I’m tired of this sad trend—the one in which it isn’t inherently oppressive social institutions being questioned, but the victims of them. Victim blaming is a lot easier than changing things. Attempts at discrediting feminism are made because admitting that gendered oppression exists would be an admission that things need to change. Attacks on feminism are a large-scale version of victim blaming: the oppressed are blamed and everything is done to justify the oppressor’s actions.

There’s this socially constructed illusion of choice that everyone can succeed, monetarily and in earned respect, if they just work hard enough. However, as we know, that equality will never exist without equity; this pull your life up by the bootstraps mentality does no one any good. Rachel Fudge writes about this in her essay “Girl, Unconstructed” published in Bitch magazine’s 2006 collection Bitchfest. Fudge is critical of the Girl Power movement in contrast to the Riot Grrrl movement, zeroing in on the confusion between equality and equity: “[Girl Power] turns the struggle inward, depoliticizes and decontextualizes the cultural messages about gender and behaviour … If, as Ann Powers wrote so hopefully nearly a decade ago, girls are seen as ‘free agents,’ they have only themselves to blame for their failures.”

The all-about-personal-choices rational excuses crimes such as rape and forcing individuals to live in poverty. If you don’t want to get raped, don’t dress like a slut. If you don’t want to be attacked, carry a weapon and don’t walk outside after dark. Don’t have a baby if you want to succeed in your career. This messaging tells us there rules are to be followed—forget changes in accepted behaviour amongst genders and middle to upper class nepotism within the workplace. The rules women are expected to follow are especially highlighted by mainstream media, school dress codes, court rooms—and almost everybody—when it comes to sexual violence.

“Victim blaming is not just about avoiding culpability—it’s also about avoiding vulnerability,” Dr. Juliana Breines writes in a 2013 article for Psychology Today entitled ‘Why Do We Blame Victims?’ “The more innocent a victim, the more threatening they are. Victims threaten our sense that the world is a safe and moral place, where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.”

Bad girls are the ones that don’t follow the rules. They may have sex, be working class, be queer, have an addiction, live with mental-based illness and/or be a person of colour. In Canada, notably, the dehumanization of Aboriginal women also persists. A recent example being the case of Cindy Gladue, a sex worker who was brutally murdered, and whose alleged murderer was initially found not guilty until a recent appeal. Stephen Harper has said that Canada’s missing and murdered Aboriginal women is not an epidemic and not on the Conservative’s radar. Aboriginal women are dehumanized the same way other racialized women are when it comes to sexual violence. Black women must live with the hypersexualized Jezebel stereotype used to justify sexual violence because—so the horribly misogynistic and racist theory goes—being women of colour, they are inheritably hypersexual and animalistic. You’d be forgiven for thinking the only time powerful white folks seem to care about women of colour who are victims of sexual violence is when is when the crime is committed outside of western society.

This month, for instance, a horrific story has been making headlines. A 10-year-old girl living in Paraguay, who was raped and impregnated by her stepfather, is being denied her right to an abortion. This is undeniably a huge injustice. Nothing like that would happen in North America. Like, in 1988 when Stephen Friend, a representative in the Pennsylvania General Assembly, said it is almost impossible for a woman to become pregnant through rape, because her body will “secrete a certain secretion, which has a tendency to kill sperm.” OK, that was 27 years ago. But only three years ago Republican Todd Akin said that from what he understands from doctors, “If it is legitimate (emphasis mine) rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

Akin apologized for his comments, but then retracted his apology in his 2014 paranoid titled book Firing Back: Taking on the Party Bosses and Media Elite to Protect Our Faith and Freedom. Here in Canada, during the same year as Akin’s comments, Rob Ford’s niece, Krista Ford reiterated the rules for women in a tweet: “Stay alert, walk tall, carry mace, take self-defence classes & don’t dress like a whore. #DontBeAVictim #StreetSmart.” Her famous uncle is no better.

But even though media headlines and interviews with neighbours glorify the good girl—the straight-A, virginal, young, white girl—the courtroom does not award the same spot on the pedestal. Alice Sebold, author of Lucky and The Lovely Bones, was raped in 1981 and has fought inside and outside of the courtroom to prove this. In a 1989 piece for The New York Times, she writes about how not only did the justice system fail her but even her own father could not figure out how she was raped if she did not want to have sex: “When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and how safe I was.” As we see with Gladue’s case, 26 years later, not much has improved. In her book Men Explain Things To Me Rebecca Solnit writes, “Credibility is a basic survival tool.” How does a victim gain credibility when they live in a world that denies bad things happen to those that don’t deserve it?

“When bad things happen to good people, it implies that no one is safe,” Breines writes. “That no matter how good we are, we too could be vulnerable. The idea that misfortune can be random, striking anyone at any time, is a terrifying thought, and yet we are faced every day with evidence that it may be true.”

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Now but a meme, this was originally seen as fact

So long ago it was proven that women are evil because, duh, uteruses have horns.

This week, I am reading An Introduction to Women’s Studies Gender In A Transnational World by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan for Dr. Kristine Klement’s Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies class at York University. We are focusing on how science may just be as culturally affected as the rest of us, especially when it comes to gender: “Many people think that biology answers [what counts as difference] once and for all,” reads the first essay, “Social and Historical Constructions of Gender.” “But science (including biology) has a history.”

These influences affect different aspects of gender and sexuality. As Dr. Klement points out, “Binary thinking affects science.” Because we are so dead set on sticking with this male/female gender dichotomy we are able to use science to justify prejudice against trans* people, or decide what gender role a child will be expected to live up to—something many people and organizations, including the Intersex Society of North America would like to see stop. “Intersexuality is primarily a problem of stigma and trauma, not gender,” reads the society’s website, for example. “Parents’ distress must not be treated by surgery on the child.”

I’m not saying all science is terrible—it’s a pretty broad profession and, of course, used toward wonderful advancements. But scientists are still people coming from an oppressive culture, with their own ideas and—even though some may be subconscious—their own prejudices. And there’s quite the history of how it has been used to justify the dehumanization of women, especially working class women. Take, for instance, the  early 1900s case of Margaret Sanger.

Sanger, is considered the mother of the birth control movement. Earlier this summer, The Washington Times published an article about Sanger’s pushing of the eugenics movement. Sanger wanted birth control to be used for “respectable” married women, not working class women—despite her own working class background. “Her views and those of her peers in the movement contributed to compulsory sterilization laws in 30 U.S. states,” writes Arina Grossu in The Washington Times. “That resulted in more than 60,000 sterilizations of vulnerable people, including people she considered ‘feeble-minded,’ ‘idiots’ and ‘morons.’”

Almost a hundred years before Sanger was Paul Broca, known for measuring skulls, or, crainometry. Broca also thought we were a bunch of idiots, and wanted science to  prove this. He determined women’s heads were smaller than men’s, and thus women were more stupid. Stephen Law writes about it in “Women’s Brains,” quoting who he referred to as “a black sheep in Broca’s fold,” L. Manouvrier: “Women displayed their talents and their diplomas. The also invoked philosophical authorities. But they were opposed by numbers … The theologians had asked if women had a soul. Several centuries later, some scientists were ready to refuse them a human intelligence.”

Also, on the list of “bad” things women’s bodies do: shedding unnecessary garbage during menstruation while men are being awesome producing all sorts of sperm (“The Egg and the Sperm” by Emily Martin.) “In analyzing male/female differences these scientists peer through the prism of everyday culture, using the colours so separated to highlight their questions, design their experiments, and interpret their results,” writes Anne Fausto-Sterling in ‘The Biological Connect.’ “More often than not their hidden agendas, non-conscious and thus unarticulated, bear strong resemblances to broader social agendas.”

Interestingly enough, at my last science lab, part of my assignment was to help a fictional lady, Jezebel (named after the Bible’s bad girl), figure out the father of her baby.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

On November 20 Jezebel posted an article with the headline “You Gotta See These ‘Regular’ Women Looking Sexy-as-Hell in Lingerie” The article shared that customers of the plus size lingerie line Curvy Girl were posting pictures of themselves in the garments (as opposed to paid models). The first comment, echoed by many to follow, was: “So, obese now equals normal. Oh America…”

Melissa A. Fabello wrote about thin privilege for Everyday Feminism, as a person who has never experienced fat discrimination, “I have never had someone dismiss me as a dating prospect based on my body type, nor had someone scoff, openly, while watching me eat French fries in public.” Fabello makes a point  that though thinner women can hate their bodies, they do not feel oppression because of them the way larger women would—thin clothing sizes are available, food choices aren’t judged, health isn’t questioned.

I applaud her point, but I’m not sure this is true: What about the little girl at the beginning of the documentary Miss Representation, who was crying that because she is thin people say she has an eating disorder? It’s an endless cycle, and all body shaming really accomplishes is turning women against each other.  Time is spent hating our own bodies, hating others, trying to figure out what is normal— then how we can surpass normal. That time should be spend being engaged in making the big political decisions that affect us. The beauty industry thrives on the money we spend out of hate. Shame that manipulation, not the female body.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna writes Gender Block every week and maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

http://specialolympicsblog.wordpress. com

“Every day I get closer to living a life like yours.”

It was 2008 when John Franklin Stephens, who has Down syndrome, wrote those words, but their importance has not diminished in the four years that have passed. A Special Olympics athlete and global messenger, Stephens recently had to once again defend his humanity—and, it seems, the world is listening.

During Monday, Oct. 22’s American presidential debate on foreign policy, outspoken conservative political commentator Ann Coulter set the internet ablaze with her tweet that she approves of “Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard.”

Coulter meant for the tweet a to be a jab at President Obama. But for Stephens, it was a chance to set her, and the rest of the world, straight on using the r-word. In an open letter on the Special Olympics website, Stephens powerfully and succinctly outlines why using “retard” as an immature slur is so awful. And it has caught the world’s attention, with publications from Gawker and Jezebel to the Daily Mail and Huffington Post writing about it, commending Stephens. Here are his words, in full:

Dear Ann Coulter,

Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow. So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?

I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow. I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you. In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.

I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child by people like you, but rose above it to find a way to succeed in life as many of my fellow Special Olympians have.

Then I wondered if you meant to describe him as someone who has to struggle to be thoughtful about everything he says, as everyone else races from one snarkey sound bite to the next.

Finally, I wondered if you meant to degrade him as someone who is likely to receive bad health care, live in low grade housing with very little income and still manages to see life as a wonderful gift.

Because, Ms. Coulter, that is who we are – and much, much more.

After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me. You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult and you assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV.

I have to wonder if you considered other hateful words but recoiled from the backlash.

Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor.

No one overcomes more than we do and still loves life so much.

Come join us someday at Special Olympics. See if you can walk away with your heart unchanged.

A friend you haven’t made yet,

John Franklin Stephens

Global Messenger

Special Olympics Virginia

https://twitter.com/AnnCoulter

What Stephens did is admirable. While Coulter’s comment surely enraged him—and many others—he responded with maturity, poise, and intelligence. It would have been easy to reply in the heat of the moment, lashing out at Coulter, thus sinking to her level. Instead, Stephens acted with the utmost dignity. He was forward and brave with his words, laying blame where blame was due. But he was also honest, sincere, and sensitive, explaining exactly how using the word “retard” as an insult hurts him so much. The letter is both heart wrenching and heartwarming, outlining how Down Syndrome has affected and shaped Stephens’ life.

“I get the joke — the irony — that only dumb and shallow people are using a term that means dumb and shallow,” Stephens wrote in his 2008 Denver Post piece. “The problem is, it is only funny if you think a ‘retard’ is someone dumb and shallow. I am not those things, but every time the term is used it tells young people that it is OK to think of me that way and to keep me on the outside.” And that’s the real shame. Because if anyone deserves to be excluded, it’s Coulter.