The hardcore abstinence message of the conservative suburban youth groups I knew, and the poisonous atmosphere of normalized denial and rationalization, are basically training a generation of men and women who literally don’t understand what sexual consent looks like.
Eaton at Growing Up Goddy. A world without consent
(Source: protoslacker)
7[TW: rape] I asked the Congolese women; ‘give me the 5 major issues affecting Congolese women today’. Rape was number 4. Political participation was number 1. Economic empowerment was number 2. Domestic violence was number 3. And they qualified it; the rape you see is because we don’t have women in high places to effect the change that needs to be done. No.2, if we were economically empowered, we wouldn’t be in abusive relationships and will know how to handle ourselves.
But outsiders expected rape to be number 1 because that’s the global image of Congolese women. One Congolese woman asked where people got the idea that rape was their major problem. Someone answered her “if you don’t say so, the West won’t give you aid”.
Congolese women wanted to show their fellow sister how they’ve been sustaining their children and communities in midst of the violence they lived in. By the time the white people arrived, they changed their tune: ‘help, I’ve been raped. I’ve been abused’.
They’ve figured you all out. That’s the stories you white people want to hear. You travel to cry. So they will make you cry. The media never goes into any community to pick stories of how you survived and what positive things are happening. A pressman once asked me if I’ve been raped during the Liberian war and when I answered no, he passed the mike over my head. So the easiest thing for those who need media attention or aid is to talk about their personal history and say they were raped.
This is a similar situation across the globe for migrants who wanted papers after war; every time they went to the US consulate and told the truth, they were denied. When they went and told a sad story, the counselor cried and granted them their papers.
But outsiders expected rape to be number 1 because that’s the global image of Congolese women. One Congolese woman asked where people got the idea that rape was their major problem. Someone answered her “if you don’t say so, the West won’t give you aid”.
Congolese women wanted to show their fellow sister how they’ve been sustaining their children and communities in midst of the violence they lived in. By the time the white people arrived, they changed their tune: ‘help, I’ve been raped. I’ve been abused’.
They’ve figured you all out. That’s the stories you white people want to hear. You travel to cry. So they will make you cry. The media never goes into any community to pick stories of how you survived and what positive things are happening. A pressman once asked me if I’ve been raped during the Liberian war and when I answered no, he passed the mike over my head. So the easiest thing for those who need media attention or aid is to talk about their personal history and say they were raped.
Mighty Be Our Powers with Leymah Gbowee
Western media and charity need to portray AfricanS as helpless and meek because that is the global image of Africa they want to sustain.
This is threefold disquieting, undermining the narratives of Africans as helpless victims, of sexual violence as the eternally central concern of women’s lives, and of democratic progressivism as being futile on the “dark continent”.
(Source: thisisnotafrica, via arms--hearts)
How did this group of Nigerians become Jewish?
“Through a history of colonialism and proselytisation through Christian missionaries. Most Igbos became Christian. Some of them in the 1970s, 1980s, were proselytized – from the United States, actually – by what in the American setting would be often called Jews for Jesus, what in Nigeria they still call Messianic. Now, having practiced Messianic Judaism for many years, which is all of the customs and the practices of Judaism – Sabbath, prayer on Saturdays, wearing of the tallit, the prayer shawl – but they also believed in Jesus, which for normative Judaism, regular Judaism, just doesn’t fit. And after some years of questioning – because Nigerians are really religious people, they take religion seriously, they go to bed thinking about it – some of them started to say, ‘this doesn’t compute. If we’re supposed to believe in one God, then this theology of a son of God in addition to God doesn’t make sense.’ And then the Internet arose and they were exposed for the first time to world global Judaism.”
The world’s first “Internet Jews”
“They had exposure to Hebrew language, to how Jewish ritual is practiced throughout the world. The Internet arrived in Nigeria at the same time that many of these Igbos were breaking away from Messianic Judaism, as they thought of it, and were able to learn and had this great access to whatever is out on the Internet. And everything is out on the Internet! Including Rabbinic Judaism.”
A Growing Community Of Jews In Nigeria, Here & Now
(via new-aesthetic)
Conventional wisdom, and even science, has it that cutting off contact with an ex makes for a smoother recovery. But nowadays … it’s much more difficult to get distance from an ex. … It isn’t as easy as tearing your rotary phone from the wall. It isn’t even as simple as deleting an ex’s number from your cellphone. There’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest of the Internet with which to contend.
My ex’s live-tweeted marriage reminded me of this. So did my most recent breakup with a man whom I remain connected to via three social media platforms. But then there came yet another reminder this week — a study with a finding that will surprise no one: “Facebook stalking” an ex “may obstruct the process of healing and moving on from a past relationship.” You can no longer pretend that hitting “refresh” on your ex’s profile is helping you “process.
Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon
And the study in question.
In 30 years observations, Jane Goodall never saw one rape among the chimpanzees, our closest primate cousins. Though it’s not possible to draw firm conclusions about human behaviour from animals, Goodall’s findings, and many other recent studies, get us questioning the old myths we have about rape. One of the most persistent myths about rape is that male biology and primitive male sex urges drive men to rape. But current information indicates that rape is more a learned act of sexual violence that comes out of social beliefs that men have a right to dominate and control women. The fact that rape is learned means that we can work to change the underlying beliefs and eliminate rape from our communities.
Truth About Rape (via remnant)
(Source: slutwalkseattle, via theotherway)
The next day, an eco-anarchist group calling itself Individuals Tending Towards Savagery (ITS) claimed responsibility for the bombing in a 5,500-word diatribe against nanotechnology that it published online. Police found a charred copy of a similar text in the detritus of the explosion. The bombers said that Herrera had been targeted for his role as director of the technology-transfer centre at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (commonly known as Monterrey Tec), “one of the major universities that has staked everything on the development of nanotechnology”. The text talked of the potential for the field to cause environmental “nanocontamination”, and concluded that technology and civilization as a whole should be held responsible for any environmental catastrophe. Chillingly, the bombers listed another five researchers at Monterrey Tec as presumptive targets, as well as a further six universities.
Nanotechnology: Armed resistance, Nature
(via kenyatta)
And here is the dilemma we face as a civilization. We march collectively toward self-annihilation. Corporate capitalism, if left unchecked, will kill us. Yet we refuse, because we cannot think and no longer listen to those who do think, to see what is about to happen to us. We have created entertaining mechanisms to obscure and silence the harsh truths, from climate change to the collapse of globalization to our enslavement to corporate power, that will mean our self-destruction. If we can do nothing else we must, even as individuals, nurture the private dialogue and the solitude that make thought possible. It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.
(via theantidote)
