{look upon my works, ye mighty}

Last night, I was talking with an friend of mine about what her definition of rape is versus harassment is, and one of the things she brought up is how much she hates it when girls don’t say no or don’t protest clearly but then claim it was rape the next day.

So I thought that since it’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I’d write about a case in my life when I wanted to say no, didn’t manage to, but I really wish I had.

This was going to be an entry about how when I was seventeen, I once failed to say no/clearly show that I didn't want a guy sexually touching me. Then I reread the journal entries that I'd written at the time and realized that I hadn't ever said the actual word 'no', but I had signified discomfort in a lot of ways and tried to get away from him.

Here's an excerpt from one of the journal entries in question. ( Cut for possible triggers. Typoes left in for the sake of accuracy. )

Originally, I had remembered this as him touching my breast and me backing away from him. I hadn't remembered that I had fought back. I didn't remember that I kicked him, and I didn't remember that he continued with his advances afterwards.

That's not what's important here. The question is, why didn't I just say no instead of trying to physically get away from him and discourage him without having to actually talk about what was happening?

The answer's in the question itself. I didn't want to talk about what was happening.

Part of the Asian culture that I was raised in involves victim-blaming. If I had told him to stop it, I would've had to admit that he was doing something wrong, and then I would've had to examine my own behavior to see how I had caused it. If I kick him, leave the room, and then quit art class? I'm still not actually addressing the fact that hey, he's touching me, he's doing things to my body that I don't want, he is behaving like a jerk.

The next day, I had my boyfriend come into the classroom with me and sit with me. While my boyfriend was in the room, the 'friend' slid his hand onto my thigh (I was wearing shorts) and tried to feel me up.

I didn't tell my boyfriend what was happening. I just stood up.

And then I quit art.

I couldn't tell my parents why because they would've blamed me. I was the one who had chosen to take special after-school lessons, and my mother honestly believes that short skirts cause rape. My mother was rubbed up against by a guy on a bus for the entire ride home when she was a teenager, and she remained absolutely quiet and made no fuss until she got home, and then she started crying.

The Sri Lankan culture does not hold with 'making scenes'. I couldn't tell him no, because then I'd have to acknowledge what was happening. I'd have to make a scene. And that's simply not done. Even though I grew up in Europe, I still grew up inside a Sri Lankan household where if a man is taking liberties with you, it's because you've somehow signified you're open to them.

Who knows? Maybe I didn't kick him hard enough. Maybe I should've kicked him in the balls to show that I meant no.

Or maybe I should've just swallowed down a lifetime of being told to be a good, quiet little Asian who doesn't make waves and called him on it.

I was too scared to. Apart from my indoctrination into silence, I didn't know what would happen next. What if he denied anything was happening? What if he told everyone else that I'd accused him of molesting me and then laughed at the idea that he'd do anything like that with me? What if my parents found out about it?

So I kicked him, I pushed him away, I brought my boyfriend to show him that I was taken and not interested, and finally, when none of that worked, I quit art class.

But I never actually voiced the word 'no', or faced up to what was happening to me.

Strange as it may seem to some of the Western readers on my flist, I'm using this post to promote Sexual Assault Awareness concerning yourself.

It is YOUR body. You have a right to decide what other people do with it. If someone is making you uncomfortable, tell them 'Stop'. They are the ones in the wrong, not you. Facing that something bad is happening to you is infinitely preferable to trying to dodge around it, because as long as you can't stand your ground, they're going to keep pushing until they've backed you into a corner.

The last time someone groped me, I yelled at them to 'FUCK OFF OR I'LL BREAK YOUR HAND'. The man in question quickly sloped away.

No matter how shy you might be, how uncertain and scared, or how tied to a culture that keeps you very firmly passive, your body is still yours. And you are never the bad guy for telling someone that what they're doing to you is wrong. Never.

Taken from a_white_rain.

Originated by dsudis.

So I was adding some new interests to my LJ profile (because I, uh... have some new interests. Yes.) and found myself feeling defensive every time I typed a female name, thinking, basically, FUCK YOU, SHE'S AWESOME, because I felt as if someone somewhere was going to be criticizing my love for them.

So, anyway, then I made a list of women who make me want to say FUCK YOU, SHE'S AWESOME. They are far from the only women who are awesome, or the only women people need to be told to step off of, but they are the top ten I feel that way about, right now, off the top of my head.

If you want to argue with me about the awesomeness of any of these women, I am afraid I will simply be referring you to the subject line. THAT IS ALL.

1) Rachel from Animorphs
2) War from Good Omens
3) Granny Weatherwax, Discworld
4) Shirley Schmidt from Boston Legal
5) Mai Kujaku, Yuugiou
6) Hayley from Stick It
7) Mulan from Mulan
8) Stephanie Brown from Batman comics
9) Lilly Rush from Cold Case
10) Dr. Cuddy from Houses

I've actually ordered them in the order that I'd like to be them. Rachel is my top pick. I know how she died, I know what she had to do before she died but gods, I love her. She had so much fierceness in her; passion and anger and courage, all wrapped up tightly inside her skin. And when she died, she was missed.

Of all the women on that list, Rachel's skin is the one that I want to wear the most.

Life and death and love and all, I want to be her.

Total:

5892 / 7000 words. 100% done, 70 dollars contributed!

This is NOT for NaNoWriMo. This is for the personal fundraiser post that I put up for the sake of the Pretty Bird Woman House women's shelter. It was burnt down by arsonists, it desperately needs donations so that it can be rebuilt, and I'm offering 1 cent per word for all the authors and fanficcers on my flist with consciences and time to write a drabble or a fic for a good cause.

Fic-contributers so far are ceresi and ohsnikt. *pokes her flist* There are 87 of you, it takes less than ten minutes to write a drabble, and it's for a good cause. Plus, you get a receipt to make you feel all warm and fuzzy.

( Receipts so far are found here. )

Pretty Bird Woman House is a women's shelter on a Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota. Ever since it opened, it's been struggling to stay afloat but a few weeks ago, it suffered a fatal blow when it was broken into, ransacked and burnt down. Right now, they're trying to reopen it and any sort of aid is greatly appreciated.

For an example of why it's so necessary to have a women's shelter, and how the clash between the Tribal police and government police result in victims not getting justice, take a look at the following excerpt from the Daily Kos article:

Georgia Little Shield told me that when her daughter was beaten by her husband, the husband, remorseful after hitting her daughter, took her daughter to the hospital and asked to be arrested. As emergency workers rebuilt her daughter's shattered nose the police argued over who was responsible for handling the crime. Finally, the city police gave the husband - who was still wearing the t-shirt covered in his wife's blood - his car keys and told him to just go home, nothing was going to happen. And nothing has.

Georgia Little Shield is the Director of the Pretty Bird Woman House. Her dreams for the shelter are modest:

"I want to have a shelter and four paid advocates. Two advocates would focus on sexual assault - currently we must travel 120 miles to get rape kit. We need two advocates for domestic violence as well. Domestic violence calls make up most of our crisis calls, but sexual assault requires a lot of resources. I want to be able to teach women's safety classes, parenting classes, offer assistance in getting GED's, have a place for women to look for jobs on line. These are the kind of support services I want to offer."

This shelter is desperately needed. Because of the vulnerability of the women who live on that reservation, as well as how useless the police are, a situation has been created where non-Natives come to the reservation purely for the purpose of raping those women. It's getting called rape tourism, and the only people who really do anything about it are the three women who work at the shelter.

For $60,000, the Pretty Bird Woman Shelter could buy a house opposite a police station. An additional $10,000 would make the house secure, with proper fencing, video cameras, reinforced doors and other measures.

I know a lot of us don't have the resources to contribute financially to this project, but winter's coming and they accept donations of material objects, like towels and washcloths, toothbrushes and toothpaste, shampoo and conditioner, women's hygiene items, diapers of all sizes, baby wipes, first aid kit items, and analgesics such as ibuprophen and aspirin.

Anything you can send would be appreciated, but those items in particular. The address is:

Pretty Bird Woman House
302 Sale Barn Rd.
McLaughlin SD 57642

If you can donate, or you want to know more about the project, check out The Pretty Bird Woman House Blog, where there's a meter keeping track of how close they are to their goal as well as updates.

rayemars also has a post about the situation. Repost, people. Spread the word.

Everyone knows that photoshopping photos is practically standard practice for magainzes.

However, when a magazine says "America' FERRERER Ugly Betty is HOT!" on the cover, but edits a photograph of her to make her 'hotter' for the cover page? That's a little much.

Especially when the result looks like this.

( Exact same image under cut, for the linkphobic amongst us. )

Arms don't work that way. Tell Glamour that you don't approve.

And for bonus irony, as Savior pointed out, this is their first annual figure flattery issue. Clearly, flattering the figure doesn't mean picking out clothes that make you look good but rather, Photoshopping yourself into generic 'prettiness'.

Taken from __marcelo
>>

Air Force Charges Victim in Her Own Rape

This news item made my stomach turn: Cassandra Hernandez, a female Air Force airman was raped, reported her attack and then subsequently became a court-martial defendant, herself.

The story goes down like this: Hernandez was at a party, where she was drinking. She says that three male airman raped her. She went to the hospital and filed a report accusing her attackers. Due to stress and harsh interrogation tactics by the Air Force, she eventually refused to testify against the airmen.

The Air Force then charged her with underage drinking (of which she admits to being guilty, but that's hardly the point, now is it?) and, along with her three attackers,"indecent acts." I had a hell of a lot of trouble finding an official definition for "indecent acts," and the best one I came up with is a "form of immorality relating to sexual impurity which is not only grossly vulgar, obscene, and repugnant to common propriety, but tends to excite lust and deprave the morals with respect to sexual relations." Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the basic translation seems to be "a sexual act, particularly one that is not generally accepted in society, such as sex with multiple partners."

So. The woman was raped. By three men. She reported her rape. She was harassed by her superiors, to the point where she became too afraid to testify. The Air Force took this as meaning that the sex was therefore consensual (which isn't what it means at all), and charged her in the case of her own rape. If she loses her case, she could be publicly registered as a sex offender.

Sounds like it couldn't get any worse, right? But it does. How? The three alleged attackers were offered sexual assault immunity to testify against Hernandez on the indecent acts charge. Having at least half a brain cell among them, they accepted.

Hernandez is writing to her congresspeople and her Governor, Rick Perry, in a desperate plea to end this madness. Once you finish throwing up, crying, breaking things, etc., I strongly suggest that you write, too.

IMPORTANT CORRECTION: Apparently, the correct action to take is to write directly to YOUR congresspersons. You can find the information to write to your Representative here, and the information to write to your Senators here. It is a good idea to include one of the links to articles about thecase, so that they know specifically what you are referring to.

Posted by Cara at 04:15 PM | in Law, News, Sexual Assault, Violence Against Women

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if any of you have a good way of passing this around--to each other or to the news through the spotlight thing--PLEASE DO IT. follow the links to write to your congressperson. (if anyone wants a pre-written letter to sign, i can draw up a template.) maybe if we get the word out, something can be done about it. <<

The level of rage on my part is not to be believed. Want to pass this on to let more people know about, links and everything? The entire rich-text file of the page can be found <a href="http://svendra.com/lj/post.txt">here</a>.

I wonder if getting an e-mail from a UN addy makes the congresspeople more or less likely to listen to me?

First of all, click this to get a scary look at exactly how much photos are tampered with before they're put on the covers of magazines. It's an animated gif, I don't recognize the woman in the photo but gods, they've changed her a ton.

Secondly, being at home without Internet has resulted in me watching more TV along with my sewing projects, and I've yet again managed to get myself hooked on stuff that hardly anyone else watches!

1. Help! I'm A Teenage Outlaw!

This airs at 11:30PM on Nick and features a twelve-year-old who found out that his mother was a highwaywoman before she dies, and now needs to carry on the family tradition. It's set in 1643, and his sidekicks are Lady Devereux (a name I've always loved) disguised as a fellow peasant called Deedee and Moses, a ten-year-old inventing genius. Deedee is actually the smartest of the lot, and although there's only one season of this show, it's funny and easy enough to follow. Kinda like Big Wolf on Campus, except cuter.

2. Boston Legal

I've only seen one ep of this show but in that one ep, there were two heterosexual men that have sleepovers, a kickass African female lawyer, an old kickass woman lawyer that's the boss of an incompetent African laywer and white lawyer, and a female judge. Talk about diversity and a good way to yank in Fans of Color (FoC).

3. Monk

Okay, this I got into last night, because of Numa. She sat down and watched two and a half eps with me, and the best way to get me into a show, any show at all, is to watch it with me. If you can explain it to me and be there to chat to, then I'm more likely to pay atttention to the show. In this case, it was funny enough that I think it's worth watching some more of. I know that someone else on my flist also mentioned it to me once, but I can't think whom, unfortunately.

The mention of Fans of Color made me think about the music I liked -- I've attended three concerts in Boston so far (Flogging Molly, Placebo and Placebo again) and both times, I was the only South Asian there. Not just the only South Asian girl, but the only South Asian, full stop. Sum 41 has a South Asian guy on drums, I think, and Damage has a Sri Lankan lead singer but apart from that, the music scene that I'm aware of seems to be split mostly between white and black, with J-Pop and J-Rock also starting to creep in. I mean, punk is angry lower middle class or upper-middle-class-pretending-to-be-lower, punk rock and pop punk are mostly the same. Hip-hop, rap and R'n'B tend to be black-dominated, and I have no idea about hardcore but from what I've seen from what Savior's shown me, that's white-dominated.

Good thing I ID myself more by my gender than by my race, huh?

Oh, and I found out what AS/S stands for. *dies*

So I'm maybe not the biggest music fan on my flist (abrandnewboom and fairly_grimm could probably duke it out for that title), but even I couldn't not go to the Donauinselfest, aka the Donau Fest. I was actually going to show up at 3PM today to see my cousin play with her band (Dinalie, the younger sister of the cousin that had her graduation ceremony yesterday that I attended), but she got moved up to 2:10 so they performed while I was still en route, unfortunately, so I went home to catch some rest instead since I'd been at a sleepover last night as well and am rather tuckered out.

Instead, I'll be heading over to meet Numa at 7PM at Kagran, and then we'll head over to the D-Fest.

If anyone feels like telling me what to see, click here. It's the website for the Donau Fest, in English, and sorted out by island since it'll have a lot of different stages in different places. *still tinkering with her outfit for tonight*

Oh, and in totally unrelated news, Brazil has some ads out that are causing quite a bit of discussion about whether it's sizeist or not. The comm is kissmyass_cosmo, and it's dedicated to fighting the beauty myth and pointing out ways in which the culture around us tries to force women to have negative self-esteem.

You who wear my skin so carelessly/I am not the girl you were afraid to become.

I had a convo with Savior the other day about why I'm not attracted to Sri Lankan guys and basically, it came down to the fact that I'm not fond of the Sri Lankan culture. I don't like the way that girls are treated (we might be the first country to have a female Prime Minister but the guys are still arrogant assholes), and I don't like the double standards concerning female purity versus male purity at all.

If you tell me you know a nice Sri Lankan guy, my first assumption is going to be that he's either a traditionalist on the lookout for a girl he can show off to his parents as the femme he's going to marry, or that he thinks that Westernized Sri Lankan girls are easy, shameless whores. That's rather unfair of me because really, they could be Western-raised as well and not culturally Sri Lankan, but guys get doted on so much in Sri Lankan society that I don't think they have the same impetus to distance themselves from it as girls do.

See, if you're a girl, you're supposed to wear nice clothes that don't show flesh, be polite to your elders, not swear, get good grades and never, ever disgrace the family. Boys can mess up and all that's going to happen is that people will tut, shake their heads and say that boys will boys, ane, what's a mother to do? (Ane, incidentally, is an exclaimation that can mean nearly anything since it is basically just a space-filler, but usually signifies despair. Sinhala is great for space fillers.)

Being a girl in a traditional Sinhalese family sucks. It means that when I go to Sri Lanka and stay with my father's side of the family, they take all my shorts, put them to be washed, and don't give them back until I'm about to leave. That forces me to wear long skirts in the meantime, when I hate skirts, and especially hate the cheap polyster, pleated type that's appropriate for girls of my age. If I have to wear skirts, I want them to be flouncy and playful and cotton! And preferably make my legs look good instead of covering them up.

But at the same time, being in Sri Lanka for me means that guys will stare at me. All the time. It's not like 'Oh, she's so pretty, I want to check her out' but rather, just staring like they have every right to and I'm not even human. It feels invasive and what I actually tend to be wearing is a pair of jeans that go down to my ankles and a sleeveless top. Only skin that's exposed are my arms and my face and some of my neck. It really doesn't warrant the kind of attention that I tend to get.

I tried talking to my mother and father about it in the car one day, and my father said I was just imagining it or that they were staring at me because I look Western-rich and fair (fair in the sense of lighter skin color than people who actually live in Sri Lanka and are exposed to constant sunshine). My mother agreed with me, surprisingly, and said that the daughter of a friend of hers had said something similar about Sri Lankan men making her feel threatened just by looking at her.

I really hate that.

It's my body. Sri Lanka is my country too. I have the right to walk down the streets or sit in a van without getting stared at by every passing male. I have the right to sit in a car without guys trying to talk to me from buses, and yes, a guy actually did lean out of a bus window and shout at me while I was in a car, trying to get my attention. And I was only thirteen or something at the time!

...I was even younger, maybe seven, when my mother tried to get me to go out with her in the dark so that she could buy something for her mother. I was terrified of the dark, but she said that she needed me to come with her so that she'd be safe. I went with her, but I remember clinging to her hand all the while and wondering what exactly I was supposed to do if we were attacked. I was seven and tiny. These days, I could pull out kickass self-defense skills but back then, all she did was scare me by saying that even the neighbourhood we lived in wasn't safe for a woman to walk during the night on her own.

Nothing happened, thankfully, but I still remember very clearly how I felt -- it was a combination of fear, helplessness and anger that I was directing at my mother just because I didn't know enough back then to understand that her fears were justified and that it really did help to have a small child who could at least be a witness or scream for help. I understand it now, but that's at least partly because an aunt of mine was recently attacked in broad daylight while walking home from the grocery store.

A man assaulted her, tried to pull off her gold chains and this happened right outside her house. Her family was in the house, and she was screaming, but they didn't hear her because they had the TV on. Some guys who worked as mechanics a few houses down heard the screaming and came to rescue her, chasing the guy off and then following him. A crowd of people apparently swarmed him as the two guys were yelling 'THIEF THIEF', and then they beat him up, and took him to the police station where he got beat up some more, with my aunt being told to not say she got the chain back because the police wanted to get heavy charges laid against the guy because this wasn't his first offense.

She ended up in hospital and needed surgery. She couldn't talk for ages; he had knocked her unconscious to stop her screaming and her head was bleeding.

This happened right outside her house.

The thought of ever going back to Sri Lanka terrifies me sometimes.

The district of Colombo that my father's side of the family lives in isn't as good as the distract my mother's side of the family inhabits (my father's from a lower-caste, oh noes!), but it really just re-emphasized the fact that Sri Lanka is not a good country in which to be a woman. And although there are good guys, like the two men that saved her, Sri Lankan men, overall, do nothing for me between the sexism and distrust of Westernized women.

I feel like a bad patriot. Or more accurate, I feel like a bad Asian chick but honestly, all those complaints (usually from Asian guys) about why Asian chicks prefer white guys? They're not necessarily trading up or trying to get rich quick, thanks. They might just like guys raised in a Western culture that they empathize with better than they like guys raised in a straitlaced society that they are trying to escape.

Is it possible to love your country without loving its culture? Captain America got blasted in the Civil War comics for not knowing what MySpace is, but I don't think that I need to love MySpace to love the ideals of America, even if I don't like seeing them be ignored. Sri Lankans are supposed to love cricket just because we won the World Cup back in '96, but I refused to watch it and read instead. As for Austria, I hated taking German classes and I still don't like the language.

They called it being a global citizen at the international high school that I attended but mostly, it feels like I don't belong anywhere.

My identity is fluid/I am a citizen of the Net.

She's pro-choice and pro-sex ed.

Or, to lump it into one reason instead of two, she's pro-reproductive rights.

I found that out thanks to an article in this month's Time magazine where they were talking about the 'pregnancy crisis centers' that give you misleading information about abortions in order to try to stop you from having one. They also use emotional manipulation -- try taking a test there to see if you're pregnant and they'll hand you a pair of hand-knit, baby blue booties with the announcement, "Congratulations, you're going to be a mother."

According to the article, some states have more of those than they have actual abortion clinics.

Fantastic.

Anyway, in the article, Hillary was paraphased as saying that she supports reproductive rights, including proper education about prevention and sex so as to decrease the need for abortions.

THANK YOU.

Something that drives me absolutely insane to read about is the apparent horror America has of sex education. Every time I see an article about how some parent complained to a school that oh noes, their child is being told how babies are made, I end up wondering what the hell is wrong with people.

The odds are that your child is eventually going to have sex. Assuming you don't want them taught about sex ed because you're scared it'll encourage them to have pre-marital sex, what about after they get married? What if they don't want to have babies straight away because it'll derail their career or because they can't afford a baby or because they just think that they're too young? For some reason, I seriously doubt that there are courses on sex ed offered for 'Young Yuppies Not Prepared For Pregnancy', and it's not exactly like they can just go back to a school that does provide that sort of information.

Of course, there's always the Internet but anyone who'd trust the Internet to teach their kid how sex happens is an absolute idiot and shouldn't be having sex in the first place. There are probably great guides out there on how to please your wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend/android fucktoy. They're just buried under all the really, really, really bad smut and porn. And porn is definitely not something anyone should be taking tips from, especially if it's the issue of long fingernails in girl/girl sex. Ow. Seriously.

Conclusion? Sex education is good. In fact, people in general being informed is good. If you're not informed, you can't make informed choices and while guessing blindly might be a working tactic for, say, playing Minesweeper (does anyone out there still play it or is that a dated culture reference?), it's a little less practical if you're risking your life because nobody told you how STDs are transmitted, to take a random example.

Sex ed isn't just about not getting pregnant. It's about not getting diseases, about not going through unnecessary pain, about knowing what's happening to your body during sex -- sex ed is basically supposed to set you up so that when you do have sex, you have a smaller chance of anything bad happen and a better chance of you enjoying it.

Since I'm asexual, I ended up ducking out of a lot of the school sex ed courses, including hiding in the changing room to avoid watching the tapes, but I'm still glad that they were offered. I think abstinence-only sex ed is an incredibly bad idea and just setting teens up to be unable to even have a responsible adult figure to question about their worries, as well as make them feel more guilt-ridden if they do have sex and personally, the chances of me voting for Hillary went waaaaaaay up when I read that she openly supports sex ed.

Go Hillary!

...Maybe I'll even make an icon in her favor.