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Summary: Susannah Breslin mocks feminists (but evidently only feminists) who warn readers of unpleasant content with the text “trigger warning.” Whatever. Since I think such warnings are often a good idea I’ve created a freely-distributable badge people can use instead of the standard text and put it at the end of this post, along with cut-and-paste-able HTML code if you want to use it in your own posts.

Vanessa Valenti of Feministing, who titled her post “Susannah Breslin: Certifiable Asshole,” may actually feel more generous towards Breslin than I do.

Susannah Breslin, the writer who called feminism “cultural roadkill” has now taken it upon herself to mock the shit out of a very serious term: trigger warnings. You know, because it’s so uncool and passe to care about rape victims.

Her post on True/Slant today begins by calling us folks at Feministing self-victimizing, angry man-haters (*yawn*), setting the tone for this oh-so-expert account of contemporary feminism. What follows is joking banter about Feministing and other blogs’ use of trigger warnings with seemingly no knowledge of what they’re actually for:

Read the quote in context here.

If you follow the links to Breslin’s post (which I’m snit-ishly not going to post since I’m… pretty sure she’s mostly just trolling to boost her stats) you’ll see that she makes one modestly fair point in the midst of her otherwise general assholishness. I’ll get to the fair point in a moment.

First, though, I hadn’t really noticed that Feministing bloggers were particularly man-hating. Nor self-hating and/or self-victimizing. So fuck her.

Second point, Breslin claims she reads feminist blogs, including Feministing, “from time to time” but that “lately” she’s noticed that some posts are prefaced with the ZOMG!1!!-like phrase “****TRIGGER WARNING***” Since those things have been around for, like, years one wonders how often Breslin actually does read Feministing and other feminist blogs. As opposed to just pulling crap out of her certifiable ass.

For the record, the first comment on Breslin’s post, by someone named Sara Libby, makes the entirely sensible (and obvious) point that… (emphasis mine)

I actually wasn’t too familiar with the whole “trigger warning” phenomenon until I read this, so I went back and looked at the Feministing posts. I found most of them that included a warning talked about rape, and other serious stuff that I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe some people could get offended by (like, say, rape victims?). The Internet can be a very cold, uncaring place, and I don’t see what the problem is in providing readers with a little heads-up that they might encounter something offensive, particularly if you’re trying to build a community where people feel comfortable expressing their opinions.

Breslin’s justification for snarking about trigger warnings is that there’s triggering stuff all over the internet

I guess I should’ve posted a trigger warning with that WikiLeaks.org video. Oooops! Come to think of it, probably 87-percent of the internet needs a goddamn trigger warning these days

You’ll have to find the quote yourself, but that’s what she said.

This, of course, is true enough. And as I recall many of the sites that posted that WikiLeaks.org video, including major, mainstream, general-interest, and otherwise non-“self-victimizing” ones, actually did include warnings that the material could be upsetting. And/or triggering. If Beslin didn’t include a warning when she linked to that video well… she’s still an asshole.

Creative Commons
license.
I do agree with her that the standard text with all its asterisks, exclamations and capital letters does seem a little retro-MSDOS. So I took a couple of minutes with Photoshop and, thanks to a randomly-Googled tutorial (from the CSS Creme design site) I put together a colorful little badge that people can use instead. If they don’t want to create their own.

Use the following HTML code to insert the image in your own posts. It will float the image on the left-hand side of whatever paragraph you insert it in, allowing the surrounding text to flow around it.

<img alt=“Trigger Warning” title=“Trigger Warning” src=“http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cDVtg63O_Jc/S8VzA5JP2pI/AAAAAAAAAHs/_HQlWsz39ro/s1600/TriggerWarning.png” style=“float: left; margin: .5em;”/>

I do think it’s a good idea to replace the text with a graphic. (The HTML title and alt-text ensure accessablity on alternative browsers.) Feel free, of course, to make and use your own instead.

Summary: Reflections on a pointed question from a website that’s usually not on the forefront of feminist activism.

Angry Mouse, in a toweringly angry post at Daily Kos asks a question that, post Bart Stupak and Ben Nelson, keeps gaining traction: Compared to the (literally!) lunatic fringe teabaggers W exactly TF do NOW and NARAL and Emily’s List actually do anyway?

You know those emails? The ones from NOW and NARAL and Emily’s List that declare, with great urgency and lots of ALL CAPS and exclamation marks, that you must give money right now? Stop this bill! Block this nominee! Protect Roe! Save the Supreme Court! And give, give, give!!!

And since you often agree — why yes, I do want to stop this bill; why no, I do not want that nominee confirmed — you click and give. It won’t stop this bill or block that nominee, but you will get another email at the next crisis.

And it’s always a crisis. Even under a Democratic president, with a Democratic supermajority in Congress, the nation’s biggest feminist organizations are in crisis mode, raising money but unable to deliver results. They’re just as effective as they were under Bush. Which is to say, Not. At. All.

...

Remember way back in the fall of 2008, when one clever person decided to donate to Planned Parenthood in “honor” of Sarah Palin?

“Make a donation to Planned Parenthood,” the anonymous e-mail message urged. “Of any amount. In Sarah Palin’s name.”

The message, which began circulating widely on the Internet last week, had one more instruction: request that the personalized thank-you card from Planned Parenthood be sent to Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee and a vocal opponent of abortion, at the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Virginia.

So far, the scheme seems to be getting a strong response. As of Friday, Planned Parenthood had taken in $802,678 in donations from 31,313 people, said a spokesman for the organization, Tait Sye. More than two-thirds of the individuals are first-time donors to Planned Parenthood, Mr. Sye said, and money came in from all 50 states.

Nearly a million dollars raised for women’s health care, not by any of these organizations asking for money, but by one anonymous email. If it really is about the bottom line, if feminist advocacy has been reduced to how much money can be raised, what purpose do these organizations serve that can’t be achieved by one person with a good idea and dial-up?

Perhaps it is time for women to examine whether the largest organizations that claim to represent them are really delivering on their promises.

They’ve failed to organize the millions of supporters they have into a coherent and powerful movement. ‘Cause when your movement looks like an amateur mess compared with the “keep your government hands off my Medicare” teabaggers, you’re doing something wrong.

There’s quite a bit more here.

Angry Mouse is absolutely clear the problem isn’t feminism itself. Witness her endorsement of the Planned-Parent letter and its awesome grass-roots response. Which got a lot of acceleration from non-institutional feminist and progressive blogs and websites. (I first heard about it on either Feministing or Feministe.)

It’s also possible those organizations launch tons of initiatives that… um… just aren’t very visible, exciting, base-mobilizing, or particularly cost-effective compared to their high-visibility, highly exciting (or at least stress-elevating), highly-effective but clearly not-at-all base-rallying fundraising.

Just for the record I don’t want to hear that the deck is stacked against women in politics. Or even that the “establishment” welds the whip. Deck-stacking has not hampered Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann, for instance, both of whom are doing even though both are women and cordially despised by a conservative establishment that would very much prefer nice well-heeled white men like Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty. That these women’s most enthusiastic support comes not from the establishment but from the very demographics that, say, NOW says is most inimical to women: MRAs, super-patriots, evangelicals, secessionists, xenophobes, skinheads, and all-round knuckle-draggers. Also for the record I don’t want to hear yeah-buts about how Palin, or Bachmann, or Liz Cheney, or Michelle Malkin, or Kellyanne Conway, or Mary K. Ham, or Virginia Foxx, or (going back a generation or two) Margaret Thatcher, Ayn Rand, Phyllis Schlaffley, Jeane Kirkpatrick, or (before her welcome but peculiar turnaround) Arianna Huffington, and on and on and on were or are just parroting, mimicking, or sock-puppeting for behind-the-scenes male power brokers. Each one of them believes that shit way more passionately than any 10 John Boehners, Mitch McConnells, or Rupert Murdochs.

And finally, from my childhood encounters with conservative protestantism it’s very often women in churches who let their ministers know when they seem to be going soft on hard-line issues. The point is that if there’s a problem for feminists it’s probably got surprisingly little to do with the fact that women are advancing the issues and way more to do with the issues. And this is why, I think, it’s a mistaken strategy in… I dunno… industrial feminist organizations to imagine that “if you fundraise for it they will come.” And why I think it’s absolutely catastrophic to wait till the bus you’re being thrown has too much momentum to be stopped before saying anything about it. You’ve got to sell it. Promote it. In advance. Sell it to women, far too many of whom are on the bus! Even sell it to men! Who are served by the status quo better than women but only relatively so and only scarcely so. (On this point: if men were that much better served then you’d expect to see neither Mary Matlin advancing the status quo nor me feeling confined by it. Instead you see similar dynamics all over the place.)

Going back to Angry Mouse’s point about the Planned Parenthood fundraiser. One email, multiplied by a thousand forwards, reposts, and retweets turned into a million dollars in donations to an organization that, however perfectly or imperfectly, actually does something. That’s a lot of pent-up interest that in turn suggests there’s room for advocacy and action.

I mean… it’s… I mean… doesn’t it says something right there that Angry Mouse’s angry thesis appeared on the only-vaguely-sorta-gets-women’s-stuff DailyKOS rather than something like, oh, say, the organization-ought-to-be-its-core-mission National Organization for Women?

I feel really, really on thin ice saying this at all but it seems like two of the possible alternatives moving forward would be for, say, some serious reinvigoration of the aforementioned groups under the leadership of new generations of unapologetically feminist-activist women like Jessica Valenti or Pam Spaulding or Jill Filipovic… or else the establishment of additional organizations that might actually do something about the adverse gender climate instead of just complain about it.

Update: I should mention, as Angry Mouse does, that Stephanie Schriock, a Gen Xer, former Deaniac, and progressive political-organizing powerhouse, has just become the new president of Emily’s List. If she’s a feminist activist as well as a political pro that could be a promising development.

Hortense of Jezebel says

The folks at the The New York Times are having a hard time coming up with a proper name for this decade. Maybe you can help them out? My vote is for "The Double-Oh-Nos."

Read the quote in context here.

A hard time? Seriously? After the dot.com bust, eight years of the Bush administration, and a largely preventable economic collapse the NYT hasn't noticed it should be called the "aught naughts?"

No wonder people say print journalism is in decline!

This is a follow-up on yesterday’s post about how “just another crack-whore from the street” is a pretty accurate predictor whether a serial killer’s victim will be a) missed if she disappears, c) file a complaint or press charges if she survives, or c) will be taken seriously if she survives and files a complaint.

From the Times Online

Police [had] been called to Sowell’s house several times, most recently two weeks ago when a naked woman fell out of a first floor window, suffering cuts and scrapes. She declined to press charges.

...

The last visit they made was on September 22, just hours before a woman went to police to complain that Sowell had invited her to house for a drink, then become enraged, choking her with an extension cord and raping her.

It was not until last Thursday, October 29 – 37 days later – that officers followed up her complaint by visiting Sowell’s property, where they uncovered the first bodies. Sowell was arrested on Saturday.

Times Online, Nov. 4

So. Why do you suppose the “naked woman” declined to press charges? Why do you think they took 37 days before they bothered to follow up on

Finally, I started college in Olympia, Washington, at a time when police and everyone else believed the notorious Ted Bundy was still trying to harvest victims. Turned out he’d moved on literally weeks before I arrived. There were notoriously few clues about him back then — authorities had only recently linked a name, Ted, to him but weren’t sure if it was real or just an alias. There was nothing lackadaisical about the police response, the college’s response, or student-body response to Bundy.

Meanwhile, though, just 40 miles north the “Green River” killer, Gary Ridgeway, who was only just hitting his stride, had already murdered roughly as many street and subsistence prostitutes as Bundy had murdered “good” girls. It would be at least several years… really till bodies started being found weekly… that police and the public finally took notice.

Which I think supports my point that not only social but the legal obstacles make street and subsistence prostitutes particularly inviting targets for serial killers. And, Ted Bundy’s celebrity not withstanding, we see that in the raw numbers of serial-killer victims.

And just to be clear? Those same conditions make them every bit as vulnerable to all manner of non-lurid crimes such as rape, robbery, assault, and “regular” old murder.