On Saturday evening, Kelly Oxford tweeted the following:

“Rihanna is not a slut; she’s from Barbados.”

I don’t follow Oxford on Twitter. I don’t know why she is so popular (she has 349K followers on Twitter). Google searches basically reveal her to be Twitter famous. From what I gather, it’s her supposed caustic wit and biting one-liners on her Twitter account that garner her the attention she receives.

Enough about her, though. I’d like, rather, to talk about what she wrote about Rihanna and Barbados.

On Saturday, after Oxford tweeted this, I responded saying that her tweet was racist and sexist. I also mentioned that Oxford had attacked someone else on Twitter (@Farrensquare) because Farren Square had also called her out. In that tweet, I mentioned Oxford’s specific brand of attack: let her rabid followers know the Twitter handle of her critics and then immediately delete the tweets that did so (as she wrote and then deleted that night: “To me a conversation @ is not worth permanent talk for my feed. Keep jokes.”). It is impossible to go back through Oxford’s feed and see the bullying she does via Twitter.

When Oxford decided to respond to me, she did NOT respond to my claims that her tweet was racist or sexist. Instead, she leapt on the opportunity instead to respond to me about her deletion of tweets. And then, from that, I received a shit storm of hate from her followers, something for which Oxford herself did not want to take responsibility. She also claimed later (in another now-deleted tweet) to hate singling people out (“there are a billion people trying to get my attention everyday. I hate singling people out. It was a random pick.”). Uh-huh.

In thinking about this post, I have decided not to go into anymore detail about the bullying and derailing techniques that Oxford uses. Nor am I going to highlight or address specifically most of the hate tweets I received. I may save that for another post. It is always interesting the response one gets for calling out racist ideas as opposed to, you know, actually saying racist things.

Instead, I’m going now do what Oxford clearly didn’t want me to do. She did not want to discuss how her tweet was inappropriate, demeaning, and, yes, racist and sexist. It’s much easier if people are talking about you deleting tweets than whether the people criticizing you have any validity to their claims of racism and sexism and if, perhaps, just maybe, what you said was actually wrong and in poor taste. And, worst of all, NOT FUNNY.

Here goes…

Well, Andy Cuthbert, since you ask with such exasperation, I’d love to explain the “racism” angle. (side note: not sure why you need the scare quotes. Racism is an actual thing.)

I’m also going to spend some time rebutting this ridiculous statement:

Yes, Greg Ogan, Oxford was just joking! The magic blanket excuse that apparently makes it okay to say whatever you want without having to answer for what you’ve said.

First things first.

“Rihanna is not a slut; she’s from Barbados.”

Let’s translate this: “Rihanna is a slut, as are all people from Barbados.” 

To be fair, someone on Twitter did try to argue that Oxford wasn’t saying people from Barbados are sluts, just that when people go to Barbados on vacation they have lots of sex. Even if that is what Oxford meant (I don’t at all for one minute believe it was), her tweet was still racist and sexist out of ignorance.

We’ll go at it from this angle: What makes this statement funny?

First, for you to find this statement funny, you must find calling any woman a slut funny.

That is why this is a sexist statement. And I refuse to laugh along as we call another woman a slut.

In a remarkable post that I return to often, Melissa McEwan talks about the terrible bargain that women in our society have struck: “Men are allowed the easy comfort of their unexamined privilege, but my regard will always be shot through with a steely, anxious bolt of caution.” In this piece, as she details the many ways that women are supposed to be quiet and let male privilege go unquestioned even when it actively hurts the woman who remains silent, McEwan discusses the idea of women as sluts a couple of times. The most relevant for this post:

There are the insidious assumptions guiding our interactions—the supposition that I will regard being exceptionalized as a compliment (“you’re not like those other women”), and the presumption that I am an ally against certain kinds of women. Surely, we’re all in agreement that Britney Spears is a dirty slut who deserves nothing but a steady stream of misogynist vitriol whenever her name is mentioned, right? Always the subtle pressure to abandon my principles to trash this woman or that woman, as if I’ll never twig to the reality that there’s always a justification for unleashing the misogyny, for hating a woman in ways reserved only for women. I am exhorted to join in the cruel revelry, and when I refuse, suddenly the target is on my back. And so it goes.

While Oxford is not a man, she is, in this instance (and the many instances, actually, where she tweets sexist things about women), banking on the power of male privilege and patriarchal ideas about women and their engrained slutiness (and our absolute right to tell those women we deem slutty that they are, in fact, slutty) to protect her statement. See:

Eric Kaufman is right, y’all. To be fair, Rihanna may or may not be a slut, but she definitely walks around in a slut’s uniform. It doesn’t matter if Rihanna is actually a slut, just that we, as a society, have decided to call her that. And because she happens to make money doing things that society deems slutty, Oxford is totes in the right for calling her a slut. Of course, is it that Rihanna is slutty because she does certain things or are certain things considered slutty because Rihanna does them?

And even if – EVEN IF – we were to all agree that the things Rihanna does are objectively slutty, I still wouldn’t laugh when you call her a slut. Because those slutty things she does: sometimes wears provocative clothing, singing about and seeming to enjoy sex, doing drugs, not giving a fuck when you criticize her behavior…I sometimes do them. And plenty of famous men do them all the time and are not scrutinized and criticized and asked to answer for those choices. As a woman, I get NOTHING out of calling Rihanna a slut, except the warm, fuzzy feeling that I am participating in the safe male privilege zone that let’s me trash on other women without having to worry about criticism.

But Rihanna is not simply a woman. She is a black woman. And she is from Barbados, an island that is 166 sq miles in size, has a population of 281,000 people, roughly 252,000 of whom are black (90%).

“Rihanna is not a slut; she’s from Barbados.”

So, again I ask, what makes this statement funny?

For you to find this statement funny, you have to find funny the idea that an entire black population is slutty. You have to be willing to laugh at the slutiness of a black woman and black women more generally.

Whether you are aware of it or not, a large reason why that is funny to you is part of a long historical tradition of over-sexualizing black people. One of the main reasons you can so easily laugh at the idea that Barbados is a place full of sluts is that you know that Barbados is a land of black people. Part of how you know that is that their most famous celebrity is Rihanna, a black woman. You also know that Barbados is part of the Caribbean and that other islands in the Caribbean, like Jamaica (which appears much more often in the US cultural imagination than Barbados does), are overwhelmingly populated by black people.

The reason that black people have been oversexualized in our culture and the reason that Barbados is today 90% black is the same reason: the history of slavery. (yeah, shit just got heavy)

Since I’m writing my dissertation on 17th-century Barbados, slavery, and the history of the body, I have discussed the history of island before:

England founded the colony of Barbados in the mid 1620s.  There was no one on the island (the Spanish had been there in the previous century so it is possible that their diseases wiped out whatever native population existed on Barbados at that time).  In the late 1630s, the Dutch brought sugar from Brazil to the island and taught the English planters how to grow it.  In the 1640s, the English in Barbados started to buy African slaves in huge numbers, unseen anywhere in the English empire up to that point.  Within mere decades, the demographic population of the island had shifted so that whites were the minority.  By the 1680s, the African/black population greatly outnumbered the English/white population.  The closest any colony in America got to such a disparity in numbers between free and slave was South Carolina (which was settled by Barbadians, no less).  And the numbers there don’t even compare.

My point here is twofold.  First, the embrace of slavery by the English was fast and it was enormous.  Second, that it was in Barbados where the English learned to be slave owners, learned how to physically control huge populations of enslaved peoples, and learned how to grow and harvest sugar on a nearly industrial level (the first such industrial production in the English empire).  All other English colonies that had slaves looked to Barbados and the Englishmen who settled there to teach them how to run their plantations.

And, of course, Barbados was a cruel place.  I think that is a given.  But one thing that always strikes me is the fact that once sugar took off as an incredibly lucrative crop, the English learned that it was cheaper to work slaves to death and buy new ones than to sustain the lives of the enslaved and promote reproduction.  Clearly, this was a space that was all about profit (and there was a lot of it).  The causality of that thinking was the lives of Africans, and the implementation of a new, terrible institution of slavery.

These are things that my work revolves around.  Barbados as a space of slavery, violence, intimidation, but also intimacy, close quarters, and cultural fusion.

The population on Barbados today is a direct result of the fact that the British brought hundreds of thousands of Africans to the island and enslaved them in grueling, body-breaking, hard labor, all to the benefit of the white British man.

The sexuality of black people was an important part of the history of slavery because white slave owners made it an important part of the story.

Black enslaved women were over-sexualized because their bodies were not just producers of labor (in fields, domestically, etc.) but re-producers of the enslaved population. Simultaneously, slave owners exploited the availability and their ownership over these women’s bodies by raping them (or constantly threatening to rape them). When you create a narrative that black women are just naturally more promiscuous or more sexual than their white counterparts, you can much more easily justify how terribly you treat their bodies. It also functioned nicely to better circumscribe what behavior was appropriate for white women: the negation of what was “normal” for enslaved women. This would throw into even greater relief the sexualization of black women against the backdrop of the supposedly priggish, prudish, and not-sexual white women.

The idea that white women were so delicate in their sexuality, should be sheltered from it, and necessarily so, is a large part of why black men were often portrayed as being sexual predators (an idea that has held on quite forcefully). It was easy to justify punishing a black man for supposedly making sexual advances toward a white woman. Almost from the very beginning of slavery, there was deep anxiety about black men having sex with white women, even in places like the Caribbean where relatively few white women were. This lone predator idea about black men was reinforced by beliefs about black men not wanting to participate in family life. In the US, especially after the Revolution, when Southern slave owners were met with having to defend the system of slavery, they turned to a narrative of paternalism, which essentially said that slave owners were the fathers of their large plantation families and that they treated the enslaved as they did their children (of course, the reality was that plenty of enslaved people were actually their children because the system of slavery allowed for the full exploitation of black women’s bodies by their white slave owners). As slave owners came to paint themselves as fathers, as people who cared for families, they defined black men as men who were uninterested in participating in families, as people who did not want to be heads of household (I think we can see how powerful an idea that has been). Again, it was the system of slavery that made it very, very difficult for enslaved men to actually be the head of a household so whites could justify this idea by simply looking at broken enslaved families, which the slave owners themselves broke. And so we arrive at this narrative: black men, left to their own devices, would fuck whomever (clearly they are not committed to monogamy) and that included the vulnerable population of white women.

These ideas, then, manifested in terrible ways such as enslaved men and women being forced to have sex under duress from slave owners, sometimes at gun point with their lives on the line, in order to breed the next generation of slaves. The so-called father of gynecology, J. Marion Sims, who has a statue today in Central Park, did surgical experiments sans anesthesia on three Alabama slave women to learn how to surgically repair vesicovaginal fistulas. One woman he operated on more than 30 times. Black women, like Saarjite Baartman (The Hottentot Venus), would be put on display for white Englishmen to consume. Baartman “became the object of popular fascination when [she] was exhibited naked in a cage at Piccadilly, England” and, even after her death, “Pseudo-scientists interested in investigating “primitive sexuality” dissected and cast her genitals in wax” (via).

Okay. So, when Oxford wrote, “Rihanna is not a slut; she’s from Barbados,” which translates to “Rihanna is a slut and so are all Bajans,” Oxford is participating in a long, long history of going after black people for their sexuality. The joke is funny for her and her followers because inherent in the joke is the idea that black people are slutty. This is a centuries old idea, one born directly from the institution of slavery, which needed to see black women as sexually available and black men as potential sexual predators in order for white slave owners to justify the absolutely horrific, terrible, hard-to-speak of things they did to black people and their bodies. 

Black people, especially black women, suffer the consequences of these dehumanizing beliefs and this over-sexualization of their bodies on a daily basis still. That is why this “joke” is still relevant to people who want to see it as funny. It simultaneously acknowledges these racist ideas about black sexuality and laughs at them as if they are unimportant. Above all, it reinforces these ideas about black sexuality. Why would someone WANT to participate in all of that?

Some final thoughts before I address the idea that this is “just a joke.”

1) Rihanna is not just a black woman from Barbados (the joke would be bad enough if that was all). She is also a very public domestic abuse victim. And her abuser, quite famously, has trashed her credibility and his rabid fans have gone after her sexuality on many many occasions. Oxford’s joke doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Even Oxford’s own Twitter feed from today reveals the extremely vicious way that Chris Brown’s fans will attack anyone who says something remotely negative about him.

2) There is a huge, ongoing campaign on the island of Barbados today because HIV/AIDS is a major issue there, as it is throughout the Caribbean:

The Caribbean region has the highest HIV prevalence among adults outside Sub-Saharan Africa. Barbados has achieved significant results in the prevention and control of the epidemic, and new AIDS cases and AIDS mortality have significantly declined (46 percent and 72 percent, respectively) since the introduction of anti-retroviral treatment in 2001, however, estimated HIV prevalence continues to increase. It is projected that the HIV prevalence rate in Barbados increased from 1.3 percent in 2001 to 1.5 percent in 2005. This is due in part to the increasing survival rate of people receiving treatment, but also to inadequate adoption of safer sexual practices. [via]

Please tell me all about those sluts in Barbados. Your words mean nothing. History means nothing. The suffering of the present means nothing. Because you are so hahahahhaahha funny. 

“Rihanna is not a slut; she’s from Barbados” is sexist. It’s racist. And it’s lazy.

In a series of now-deleted tweets, Oxford made the following statements: “I get @’s like this every single day [by which she means my critiques] and I usually ignore. not sure why I bothered today. this is not permanent. Just sick of having to read misconstrued @’s like this ‘wow slut shaming and racism…super cool.’ to get to the nice @’s, which I love. People who follow me have a sense of my POV and know I’m not racist. People who walk in looking for a fight, do. That’s life.” I imagine she meant me, the person walking in looking for a fight, doesn’t know her POV.

I can find almost no information out about her at all. I do know she’s a thin white lady from Canada who got famous by making “jokes” like this one about Rihanna and Bajans. If Oxford wants to explain her POV beyond me having to read her entire Twitter feed (which I did spend plenty of time doing and do not see how anything from her Twitter feed is supposed to lead me to see her Rihanna/Barbados tweet as anything but normal for her brand of “humor”), I’d love to hear it. I won’t hold my breath.

I do have a piece of advice for Oxford. If you don’t want people to walk into your Twitter feed (which is, actually, how Twitter works, by the way) and call your tweets racist, don’t write racist shit on your Twitter feed. Again, no breath holding going on over here.

Finally, this isn’t about me being offended. What Oxford wrote is offensive. But beyond that, as Scott Madin writes:

I actually don’t care whether anyone is offended. Offense is a vague, amorphous concept, and it is completely subjective, as my friend pointed out.  Anyone can claim to be deeply, mortally offended by anything, and it may very well be true; even if it’s not, there’s no way to dispute it.  “You don’t really feel what you claim you feel,” is a line of argumentation that doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

What I care about is harm. What I ultimately said in this other argument was:

The problem with sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, ableist, etc., remarks and “jokes” is not that they’re offensive, but that by relying for their meaning on harmful cultural narratives about privileged and marginalized groups they reinforce those narratives, and the stronger those narratives are, the stronger the implicit biases with which people are indoctrinated are. That’s real harm, not just “offense.”

Rihanna does not need me to stick up for her. I didn’t respond to Oxford because she picked on Rihanna, even if I think that the part of joke that targets her is sexist.

I was defending all black women who are harmed by such “jokes.” I was defending Bajans, who live with consequences of slavery every day. It is not that these people even need me to defend them. I want to. Because what Oxford wrote was harmful in that it reinforced the narratives I talked about above and, in doing so, made those narratives stronger and, in turn, strengthened the implicit biases with which people are indoctrinated. As Scott says, THAT’S REAL HARM.

______________________________

On to the other point of this post…

So, to Lina Capova (who is here responding to a thread of tweets that included @belle_vous telling me to “Kill Yourself”) there is no point to my criticism because Oxford is a “comedy writer.”

As Brian Stuart wrote me on Twitter:

It puzzles me when comics insist on the importance of saying offensive things, but then righteously scold people who are offended. I have some sympathy for “offensive” humor, but it makes no sense artistically if you get bent out of shape when ppl are offended. I’m vastly more troubled by attempts to silence ppl for being offended than these supposed threats to the “freedom to offend”.

I would say this also applies to the comedian’s fans.

Lots of smart people have said lots of brilliant things about why “jokes” about marginalized people told by not-marginalized people are often not okay, especially when they are playing on stereotypes about the marginalized.

Melissa McEwan:

A racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a transphobe, a disablist, a fat-hater, a xenophobe, a privileged jerk of any stripe who belligerently wields hir privilege like a weapon. They don’t like being the butt of the joke.

And so “edgy” comedians tell “edgy” jokes that play to their sensibilities, lampooning the marginalized and the disempowered, crushing the underdog for the entertainment of the big dogs. (And hope that no one will heckle them.) But that’s not really edginess at all; it’s cowardice.

What’s edgy is mustering the fortitude to walk a line that refuses to pander to bullies. What’s edgy is finding the joke that says something new about an old topic; that challenges convention, not entrenches it; that risks something.

As Carrie Patrick has written, for people who wrote me on Saturday and said, “What Oxford wrote wasn’t racist!” or “Relax!” or “CALM THE FUCK DOWN”:

This sort of response creates a perfect 10 on the blinding insane berserker rageometer. Best of all, it shuts down all possible further rebuttal. The women who weren’t particularly upset or angry when they posted their original comments are now completely unable to express their further annoyance at being told to shut up and go away, because if they do, they’re just going to prove they Can’t Take A Joke.

So, here we are. By expressing an opinion that a joke about me was perhaps a little insulting to me, I have become that worst of all creatures, a woman with an opinion on the internet, otherwise known as a humorless bitch who needs to get a grip. I have a total lack of irony. I should settle down. I should relax. I should realize that people who were not the target of the joke have a much better right than me to decide whether I should be annoyed by it, and in fact, that they were the ones who should be offended, if anyone.

And they weren’t! So that’s all right, then.

From the Gender Blender Blog:

Joking about a type of oppression or a marginalized group gives people the false impression that we are beyond that oppression and that everything is okay.  But no, sexism isn’t over.  Racism isn’t over.  Ableism isn’t over.  Heterosexism isn’t over.  All forms of oppression are intertwined and function in conjunction to maintain the status quo.  Therefore we can never be “beyond racism” unless we are “beyond sexism” or any of the other forms of oppression.

These oh-so-humorous offensive jokes are so deeply institutionalized and embedded in our society as harmless things that we need not worry or make a big deal about.  But they are really just mechanisms to silence people from protesting these offensive “jokes” and shame those who do object as un-funny, un-fun losers.  Because yes, you’re just an overly sensitive girl who can’t take a goddamn joke for not laughing at a rape joke and refusing to let such triggering comments slip by as humor when it’s not funny to begin with.

Zee (this entire post is golden):

The kyriarchy gives members of privileged and non-privileged groups thousands of scripts with which to navigate its hierarchical social structure, but for this particular instance it gives us a script that slightly changes the normal joke-telling one. Instead of needing to gauge the audience for knowledge of the subject and if they’re likely to find it funny or not, the kyriarchy gives the offensive-joke-teller the knowledge that their audience will be fully aware of the subject at hand and that they will be well versed in the context that creates the joke’s implications or juxtapositions. It also gives the offensive-joke-teller assurances that privileged members of the audience will find the joke hilarious and that non-privileged members will at best find the joke funny because they’ve internalized the hateful messages of the kyriarchy or at worst laugh nervously to appease the privileged among them or stay silent. It is rarely expected that the butt of the jokes in these cases will call out the joke-teller for the joke’s offensiveness, and it’s definitely not expected that privileged members will defend the non-privileged. This is where the flamewars start. The joke-tellers kyriarchy granted script has been shattered, what they thought was true of the world is being forcefully shown to be wrong. They’ve been told their whole lives that cracking jokes that uphold the ideals of the kyriarchy will get them nothing but praise and forward momentum through the social rungs. Being met with opposition is the last thing they expect and can call into question their entire worldview, creating a lot of cognitive dissonance and anger.

It is amazing how often comedians (and those who defend them) turn to the “it’s just a joke” defense. This type of defense is similar to charges of “you’re just too sensitive” or “why do you care when there are real issues to be upset about?”, as if being sensitive is a bad thing or caring about this particular issue is a waste of time. [I owe Hubbit Ducreux, Zoie, and Heidi Swindell thanks for pointing this out to me today]

• Bill Maher 
• Louis CK (h/t Melissa McEwan)
• Ricky Gervaiss
• Tracy Morgan (h/t Megan B)
• Sacha Baron Cohen (the article I link to here is a great example of someone doing lots of work to justify why shit like this is “funny”)
• David Letterman (h/t sirfith)

The sad thing is that Oxford would probably rather be in this pantheon than be sensitive to the harm her “jokes” do.

I agree with Brian Stuart. The issue is not necessarily that Oxford said something bad. It’s that she shut down all criticism of her “joke” by bullying those who tried to address the problem. We have to allow some space for pushing boundaries but people wanting to push the boundaries MUST allow others to draw them back when they cross a line. Being “edgy” doesn’t mean that you no longer have to be a concerned and compassionate citizen of the world. If that is your definition of “edgy,” I don’t want anything to do with you.

______________________________

Bottom line: Oxford’s joke was not funny. I’m tired of even referring to it as a joke. Her sentence was racist, sexist, and out of line.

Actually, Vanessa North should have the final say on this analysis:

North: “privilege is being able to say something offensive, call it a joke, and get mad when people don’t find it funny.” BOOM. That could have been my entire blog post, in less than 140 characters. Thank you, Ms. North.

I’ll leave you all with this video from comedian Stewart Lee. Props to Lauren G for sending it to me. It starts to get good around 6:00. It hits a home run around 11:30:

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WAIT! I can’t go without sharing one more fan tweet:

Oh, Ritzi Cortez. You don’t know how many times I’ve read this tweet and just shook my head and laughed to myself.

Why do comedians have such purchase in our worlds? Why do fans give their objects of affection so much leeway? Things I will never understand.

From the website for the movie Always Together: Chinese-Jamaicans in Reggae Music:

From the first Mento record ever recorded on the island to the continuing popularity of performers like Black Chiney today, Chinese-Jamaicans have played a tremendous but little-recognized role in the development and spread of Jamaican music.

Check out the trailer for the film. This looks amazing.

This blog post is NSFW. The words in it, at least, are NSFW. Naughty, naughty descriptions lie ahead…

What I have read by her:

• Sinful
• Addicted
• Seduction & Scandal (Brethren Guardian #1)
• Pride & Passion (Brethren Guardian #2)
• Temptation and Twilight (Brethren Guardians #3) [MY REVIEW]

Here’s the short of it: NO ONE writes a sex scene like Charlotte Featherstone. Even in the books her Brethren Guardians series, which I enjoyed but am not sure I will eagerly flip back to them in the future, the sex scenes were stellar.

For example, from Pride & Passion. Adrian, the Duke of Sussex, is determined to marry Lucy Ashton, but she loves another. In his quest to convince her that he is the man for her, he uses some killer seduction:

As she crested, and tumbled, she called his name again, only to find herself freed, her hands thrown around his neck as he lifted her from the chair, and moved with her so swiftly that she found herself pressed up against the wall, her legs wrapped around his waist, her skirts and chemise raised and the slit in her drawers opened wide, and the feel of Adrian’s woolen trousers, his phallus hard and unyielding rubbing against her as his fingers pressed into her bottom.

“I want to come with you, to share this first time with you,” he growled before capturing her lips and devouring them with a hard and demanding kiss as he rubbed relentlessly against her, thrusting her up against the wall as they shared lips and tongues and breaths. And then they were sharing something so intimate that Lucy could only breathe his name, and listen as Adrian’s breath stopped altogether – the silence hung by a thread, and the world ceased to turn as their eyes opened and heat and wetness pooled between them, and they fell over the cliff together, her wrapped tightly around Sussex, a man she hadn’t wanted to like, let alone trust. She looked into his eyes, and saw something deeper than she ever had before.

Hot. Damn.

Evidence, part 2: from Addicted. A man, Lindsay, lost the love of his life, Anais, and, in response, turned to opium to cope. He struggles to overcome the addiction in order to win her back. At a critical point in the book, she goes to him but, in his drugged stupor, he believes her to be a figment of his imagination. And they have some hot, hot sex:

Twin cravings, he reminded himself. Oblivion and passion. Stirring, Anais, brushed against him, her lashes flickering until she was looking up at him. Her eyes were glazed, glassy with passion. He pressed forward, letting her feel his cock. His finger pressed in, filling the alluring bud between her plump buttocks. Her eyes went round as he matched the rhythm of his cock and finger. Taking her nipple into his mouth, he suckled her, building her up once more. He stroked her hard, filled her up with his finger. She arched and scratched her nails down his shoulders as she cried out in pleasure.

Beautiful fallen angel, he thought, watching her fall apart in his arms. Won’t you stay with me forever?

Yes.

Despite their sexy scenes, I have a hard time recommending the three Brethren Guardian books. I liked them. But I barely remember the first one. I felt it hard in the second one to understand why Lucy was so reluctant to like the Duke. And in the third one, I’m not sure how much I buy the turnaround that is the crux of the character arc of the male protagonist. And, across them all, I found the Brethren mysticism and mythology heavy handed at times and often seemed to drag down the pace of the plot instead of add to it.

But Sinful and Addiction are a different story.

Sinful’s plot (from Featherstone’s website):

In Victorian England vice of every kind can be purchased, and Matthew, the Earl of Wallingford, makes certain he avails himself of every possible pleasure. Bored and jaded, he is as well known for his coldness as for his licentious affairs with beautiful women.

While these numerous daliances fulfill Matthew’s every physical need, they secretly leave him numb and emotionally void. Until one night when he finds himself beaten, eyes bandaged and in the care of a nurse with the voice of an angel–and a gentle touch that sooths the darkness in him and makes him yearn for more.

Yet Jane Rankin is a lowly nurse, considered shy and plain by most. There is no place for her amongst the lords and ladies of aristocracy–despite Matthew’s growing craving for the fire that burns behind her earnest facade. And then there is Matthew’s secret. A secret so humiliating and scandalous it could destroy everyone he loves. A sin, he fears, not even the love of a good woman can take away…

And Matthew’s secret is devastating. One for which I wasn’t really prepared. There was also a major plot twist in Addicted that I did not see coming.

I believe these two stories fit a particular type of narrative that I am drawn to: the messy, complicated hell of life. And despite how hard life can be and the sacrifices people must make, these characters in Sinful and Addicted somehow find each other in the end. [Side note: these type of stories are also why I am so captivated with Cecilia Grant's storytelling.]

There is something much more cathartic perhaps, more triumphant maybe about two people overcoming giant self-made hurdles than simply reading about falling in love despite, say, personality differences (though, you know, I love those, too). Both books squeezed my heart and made me cry in certain places, often out of a feeling of despair for the characters, sometimes anger for their poor decision making and their atrocious lack of communication. Yet, the endings are satisfying, though not necessarily what you expect (especially so for Sinful, I’d say).

I would most certainly recommend these two books.

And any Featherstone book if you just want to read some wonderful sex scenes.

There is nothing earth-shattering or even original about this post. Nor do I believe for one second that what I am going to write about is a US phenomenon. But I don’t want to speak out of turn about sports culture in other places because I simply do not know enough to do so.

According to mashable.com:

NBA player Steve Blake and his wife have received a stream of hate — including at least one death threat — from fans viaTwitter after the Lakers guard missed a crucial shot in an important playoff game.

Blake had an open three-pointer that would have won the second game of the Lakers’ Western Conference Semifinals matchup against the Oklahoma City Thunder on Wednesday. But he missed, the Lakers went down 2-0 in the series and a comeback appears improbable.

So, death threats for players who don’t play awesomely in the big moments. But enable the rape of children for years on end and: “Penn State students stage mini-riot after Joe Paterno is fired“.

As Lis Mitchell said to me on Twitter: “It is horrible that sports culture valourizes performance over being a decent human being.”

And I responded (in many less words and less coherently) to her saying that this type of valorization also then seems to extend out to fans, who suddenly feel entitled to treat those who fail to do well at sports as less than worthy of even the lowest levels of respect. BUT if you do well at sports, then it’s almost as if you have carte blanche to do whatever you want, no matter how horrific the circumstances.

Sports culture in the US…we have a problem.

WTEWYE, your movie posters are the worst. I’m going to assume this bullshit gender essentializing and this desire to play off old and tired tropes about men and women around the topic of pregnancy and child rearing plagues your movie, too.

UPDATE: Carlos del Rio has sent me the full poster with the “It’s Too Late to Pull Out Now” nice and big and bright above the picture of the dudes with all the babies:

UPDATE #2: SS sent me this Movieline article: The 9 Most Scathing Critical Responses to What to Expect When You’re Expecting. As SS wrote me, “Glad to see no one’s buying this crap (although too many reviewers were offended the film wasn’t funny (Being offended: ur doing it wrong)).”

If you’re surprised the movie is crappy, raise your hand! Anybody??

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From movieline:

Signs continue to emerge suggesting that What to Expect When You’re Expecting is a real movie with real stars and a very real prospect of opening theatrically…. The latest indication: Character posters! It’s like The Avengers of maternity anthologies! If, that is, the Avengers labored superhumanly on behalf of the beleaguered population of Cringe City.

Who’s got it worse? It’s a tough call, right? I mean, I feel worst for Anna Kendrick, but Elizabeth Banks wields arguably the least convincing baby bump in modern moviegoing. And Cameron Diaz. That face! That posture!

Here are the posters (also available at movieline):

The pictures are bad enough (back to them in a second) but the quotes are atrocious:

• “I’m calling bull$#!%. Pregnancy sucks.”
• “I can’t wait to meet my baby.”
• “I just have all this extra energy. Plus I’m like crazy horny.”
• “You pee on a stick. It’s pretty idiot proof.”
• “If I knew I’d have a rack like this, I would’ve gotten knocked up years ago.”

These statements make me embarrassed to have ever been pregnant.

I know nothing about the book the movie is based on except that it is famous. I did not use it while I was pregnant and I’m not sure I have ever read it. But when I posted the movieline article on Facebook, my doula (who is as kick ass as human beings come) said “That became a client screening method for me. If that was their favorite resource, we probably weren’t going to click. To be honest, it does have some good info, but you have to wade through so much other junk that I’d rather read something else.”

Other friends on Facebook told me it wasn’t useful. Misty Clifton told me on Twitter that “I hated that book. So much so, I harbor residual loathing several years later, lol. I am definitely not seeing that movie.”@KushielsMoon said, “”What to Expect” is actually one of the worse pregnancy books. It’s condescending and anxiety inducing.” And @rachelcooks followed up with “It’s like, “Here are many details of a rare but horrible side effect of sth inconspicuous. But don’t worry about it!!”” Misty also said, “”Month Four: Your baby is developing ears…AND IT MIGHT BE DEAF!!!! Be sure to follow this routine and diet OR ELSE.”

Anyhow, let’s just go through and categorize what is wrong with these posters:

1) These are stick figure women with fake baby bumps strapped to them. Even Decker, who appears to be in her last month of pregnancy, is not at all bloated, no red face, no pimples. Nope. She’s just horny with lots of energy!

@KnittingRad‘s response to these picture: “why does Brooklyn Decker have a goddamn basketball stuffed under her shirt?” And @biscuitzombie said: “Brooklyn Decker looks like she is literally smuggling a soccer ball under her dress.”

My currently pregnant friend, KH, told me: “I totally look like that…oh wait, I look like a houseboat.”

2) As @biscuitzombie said: “Also, all the photoshopping and soft angles and smiles, my goodness. Pregnancy must only be a good thing with no side effects!”

My friend, RDR said on FB, “What I want to know is, will this movie address all bizarre things that happen to one’s body? I’m guessing there will be no discussion of ‘good gawd, why do I have so much snot all of a sudden,’ or ‘surprise, colostrum!’”

3) Of these five women, the only one that doesn’t have the baby bump here is the only woman who has actually been pregnant.

4) The hands underneath the stomach. When I posted this complaint on Twitter, my friends said:

• @biscuitzombie: “Well, yeah. It’s the ol’ “Look at me I am but a baby factory” move. Draws attention from anything else.”
• @catvoncat: “I think it is meant to convey, “No, no, I’m not fat! I’m just pregnant!””
• @KushielsMoon: “Well yes, otherwise you might mistake them for fat, & we all know women are completely afraid of being mistaken for fat.”

Now we all know. The hand under the pregnant belly is the universal sign for “I’m PREGNANT. NOT fat.”

5) These look like the covers for “Cosmo: Pregnant Edition.” Diaz’s face next to “Look at my awesome rack!” is best example.

I’m going to go ahead and judge this movie based on these ridiculously terrible, terrible posters. Therefore, as I said on Twitter, I plan on seeing this movie as many times as I saw The Help. And as @snipy said in reply, “can you see something negative times?” If only.

I can’t really say it any better than @diannapevensie said: “I feel sad for every woman involved with that hellfest of a movie.” Or, in shorter form, from Melissa McEwan: “Oh. My. God.”

FINALLY, my wonderful friend @iwriteplays (Laura Birek) is a funny, masterful photoshopper. On FB, she said, “WE NEED TO MAKE PARODY POSTERS OF THIS NOW. PREGNANT LADIES, PLEASE HELP!”  I posted that on Twitter and @biscuitzombie said, “Get ladies to shove basketballs under their clothes and pose with vapid smiles, throw on some garbage quote?” I put that suggestion back on FB and Laura’s response was, “”Nobody ever told me how uncomfortable this basketball would be under my shirt.” What to expect when you’re fake-expecting.” I told her that ALL parodies should then end in “And I’m crazy horny!”

The end result, my friends (as created by Laura):

BOOM!

Also, don’t go see this movie. And if you do, NEVER tell me about it.

Text submitted by MG, my doula. Pic by Laura:

Text provided by me and Mr. Scatx, pic by Laura:

[We are going to do away with “crazy” in future parody posters athttp://whattoexpectforreal.tumblr.com/ because it is ableist. It is here in these because they are mocking the original, albeit, ableist language of the WTEWYAE posters.]

[h/t]

According to the National Network of Abortion Funds, this what abortion funds are:

Abortion funds are groups of people who help women pay for their abortions.

Nearly all abortion funds are grassroots organizations that work directly with women and families who face obstacles to abortion. Funds help women to pay for an abortion and for travel to a clinic or for an overnight stay in a motel near a clinic. Some funds provide a place to stay in their own homes for women who have to travel a great distance. Many funds also help women to pay for contraception and the morning after pill.

Abortion funds are often women’s only allies as they try to raise money to pay for an abortion.

They are also at the forefront of a dynamic and growing movement that honors the leadership and voices of low-income women, young women, and women of color.

[NB: more people than just cis women need and want access to abortion care]

Lilith Fund helps low-income Texans from Waco south (there is a north Texas abortion fund: Texas Equal Access Fund).

How the hotline works: it is open three mornings a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). During the line’s open hours, people who need help funding their abortion call and leave messages giving basic information. A volunteer then transcribes that information into a document. That afternoon/evening, whatever volunteer is on duty, looks at the list and determines who to call first. You have a set amount of money per day (right now it is $880) that you can give out at your discretion. Most people’s abortion costs around $450 but go up from there. You get 20 to 25 people who call each day. $880 is NOT nearly enough to cover everyone who needs help. On average, each person the LF helps gets $75.

I was nervous about volunteering for the hotline. I was nervous about being responsible for dividing up the money (or, rather, turning people down). I was nervous about listening to and having to react in real time to people’s difficult situations. I assumed that it would be too much emotionally for me to handle.

I was wrong.

Yes, the stories are hard sometimes and making decisions regarding who to fund is stressful. But these things are balanced by (or even utterly destroyed by) the power of a single person saying, “Thank you” six times over, happy that anyone cares about their situation, relieved to receive help without judgement.

I have now volunteered twice with Lilith Fund and I can say two definitive things about it:

1. Even if you think you understand what limited resources and difficult access to abortion care means on the ground, until it either happens to you or you spend time talking to people to whom it affects, YOU DON’T KNOW.
2. Helping people get the abortions they want or need has been the most life-affirming thing I have done in a very long time. It has changed my life.

If you can, you should volunteer with your local abortion fund and/or donate. Find a list of abortion funds here.

I’m going to spend the rest of this post re-telling some of the stories that I have heard in the two (only TWO) hotline sessions that I have done. I hope to make this an on-going series as I volunteer each month with Lilith Fund.

These stories are important. These people are real. Their struggles are real. Their needs matter. 

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[Originally in this spot I had stories from people I talked to while working the hotline. A good friend of mine whom I respect more than almost anyone else in my life contacted me because they felt uncomfortable with me telling other people's stories. While I did get permission from people who work at Lilith Fund to publish these stories, I admit that I was initially hesitant. I do want to tell these stories and we need to tell abortion stories more often, especially the stories of people who are so rarely heard from or are not given space to talk about their experiences. But I'm feeling uncomfortable with my decision and for now, possibly forever, I've removed them.]

Donate to Lilith Fund here.

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UPDATE, May 16: I’m not going to be adding the stories back. At least not for a long while. And if I do, not in the same form. What I will definitely be doing, though, is writing a lot about the ethics of storytelling, which is now my brain’s main obsession.

But I do want to pull out some of the lessons I have learned thus far:

• An often-repeated lesson while working the hotline: you don’t know ANYTHING about people and the situations they face and why they make the choices they do. Calm demeanors do not indicate ambivalence or easy pasts or sanitized backgrounds.
• The Hyde amendment is the devil’s work. Medicaid does not cover abortions. Why? The Hyde Amendment:
  

  This provision, prohibiting federal Medicaid coverage of abortion in almost all circumstances, was the beginning of the anti-abortion movement’s post-Roe, all-out effort to ban abortion. It was a gateway bill, opening the door to the flood of restrictions which today constrict a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion, forcing women to “choose” between paying for other basic necessities and having an abortion, and, in too many cases, making abortion impossible. It became the precedent for all other denials of abortion funding, and reinforces our discriminatory, two-tier health care system in which people without financial resources cannot get the care they need.

  Without this 35-year old law, many people would already have the means to access the abortion they need without having to go through an abortion fund.

• It’s very common that people calling LF were using contraception when they got pregnant. Contraception fails to work all the time.
• There are times when LF literally saves people lives by helping them get the medical care they *need* for survival. When you volunteer with an abortion fund, you can help save people’s lives.

All semester, more than anything else, the students struggled on these reading quizzes (though “struggle” doesn’t even accurately describe it – overall, most people did just fine on them). So, I literally laughed out loud when I started reading one student’s responses to the final reading quiz of the semester:

[In response to the first two questions, they wrote out the lyrics to the opening sequence of every "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" episode.]

[In response to the question, "Why was that interesting?" this student wrote, "It is interesting because who would have thought a poor boy from the ghettos of Philadelphia could make it in an upscale city like Belair."]

I’m going to miss these students more than I imagined.

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From The Maddow Blog:

Mississippi State Representative Bubba Carpenter, speaking to the Alcorn County GOP on Thursday, said as much:

“We have literally stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi. Three blocks from the Capitol sits the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. A bill was drafted. It said, if you would perform an abortion in the state of Mississippi, you must be a certified OB/GYN and you must have admitting privileges to a hospital. Anybody here in the medical field knows how hard it is to get admitting privileges to a hospital…

“It’s going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to—  Roe vs. Wade. So we’ve done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They’re like, ‘Well, the poor pitiful women that can’t afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger. That’s what we’ve learned over and over and over.’

“But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi.”

Garland Grey recently wrote:

I think one of the most important things we could do is to continually find ways to make pro-choice people proud and forthright about their beliefs, to puff them up with moral superiority and FACTS and send them out into the world with the conviction that abortion isn’t shameful, not even a little, that supporting abortion is not merely the right thing to do but opposing abortion is morally obscene, and that anyone who questions these two premises is more invested in self-righteousness than they are in human lives. I think if we could drain the residual shame from the movement and create activists who aren’t simply pro-choice but who understand that being “pro-life” is a symptom of not knowing what the fuck you’re talking about and not giving a damn as long as you can think of yourself as morally superior, we could move this fight toward a decisive victory.

What Bubba Carpenter says here, that it doesn’t matter if people seeking abortions die because forcing people into unsafe abortions is a winning MORAL position, shows how completely morally-corrupt the anti-choice position actually is. Bubba Carpenter is “pro-life”, via Garland’s on-spot definition, because he doesn’t give a damn about any actual people. Carpenter sees himself as morally superior to every person who has gotten an abortion or will ever get one. It’s hard to see the humanity in others when you are looking down at them from so far up on high.

Bubba Carpenter and the “morality” that he represents are truly disgusting. And there is nothing – NOTHING – pro-life about it.