Let’s just say that this week isn’t happy under the cut, but it is full of compassion and anger both
Queer, Muslim, & Unwelcome at the “New Stonewall”
According to the logic of the New Stonewall, police oppression of queers is in the past. Our oppression is compartmentalized from our political goals. If we just ask nicely and give them the respect they apparently deserve, people in power will listen to us. Based on this thinking, the fight for job non-discrimination is separate from the fight against transphobia is separate from the fight against gentrification is separate from the fight against police brutality is separate from racism is separate from the deaths of forty-nine, mostly Latinx, folks at the hands of a raging, gun-obsessed homophobe.
Biphobia and the Pulse Massacre
So I’m passing this on to you:
You aren’t alone.
Bisexual people, pansexual people, polysexual people, any non monosexual people, when you worry that you aren’t gay enough, when your identity is erased, when you feel like you don’t fit anywhere….you are not alone.
Orlando shooting: thoughts and prayers from hypocrites do nothing to help
It’s awfully hard to appear duly sympathetic to victims you yourself have been victimising for years.
At War with Ourselves — an interesting, detailed and depressing account of Australia’s culture wars, including a brief look at Helen Garner, Australia’s most misogynistic “feminist thinker”:
Along the way there were two diversions from the hearty decade-long round of Aboriginal bashing. The first was triggered by the publication of Helen Garner’s The First Stone, which charged that the disgraced master of a Melbourne University college had been victim of a feminist conspiracy. What was supposedly sexual harassment, Garner argued, was no such thing but was ‘victim feminism’, an overreaction by young women who had been egged on by their feminist mentors to take the case to the police when it could have otherwise been sensibly resolved. A conspiracy was afoot, orchestrated by ‘politically correct’ elites at the expense of common sense, personified by the ordinary battling college master.
It was a beautiful story and sold a lot of books. But ‘victim feminism’, too, was a term imported from the US culture wars and the work of bestselling authors such as Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia. And there was no conspiracy. It turned out the complainants hadn’t gone ‘straight to the police’ but had first sought redress through the college. And that they went to the police on legal advice, not because of spurious advice from a vengeful sisterhood. And that the ‘feminist conspiracy’ line was possible only because Garner had split the complainant’s main defender in the college into seven different people on legal advice.
(I haven’t read The First Stone, but I did read Joe Cinque’s Consolation when it came out, a true crime book with long, angry digressions about the “exotic beauty” of the Asian woman accused of Cinque’s murder, and In This House of Grief, in which Garner is shocked! and appalled! to learn that men sometimes murder their children by way of revenge on estranged spouses, and then reaches quite hard to figure out how the estranged wife “emasculated” her partner.)
Police may finally have a breakthrough in the case of the Boulie Tacker
HOORAY: AFL women’s competition HOORAY
Amazing birb business: The hunt for the bushfire birds
This week at No Award (slow week):
No Award watches stuff: Cleverman 1×02
24 Terrible Life Lessons from Australian Music of the 90s <– definitely spend some quality time with this post though
no-award.net 