Angelina Jolie’s double mastectomy

By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, May 14, 2013 at 8:44 PM - 0 Comments

In 1991, the New York Times published a story called Women Who Lost Breasts Define Their Own Femininity. The piece was mostly positive; its message—that losing one breast, or both, does not extinguish one’s femininity or sexuality. Beyond their courage in the face of disease, the women seemed ordinary.

Angelina Jolie is not. She is a diplomat, an Oscar winner, a humanitarian and an eternal thorn in the side of Jennifer Aniston. She is Lara Croft.

And she’s just had a double mastectomy.

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Stephen Hawking and the Made in Israel Boycott

By Emma Teitel - Saturday, May 11, 2013 at 5:12 PM - 0 Comments

Matt Dunham/AP

Stephen Hawking has joined a motley crew of celebrities who have distanced themselves from the state of Israel. The list of personalities to do so includes Annie Lennox, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bran Van 3000 (remember them?).

Hawking has announced that he will not attend the Israeli Presidential Conference next month, an academic event set to explore “the central issues that will influence the face of our future.” It’s also a celebration of Israeli President Shimon Peres’ 90^th birthday.

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Gay Expectations: Brittney Griner vs. Jason Collins

By Emma Teitel - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at 10:41 PM - 0 Comments

I texted my sports-addicted dad with the news that veteran NBA player Jason Collins is gay.

“Who’s Jason Collins?” he wrote back.

Apparently before his very brave admission, Collins wasn’t a big deal. Brittney Griner, this year’s WNBA No. 1 draft pick—not to mention the only woman in professional basketball who can dunk—is a big deal.

She’s also recently, publicly, gay. Griner came out casually last week during an interview with USA Today. In fact, she didn’t come out so much as confirm what most people already thought they knew.

From USA Today:

She also took the advice of her parents, who always encouraged her to be herself. Griner has always embraced that advice, and it gave her the courage to open up to her parents about her sexuality. “I hadn’t come out completely,” she said. “It was kind of like, you know … I just hadn’t said it.”

In an interview with Sports Illustrated, Griner was equally laid back: “Being one that’s out, it’s just being who you are.” Media reaction was as placid as Griner’s acknowledgement. If you weren’t seeking out LGBT or WNBA news that day, you probably wouldn’t have known Griner was gay—or who she was in the first place. This seemed to irk some women in and out of the sports world who have since asserted that Jason Collins is not the first sports star to come out of the closet (as some news outlets proclaimed). There were many trailblazers — Brittney Griner included.

So why is a high-profile man’s coming-out story more newsworthy than a woman’s?

The answer is simple and separate from the fact men’s professional sports are infinitely more popular (and thus more newsworthy) than women’s athletics.

Travis Waldron at thinkprogress.org articulates it perfectly: “Because heterosexual women are assumed to be feminine,” he writes, “women who excel in male-dominated fields, or who exhibit strength normally associated with men, find themselves subject to having assumptions about their sexuality made on the basis of their bodies or their skills.” In other words, people assume if you are a woman who is heavily into sports—especially at a high level—you may be gay. Whether or not this assumption is fair or founded is irrelevant. In men’s sports, the pendulum swings the other way: people assume a man who is heavily into sports—especially at a high level—cannot be gay.

Coming out is never easy — no matter how many people “already know.” But defying other people’s expectations—as Collins and male athletes like him have to do—is an added pressure to a daunting and painful task.

Brittney Griner affirmed a stereotype. Jason Collins broke one. That is why his coming out received more attention. And in many ways, that is why it is more important.

Terrorists speak for themselves

By Emma Teitel - Friday, April 26, 2013 at 10:23 AM - 0 Comments

Acts of religiously motivated terrorism, or in Canada’s case, foiled plans of religiously motivated terrorism, do not generally bode well for multiculturalism.

In the wake of Boston, and news of the VIA Rail plot, people are left to wonder about the merits of cultural pluralism. What are we to make of terrorists and would-be terrorists who weren’t disciples of Osama bin Laden, but outwardly happy inhabitants of the Western world. These people studied here, made friends here, sang the national anthem beside us after the morning school bell. It’s easier to conceive of blind hatred when the person doing the hating has never come into direct contact with the thing he hates: the skinhead who has never met a Jew, the righteous belieber who has never read the Diary of Anne Frank. But these men knew us.

It’s easy to become disillusioned with multiculturalism and religious tolerance when we fixate on the people trying to obliterate these ideals. Yet look to the faith communities that these men thought they were a valuable part of and it becomes clear that multiculturalism, co-operation, tolerance — all the cheesy Canadian principles Fox News makes fun of us for—are alive and well. So too are we, quite possibly, because a Canadian imam tipped the RCMP about a shady member of his mosque—a potential religious extremist. If Raed Jaser and Chiheb Esseghaier are the villains in this story, the anonymous imam is our hero.

I don’t usually agree with Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, but I can’t fault him for these comments he made to the National Post:

“The community involvement in dealing with these kinds of activities is absolutely essential. In that context, I’d specifically want to point out the fact that the Muslim community was very instrumental in providing very crucial information that helped the police in this case.”

The actions of the Cambridge Muslim community speak for themselves. The Tsarnaevs’ mosque refused to give Tamerlan a funeral. Yusufi Vali, executive director of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Centre, Boston’s biggest mosque—denounced the brothers and their alleged crimes:

“I don’t care who or what these criminals claim to be, but I can never recognize these criminals as part of my city or my faith community. All of us Bostonians want these criminals to be brought to justice immediately. I am infuriated at the criminals of these bombings for trying to rip our city apart. We will remain united and not let them change who we are as Bostonians.”

Anyone cynical about multiculturalism and suspicious of foreigners in the wake of this month’s events would do well to remember that these suspects—Tamerlan and Dhokhar Tsarnaev, Raed Jaser and Chiheb Esseghaier—do not speak for their communities. But their communities have spoken for them, and their message is clear: Those guys are not with us.

Why shouldn’t everyone have a gun?

By Emma Teitel - Monday, April 22, 2013 at 6:26 PM - 0 Comments

Shortly after the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly bombed their own city and a day before they took their armory to Watertown, the U.S. Senate defeated a bi-partisan gun control amendment that aimed to expand background checks for gun buyers. President Obama was furious. Vice President Joe Biden verged on tears, while Newtown families in Washington wept openly.

“We’ll return home now, disappointed but not defeated,” said Mark Barden, whose seven-year-old was one of 20 children shot and killed by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. “We return home with a determination that change will happen. Maybe not today, but it will happen. It will happen soon.”

Or perhaps not at all. In the wake of Boston some might see heightened hope for the gun control lobby. Paul M. Barrett at Bloomberg Businessweek sees the opposite:

“I’ll predict that the unrest emanating from Boston will benefit the National Rifle Association and its allies in their campaign for widespread individual firearm ownership. For better or worse, the pro-gun side thrives on heightened anxiety … As any gun manufacturer will tell you, the 9/11 attacks helped sales at firearm counters around the country and strengthened the NRA’s hand in lobbying against greater federal restrictions.”

Arkansas State Representative and long-time NRA member Nate Bell tweeted the following on the weekend: “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?”  Cain TV —Herman Cain’s TV network—was equally subtle: “Just wondering: wouldn’t it be good right now if everyone in Boston had a gun?”

To follow the NRA’s logic—“the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun”—the more good guys with guns, the better. The more gun owners who are “law-abiding citizens”—to use the right’s new favourite expression (“job creators” is so 2012)–the less likely criminals are to shoot up the neighbourhood and hide in your boat. According to the NRA, merely following the law is proof you should have unlimited access to the tools most convenient for breaking it. The gun lobby doesn’t just thrive on fear mongering, or  “heightened anxiety,” as Barrett calls it. It thrives on the myth that the law-abiding citizen will never cease to be one. And so its leaders ask, every time a new measure comes before the Senate, every time a violent tragedy strikes somewhere in their country:

Why should harmless, law-abiding citizens, be inconvenienced and insulted with extensive background checks when we have no reason to fear them?

The answer is simple: Until last week we had no apparent reason to fear a person like Dzhohkar Tsarnaev, the “popular” teenage wrestler, handsome stoner, and — at least as far as his father is concerned—“angel” on Earth.  Until last week, the brothers Tsarnaev were seemingly harmless, law-abiding citizens. (The older brother’s rumoured domestic violence charge has not yet been verified and there’s nothing illegal about watching unsavoury YouTube videos.) Neither showed any desire to commit mass murder. Everyone’s query, now that four people are dead and nearly 200 are injured, about how two supposedly normal individuals could be capable of such atrocities, is in essence, an answer. It’s the answer to the gun-control, background-check debate: we never know, ultimately, who is capable of evil and who isn’t. We only talk about “root causes” once they’ve torn through the earth and fulfilled their twisted purpose. The Boston Marathon bombing isn’t proof that people need weapons to protect themselves from monsters. It’s proof that any one of us could be a monster. We are all law-abiding citizens until we aren’t.

Why shouldn’t “everyone in Boston have a gun?” Because until last week, Dzhohkar Tsarnaev was everyone. No one today would protect his right to forego an extensive background check on the purchase of a weapon. So why last week? Why ever?

The moral universe of Anonymous

By Emma Teitel - Friday, April 12, 2013 at 5:56 PM - 0 Comments

The hacktivist group, Anonymous, is known for vigilante justice—or hooliganism, depending on who you ask—but its role in the enormous public backlash to Nova Scotia teen Rehtaeh Parsons’ tragic death last week is not so black and white. When Amanda Todd took her own life after merciless cyber-bullying last year, Anonymous implicated B.C. resident Kody Maxson — later widely reported to be the wrong man. Maxson says he received over 50 death threats after the hacktivist group spread his name around the web, accusing him of tormenting Todd.

This time around, however, Anonymous appears more strategic, probably because whomever wears the mask in Nova Scotia is not the same person(s) who slandered Maxson in British Columbia. This Anonymous hasn’t used vigilante justice to expose Parsons’ alleged rapists. It’s used the threat of vigilante justice to move the authorities to action. If the RCMP doesn’t act fast, in other words, Anonymous claims it will release the names of Parsons’ alleged rapists. [Editor's note: RCMP have since announced that they have reopened their investigation.] The group says it has obtained an actual confession from one of the boys involved in the alleged rape. Excerpts from the group’s most recent statement, below:

  A 17-year-old girl killed herself because the police failed to do their jobs…

We do not seek vigilante justice. If those who we believe are guilty are exonerated in a court of law, Anonymous will disappear from Nova Scotia.

Is it necessary for Anonymous to be involved in this case? Yes. For a moment lets set aside the theatrics, the masks and the labels. We are group of concerned citizens that have recognized an injustice in the system. We have taken it upon ourselves to point out that injustice to the public and we are asking the police to correct their incompetent handling of this case–a young girl has already died from it.

Robin Hood doesn’t usually work with the Sheriff of Nottingham. This is, in my view, a much more sophisticated, socially conscious, breed of Anonymous. Not everyone would agree, however. This afternoon I heard from a Halifax man in his twenties who is a friend of one of Parsons’ alleged rapists. He wishes to remain anonymous (in the traditional sense of the word). He believes Anonymous is doing “the right thing, the wrong way.” He is concerned that innocent people will be implicated in the group’s search for justice. “This is the problem with people taking it into their own hands,” he says. “Now their [those implicated] lives are at risk.” He says that his friend received threats prior to Anonymous’ public statements, “but nothing in comparison to now.” It hasn’t been easy for him, either: He’s received emails from friends and acquaintances on Facebook suggesting he is “defending rapists.” He even went so far as to compare the actions of Anonymous to cyber-bullying itself.

Whatever your thoughts on cyber vigilantism, there is no question that the actions of the person(s) behind Anonymous in this particular case has jump-started a remarkably stalled justice system. The RCMP is of course propelled to act because of public outrage, but the hacktivists’ blackmailing has given them a firm deadline. When tragedies like these occur, people want answers, and they want them fast. Right or wrong, Anonymous delivers.

Cultural barbaric practices here and there

By Emma Teitel - Friday, April 12, 2013 at 12:50 PM - 0 Comments

NDP immigration critic Jinny Sims recently revealed that she is uncomfortable with the revised edition of the Welcome to Canada guide—a 146-page document compiled by Citizenship and Immigration Canada and presented last week by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. Sims doesn’t care about the guide’s monarchist bent, or its omission of  ”O Canada” lyrics. But she does take umbrage with the following passage:

“Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, honour killings, female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence. Those guilty of these crimes are severely punished under Canada’s criminal laws.”

Sims’ problem isn’t with sentiment (she agrees such crimes are barbaric). It’s with semantics.

“All of those practices are barbaric, but they are barbaric no matter which culture they happen in,” she explained. “As soon as you put the word ‘cultural’ in there, you are putting it as if it doesn’t happen here.”

I called Sims and asked her to elaborate. Why the opposition to the word “cultural?”

“It is barbaric,” she said. “You don’t need any other adjective. They are barbaric. Period.”

I tried to press her:  Isn’t there a cultural difference, I argued, when you’re dealing with immigrants who are coming from a place where certain barbaric practices are condoned? Doesn’t the cultural acceptance of those practices render them culturally barbaric, as opposed to just plain old barbaric?

We have our fair share of gender violence, of course, I argued, but our culture rejects it overwhelmingly as immoral. That’s a stark cultural difference.

Sims didn’t want to talk semantics, or ethnicity. When asked if the word “cultural” stigmatizes certain cultures, she changed the subject to the Conservatives.

“I see a little bit of hypocrisy,” she said. “We’re telling newcomers all of these things are barbaric, but my question is, what has this government actually done? What has the government done right here in Canada and internationally to address those issues?”

Although Sims wouldn’t say directly why she objects to the word “cultural,”  the obfuscation in her answers leads me to the following:

Describing vaginal mutilation and honour killings in a cultural context is inappropriate, she and others probably feel, because there is gender violence in Canada. Therefore, labelling imported gender violence as “cultural” is potentially racist and misleading. The same barbaric things happen here as well. Or as Sims said, on average, “every six days a Canadian woman is killed by her partner.”

Forgetting for a moment that the incidence of vaginal mutilation in Canada is probably lower than it is in Djibouti, there’s a glaring logical error in this argument: it confuses behaviour with attitude.

It may be true that gender-based violence and other barbaric practices occur “here” and “there,” as Sims suggests. But if you mutilate a child’s genitals here, you go to jail; there you carry on and go about your business. Culture is attitude.

Jinny Sims likely feels that by condemning certain “barbaric cultural practices,” we are judging entire countries and civilizations. But when behaviours are antithetical to what we believe and at odds with what we consider to be civilized, it’s our responsibility to underline our antipathy in terms that leave no room for misinterpretation.

The “Welcome to Canada” guide says we are a tolerant society, but our tolerance does not extend to intolerance or savagery — here or there. The Canadian government’s rejection of cultural barbaric practices from afar is not a tacit approval of cultural barbaric practices at home. It is a clear message to our immigrant population that where gender violence is concerned, there are no sacred cows.

When I was an undergrad, I tutored adult ESL at a public library. My students were women, the majority of them immigrants from theocracies where “barbaric cultural practices” aren’t barbaric — they’re what you do on a Tuesday afternoon. Many told stories I will not repeat here and don’t like to think about. But I am reminded of their words every time a well-intentioned person like Justin Trudeau or Jinny Sims equivocates and obfuscates in the name of cultural sensitivity.

I am also reminded of the time I tried to discuss with my ESL students, this strange breed of well-intentioned Canadians (which for me, at that time, was a university classroom of white feminists debating the freeing qualities of the burka). They were, I assured my students, really well-intentioned. My students laughed, loudly.

They thought I was telling a joke.

Spring Breakers: The emperor’s new bikini

By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, April 2, 2013 at 11:59 AM - 0 Comments

I know I’m a few days late to the party, but if spring break is forever, as James Franco’s “Alien” reminds us every 15 seconds in Skrillex’s 92-minute music video Harmony Korine’s latest think piece, then I have plenty of time to kill. I never intended to write about Spring Breakers, until I saw it on Saturday night and have since felt worse than Stan and Kenny post Passion of the Christ. I want my money back. I want to round up my best girlfriends, invest in some pink balaclavas, day glo bikinis, and squirt guns, and hold up Harmony Korine’s house like it’s the chicken shack and I need to get myself to Florida, stat.

For some reason I find myself almost entirely alone in this sentiment, which leads me to believe that either the film’s greatness was lost on me (I am a boring nube and just don’t get it) or perhaps, Spring Breakers is the Emperor’s New Clothes of our day: a nude spectacle critics are falling over themselves to endorse. Sure it lags a bit, they say, but in a self conscious way. Can’t you see? It’s laughing at itself. It’s ironic. It’s rebellious. It’s a searing indictment of Western hedonism and materialism. It’s the only American movie that matters right now.

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Republican ‘comes out’ in support of gay marriage, liberal cynics attack

By Emma Teitel - Saturday, March 16, 2013 at 9:47 AM - 0 Comments

Something very good happened in the United States this week: Rob Portman, the Republican senator from Ohio, who co-sponsored DOMA and was once favoured to be Mitt Romney’s running mate, penned an editorial in the Columbus Dispatch, announcing his newfound support for gay marriage. He began to change his mind on the issue, he wrote, after his son Will came out of the closet two years ago. Here he is, below:

“At the time my position on marriage for same-sex couples was rooted in my faith tradition that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman. Knowing that my son is gay prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective: that of a dad who wants all three of his kids to lead happy, meaningful lives with the people they love.”

For anyone unaffiliated with NOM, it would seem like pretty heartwarming stuff—good fodder for the next marriage equality PSA, or in the very least, something for Ellen DeGeneres to dance about. The consensus among progressive pundits, however, was decidedly different.

Rob Portman made the right choice, they argued, but his history of wrong ones (voting against gay rights) overrides that. Changing your mind for personal reasons is selfish. The only noble about-face is an altruistic one.

Witness below, a living example of Oscar Wilde’s observation that a “cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Igor Volsky, the managing editor of ThingProgress.org, on Twitter:

“Kind of sad that Rob Portman probably wouldn’t have come out for marriage equality if his son wasn’t gay.”

Noah Berlatsky in The Atlantic:

“Portman says he changed his mind because he looked at his son and wanted him to have a happy life. But the gay people to whom Portman was denying marriage before his conversion—those people were also someone’s sons and daughters. Does Portman only care about suffering when it occurs in his family?”

Steve Benen, on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC blog:

“I’m genuinely glad Portman has done the right thing, and can only hope it encourages other Republicans to do the same. What I find discouraging, though, is that the Republican senator was content to support discriminatory policies until they affected someone he personally cares about. What about everyone else’s sons and daughters? Why must empathy among conservatives be tied so directly to their own personal interactions?”

The moral posturing would make Moses cringe.

Personal interaction has inspired practically all activism and ethical choice throughout history. We don’t discredit abolitionists who rejected slavery because of personal encounters with slaves, nor do we doubt the sincerity of activist parents who champion causes that affect their own children. Unless you are on the list of possibly two people in human history and imagination whose empathy is not tied to their own personal interactions (Jesus and God?), perhaps you should keep your righteous indignation to yourself.

Portman’s critics refuse to acknowledge that overcoming prejudice and changing one’s mind—for whatever reason—is a really big deal. It’s something that should be commended, especially when you come from an enormously anti-equality environment, in which minds do not change overnight.

Being gay is not a choice, but neither is being born to a socially conservative, Methodist family. The way a person is raised—to believe homosexuality is a grave sin for example—is as beyond his control as his sexual orientation. No one is immune to child rearing. I was not immune to my own secular Jewish, liberal upbringing, which instilled in me two core principles: that it’s perfectly okay to be gay but it’s not okay to drink milk with dinner. Had those principles been reversed, as I’m guessing they were in the Portman household, I don’t know what I would believe. I don’t know if I would have the courage to challenge my convictions as Rob Portman has, and announce publicly that they have changed. I don’t know because I am lucky to have never had to make such a choice. And I suspect, neither have any of the cynics above. It’s easy to love everyone and everything with conviction when you were never taught to hate.

I understand the urge to dismiss Portman and people like him—people who come out for equality later in life–if you have always been “out” yourself. But to dismiss him on those grounds is to lose sight of the bigger picture: Portman’s change is a boon for gay rights.  And celebrating that change is an even bigger boon. It lets others know that if or when they follow suit, they too will be celebrated. They may lose friends in one corner, but they’ll gain a whole lot more, somewhere else. Chiding Rob Portman for his homophobic past isn’t bad for Rob Portman: it’s bad for gay rights. It leaves progressives in the closet and open-minded people in the dark–caught between one community that will denounce them for thinking differently, and another, for not thinking differently soon enough.

There will come a time when Republican lawmakers overwhelmingly support same-sex marriage, because it would be political suicide to do otherwise. If the pro-equality movement in the United States wants that time to come sooner rather than later, it should give its newest members an extra warm welcome.

Sarah Thomson vs. Rob Ford: The court of public opinion is often unfair

By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

David Cooper/Toronto Star

On the eve of International Women’s Day last week, Sarah Thomson, the publisher of Women’s Post magazine, attended a party for the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee, where she was allegedly groped and propositioned by an “arrogant” and “outrageous” Rob Ford. The Toronto mayor grabbed her buttocks, Thomson claims, and expressed regret that she didn’t join him in Florida the week before, when his “wife wasn’t there.” She went even further—suggesting on morning radio that Ford might have been high on cocaine at the party because he was “talking fast.” Thomson went public with her claims via Facebook the morning after the alleged groping, and has since been deemed a thoroughly unreliable narrator. Not only because there are problems with her story (two other municipal councillors claim to have heard her telling a friend about a plan to entrap the mayor) but, considerably more disturbing, because people just don’t like her. She’s obnoxious, she has unconvincing political slogans, she’s too skinny: these are just a few of the completely unrelated Sarah Thomson criticisms circulating the Internet at the moment. Tarek Fatah, the writer and activist, criticized the Toronto publisher for being rich (he assumed, incorrectly, on Twitter, that she is “from the richest family in Canada,” those other Thomsons). Others have attacked her for her employment of the word “ass” in describing the incident (as in, “the mayor grabbed my ass”) and even for speaking publicly about the incident in the first place.

In other words, being modest—and not rich—would seem to be the preferred prerequisites for someone who is groped. Oh, how far we’ve come. But it doesn’t stop at modesty. Once you’ve been groped, there are, apparently, exactly two things you can do about it. Here’s Christie Blatchford, spelling out those two things, in the National Post: “If Ms. Thomson believed she was sexually assaulted, she should have complained to a traditional body with the expertise to conduct a proper investigation, like the police. If she believed the mayor had just been a boor, she should have kept her mouth shut; wherever did the notion of discretion among ostensibly capable adults go?”

Press charges or keep quiet. Surely there is a happy medium in such a situation.

My ass, for example, has been grabbed more times than I can count, mostly in clubs and bars, and I haven’t once pressed charges. For me—and I suspect Thomson feels the same way—public groping is a momentarily perverse invasion of privacy, not an act of sexual violence. (It’s also incredibly hard to prove.) It makes me mad, not necessarily sad. But quiet? Never. In fact, on the particular ass-grabbing occasions I can recall, I sought out my girlfriends and we tried as best we could to publicly shame the guy responsible. We even had a technique at nightclubs—where dancing has devolved into arrhythmic mounting—of banding together and collectively remounting the guy who had groped us. It was the biblical solution to public groping: an ass for an ass.

Women have many choices in exacting revenge in the event of a public groping. They can be as immodest as they like—and yes, Tarek Fatah: as perversely rich, too.

And the notion that all sexual assault claims made by women who don’t go to the police are automatically false or at the very least suspicious is outrageous. According to a survey last year, 83 per cent of women who are sexually assaulted choose not to report it to the police because, ironically, they are convinced their attackers will never be brought to justice.

Still, as much as it pains me to say, some critics are right about one thing: Sarah Thomson may have made the wrong choice. Not about speaking out, but about with whom she is currently speaking. She didn’t go to the police with her accusation, perhaps because of the reasons outlined above. And she didn’t go to Rob Ford, to confront him directly. Instead, she came to us, the media. (And we aren’t, traditionally, known for our fair-minded and reasonable judgment.)

She chose to air her grievances not in a court of law but solely in the court of public opinion, where she is subject to the same scrutiny as her alleged abuser. She chose to deal with the incursion privately but in the most public setting, thereby forfeiting the protections of both realms. She chose the shaming route. She took the route of the 22-year-old at a nightclub, which, while it works in that realm, doesn’t work as well for the publisher of a magazine and a former contender for mayor.

I tend to believe she’s telling the truth, but because of her potentially libellous finger-pointing, refusal to consult police and utter lack of proof, the truth is something we may never discover. In a court of law, we might. In a court of law, Rob Ford would be innocent until proven guilty. But in the court of public opinion, Sarah Thomson is, unfortunately, guilty until proven innocent.

Why women’s studies needs an extreme makeover

By Emma Teitel - Friday, March 8, 2013 at 4:32 PM - 0 Comments

Janice Fiamengo, a professor who advocates for men’s rights, at lecture at the University of Toronto on Thursday evening. (Photo by Josh Dehaas, Macleans)

Nothing says free speech like pulling the fire alarm. It was a quarter past seven last night when police emptied U of T’s George Ignatieff Theatre. Keynote speaker Dr. Janice Fiamengo, an English professor at the University of Ottawa, rolled her eyes and adjusted her blouse as the crowd poured out of the building and onto the sidewalk to mingle with the small throng of protesters—pretty girls with big placards and little patience. They wanted Dr. Fiamengo to take her message elsewhere. But firemen came and went, and the professor, once a radical feminist, proceeded to do what the University of Toronto Men’s Issues Awareness Society, and the Canadian Association for Equality invited her to do: denounce women’s studies.

The discipline has devolved into an “intellectually incoherent and dishonest” one, she argued, replacing a “callow set of slogans for real thought.” It’s man-hating, anti-Western, and fundamentally illiberal. “It champions a “kind of masculinity that isn’t very masculine at all,” and shuts down freedom of debate, hence the fire alarm.

This message was quite pleasing to the minority in the room—greying baby boomers of  the pro-Fiamengo, Men’s rights camp–and exceedingly distressing to the majority—by the looks of it, gender studies majors and people who would, if given the opportunity, personally execute Rob Ford.  It looked like a small contingent of CARP wandered, bemused, into a Bon Iver concert.

Appearances aside though, it was a meeting of truly lunatic minds.

Fiamengo opened the lecture with a recording of a song written by a male friend: a satirical folk number about the need for men to rise up and take back their masculinity from gender-bending feminists. “Stand our ground/defend our den/it’s time we learned to be men again.” And then there was this: “You don’t have to sit down to pee.”

From here things got progressively awkward. She referenced the male to female death ratio on the Titanic, and declared that “self sacrifice and heroism are not exclusive to men,” “but they are distinctive to men.” Students scowled behind their wayfarers. She railed against affirmative action, a family court system skewed unjustly to favour mothers over fathers, and the deep vein of anti-Western sentiment running through academic feminism that makes it okay to decry gender inequality in the West, and keep quiet about vaginal mutilation and honour killings in the East.

The women’s studies crowd looked constipated. Fiamengo’s arguments weren’t going down easy, this one—her best—in particular: women’s studies “can’t be about the pursuit of truth” because it has an “ideological base.” Its goal is to push the ideology that women are victims and men are perpetrators. Therefore, any evidence to the contrary, regardless of its veracity, is unwelcome. In other words, ideology censors truth. “If you believe you are righteous,” she said, “you don’t challenge other views.”

Click here for a photo gallery from the lecture. 

But you can try. And many did during the question period. When the professor finished her talk on an inspirational note about being relentlessly inquisitive, students and men’s rights activists filled the aisles to lambast and laud her. One man bemoaned the “feminist dictatorship,” another, the legal system that bankrupted him after a divorce. A stout black man in the corner demanded to know what men’s rights groups were doing to help him, as “a racialized person,” exploring different “gender identities.” When a woman complained that the man who spoke before her got more time at the microphone, another woman stood up and yelled in her defence, something  to the effect of “That’s because he’s a man!” A young woman with thick black hair in a yellow coat, irked by Dr. Fiamengo’s “heteronormative” answer to her question about lesbian moms, screamed “That is bullshit!” and stormed out of the lecture hall.

Free speech was alive and well at the University of Toronto last night, but in that moment I’d have welcomed its death with open arms.

It was clear that both the professor’s detractors and supporters were, overwhelmingly, nuts. And Dr. Fiamengo herself, was, standing at that podium, a buoy of relative reason in a sea of everything but. “Any movement can attract hysterical detraction and unsavoury allies,” she would tell me over the phone the next morning. “That is the risk one runs.” She’s right. Take this little Facebook diatribe from an active member of A Voice for Men, one of the men’s rights groups who support her.

There has never been a great female composer. Throughout history there has been plenty of privileged woman, who have had access to pianos, and violins, yet somehow we are expected to believe that men have somehow stopped them for being composers?  Woman have the big lovely eyes, big tits, but mean [I think he meant “men”] are far more beautiful, they are more beautiful where it counts. In their wonderful creative souls.

Unfortunately, though, the other side is no more intelligent. They just use bigger words.

Almost every pro-women’s studies person who approached the mic last night, spoke another language, a jargon you might misconstrue as scientific–only the words they used weren’t shortcuts meant to simplify or summarize complex concepts, they were used to make simple concepts sound complex: Hegemonic, racialized, problematic, intersectionality. It was pure obfuscation, 1984 with tattoos and septum piercings. Some of the students couldn’t even string together a single lucid sentence. All they had were these meaningless, monolithic words. I felt like I was on a game show, the exercise being how many times can you say patriarchal, phallocentric hegemony in 45 seconds or less. It was frankly, for a feminist, depressing.

Slogans don’t make scholarship and being self-righteous does not make you right.

Going into the talk last night I wasn’t convinced women’s studies needed overhauling. Now I’m positive that it does. Not because I believe fighting misandry is a legitimate humanitarian cause (LOL) or because Dr. Fiamengo’s speech was particularly insightful, but because her detractors—presumably, women’s studies’ finest—were so profoundly, not.

Happy women’s day, everyone.

Why it’s OK to hate Anne Hathaway (and anyone else you want)

By Emma Teitel - Thursday, February 28, 2013 at 9:04 PM - 0 Comments

Anti-Hathaway is as pervasive as Kimye’s unborn child on the Internet this week. A lot of people don’t like the Oscar-winning actress, and a lot of those people, are, apparently women.

Enter Anne Hathaway’s stalwart defenders—also women—some of whom hate her just the same. New York Magazine’s Ann Friedman, for example, is confused about her anti-Hathawayism because the actress “seems smart and self-possessed, savvy and successful.”

“Hathaway and I would probably get along swimmingly,” she writes. “She’s a spokesperson for Eve Ensler’s anti-violence organization, One Billion Rising. And have you seen the clip of her shutting down Matt Lauer’s creepy questions about her upskirt moment with a measured response about the commodification of female sexuality? It is on point. Yet she leaves me cold.”

Continue…

Boehner likes Obama less than Chris Brown likes Frank Ocean

By Emma Teitel - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 at 9:57 AM - 0 Comments

I heard Fran Lebowitz speak at Massey Hall last week about how much she hates strollers, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and audiences with low standards. She blames the latter on the Oprah effect—the impulse of the modern American audience to rise in applause of anything and everything. Nowhere in history (besides, perhaps, on the Oprah Winfrey show) was this phenomenon more pervasive than last night during Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address. Except for Ted Nugent or John Boehner, the live audience was perpetually on its feet. Even Paul Ryan couldn’t resist applauding this one liner — that or he really enjoys veiled digs at his own policy proposals:

“I am open to additional reforms from both parties, so long as they don’t violate the guarantee of a secure retirement.  Our government shouldn’t make promises we cannot keep – but we must keep the promises we’ve already made.”

Three more observations about the State of the Union: Continue…

Free speech and unequal prejudice

By Emma Teitel - Friday, February 1, 2013 at 12:54 PM - 0 Comments

Have you heard? Free speech is a thing of the past. And religious liberty is dying fast.

It began last week when Arun Smith, a seventh-year human rights student at Carleton University in Ottawa, tore down a “free speech wall” on campus because it featured socially conservative comments. The action inspired three National Post columns and an Ezra Levant exclusive lamenting the end of freedom of expression as we know it.

Elsewhere, on the religious liberty front, the Canadian Council of Law Deans wrote a letter of protest to Canada’s Federation of Law Societies about Trinity Western University. The Christian liberal arts school in British Columbia wants to open a law school that would require students to sign a Community Covenant Agreement that pledges “Healthy Sexuality.” The agreement has nothing to do with gonorrhea or how to avoid it: what’s to be avoided is love and sex between people of the same gender (which is, I guess, by Trinity Western’s standards, worse than gonorrhea). “Sexual intimacy,” says the covenant, “is reserved for marriage between one man and one woman.” In other words, gays need not apply.

In a bizarre twist, one of Trinity Western’s champions is the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, whose double-speak on this issue would confound George Orwell himself. From the Vancouver Sun:

“Despite TWU’s ban on homosexual relationships and sex outside marriage, Lyster [British Columbia Civil Liberties Association president Lindsay Lyster] also defended the evangelical school’s approach to academic freedom — saying secular universities often impose restrictions on free thought, including in regards to religious perspectives.”

Lyster’s concern, I suspect, is the same kind shared by Rex Murphy and Ezra Levant when they lament the end of free speech at Carleton University. There’s no denying most secular liberal arts schools are left-leaning, but do they really “impose restrictions on free thought and religious perspectives” draconian enough to match the injustice of Trinity Western’s ban on homosexuality?

No.

Secular schools are by and large socially liberal, yes, but the mere presence of seventh-year human rights students and atheist professors in blue jeans does not equal discriminatory policy against socially conservative, religious students. Nor does the overwhelming presence of socially liberal thought prohibit social conservatism. Telling gays they are going to hell probably won’t make you valedictorian, but there is no rule against doing so. Arun Smith ripped down the “free speech wall” because written on it, among other things, was “Traditional marriage is awesome,” and “Abortion is murder.” He was wrong to do so. But the fact remains: he was punished. The students who wrote the conservative comments were not. As for the free speech wall? There is a new one in its place.

Freedom of expression: 1.

Arun Smith: 0.

Free speech dead? Apparently not.

Socially conservative students may find that in a modern university classroom, they’re uncomfortable stating their views on the civil rights of gays and lesbians (possibly that they shouldn’t have any), but that doesn’t mean they’re not allowed to. However, your right to speak freely doesn’t negate someone else’s right to tell you to stop talking. And asking that you do so because your argument has no place in an institution of higher learning, or in a court of law (my right to marry my girlfriend is no longer a valid debate topic, nor is it any of your business) is not a letter of expulsion.

Echoing the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, Barbara Kay writes in the National Post that secular law schools are breeding grounds of their own a-religious philosophies; prone to different but equal prejudice. Here she is below:

“So although white Christian students of European descent don’t actually have to sign a Covenant attesting to their original sin of white or male privilege when they sign up for law school, they may as well have had to, considering what they will be taught once they’re in, and the way they’ll be treated if they dissent from the critical race theory or feminist line. Unlike gays, who have their pick of law schools that cater to minority sensibilities, those who reject the Marxist-based faith governing most law schools in the West are forced to submit to their tenets.”

Let’s assume for a moment Kay is correct: Canadian law school is a three-year pinko party to which all would-be gay law students aspire. And one at which all socially conservative law students feel out of place.

That she can even allude to the isolation of socially conservative students on secular campuses proves my point precisely. They are allowed on secular campuses. They don’t have to sign a covenant. They may not Take Back the Night, or Occupy Bay Street, but nobody’s stopping them from going to school. More on point, their rights to rant and lobby against my rights does not bar them from enrolling in a secular institution. But my right to be myself would bar me from enrolling in theirs.

So let’s be clear. We are not dealing with equal prejudices. One is far more insidious. Secular law schools, no matter how annoyingly liberal, do not have the power to expel socially conservative, religious students simply because they are socially conservative and religious. Trinity Western University’s law school, on the other hand, would have the power to expel gays because they are gay.

Social conservatives of this ilk are not defenders of liberty. They are its thieves.

Anti-Semitism and the Jewish caricature

By Emma Teitel - Monday, January 28, 2013 at 10:27 AM - 0 Comments

Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

Sunday Times cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, the man who brought you the album art on Pink Floyd’s The Wall, erected another wall this past weekend. The new one looks a lot like the old one, except that it’s built atop dying Palestinians and their blood provides the mortar. Oh, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands in as architect, his caricature complete with oversized ears and (you guessed it) a formidable nose. His horns, they say, are vestigial.

The writing on the wall as inferred by the Anti-Defamation League?

We don’t need no Jewish Nation.

Here’s Michael A. Salberg, the ADL’s International Affairs Director:

“The Sunday Times has clearly lost its moral bearings publishing a cartoon with a blatantly anti-Semitic theme and motif which is a modern day evocation of the ancient ‘blood libel’ charge leveled at Jews.”

I wasn’t aware that the Times had moral bearings, but the ADL isn’t entirely wrong in their “blood libel” charge. Scarfe’s Netanyahu does look a lot like this, and this, and this. There’s also the awkward bit about the cartoon being published on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Even Rupert Murdoch, who owns the newspaper, managed an apology. He called the cartoon grotesque.

But there remains a big gaping hole in this tale of anti-Semitism. For one, Scarfe isn’t an anti-Semite. Yes, to a lot of Jews (myself included) the cartoon appears anti-Semitic, but that has less to do with Scarfe–a man who has depicted several political leaders he abhors, most of them non-Jews, with exaggerated facial features in exaggerated ways—and more to do with context. Tony Blair, for example, (another one of Scarfe’s subjects) doesn’t belong to a religious group with a history of systemic discrimination. Or genocide. Neither does George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton–other leaders the cartoonist has taken aim at over the years. Netanyahu, on the other hand, does. Unlike Bibi, Blair, Bush, and Clinton don’t belong to a minority whose facial features were altered grotesquely throughout propaganda history, not for comic effect, but to instill fear and incite violence.

Scarfe has affirmed that he is not an anti-Semite—that he had no idea Holocaust Remembrance Day would fall on the same day the paper published his Bibi Netanyahu-architect-of-death cartoon. Here he is talking to the press, below:

“The Sunday Times has given me the freedom of speech over the last 46 years to criticize world leaders for what I see as their wrong-doings. This drawing was a criticism of Netanyahu, and not of the Jewish people…I was, however, stupidly completely unaware that it would be printed on Holocaust day, and I apologize for the very unfortunate timing.”

Anti-Zionists and ADL critics will of course say that the date on which the cartoon was published is irrelevant. If Scarfe’s beef is with a government, not a people, what does Holocaust Remembrance Day have to do with anything?

The answer, as he now knows, is everything.

The day has everything to do with the deed because it is, at this point in history, almost impossible to draw a sensational political caricature of a Jewish person without evoking images of Der Sturmer. The history is still too recent, the wounds still fresh.

If Gerald Scarfe is to learn anything from this, let it be that until further notice, like it or not, the only socially acceptable time to draw a Jewish caricature is at a Bar Mitzvah.

Rob Ford Forever

By Emma Teitel - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 9:41 PM - 0 Comments

On the eve of the Ford ruling, Daniel Dale warned in the Toronto Star that a court decision ending Rob Ford’s “unlikely mayoralty” would launch Toronto into “unprecedented uncertainty.” Instead, today’s ruling launched Toronto’s government into something else: at least two more years of Rob Ford.

In the words of the law:

“In light of our conclusion that Decision CC 52.1 was a nullity because of the nature of the financial sanction it imposed, the appellant has not contravened s. 5(1) of the MCIA. Therefore, the appeal is allowed, the judgment of the application judge is set aside and the application under the MCIA is dismissed.”

In English: Victory, thy name is Rob Ford.

(Or as one of my online stalkers used to write me three times a day until HR blocked him from our email list: ALL HAIL KING FORD.)

Bikers beware (not the cool kind): From mayor to ex-mayor to temporary mayor to official mayor once more: Ford Nation lives on.

Mayor Ford appeared at a city hall press conference to thank his family and the supporters who stood by him in “restaurants and gas stations.” I sat at Ford’s feet-—at least a few feet away—as he spoke about his newfound humility:

“This has been a very, very humbling experience. I have an enormous respect for the judicial system and I’m very, very thankful for the decision it made today.”

“We have spent the last two years doing exactly what we said we will do. Over the next two years, we will focus on getting the rest of the job done.”

Translation: METRO BOWL CHAMPIONS 2014-15

A reporter asked Ford if he’d learned from the experience. He said something to the effect of, yes, I’ve learned how many supporters I have–some of whom didn’t even vote for me. Other questions were answered like this: “You know, gotta stay focused.” The eloquence of Roberto Luongo and the humility of Lance Armstrong. Who could ask for more from a mayor?

Of course, this is only the beginning. Ford ensured everyone he’d win his second term; he alluded to “the next six years.” I’m pulling for 60.  (I have a lot to thank him for.)

In the end, as in his favourite pastime, it could be said Ford got off on a technicality. The court ruled  City Council out of bounds in its request that the mayor reimburse his football donors. So not a vindication but a “nullity,” the judicial version of  ”we can’t call you a cheater because the game you were playing didn’t count.” The mayor’s critics can take solace in the fact Ford wasn’t deemed virtuous. He can’t say definitively, no matter how deeply he may believe it, they were wrong and I was right. And now, he may never have to.

Idle No More, and the reliable Old Fart

By Emma Teitel - Friday, January 18, 2013 at 6:31 AM - 0 Comments

CP/Fred Chartrand

In the National Post yesterday, Kelly McParland coined a new term for the progressive social movements of our time: the Arab Spring, Occupy and Idle No More.

“The great International anti-The Man movement,” is what he likes to call them — a catch-all phrase for bacchanals of smelly young people clutching placards, weighed down by the billion Che Guevara pins on their canvas bags, the Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians and Syrians who died brutally for democracy—and now—the aboriginal Canadians who block roadways to protest treaty violations. Who knew they had so much in common?

I would like to coin my own term for people like McParland, and Barbara Kay, and Margaret Wente, pundits who defecate rhetorically on every liberal protest movement that makes the nightly news. My term is easier to remember.

I like to call these people FAIPOFS—For all Intents and Purposes, Old Farts. Not necessarily physically old, that is (I’m not ageist), just unfathomable to fathom as young: like Ms. Trunchbull in Roald Dahl’s Matilda, who admits she doesn’t care for children because she never was one. You try to picture the FAIPOFS young at heart, at a party, maybe even sitting friendless in a high school cafeteria, but you can’t. Because unless their long-form birth certificates verify otherwise, it’s almost certain they exited the womb fully grown, hurling insults at shiftless grad students. Or in Wente’s case, imaginary shiftless grad students.

Yesterday’s star FAIPOF, Kelly McParland, actually doesn’t mind the original sentiment behind Idle No More, likely because it would have remained idle without the radicalism, road blockades and hunger strikes clogging news feeds every hour. Below, he writes approvingly of the original movement’s website.

“The photo section is like a suburban family’s Facebook page, with shots [of] kids and nature, and what looks like someone’s vacation snapshot from Beijing. It’s pretty harmless and well-meaning. But it’s been largely co-opted by the great international anti-The Man movement.”

That McParland wouldn’t be aware of the website’s existence without the great anti-The Man movement seems lost on him entirely. And that is—to everyone who looks at Theresa Spence’s tent with annoyed bewilderment—precisely the point.

Like clockwork, every time people take to the streets or roads or parks with a cause, they are celebrated and disdained. The Toronto Star says good for them, the National Post says get a life, and the Globe and Mail says something I can’t remember.

What matters though, is that right or wrong these people are seen and heard. If they stayed home, or as every FAIPOF suggested—went through the appropriate channels to voice their concerns—we wouldn’t know their names or their grievances. Now we do.

Now we can’t avoid them. Now, some of my friends, most of whom have never paid attention to aboriginal affairs, are talking about Idle No More. My extended family, at our weekly Friday night Shabbat dinner, is talking about Idle No More. Most of them (one FAIPOF in particular, you know who you are) don’t particularly like the movement, but the fact remains that without it, we would not have replaced our Israel-Palestine debates with discussions on First Nations policy—and thank God we did, because the Israel thing was getting really old.

Chances are, my friends and family will not heed the call of Chief Spence (they are still, as far as I tell, very much idle), but at least they’ve heard it loud and clear. At least they can pronounce Attawapiskat.

As for the old farts, they’ll fart on until the end of time, content, I’d imagine, with the recent discovery that two thirds of Canadians think “Canada’s Aboriginal peoples receive too much support from Canadian taxpayers,” and the Aboriginal peoples themselves will be content that we’re thinking of them at all.

The UTSEC orgy that wasn’t

By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, January 15, 2013 at 6:05 PM - 0 Comments

The “epic sex club adventure”, or, more specifically, The University of Toronto’s Sexual Education Centre’s annual Sexual Awareness Week, was big news in Toronto Tuesday morning. The UTSEC will host a party at the Oasis Aqua Lounge–a sex club in downtown Toronto– on January 21st. Although the group denies that the event is an orgy, everyone else is pretty much convinced that it is.

In the words of one very enthusiastic University of Waterloo student and reddit user: ”UofT is holding an orgy, and you’re invited! You just need your student ID. (It’s for UTSEC’s sexual awareness week…and sex positiveness of course…)”

Sadly, things are not always as they seem.

Aspiring swingers take note: I spoke to one of the event’s organizers this morning and learned more about the “epic sex adventure”: There will be free condoms, free lube, sex swings, bondage, a dungeon—and even finger foods. The only thing there won’t be much of is actual sex. According to Dylan Tower, a UTSEC coordinator, a total of four people consummated their love in the bowels of the Oasis Aqua Lounge at last year’s party (there were 80 guests in attendance). Who were these swingers exactly? Two monogamous couples.

So much for an orgy.

Read the complete interview with Tower, below.

Continue…

Jodie Foster, Honey Boo Boo and Rebecca Black

By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, January 15, 2013 at 10:59 AM - 0 Comments

Alana "Honey Boo Boo" Thompson. (John Bazemore/AP)

Jodie Foster’s Golden Globe speech will be remembered for many things, other than how not to give a speech. We’ll remember the wackiness, the coming out that wasn’t, and, of course, Mel Gibson. Something that likely won’t be remembered and should, is this:

“You guys might be surprised,” Foster said to a gallery of teary-eyed celebrirites, “but I am not Honey Boo Boo Child.”

Foster, a former child actress, went on to explain that she is not like the seven-year-old laughing stock of this continent because she enjoys her privacy. Not only that: she has earned her privacy.

So, too, I think, has Alana Thompson (the person behind Honey Boo Boo Child). Unfortunately, the adults in and outside her life don’t really seem to care. Why? Because we live in a cruel world in which it’s socially acceptable for adults to relive and rewrite their adolescence (follow, unfollow, friend, unfriend). Continue…

Todd Akin was right. (A doctor said so.)

By Emma Teitel - Monday, January 14, 2013 at 2:04 PM - 0 Comments

Todd Akin’s legacy lives on, thanks to one of his close friends (though maybe not anymore),  Georgia Republican congressman and certified gynecologist Phil Gingrey. The congressman thought it would be a good idea to defend his pal’s controversial (read: stupid) rape comments at a town hall meeting recently, with a little science lesson. Brace yourselves.

“And in Missouri, Todd Akin … was asked by a local news source about rape and he said, ‘Look, in a legitimate rape situation’ — and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape. I don’t find anything so horrible about that. But then he went on and said that in a situation of rape, of a legitimate rape, a woman’s body has a way of shutting down so the pregnancy would not occur. He’s partly right on that.”

“And I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true. We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he? But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak. And yet the media took that and tore it apart.”

That they did.

Unfortunately Akin and pal’s pseodo science–made popular, most likely, by this 1999 essay–will persist, regargless of media and medical scrinuty. What’s most interesting, though, is the science on the other side of the political spectrum–the side that believes in evolution.

Here’s BBC Health  in 2001, one year after the publication of A Natural History of Rape--a book which sought to explain rape evolutionarily:

“Scientists have made a disturbing finding about rape which they believe may explain why the crime has been so common throughout history. They have found that a single act of rape may be more than twice as likely to make a woman pregnant than a single act of consensual sex.This suggests, they say, that in a strictly biological sense, rape is a successful way for a man to spread his genes.”

Creationism and evolution aren’t just ideological, scientific foes. They are political ones as well.

Death, taxes, and rape. Which one does not belong?

By Emma Teitel - Friday, January 11, 2013 at 10:57 AM - 0 Comments

Dar Yasin/AP

Men, and sometimes women, have and will always say stupid and horrendous things in the aftermath of rape. Said things usually go like this:

“Don’t dress like a slut.”

“Don’t dress like a whore.”

“Until today I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady. Even an underworld don would not like to touch a girl with respect.”

The impetus behind these statements is that rape is inevitable because some men just can’t help it. And if rape is inevitable, if it’s a biological certainty that men are dormant deviants until a bare midriff in a dark alley catches their eye, then women should take “practical” precautions, like wear modest clothing or walk to and from their points of destination chaperoned by male specimens less prone to deviant outbursts. (For the record, the “don’t dress like a slut” argument is pretty easy to refute when you’ve been verbally harassed in a balaclava and snowsuit.)

Or perhaps, as former murder suspect and Indian Yoga guru Asaram Bapu, suggested recently, women should try and reason with their rapists–bring out the man inside the beast. Continue…

Lesbian psychopaths: are there any other kind?

By Emma Teitel - Saturday, December 22, 2012 at 7:45 AM - 0 Comments

When I was in my third year of university, I had a very interesting conversation with my former nanny, a Filipino woman who I will call Elsie. Elsie takes care of my 91-year-old bubie (Jewish grandmother) and when I visit my bubie, I  visit Elsie too.

One day Elsie asked me about an old friend of mine, what she was up to–and whether or not she had a boyfriend. “Actually,” I said, “she’s a lesbian.” Elsie’s face turned red. She was embarrassed. And then afraid.

Elsie told me that Libyans–by which I’m pretty sure she meant lesbians (her accent made it sound a lot like Libyans)–have a way of trapping or manipulating unsuspecting women and making them do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Dangerous things.

“Beware of libyans,” she said. “They will get you, and they will have you trapped.” Continue…

NRA: The world’s foremost child protection agency

By Emma Teitel - Friday, December 21, 2012 at 3:41 PM - 0 Comments

Are you a deranged young man living in the United States who fantasizes about shooting up your former school, but you’re worried that Joe Biden and his gun control “task force” will rob you of your assault rifle or subject you to endless background checks at the next gun show? Well have no fear, because there’s someone looking out for you. That’s right…

Thanks to insufficient mental health resources (chances are nobody knows just how deranged you are, or can’t afford to help you even if they do) and the new NRA-sponsored “operation school shield program”  you may just get to keep your guns forever. All of them.

Are you a veteran? Excellent. Used to be a cop? Even better. Continue…

Tom Green on stand up, social media, and Trailer Park Boys

By Emma Teitel - Friday, December 21, 2012 at 12:41 PM - 0 Comments

Tom Green. (Danny Moloshok/AP)

Tom Green, the man who brought you Freddy Got Fingered and the Bum Bum Song, has abandoned his traditional antics for a tour on stage. He’s got Canadian stand up shows lined up for the new year, as well as a role in the next Trailer Park Boys movie. Here he is, on all of that, below.

Emma Teitel: What are you wearing?

Tom Green: Blue jeans and a t-shirt. I’m just relaxing around the house. No need to dress up.

E.T. I’ve heard that you’re trying to get more “mainstream” and “sophisticated” with your comedy. What exactly does that mean? Less rodent tasting?

T.G. I wouldn’t use those words myself. I’m just talking [in my stand up] about issues and subjects that I think are relevant to people, and making jokes out of them: things like social media and technology. I’m making a point not to do a prop-driven, prank-driven show. It’s been a cathartic experience for me doing stand up because I like to interact with my audience.

E.T. Why social media?

T.G. I’m in a unique position because I’m 41 years old and I very clearly remember a different, Internet-free, cell-phone-free world. I’m so glad that I didn’t have that stuff at the time. I was always amazed by new technology, right back to when I was in high school–using computers to make music. All that stuff was brand new. When I was 15, I’d work a summer job to buy a new machine to make hip hop beats [with his rap group, Organized Rhyme.]

As soon as we started posting things online, getting the feedback from the public was interesting to me. But I was doing it because I was trying to get my comedy out there for people to see, and I could put up with all the positives and negatives [of public feedback.] Then all of a sudden Facebook comes along and people are posting a video because they can. Every single person is aware of every single person’s life. It creates a scary world. I like to make people laugh about things they’re actually worried about—make a funny situation out of something dark and scary.

E.T. How did you hook up with the Trailer Park Boys?

T.G. At the Montreal comedy festival a few years ago, we met up, had a few drinks, had some laughs. I’ve run into them several times since then. They asked me to be in their movie. That was really fun, I’m a big fan of theirs. We shot up in Northern Ontario. I’m playing myself in the movie; wasn’t much of a stretch. I knew the character pretty well.

E.T. Do you like Rush?

T.G. Yeah, of course. Every Canadian has to like Rush.

E.T. Favourite song?

T.G. Tom Sawyer, cause it’s got the name Tom in it.

E.T. If you could address the Canadian people en masse, what would you say?

T.G. Love and enjoy your Crispy Crunch bars and your Coffee Crunch bars and your Littlest Hobo reruns, and cherish those things. Embrace those things. It’s what makes you different.

E.T. Was the raccoon you sawed in half a real raccoon?

T.G. I don’t give away trade secrets.