This will probably be our last post on the blog, and to tell you that Wednesday and Thursday have disappeared into the aether. Maybe we’ll be back, maybe you’ll find us elsewhere.
Till then, ave atque vale.
Signed,
Margaret and Sarah.
I am a car, or a wallet, or possibly a house.
Delurking to say this:
When rape apologists, in the process of victim-blaming, compare the crime of sexual assault to theft or robbery or burglary – when they refer to how a survivor was dressed or behaved with allusions to unlocked car doors or open wallets or un-alarmed doors and windows – what they are saying is this:
That bodies are property. That the violation of someone’s bodily autonomy is akin to the theft of property. That someone’s right to sexual freedom and consent is nothing more than property.
In effect, then, we are to constantly erase or invisibilise our bodies from the public sphere. That is what they mean.
And that’s why it is so disingenuous a comparison. Because no one argues with the right of your car or wallet or house to exist, but our bodies must be taken out of the equation.
– M. We.
Trauma? Thou knowest nothing of trauma.
News 5 Tonight demands if Tin Pei Ling really went through ‘supposed “trauma”‘ (scare quotes theirs). Goh Chok Tong clarified that it was a ‘tongue-in-cheek medical metaphor’. Everyone is missing the point.
Yeah, as though misogyny and ageism weren’t enough, we have to be disablist.
1. You don’t put scare quotes over the word ‘trauma’ or behave with condescension toward the suggestion of psychological hurt. By doing so, you dismiss the real, lived experiences of many of us who experience anxiety, panic, and stress disorders.
2. You don’t make jokes about disability, for fuck’s sake, especially about a form of disability that’s already demeaned and erased in the public consciousness. It’s not tongue-in-cheek. It’s our daily lives.
No love,
Weds.
This was supposed to be a good week, too.
Can we stop already?
Oh, me and my mild, sensitive hysterical feminist survivor ways!
…no. Googling “tin pei ling fuck her” is using a gendered threat of rape, of aggressive masculine sexuality, to threaten a politician for her gender rather than her ideas or lack thereof.
I’m going to be keeping an eye on the search engine terms, people.
No love,
Wednesday
In Spite Of, or Because Of.
Whoever came to this blog by googling “tin pei ling + slut”? Get out. Get the fuck out of this place, and go and have a good think. I want no part of your politics.
You call yourselves advocates of democracy, you people shilling for the opposition with unthinking faith. Excuse my lack of enthusiasm. I see no freedom in your words or actions.
You just proved my fucking point about the undercurrent of misogyny under the thin veneer of political concern that’s going on so much right now.
Let me recapitulate:
(1) There is nothing wrong with criticising politicians.
(2) Politicians should be held accountable, after all.
(3) There is a lot wrong with framing criticism in terms of bigotry.
(4) Tin Pei Ling is being criticised in the language of misogyny.
(5) She is being called ‘a little girl’, infantilising a grown woman.
(6) She is being called a ‘gold-digger’, and hauled over the coals for her personal relationships. This is a culture where women are judged on their sexual histories and defined by their relationships with men, rather than considered on their own merit.
(7) Words like ‘cunt’, ‘slut’, and ‘bitch’ are being used to demean. Words have oppressive histories. Don’t even use the reclamation argument because reclamation only holds when it’s being deliberately reactionary and used by a member of the marginalised group.
(8) It is completely possible to criticise Tin Pei Ling without using the language and ideas of misogny.
Dear patriarchy, GTFO.
No love,
Wednesday
Weekday Blues 