Nicolas de Largillière, Selbstporträt mit Familie, c. 1730

In my painful leisure I’ve been sleeping and not sleeping, in a weird schedule that on the upside is decent for keeping up with the fun stuff. That’s right, the World Cup, friends! My favorite part of it is when all the people who love to talk about how not into sports they are join forces with all of the people who are always more than happy to expound on how psyched American football or hockey or whatever makes them, to make sure everyone knows how stupid they think everyone who is “suddenly” excited about soccer² is for being stoked about a sport they like actually being on regular tv for a change. Because the United States is entirely made up of only NFL meathead jock douchebag fans and too-cool hipsters, and totally not a place where people from nations all over the world have immigrated –a world that is hugely taken with … soccer?

Soccer is a touchy subject for me because when I was little soccer was the one organized game that I could play where my best friend Melvin and I could be on the same team. Soccer was awesome and most of the people who told me otherwise insisted they were right because it was the sport that girls played too. I very strongly believe that is at the root of soccer not being regarded as a real sport here. And still, today, despite it being a worldwide phenomenon, you have people trying to erase a large percentage of the country’s interest in something because it is deemed “lesser than” — a stupid thing that even little girls (and foreigners) can do. How could it possibly be popular if it’s not a real sport? And anyone who is talking about it must be faking it because if people –meaning this very limited notion of the default American– really enjoyed it, it wouldn’t require some fancy sports package to keep up with more than once a year. This American essentialism and sexism rolled together and casually thrown around, even by some of the raddest women I know, is such a bummer.

Anyway how cute would a sock monkey in a wee soccer uniform be? Oh look, I found one³. God, my fucking back hurts.

1. except, no you shouldn’t
2. I’m calling it soccer for sake of clarity, and when I say “American” of course I mean USian.
3. adorable soccer monkey ganked from flickr user sockmonkeyfun.

Look, I said it was the big story, not news. Also not news: the comments are a grab bag of upsetting, disturbing, and infuriating. But it’s still a sucker punch every time this comes up.

You know what is surprising? Finding the They’re All Dirty Liars Myth being perpetuated on a site focusing on young adult literature. In her review of a biography of Claudette Colvin, Colleen Mondor writes:

The other issue I had was with her pregnancy. The fact that Claudette became an unwed mother was a big part of why she was apparently deemed too unpredictable to be the face of the bus boycott. Her explanation of that pregnancy – that it was an older young man who took advantage of her, that she had no idea how to even get pregnant, and that he abandoned her, all read as….well, forgive me but it’s a story I have heard dozens of times. Every teenage girl I’ve known in my life who got pregnant always had a variation of the virgin rape story to share. This indeed could be what happened to Claudette but there is no corroborating interviews – no friends or relatives who say yes, she was an innocent who was taken advantage of. There is instead another round of silence. Claudette was a blameless victim yet again.

Being critical of sources in nonfiction is a valid endeavor, of course, and I have picked up what Colleen has put down –as the kids say– except in the above passage. The problem here is that stating matter of factly that every pregnant teen you’ve encountered was falsely crying rape in a book review that will likely be read by teenage ladies is irresponsible. I mean, seriously? And this doesn’t make that statement less gross: “This indeed could be what happened to Claudette but there is no corroborating interviews.” Interviews to corroborate a common situation so rarely taken seriously, and the victims scrutinized and judged so harshly –say perhaps even casually, like in book reviews of biographies of teen mothers and sexual assault victims– that even today they hesitate to come forward?

RAINN’s site states that 7% of girls in grades 5-8 and 12% of girls in grades 9-12 said they had been sexually abused, sourcing a 1998 Commonwealth Fund Survey of the Health of Adolescent Girls. One out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime and college age women are 4 times more likely to be sexually assaulted; numbers that ought to be considered when blithely shaming large swaths of your audience.

So, well, that’s the first time I’ve felt really uncomfortable reading a YA book review that wasn’t written by an over privileged teenage boy who resents being tasked with reading something he wouldn’t choose for himself, or someone insisting the material be burned in a pit in some backwoods town square. (Like the exact opposites of Colleen Mondor!) It’s mostly unsettling because I truly like what she’s been doing with Chasing Ray, one of my favorite YA feeds in my reader. But then, that’s the only reason why I would even say anything.

Links that discuss false accusations:

• False Rape Accusations and Rape Culture, and
• Victims vs Sluts, Hofstra’s False Rape and the Media by Amanda Hess at The Sexist
• Don’t Just Blame the Victim; Prosecute Her and
• L&O:SVU by Melissa McEwan at Shakesville
• The MRA Mirror by Sunless Nick at Shakesville
• The Horror! by Lesley Plum at Shakesville
• This is What Rape Culture Looks Like and
• Why the Charges are Civil (and Why That Doesn’t Mean She’s a Lying Golddigger) at Yes Means Yes

Link that explains why I have trouble making friends:

• Questioning Victims by me at Surplus Cats

This man, this hunka hunka macho manly man-ness, has sounded an alarm that’s totally new and the guys are probably going to give him some manner of phallus-shaped trophy for his exceptional work in preserving all that is great and good and worthwhile in the world: hard men.

You know hard men? The opposite of soft men who are the men we’ve created with our insistence on controlling our reproductive systems, which alters our strange womenbrains and confuses us into not wanting to go to Boner Town with the square-jawed types who don’t groom, love breaking their expensive electronic gadgets they shove carelessly into their pockets, and who apparently don’t read so have no need to transport books anywhere, ever? Right. Those guys.

Sisters, get ready for the Rebirth of Proper Manhood inspired by what will surely someday be known as Purcellian heroism! All of us. Yes, even us. Look, it is Tom Purcell’s world and it doesn’t matter that not everyone is heterosexual. Friends, I don’t make the rules. That’s why we have hard men like Tom Purcell, hardest and real-est of real hard men to tell it like it is.

Except, according to an earlier columns by Purcell, women have already won the war. So I’m a little confused, but that may just be my unfortunate genetic start as a gatherer of berries and not knowledge. Did you know we make more than the menfolk? Which made them sad and opt to give up… and go to the salon to make themselves pretty for us? No? Or that real men don’t like to clean, (but I guess all us women love it?) Well, good thing Tom Purcell is around to explain things with evolutionary psychology wankery, right? I could just keep linking and linking to his insightful take on previously-undiscussed topics, but I just don’t have time what with my amazing high salaried career and all the time I’m obviously spending oogling pop stars.

So, who is this wily and dangerous Tom Purcell, you ask? He is a nationally syndicated humor columnist. Yes, humor, that thing we women lack. But don’t worry, you can be sure he is a funny guy because his blurb says so. He is also single. But you knew that.

• My internet friend Lindsey Markel was mentioned in the current editon of Bitch Magazine. And she posted an excerpt from the introduction to her upcoming book, You Are Among Friends, in her blog. I cannot wait to get my hands on a copy! Lindsey is also performing in the one-woman play My Name is Rachel Corrie in October and if you are in the Champaign-Urbana area, I hope you’ll go see it!
• Melissa over at Shakesville takes a look at “Real” Christians and Christian Privilege and goes to town on Ray Comfort & Kirk Cameron all in the span of a two days. GO LISS!
• Awesome, awesome comic from Carolita Johnson in the Huffington Post, A Woman Walks Down the Street. The comments are an added kicker.
• I can’t narrow down the most enjoyable post on Tiger Beatdown. So you should just go read it all, subscribe to the feed, and thank me later (with beers).
• Do you want your blood to boil? Here: Are female students ‘a perk of the job’? And a follow-up from vice-chancellor douchebag himself. (Just in case you didn’t loathe him enough.)

My list is short this time because I am currently working on getting my resume out to as many places as possible, while playing around with my new Wacom tablet that I have pined for since 1998 when Jeff sent me a link to the site that took a million years to load via dial-up but has never left my heart for a single day in these eleven restless years. Do I like it? Yes. Does it make me feel clumsy and untalented? Well, yes. But when has that ever stopped me?

I feel like the lowest of the low sometimes even at events I’ve co-organized. Last Friday at our Drinking Skeptically it took me several minutes to convince an English grad student that he was welcome and needn’t be apologetic about his major! That’s when it clicked: I don’t feel welcome, or like anything I would contribute would be valued. And after months of being completely frustrated by comment threads at various blogs and forums, I feel like a lot of those folks attending would agree with my low estimation of my worth in this community. Do I want to spend a large chunk of money and my limited vacation time to socialize with them?

I’m really not so sure.

This is much more negative than I initially intended, but it’s been stewing for a while and it’s been keeping me from reading and being an active participant in communities I feel like I’ve previously gotten a lot from. And that is bullshit that needs to stop.

And it’s not as if the skeptical community doesn’t need writers and artists. Specifically graphic designers. Have you seen some of these websites?

Yeah. I said it.

Much respect and love for the first woman in space, Colonel-Engineer Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova.