Good
Morning
Afternoon
I am a coward. A big fat coward. I’ve spent the last countless days avoiding the computer so that I could have an excuse not to go online.
Why? Because one of my oldest childhood friends from Florida…whom I’ve lost touch with over the years, but is someone who is connected deeply to my memories of growing up that I could not even comprehend a world without her…this person who shared life dreams with me…is currently getting treatment for third-stage breast cancer.
The chemo is making her sick as hell. Her long natural curly hair is all gone, she’s bald, and the things that seem to keep her going now are the three kids (20, 15 and 6) and her crazy family and her close friends, which are more like family to her then the one she and her sister survived from.
Honestly, I cannot tell you how many adversities she has fought through. My one repeated memory of her locking her bedroom door when we were little, and sleeping with a kitchen knife under the bed should give you a hint. The fact that the mother did not “believe” the stories…or divorce the father until years later. Oh…it is amazing that the family has even worked through it, albeit understandably with tensions still intact.
It was something I could not face. To read her email telling me how her treatment was going, what it was doing to her physically, financially and emotionally. Shit.
I finally sent her a message yesterday and told her what a coward I was…and why I had not responded to her the past couple of days. I am so pissed at myself.
It really makes me want to check out even more, especially with so much crap going on, and so many good people like my friend…struggling to get through the day. As if she did not have all the shitty obstacles of her life to get across, then to have additional road blocks put up by rich ass dickwad politicians and hypocritical assholes. The hoops she has jump to get her treatments covered in Gov. Rick Scott aka Voldemort’s State of Florida is ridiculous. It just adds to an already stressful situation. I hate it.
The reason for that longer than usual opening is to give you the sense of my mood. My frustrations.
Now, on to a few items of fancy this morning…you see these old comic clips?
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
She was the first woman “heroine” main character to have a comic book all to herself. Years before Wonder Woman!
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle is a fictional, American comic book jungle girl heroine, originally published primarily by Fiction House. She was the first female comic-book character with her own title, with her 1937 (in Great Britain; 1938 in the United States) premiere preceding Wonder Woman #1 (cover-dated Dec. 1941). Sheena inspired a wealth of similar comic-book jungle queens. She was predated in literature by Rima, the Jungle Girl, introduced in the 1904 William Henry Hudson novel Green Mansions. Sheena was ranked 59th in Comics Buyer’s Guide’s “100 Sexiest Women in Comics” list.
An orphan who grew up in the jungle, learning how to survive and thrive there, she possessed the ability to communicate with wild animals and was proficient in fighting with knives, spears, bows, and makeshift weapons.
This woman kicks ass…as you can see if you take a look at her archive of comics:
Here…at this link (which is something Boston Boomer sent to me a little while ago and it is fantastic.) The Digital Comic Museum > Sheena, Queen of the Jungle
Or…here: Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (Fiction House)
Both are good sites with lots of downloadable comics that have become part of the public domain.
One thing you will notice is the change in Sheena as she transitions into the 1950′s woman.
Take a look at this gallery of covers and see the way she is represented, in both the artwork and situations on the covers and the various titles and headlines.
Sheena went from a cover where she is alone kicking a guy’s ass in a crocodile suit and, “She rules a world of killer beast and savage men!” to an ape grabbing her suggestively around the waist, and a dudebro saving her by shooting another ape with, “Trek the jungle trails of killer beast and savage men with Sheena wild beauty of the Congo.”
Well, that was just my observation.
The Digital Comic Museum has some wonderful comics to look through. Luckily they have more Women in Red comics, so maybe another installment of our shero is in the future?
Other strong woman characters from the late 30′s and 40′s included Brenda Starr Reporter, Sally O’Neil Cop,
Sally the Sleuth in Crime Smashers (Check out the first Sally the Sleuth story here… Love the lipstick gun!), Firehair Queen of the Sagebrush Frontier, Lady Luck (who was later replaced by Wendy the Waitress) and the dames in Gangsters and Gun Molls and Underworld.
I think if you spend some time, and bookmark some of those pages, you will have an enjoyable few hours wasted away…and forget reality of what is going on in the real world…where those women in the comic books from the 40′s seemed to be given more credit for being an individual “thinking” human being (flawed or not) than what the assholes give women of today. I mean I am not blind to the advances that have been made, but seriously? Links below the jump will connect to this point.
As Abortion Clinics Close, Student Creates Travel Fund | The Texas Tribune
Lenzi Sheible is well versed on Texas’ divisive abortion debate. The 19-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin made the three-hour drive from Houston to Austin multiple times last summer to protest House Bill 2, the strict abortion regulations Republican lawmakers proposed and later passed.
Not long after they banned the procedure after 20 weeks of gestation and required physicians who perform abortions to have hospital-admitting privileges within 30 miles of an abortion facility — a measure that has reduced access to abortion statewide — Sheible founded Fund Texas Women, a nonprofit organization that pays travel expenses to help Texas women get abortions in and outside of the state.
“I fought, and I got caught up in the spirit of fighting, but I realized that while everyone was interested in fighting HB 2 so that it didn’t pass, not a lot of people we’re prepared to accept the fact that it would,” said Sheible, who is seven months pregnant. “And that once it did it would be a totally different world in Texas.”
Four Democrats want Rhode Island to require pre-abortion ultrasounds
Rhode Island would require that doctors provide women seeking abortions with the opportunity to view an ultrasound under a new bill cosponsored by one Republican and four Democrats, one of them a woman.
The bill would require that, before a woman gets an abortion, the doctor or a technician perform an ultrasound, explain the results and provide the woman with an opportunity to view the resulting images. There is no requirement that the woman view the ultrasound.
I can’t believe that shit…four DEMOCRATS!
Missouri Lawmakers Are Pushing 32 Separate Abortion Restrictions To Regulate One Clinic | ThinkProgress
As state legislatures practically trip over each other to see which one can pass the most stringent abortion restrictions in first few months of 2014, Missouri is pulling into the lead. The state is currently considering 32 different anti-choice bills. And, since there’s only one abortion clinic left in Missouri, all of that legislation will end up targeting a single reproductive health facility.
Missouri lawmakers are currently advancing several stringent measures that are capturing most of the media attention. One bill would triple the mandatory waiting period for abortion, forcing women to wait 72 hours before proceeding with the legal medical procedure. Another would require the state’s lone abortion clinic to undergo four inspections every year.
But those are hardly the only abortion restrictions up before the legislature. According to the Guttmacher Institute, Missouri has introduced more anti-abortion bills than nearly every other state in the country so far this year. The majority of the proposed laws are specifically focused on restricting and regulating the abortion clinic remaining in St. Louis.
WATCH: Front-Runner in GOP Senate Primary Says Planned Parenthood Wants to Kill Newborns | Mother Jones
According to North Carolina GOP Senate candidate Greg Brannon, Planned Parenthood has a secret plan to legalize the killing of newborn babies as old as three months. Brannon, a Rand Paul-backed obstetrician who is a front-runner for the GOP nomination, made the allegations at a November fundraiser for Hand of Hope, a chain of crisis pregnancy centers he operates in North Carolina.
Well how far will [it] go? Last year, February 29, 2012, the Journal of Ethics in Australia, they debated that. They said we already know abortion is fine, why stop in the womb? Why not three months after. Why should we end the responsibility at that point? It could happen in America. Florida’s trying to do it right now and so is Georgia. Planned Parenthood. Because we allowed that slippery slope. Every human being deserves life, liberty, and property.
Brannon went on to say:
…women get abortions because of the same nihilistic worldview that causes them to believe in evolution. “We have people who believe they evolve from nothing, they came from nothing, they’ll go to nothing, and today doesn’t matter, so when they have a mistake, why not move on?,” he said.
The most recent survey of the race, from Public Policy Polling, showed Brannon tied with Thom Tillis, the speaker of the state house of representatives, for the Republican nomination—and running even with Sen. Kay Hagan (R-N.C.) in a hypothetical November matchup.
Women Don’t Have More Sexual Partners When They Use Birth Control — But Why Do We Care? | Amanda Duberman
Women use birth control. Almost all of them. Abortion rates decrease when more women take birth control. Sex is better and more fun when women are on the pill. Oral contraceptives make life better for many women in ways that have nothing to do with preventing pregnancy.
Now that most women can reasonably expect to have sex without giving birth nine months later, they must be having tons of sex, right? Too much sex. Just an uninterrupted, condomless flow of high-risk sex.
If we were prepared to indulge the idea that anyone should be concerned with how many people women sleep with and how often they do so, we now have empirical proof that providing access to free birth control has no impact on the number of sexual partners a woman has. Phew.
A comprehensive study by researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine found that providing women birth control at no cost does not effect the number of sexual partners they have. Multiple methods of long-term birth control (oral contraception, IUDs, etc.) were provided to 9,256 St. Louis women who were considered “at high risk for unintended pregnancy.” Over the course of a year, participants’ incidence of “high risk sexual behavior” such as “having multiple partners” did not increase when they were given birth control at no cost.
Seventy percent of women surveyed reported no increase in sexual partners. Overall, the percentage of participants who reported multiple partners actually declined throughout the study. For women reporting an increase in number of sexual partners, 80 percent simply went from having sex with no one to having sex with someone.
Men’s Rights Activists Didn’t Like Lena Dunham’s SNL Skit That Made Fun of Men’s Rights Activists | TIME.com
The Girls creator hosted Saturday Night Live on March 8 — which happened to be International Women’s Day— and appeared in a skit called “Jewelry Party” (above). The skit, which also starred SNL cast members Cecily Strong and Mike O’Brien, featured a man accompanying his Venezuelan girlfriend to a jewelry party, where he was outed as a men’s rights activist in front of her feminist friends.
For the uninitiated, men’s rights activists (MRAs) belong to a somewhat amorphous grassroots movement in which men — and, surprisingly, a few women — advocate for, well, men’s rights on the grounds that anti-male discrimination is allegedly a widespread problem. While some MRAs focus on discrimination in child custody cases or female-on-male domestic violence, which are objectively worthy concerns, others push a more problematic agenda, such as arguing that sexual assault numbers are inflated. Not helping their cause, of course, is that fact that many MRAs also tend to rely on spewing sexist and misogynist vitriol as their modus operandi.
When real-life MRAs saw Dunham’s SNL skit portraying one of their own as a scrawny virgin with a mail-order girlfriend and a vendetta against Planned Parenthood, they were offended. Several Redditdiscussionsquickly popped up, where MRAs complained that the sketch was not only an inaccurate portrayal of their movement, but that it was also offensive and not funny.
Of course the skit was not “fresh”…I mean the show is no longer funny, but it makes a point about the next few links:
You remember this outrage? Judge orders new trial for man convicted of rape, says complainant didn’t behave like a victim
A Georgia appeals judge has ordered a new trial for a convicted rapist, saying the woman who complained of the attack didn’t behave like a victim when she made the report the next day.
Judge Christopher McFadden said the guilty verdicts against William Jeffrey Dumas “do not have the approval of the court’s mind and conscience,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. McFadden is an appeals judge, but he temporarily presided at the trial. The alleged victim has Down syndrome.
In his ruling, McFadden cited the behavior of the complainant as well as that of Dumas, who “did not behave like someone who had recently perpetrated a series of violent crimes.” The judge also cited inconsistencies in testimony.
Remove judge from office | The Citizen
Our two national organizations, National Down Syndrome Society and National Down Syndrome Congress, are dedicated to serving and advocating for individuals with Down syndrome.
We are outraged by Judge Christopher McFadden’s recent overturned ruling of a jury’s guilty verdicts against William Jeffrey Dumas. Dumas was convicted of repeatedly raping a young woman with Down syndrome on Oct. 18, 2010.
According to his ruling, Judge Christopher McFadden claims that a new trial is necessary because the victim (who happens to have Down syndrome) waited a day before reporting the rape, and because she did not behave like a rape victim.
We’d like to ask the question, “How should a rape victim act – disability or non-disability?”
This ruling reflects an astonishing and dehumanizing view of an individual with a disability – in this case the young woman with Down syndrome. We condemn the judge’s actions.
Every person has a different way of coping with traumatic situations, and, this includes people with Down syndrome. We would like to know, how she was “supposed” to act after being repeatedly raped? Has some sort of standard been set for this or is this entirely judgmental?
The trial testimony established evidence that Dumas’ semen was found on the bed on which the woman slept the night of the attack.
Additionally, the doctor who examined the woman had made findings that were consistent with a woman who had been forcibly raped. Does someone’s behavior trump hard evidence in court?
A judge’s personal, ignorant, and ill-informed beliefs should not be part of deciding a case.
We envision a world in which all people with Down syndrome have the opportunity to enhance their quality of life, realize their life aspirations and become valued members of welcoming communities.
People with disabilities, like all people, deserve to be treated as valued citizens and not referred to in a hurtful manner for any purpose.
The judge has stepped away from the case…but has not made a decision on recusing himself from the appeal.
Opinion: Rape case not just about Down syndrome – CNN.com
Last September, William Jeffrey Dumas was convicted of three counts of rape. According to the charges, he had raped a woman three times over a night and the following morning, and the jury agreed with the prosecution that he was guilty. But just last week, a judge overturned the jury’s conviction and ordered a new trial.
The Georgia appeals court judge, Christopher McFadden, argued that the verdict went “strongly against the weight of the evidence” because, in his judgment, the woman in question — I’ll join other writers in calling her Jane — didn’t act like a victim and the man didn’t act like a rapist.
Jane has Down syndrome and the growing national outrage to this case has focused, with reason, on her disability. But Down syndrome is only part of the story.
Yes…it is part of it…
The outrage is not only because this judge didn’t understand Down syndrome, but that judges frequently impose their perceptions on cases of sexual assault, reducing sentences even for convicted rapists on the grounds that the victim didn’t act “correctly.” Jane’s troubling case reveals the intersections between rape culture and the way we strip agency from people with disabilities.
Here are a few details. In October of 2010, Jeffrey Dumas was hanging out with friends in a home where a 24-year-old woman with Down syndrome was staying while her mother was out of town. According to the complaint, Dumas raped the woman three times over an evening and the following morning, but she made no “outcry” until the following day, despite having ample opportunities to tell the other adults in the house.
People with intellectual disabilities, especially women and girls, are sexually assaulted at a much higher rate than the rest of the population. People with intellectual disabilities, even those with strong communication skills, can be vulnerable to sexual assault because they are unsure of what’s right or wrong or whether they can say no.
They rarely receive sexual education or are provided assertiveness training. Given this context, one might well invoke Down syndrome to explain the delay between the assault and the complaint. Most important, during the trial, Jane testified that she was raped, the jury believed her, and the medical and physical evidence confirmed her story.
But the judge, acting as he says in his decision, as the 13th juror, saw things differently. McFadden writes that although “the evidence is sufficient to sustain the conviction,” he offers a long list of confusing aspects in the testimony, which he boils down to, “At no time prior to her outcry on the 19th (the next day), did (she) behave like a victim. Nor did Mr. Dumas behave like someone who had recently perpetrated a series of violent crimes against her.”
Continue to read more at the link.
There is more analysis here: The Judge as 13th Juror: Thoughts on the Fayette Rape Controversy | Georgia Criminal Appellate Law Blog However, it is somewhat biased to me…written by an attorney whose goal with the blog is:
…to show Scott Key’s breadth of knowledge in criminal appellate issues.
I know that I am extremely biased myself, but you all know why. (Brother Denny has Downs and I am a rape victim myself.) Can you blame me?
Still, take a look at those links. Geez it pisses me off.
Two more stories on Women’s Issues:
Iraq: Don’t Legalize Marriage for 9-Year-Olds | Human Rights Watch
– Iraq’s Council of Ministers should withdraw a new draft Personal Status Law and ensure that Iraq’s legal framework protects women and girls in line with its international obligations. The pending legislation would restrict women’s rights in matters of inheritance and parental and other rights after divorce, make it easier for men to take multiple wives, and allow girls to be married from age nine.
The draft law, called the Jaafari Personal Status Law, is based on the principles of the Jaafari school of Shia religious jurisprudence, founded by Imam Jaafar al-Sadiq, the sixth Shia imam. Approved by the Council of Ministers on February 25, 2014, it must now be approved by the parliament to become law.
“Passage of the Jaafari law would be a disastrous and discriminatory step backward for Iraq’s women and girls,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “This personal status law would only entrench Iraq’s divisions while the government claims to support equal rights for all.”
Particulars of the law at the link.
KABUL, Afghanistan: Frustration in Afghan women’s rights struggle
In 2009, the United States gave Wazhma Frogh the International Woman of Courage award for her women’s rights activism in Afghanistan. Prominently displayed in Frogh’s office is a picture of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton granting her the award as First Lady Michelle Obama smiles, clapping by her side.
Four years later, the United States denied her a visa when she was trying to get away from an Afghan militia commander who she says was persecuting her.
For Frogh, the experience underlined the state of the women’s rights movement in her country. Thirteen years after the fall of the Taliban, billions of dollars have been spent, the West and the Afghan government have offered countless words of support, yet the successes that have been achieved remain vulnerable. Ultimately, women still have nowhere to turn when their battle for equal rights puts them on the firing line, she said.
“They give you an award but they don’t support you when you need them,” she told The Associated Press. “I always thought that if my government didn’t help me I would always be able to turn to the United States. I never thought that they would turn their back on me.”
Well, why not? The US is turning it’s back on their own women…why expect anything less?
Read more of Frogh story at the link.
I hate to end this on such a shitty note, but there it is.
If you want something funny to laugh at after that disturbing end, check out some of these hilarious videos: Screen Junkies – YouTube
Honest Trailers that tell you the TRUTH about your favorite movies and TV shows: These are the hilarious trailers the producers don’t want you to see…
I will give you this taste of Lord of the Rings that starts off, “When an evil vagina awakens, its up to this hobbit and this fantasy boy band to destroy its jewelry…” You may remember way back when, I used that evil vagina once in a PLUB post. Lord of the PLUBs: Attack of the Fetus Fanatics | Sky Dancing
The Flaming Ass of GOP.
The Flaming Ass of the Republican Religious Right, “The Crack” is always watching your uterus…ever on the lookout for the fetus it desires to wield as the ultimate power against women and girls. No Man can kill the evil that is inherent in the fetus fanatic. He will not be stopped until his quest for dominion over every uterus in Middle Earth has been achieved. It is no longer the age of women, the time of the PLUB has come.
The Ass commands that all with a uterus must obey his shrieking calls of Pro-Life. Like hemorrhoids from deep within the smoldering lava of Mount GOP, The Crack’s words strike out at any former fetus that is a woman or girl. Hot turds of hypocrisy spew from the Flaming Ass as he conducts his evil assault on Woman’s Rights and Reproductive Health.
No offense to J.R.R. Tolkien, but this war against women that is being waged by PLUB (Pro-Life-Until-Birth) Republicans is just as threatening to the female race as “The Ring” was to the inhabitants of Middle Earth. Instead of using their new-found power in Washington DC and State Houses to promote job growth and improve the failed economy, Republicans are trampling over the American Uteri. But that is not all they, the GOP, are destroying. These PLUBs assholes want to stop any form of affordable reproduction and general healthcare available to women and girls of limited means. Lets face it, the rich will always have their abortions available to them on a silver platter. The outright abuse of the poor and working class female is so dangerous. I just cannot understand why so few elected Democrats are not standing up to these bastards.
Sorry about quoting something I wrote from back in March of 2011, but it has been three fucking years and things are worse than ever! Now we got four democrats in Rhode Island co-sponsoring a government forced sonogram bill on women wanting an abortion? PLUB Muthafukkerz!
Have a happy hobbit day! And see you later in the comments…