Entries Tagged 'Victims & Dangers' ↓

Hey U.G.L.Y. (Unique, Gifted, Lovable, You) has started a campaign to fight back against Bullying. Bullying Bystanders Unite asks students to take a pledge to be eye witnesses and even record incidences with their cell phones.

One Hey U.G.L.Y. teen team-member was attacked and brutally kicked in the face numerous times, when the police and principal were approached they said they couldn’t do anything without witnesses or evidence.

“On a school campus there’s about 85 percent of kids called bystanders. They’re the missing link, the silent majority,” Dr. Michele Bora said on Dateline NBC.

Kids have cell phones now and they can be used as safety tools. If a kid is a bully, reporting a bully is a safety measure for other kids who might be the bully’s next target.

Being recorded in the act of bullying has even made bullies stop and run away, according to the Pledge website.

The website has safety rules to go over with kids with different rules for when the child is alone or with other cell phone carrying friends.

Read more about Hey U.G.L.Y’s Stop Bullying Task Force training.

To sign the pledge, or find out more about what kinds of things your kids can do to protect themselves and others from bullies visit Bullying Bystanders Unite.

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So there’s this evil character on Private Practice, she’s the BOSS, THE Chief-of-Staff, Charlotte. The cold hard unfeeling hateful, sexaholic, overly-ambitious, Ex-Texan LA-living, plan-killin BITCH. God, to hate her is the only RIGHT way. She’s the epitome of the bad, bad, evil devil-woman, Charlotte.

And then she is raped, beaten, battered and criminally assaulted. She’s raped on a show that makes a habit out of maiming, torturing, killing, ethically dilemma-ing, the hell out of its own characters, which has the effect of emotionally fucking with its own viewers.

As a viewer, it’s like a train wreck. You don’t want to watch. You don’t want to participate in the viewer jerk-off that it is. Lured in by the sexy promiscuity of it’s former Grey’s Anatomy star Kate Walsh and your desire to see her  make a true love life, a true loving relationship. You’re attached to the characters. The interweaving of emotional entanglements. So you watch. Every week. Even though the emotional issues bring up emotional issues for you. Ones too close to home. How can they not? The show covers every emotional issue. Ones you have experienced and ones you have only imagined. But, they are not reality. They are not anyone’s true emotional life. They are not the equivalent of anyone’s and everyone’s encompassing emotional experience –  all the bad parts and some of the good parts – encompassed in every single person’s tragic and horrible life experience. And you watch, because For God’s Sake, it CAN’T get worse than this, you tell yourself every week. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

Then there’s the rapist, huddled. afraid. Freaking out about what he is. What he did. “I had a bad night,”

“That happens,” goes the dialogue.

She is strong for her lover, her boyfriend. Because that’s what women are. Another of yours, a man like you, yourself, did this to you. Let ME comfort you. Let me hold your strong and complicated feelings of violation of your woman in my womb, that which has just been violated.

My womb, the place that holds your feelings, your pain, your issues, your emotional turmoil and garbage that you just can’t figure out because you were born a man and don’t know what the hell to do with the heavy, hard baggage of all the awful and terrible things that happens to you and the women you love; your mothers, daughters, sisters and wives.

Don’t forget . . . she IS the evil character. The one you kind of . . . naturally . . . hope something bad happens to. That’s righteous justice isn’t it?

Who hurt YOU Lee? The shrink asks the rapist. Because we all know that someone must have hurt YOU for you to behave like this towards women. We all want to get to the foundation of the problem, to find the cure for this hateful, abusive, tragic treatment of women you feel compelled toward. Who hurt YOU Lee? Perhaps if we find the source, we could cure this centuries old disease of violence against femininity, this bizarre hatred of half of the species of humans.

When she, the woman, the raped one talked about it, there is her hardness. Her detachment, her coldness, her distain for the pity of her vulnerability – her being a woman – the distainment for her own vulnerability – the fact of being feminine – weaker. Ugh. Weaker. No way is she going to expose that part of herself for the sake of protecting other . . . women. Other disdainfully vulnerables – who might also have . . . character flaws, emotional blocks for which she feels inferior, other feminines who might be also .  . .a bitch . . . the kind who don’t hold their men’s negative and destructive emotions properly , effectively in her womb space, keeping them safe and protected and without harm to themselves or others.

You ever call me the victim again this marriage is off, she says to the man she’s to marry, hesitantly because to marry would be to acknowledge this curse of femininity and vulnerability, but still, to marry.

She had it coming, and I gave it to her. I gave it to her so good. They’re all the same, you hear me? They’re all the same.

No one’s going to press charges . . . Ain’t life a bitch. . .

Well, for us. I guess it is.

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I’ve noticed a trend in literature in the last few years: gratuitous rape scenes. Specifically gratuitous anal rape combined with demented torture.

I find this trend disturbing and I’ve boycotted the authors.

Not a sort of “I hate you now and I’ll never read you again,” boycott.

More of a “I don’t trust you now and I don’t want your demented images floating around in my head,” boycott.

The latest was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  I could have done without the very graphic descriptions of torture, the very demented mix of sexuality and violence.

It’s not only in the fiction of male authors. It seems female authors are going for the emotional jugular and shock value as well. Specifically I’ll mention Kira Silak’s The White Mary and one of Janet Evonovich’s numbered novels. Both had incredibly horrific imagery of vaginal mutilation and anal rape.

I’ve gotten to where I don’t read much of the thriller mystery genre anymore.

It’s particularly disturbing when the author feels it necessary to graphically describe the rape, anal rape and torture of his or her own protagonist. Often times by someone they love or have a relationship with. Then the protagonist will spend maybe a day or a few hours washing herself off and going about her business, as if this is just what women should expect of the world and the men they are involved with.

There is a disturbing underlying emotion of hatred of female sexuality, a hatred of females in and of themselves, an objectification that goes beyond a one-night-stand-use-them-for-pleasure into women-are-disposable ideology. It’s an absurd notion that the witnessing of such horrific deeds – fiction or otherwise – passes for harmless entertainment in the plots of the stories.

It makes me wonder several disturbing things like:

How many men are jacking off to these images and creating an attraction to the mingling of misogyny, a fear and loathing of normal female sexuality and taking an an erotic pleasure in climaxing at the moment of a woman’s mutilation and even her naked death?

It also makes me wonder about the female audience. Why are we passively consuming graphic descriptions of rape, violence and torture of women in mass quantities of mainstream literature, music, television, movies and online porn and not offended by it?

I think there’s something wrong with both the men and women who are not offended. Mass desensitization to sexually violent misogyny can’t bode well for us.

It’s a form of vicarious rape of the masses of femininity.  I don’t know whether its intent, in all cases, is to “keep women in their place” making sure that they’re aware of and just a little frightened about their physical vulnerability in this world – but I do think that’s the effect of it.

For more on this theory check out Misogynistic Violence for Breakfast where I discuss the sexuality violent graphic nature of commercials during family programming time.

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My husband was just informed by a police officer that he would call child protective services on us. He gave us a warning, this time.

Our crime?

We let him ride his bike outside in front of our house. In a residential neighborhood with dead-end streets.

Is it actually illegal to let a kid ride their bike outside?

I doubt it.

In the meantime, we live in a town with 60% fat kids. It appears that endangering a child’s life by sitting them in front of the TV with a bag of Sonic everyday is not considered child endangerment, though exercise  and play is.

Never mind that this same officer likely rode his bike all freaking day long when he was growing up, and relished in the freedom and fun of it. Probably on this same street.

Back to the TV for you kid. It’s “safer.”

Visit Free Range Kids.

image from iamway2fat.

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Mike Males and Chelsea Lynd have written a piece in The New York Times Op-Ed section, The Myth of Mean Girls which has brilliant news for parents of girls.

Girls are being bullied. But not by each other. Not by boys. Those numbers are down drastically. Those numbers are down, down, down to the lowest point since the 1960s. Girls are being bullied buy the 24 hour news cycle and middle-aged do-gooders (like myself) who focus on, and raise alarms, about isolated instances of cyber-bullying and mean girl behavior that randomly and rarely gets out of hand.

I would write more about this, but I haven’t figured out how to highlight an entire sentence on my new Macbook. So, if you’ll just go up there and click on the word “The” you can read the piece yourself.

OR you can just sit peacefully with the new and radically awesome idea that your girls is probably safe, probably not going to be raped, beaten, kidnapped, or robbed. And that it’s unlikely she will bully, beat, or emotionally torture others to death either.

That’s great news. Sit with it until it sinks into your cells and it dissolves the old, outdated, media-induced fear.

It’s a freaking great time to be a girl.

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