violated Antioch’s much-misunderstood SOPP (Sexual Offense Prevention Policy), which requires people on campus to ensure that explicit consent is present before initiating a particular sex act. She goes on to deride the SOPP — this isn’t exactly an original sentiment, but what I think we’re meant to take away from the dialogue is that clearly, Madison Young couldn’t possibly be a rapist. And therefore, the SOPP — a policy that she violated by initiating a sex act with someone who was too intoxicated to consent — must be ridiculous, since what kind of policy would censure someone like her for having some innocent undergrad fun?

Young issued an apology for the video and for her initial — highly defensive — comments on Twitter when the video resurfaced. But as Kitty Stryker at Consent Culture does a great job of explaining in her post “Consent, Critique, & Feminist Porn: Madison Young’s Hard Lesson”, the apology itself is still very defensive. In it, Young does not demonstrate understanding of why it was wrong for her to indulge in victim-blaming rhetoric, both in the original video and in her comments about it in July 2014.

I find it especially worrisome that Young characterizes a code of conduct that simply seeks to affirm the need for sexual consent as “censorship”: “Although SOPP is an extreme policy around consent, that came out of the now defunct Antioch College, I do applaud its effort. Like many things that were generated from Antioch College it started with good intentions but went too far to extremes to be useful and effective in practice. There was an inherent policing at Antioch that bordered on censorship.” (n.b. Antioch College is not, in fact, defunct.)

Can a hackerspace be a safe space if one of its organizers is somebody who styles herself as a consent advocate while engaging in derailing and victim-blaming speech about sexual assault? If you are directly involved with HackerMoms, I encourage you to start that dialogue.

Geekfeminism.org statement on rape allegations and transmisogyny

This morning as I was about to get on a plane back from a conference I found out that Dana McCallum, aka Dana L. Contreras, a software engineer at Twitter as well as a feminist activist, was arrested in late January and charged with several felonies including rape, false imprisonment, and domestic violence. Some details of the charges are described on SFgate: SF Women’s Rights Advocate Accused of Raping Wife.

Many of us associated with geekfeminism.org and its sister organizations would like to make a statement in response.

This is horrifying and came as a shock to many of us in feminist communities, as McCallum has been a fellow feminist activist for some time. The bloggers at geekfeminism.org would like to express our empathy and support for the victim/survivor and her family.

Another aspect of this case is that the media coverage of the rape and assault charges are almost universally misogynist and transphobic both in their perpetuation of rape culture (for one, by providing an uncritical platform for McCallum’s lawyer) and in their misgendering and obsessive focus on McCallum’s gender identity and history.  Some radical feminist activists (and their many obvious sockpuppets) have also been writing hateful “trans panic” or TERF articles and tweets. We strongly repudiate such responses.

Rape is a horrible violent crime no matter who the rapist is.

The National Center for Transgender Equality director Mara Keisling says on a comment on a post by Nitasha Tiku,

“Rape is a horrific crime. Sexual violence is never okay. But this isn’t a transgender story. We can’t speak to the specifics of this case but sexual assault knows no gender. That’s why the FBI recently revised their definition of rape. As this case gains more attention, we must avoid using it as a reason to misrepresent transgender people.”

For anyone who has experienced abuse or sexual assault, it can be helpful to turn to local or broader resources. Here is a list of trans-friendly and inclusive rape survivor organizations and resources.  In San Francisco,  San Francisco Women Against Rape is a good resource;  WOMAN Inc, the Cooperative Restraining Order Clinic, and GLIDE also provide many resources for people in the SF Bay Area who have experienced domestic violence. Please don’t go through this on your own; reach out to people around you — you’re not alone.

– Liz Henry

cosigned:

Leigh Honeywell

Valerie Aurora

Brenda Wallace

Tim Chevalier

Annalee Flower Horne

Beth Flanagan

By request: Facebook treats rape page as “pub joke’

Warning for rape descriptions quoted in this post and found at links.

Jane Osmond asked for a signal boost in the open thread, and thus I’m popping the Facebook treats rape page as “pub joke’ media release up:

Facebook treats rape page as “pub joke’

Over 3000 people have signed a UK petition asking Facebook to delete a page that contains “joke’ posts about rape against women.

The page – “You know she’s playing hard to get when your chasing her down an alleyway’ (sic) – contains posts such as “I have raped many women….no lie’ and “I rape a pregnant bitch and tell my friends I had a threesome’.

The petition was launched on Aug 19 by student Orlagh Ni Léid after Facebook issued a statement likening the page to a pub joke, despite thousands of people protesting against it through the Facebook report mechanism:

“It is very important to point out that what one person finds offensive another can find entertaining – just as telling a rude joke won’t get you thrown out of your local pub, it won’t get you thrown off Facebook.” (Facebook statement 17.8.11)

Orlagh commented:

“I stumbled across this page and was shocked to see not only rape “jokes’, but outright advocacy and even apparent confessions.

I started the petition when I found out that Facebook refused to take the page down and the UK mainstream press proved unresponsive to a letter from Rape Crisis England and Wales.

To date, thanks to articles on sites like “Women’s Views on News‘, the petition has drawn strong support from around the globe and is building on a US petition against similar pages that has attracted over 170,000 signatures.

Facebook is an influential social force and in a world where 1 in 5 women is a victim of rape or attempted rape, these pages are more than a “pub joke. Surely Facebook should not be perpetuating rape culture?”

Further, Facebook appears selective about how it applies its rules – for instance, a policy against breastfeeding pictures is upheld, indicating that breasts are offensive, but that rape is not.

In doing so, Facebook have made it clear that it does not consider groups which condone rape to be in violation of their own hate speech rules such as “You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.’ (Section 3, Point 7)

The petition can be signed here.

See also Bidisha in the Guardian, The rape shame of social media: Despite their capacity for good, Facebook and Twitter still provide outlets for the worst kind of misogyny.

Linkspam shattered on impact (19th September, 2011)

• The GNOME Women’s Outreach Program is running paid internships (for women, and not only students) from December 12, 2011 through March 12, 2012. The application deadline is October 31.
• Just 12% of CSIRO’s senior scientists women: While at entry level almost 50 per cent of post-doctorate graduates are female [at CSIRO, Australia’s government research agency], just 12 per cent of senior specialists are women.
• Women, swearing and the workplace: Since [Carol] Bartz’s very public departure from Yahoo last week, her penchant for blunt, profane language has become recurring themes in discussions of her career, driving conversation about what women can and can’t be in the workplace.
• (Warning: self-harm and harassment mentioned.) Naming Names on the Internet: Three years ago… It required contributors to Web portals and other popular sites to use their real names, rather than pseudonyms… Last month, after a huge security breach, the government said it would abandon the system.
• (Warning for sexual assault and denial.) Reddit Users Find New Way To Be Assholes. When a woman posted about her sexual assault on Reddit, she enraged doubters, who eventually convinced her to post video proof of the crime.
• Introducing Ladydrawers: it’s the female-identified creators who aren’t being encouraged to submit [comics] work, aren’t being sought out and aren’t getting books turned into big movie deals. In comics and elsewhere, women creators of all sorts of media are starting to ask: Why? Ladydrawers, a new semimonthly comics collaboration, will look at a few possible reasons and impacts in comics form.
• Across the digital divide: This doesn’t change the part where, every time a discussion of ebooks turns, seemingly inevitably, to Print is dead, traditional publishing is dead, all smart authors should be bailing to the brave new electronic frontier, what I hear, however unintentionally, is Poor people don’t deserve to read.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

A merry linkspamming band (1st September, 2011)

• Results from the 2011 Wikipedia Editor Survey: using only logged-in users as subjects (so, different to the 2008 UNU-Merit study – WMF intends to use this one as a baseline for future studies). Had 4,930 total respondents, of which 434 (9%) identified as female.
• Calling Pythonista sisters: Five reasons to attend a coding conference: Five reasons women should consider attending events like PyCon AU.
• Nurture affects gender differences in spatial abilities. In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society. (Mainstream audience summary at Ars Technica.)
• (Warning: screenshots of video game violence.) “Did she just money-shot herself with his neck-blood?”: And in a patriarchal society where masculine = good, strong and feminine = bad, weak these women (made by dudes for dudes) exist as tokens of counterfeit empowerment because they enact male fantasies of power. This is why the femme fatale, despite having no narrative agency, is sold as a strong character.
• The Luxury of “Reasonable”: But there’s a reason [Brandon] Sanderson can be so reasonable [about his faith-based anti-homosexuality beliefs]… He’s not being told he can’t bring his boyfriend to his own prom. Agents/editors aren’t rejecting his work because he wrote about LGBT characters. He’s not being denied basic rights…
• Different takes on rape and negative portrayals of women in George R.R. Martin’s fiction (meta discussion, some satirical, not graphic):
  • Enter Ye Myne Mystic World of Gayng-Raype: What the “R” Stands for in “George R.R. Martin”: Sady Doyle is no fan of George R.R. Martin.
  • Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece: Alyssa Rosenberg criticises Sady Doyle’s take, in particular that she reads it as coming close to stating that no artistic depiction of sexual violence is acceptable, and that the anti-geek tone is harmful. Now, sexism is more entrenched and more broadly impactful than disdain for nerds. But that doesn’t actually mean that these kinds of statements are useful or clever when they’re deployed by feminists against nerds…
• Meanwhile, Sady Doyle takes on mansplainers.
• When computer programming was “women’s work’. Reflections by recruiter Anna Lewis on learning about the historic status of programming.
• Changing the Ratio at SXSW. Emma Persky does detailed analysis of SXSW’s presenter gender breakdown.
• So seriously, why aren’t there more women in science?: Yes, the perennial question, but there are some brief interviews with some leading women scientists: Cathy Foley, CSIRO division chief; Suzanne Cory, Australian Academy of Science President; Mahananda Dasgupta professor in ANU Department of Nuclear Physics and others.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

The performer formerly known as Linkspam (31st August, 2011)

• Women’s Information Security Scholarship: The aim of the program is to encourage women from around the world, including the UK, to undertake study in information security and eventually pursue a career in the industry. Deadline is October 3.
• Anonymous CVs will not be compulsory: a study in France finds that anonymous CVs harm disadvantaged applicants. The article speculates that anonymised CVs strip the employer of the ability to make allowances for lack of experience or non-standard French.
• Pictures of Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor. (Unsurprisingly, we’ve talked about this before.)
• Sexism, Misogyny and Misandry in Geek Cultures: Discusses how sexism (against women and men) manifests in geek culture, and how easy it is for those who think of sexism as only bullying or harassment to not see it.
• Subnormality has a comic about a woman’s dilemma deciding what to wear given the spectrum of roles clothing has (that is avoiding being read as weird, frumpy, slutty, etc).
• (Warning for apparent assailant re-telling rape as humour.) Man describes an apparent rape for comedy purposes during the audience seciont of a comedy event:
  • (Warning: verbal description of rape from apparent assailant’s point of view. We’ve included the video for your reference but you may prefer to stick to the analysis links.) Original video of Asssscat 3000 (Eric—identity apparently known—begins speaking at approximately 38 minutes.)
  • Horrified Tumblr discussion from attendees and friends of theirs: On the Subject of Rape… and follow-up discussion.
  • Another audience member Halle Kiefer, One Night at Asssscat, or What to Do With a Date Rape Monologue. …when the audience started booing the monologist, the storyteller turned around with a look of pure bafflement, as if he didn’t understand why an auditorium of hundreds of strangers didn’t like his hilarious story.
  • Eric’s former employer The Second City tweets that they have referred the matter to police.
  • Coverage at NPR, Jezebel.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Flying by the seat of my linkspam (29th July, 2011)

• Four-day online course in September: Build Your Own WordPress Website. Early bird and BlogHer discounts now available.
• N.K. Jemisin writes “The Limitations of Womanhood in Fantasy.”  “Here’s the problem with this wholesale rejection of both societally-imposed and self-chosen “typical” women’s behaviors…”
• Nancy Linde wants the girls-in-science recruiters to learn some marketing. “Which title did the girls like? Dot Diva, of course. To them, the word “diva” was neither negative nor frivolous—rather, it suggested maturity and sophistication, a good thing among aspirational young women.”
• Trigger warning More Heartbreak: Jim Henley documents the survivor statements that Kynn Bartlett, creator of the feminist RPG proposal Heartbreak & Heroines, is a sexual abuser. (Also on our wiki.)
• On being a woman and a non-physicist at CERN: I… feel like people here, men especially, treat me like some sort of novelty item. Like because I am not a physicist, I have nothing substantive to contribute to CERN, but it’s cute that I try.
• Archive reveals women’s vital role in the Post Office: Records of Post Office workers dating back to 1737 have been published online for the first time.
• Rebuttal: Make Room In the Bubble For Everyone: Being gender-blind or race-blind or truly meritocratic is an incredibly worthy aspiration, but there’s plenty of research including new neuroscience to demonstrate it isn’t possible without actively mitigating individual and organizational biases.
• What is Feminist About Open Access?: A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy: Is it a feminist/social-justice issue that access to scholarly information is often walled off by its publishers?
• Questions for Nicholas de Monchaux, author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo: Like few others in the whole process, [the Playtex seamstresses] really had the lives of the astronauts literally in their hands. They had a skill and dedication that was unparalleled. The same women have made U.S. space suits all the way up to the shuttle and space station era, so the skill is by no means obsolete.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Hubris, thy name is linkspam (12th July, 2011)

• Trigger warning Assange’s Account Looks Like Accusers’ Account: Assange’s own attorney now effectively concedes that was, at best, what happened here: His victims gave subsequent consent to sexual activity for which explicit consent was neither sought nor given
• Why We Can’t Let Design Become a Boys’ Club: This is all such a bummer! We haven’t vaulted ourselves very far above the 1960s stereotypes presented on Mad Men. But it’s not as if women designers and illustrators aren’t out there.
• What Does it Mean to be a Woman Hackerspace Member?: interviews with women in hackerspaces.
• Open Source Business Resource’s July 2011 issue focuses on women entrepreneurs. Authors interrogate norms around gendered expectations of entrepreneurship and consider infrastructure that supports women founders.
• Bitch Radio interviews Geek Feminism authors Valerie Aurora about what the Ada Initiative’s already done (including a success with a conference anti-harrassment policy) and Sumana Harihareswara about the Wikimedia gender gap.  Audio and transcripts available.
• Girls gone missing: kids’ movie posters in 2011 a set of movie posters demonstrating the things described in Dogs and Smurfs; Why women writers and stories about women are taken less seriously: that is, how girls and women are often absent in children’s media.
• Video: Net Talk: Brenda Wallace. Brenda talks about open source; geeks and women in tech; OLPC; copyright law changes; and privacy.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Linkspam isn’t saying no… (13th June, 2011)

• Talk on June 15 at Melbourne University: Dr Cathy Foley, 100 years later: has anything changed for women in science?: This talk will look at what is the status of women in science in Australia, report on the Women in Science and Engineering summit held in Parliament House in April this year. I will then reflect on ways to enhance careers for women in science and the need not only for equity but also for improved productivity and innovation by capturing the full human potential in Australia.
• Why are more women not speaking at technical conferences? Insights from the WiT discussion at CodeStock: Jennifer Marsman discusses the points raised in her panel, with some suggested solutions.
• The Australian talks about online harassment of (female) journalists, which will sound familiar to many other women online: [Trigger warning: online harassment/bullying] War of the Words
  

  And therein lies the Catch-22 for women in the cyber-firing line. On the one hand, they believe it is essential to expose the level of abuse and misogyny that has flourished on the largely unregulated new media. On the other, they fear the only effect that would have is to discourage women from participating in public debates.

• Forever 21 Pulls “I’m Too Pretty To Do Math” Magnet From Online Store: Our submitter writes: OK, it’s not just bad that this was made in the first place. But around the article? Let’s see, You might like: The Top 10 Lies Women Tell Men; 12 Stars Posing Naked With Super Random Props; and the poll of important information: Does Flirting Over Facebook & Twitter Count As Cheating?; Please Just Kill Me NOW.
• Becky Stern has crafted TV-B-Gone (a universal remote for switching off TVs) into a jacket for subtlety: TV-B-Gone jacket (via BoingBoing).
• [Trigger warning: very frank anti-rape campaign] Don’t be that guy: a surprisingly refreshing anti-rape campaign targeting men is now making its way to other Canadian cities.
  

  Typically, sexual assault awareness campaigns target potential victims by urging women to restrict their behavior. Research is telling us that targeting the behavior of victims is not only ineffective, but also contributes to how much they blame themselves after the assault. That’s why our campaign is targeting potential offenders – they are the ones responsible for the assault and responsible for stopping it. By addressing alcohol-facilitated sexual assault without victim-blaming, we intend to mark Edmonton on the map as a model for other cities.

• Androcentrism: It’s Okay to Be a Boy, but Being a Girl…: androcentrism… a new kind of sexism, one that replaces the favoring of men over women with the favoring of masculinity over femininity.
• Researcher reveals how “Computer Geeks” replaced “Computer Girls”, an account of a talk by Nathan Ensmenger. (Don’t forget Jennifer Light, when namechecking people to quote on this!)
• Rebecca Koeser of Emory University, won a prize in the DevCSI challenge at Open Repositories 2011 for her use of Microsoft Pivot as a repository-visualization tool. Here’s a picture of Koeser accepting her prize.
• Women Atop Their Fields Discuss the Scientific Life: Elena Aprile, Joy Hirsch, Mary-Claire King and Tal Rabin talk about their scientific work and life.
• How Not To Be An Asshole: A Guide For Men: Chris Clarke re-posts this in ‘honour’ of Tammy Camp’s harassment experience

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.