Silent

So one night, my friend and I were in her car, talking about "attention whores". You know, those obnoxious douche bags who constantly need everyone to smell their summer's eve? Well anyhow, this was our topic of discussion and my friend started to talk about a girl who had informed her that she had been raped. She told me she thought the girl was just trying to get attention. My friend (who actually isn't my friend anymore by the way) went on to talk about how rape survivors NEVER EVER talk about their assault. They are always silent so this girl MUST be full of shit. **I should have told her that silence is one of the reasons people get away with rape so often. And that I found the "attention whore" in her story brave as opposed to dishonest. Why did my friend not understand that speaking out is the best way to fight this; that this woman was simply playing an active role in the fight against these sorts of attacks? I should have given her a piece of my mind but I stayed silent for reasons unknown to me. 


**Not saying that people who neglect to report their assaults are somehow at fault. The cards are pretty much stacked against people who report these things so I do understand why some people refuse to do so.

  

False Information

So, in an effort to start a few conversations about feminism with people from all sides, I took to posting links to some of my blogs on anti-feminist Facebook pages. I got one fairly civil debate out of which the inspiration for this blog post was born.  There were pieces of misinformation and misquotes a plenty from the other side and I have decided to address them in a more public fashion given the ubiquity of said misinformation.

1.)  Do you think you know who coined and used the phrase "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"? Well some of you out there seem to think it was Gloria Steinem. HOWEVER she did NOT create or use the phrase "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle". According to Wikipedia who cited phrase finder as its source:

 "Contrary to popular belief, Steinem did not coin the feminist slogan "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." The phrase is actually attributable to Irina Dunn." (1)

 2.)"All sex is rape" I have seen this quote attributed to not one BUT two different feminists and both have have denied ever uttering the ridiculous phrase. Both Andrea Dworkin and Catherine A. Mackinnon are said to have coined the phrase and both deny it. You would be hard pressed to find it in anything they have written either. SO bearing that in mind, maybe people should stop using it? (2)

3.) Another claim that has been floating around without any real evidence to is that Valeria Solanas who wrote the SCUM Manifesto meant SCUM to be an acronym for Society for Cutting Up Men. It is not found anywhere in the book itself aside from the cover and there is reason to believe that the author had not put it there:

"Though it has come to be said that "SCUM" stands for "Society For Cutting Up Men"..... this phrase actually occurs nowhere in the text. Heller argued that "there is no reliable evidence that Solanas intended SCUM to stand as an acronym for 'Society for Cutting Up Men'." Susan Ware et al. state that it was Solanas' publisher Girodias who claimed that SCUM was an acronym for "Society for Cutting Up Men", something Solanas never seems to have intended. Gary Dexter contends that Solanas called it the SCUM Manifesto without periods after the letters of SCUM. Dexter adds: "The spelling out of her coded title by Girodias was one more act of patriarchal intervention, an attempt to possess."

So this acronym, in my opinion, is better left out of ANY argument concerning feminism since it seems that no one really knows what it (if it actually means anything anyway!) stands for. (3) 

4.) When Andrea Dworkin declared "Marriage is a legal license to rape", she wasn't just talking out of her asshole:

  

"Until 1976, marital rape was legal in every state in the United States. Although marital rape is now a crime in all 50 states in the U.S., some states still don't consider it as serious as other forms of rape."

 "In the US, spousal rape is illegal in all 50 states; the first state to outlaw it was South Dakota in 1975, and the last North Carolina in 1993.^"

She actually had a valid complaint! How about that? (4)

5.) When Nancy Pelosi claimed that women "would die on the emergency room floor" as her response to the Protect Life Act"  plenty of people spoke out against her for supposedly over-dramatizing the situation and some even claimed that she was just making shit up. BUT if you pay attention to the nondiscrimination provision you will find that medical professionals will be able to refuse a woman an abortion under ANY circumstances if it is in conflict with their moral and/or religious views. That means a woman who needs an emergency abortion to save her life might not be able to obtain one simply because it goes against the religious views of her doctor! That means that YES IT IS POSSIBLE FOR WOMEN TO DIE BECAUSE OF THIS PROVISION. (5) 



I will be posting more False Information in the future and well as other shit radical MRAs say

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem#Political_awakening_and_activism
(2) http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinnon.asp
(3) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUM_Manifesto#As_parody_and_satire
(4)  http://www.answers.com/topic/rape
       http://marriage.about.com/cs/maritalrape/f/maritalrape10.htm
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_Life_Act#Provisions