Thank the Heavens I'm a Magical Chicken

Thanks the Heavens I'm a Magical Chicken. I can go about my merry way without enduring shit being slung at me on account of being a Magical Chicken. Same can't be said, I'm afraid, of being a human woman or girl. I couldn't be quite so chipper if I were one of them - I'd probably want to slam my own head against a wall repeatedly to drown out the torrent of woman- and girl-hating abuse that passes for... for everything, really: law, language, history, news media, statesmanship, advertising, and bicycles, yes, fucking bicycles.

To say nothing of my absolute favourite thing ever - really, this is my favourite thing ever, I love it THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS much - Rational Male Blogging^TM.

Today my favourite Rational Male Blogger^TM is Benjamin Cheah, who has taken it upon himself to Rationally^TM address Robin Rheaume's mighty fine post about victim-blaming in the recent gang rape case that's been all over the press.

Benjamin Cheah has difficulty grasping the simple proposition that women and girls are human beings, who seek quite rightly to live full and rich human lives, uninterrupted by the violence of having a penis forced inside you against your wishes. For some people, this full and rich human life may even include socialising with new people, drinking, and having consensual sex. Benjamin Cheah, however, appears to believe such acts - socialising, drinking, having consensual sex - can appropriately be punished with rape. Thus:

Here, the woman failed to take responsibility for her actions. She deliberately engaged in high-risk behaviour. To declare ‘The failure of a woman to adequately assess the risk of attack does not mean that she caused what happens and should take blame for it’ is to declare that a drink driver should not take responsibility for running over a pedestrian. It is simply absurd to think that one can divorce one’s action from the consequences of that action. Every action has consequences; the woman has to take responsibility has to take actions. To not do so is both foolish and dangerous.

The woman engaged in high risk behaviour. An example of such behaviour is for a young woman to go alone late at night to a place with plenty of strange young men and alcohol. Another is for a single young woman to play drinking games in a private place with young men unknown to her. Such behaviour puts her at a very high risk of being robbed, raped, and/or killed. This whole case could have been avoided had the victim not showed up, left the moment she realised she didn’t know most of the people at the gathering, or went home before the drinking became serious. She took a risk, and she got burned.

Benjamin Cheah appears to be suggesting that we should simply accept, as an immutable fact, that men will rape women. Gang rape is a simple consequence of drinking and engaging in sexual activity with strangers, apparently, which has nothing to do with the rapists in question choosing to take their penises out of their pants and force them into the body of a non-consenting woman. It's a foolish pipe dream for Magical Chickens to think that maybe, just maybe, censuring, prosecuting, punishing and strongly denouncing gang rape will create an environment in which rapists are discouraged from taking their penises out of their pants and forcing them into the bodies of non-consenting women. (Rather than an environment in which they will be excused because being gang-raped is understood primarily as what happens to women because of women's own actions.) Actually, women who drink and socialise and have sex are extending mysterious tentacles of dark matter from their very bodies, which physically compel other men - struggling and wailing in protest - to take their penises out of their pants and force them into the bodies of non-consenting women.

I'm finding this hard to square with the occasions when I've gone drinking with and/or climbed into bed with strangers without, funnily enough, being raped, because nobody there chose to take their penises out of their pants and force them into me, but hey, what do I know, I'm just a Magical Chicken.

The victim had sex with someone after the game and before the crime. To someone under the influence of alcohol, the victim’s behaviour could be interpreted as a signal of sexual availability. This effect could be pronounced because the members of the group could have pressured each other towards that interpretation (assuming that had happened).

Oh dear sweet fucking kitty cats, where to start with this? Maybe with the terminally stupid concept of "sexual availability", as if the vagina is either Open for Business and must accept all customers, or Regrettably Closed for the Day and must be shut to everyone. I hate to break it to you sunshine, but women sometimes like to fuck. A woman may be sexually attracted to one man without being attracted to his entire cabal of friends. A woman may feel horny at one point (like, just before having sex with one man) without feeling horny at another (like, just after sex with that man). This is basic stuff, please keep up.

To those of us who take the humanity of women seriously, a woman having sex with person A at time X does not amount of consent to having sex with persons B-E at times Y and Z. Yes, to some men the first sex act "could be interpreted" as consent to penetration by their own penises: but their interpretation is misogynist and wrong, and when they act on this belief they become rapists.

If the men in the gang rape scenario had raped the first man in this scenario, I wonder, would Benjamin Cheah believe the same argument applied? After all, he'd been drinking and signalled his availability for sex, ce n'est pas?

And where are Benjamin Cheah's strong words for the men in this scenario anyway? At which point in the entire piece does he ask them to "take responsibility" for their "actions" - including the "action" of taking their penises out of their pants and forcing them into the body of this girl? When will he tell men that they must not socialise with strangers, or have consensual sex, or drink, or go into someone else's home, so as to avoid becoming rapists? The words of one Magical Chicken, circa January 2010, seem appropriate here:

The suggestion that we should solve any problem by deliberately sequestering men at home is ludicrous and unacceptable on its face - and it should be equally so when it applies to women.

I don't want to go into depth about the ridiculousness of Benjamin Cheah first of all claiming there was no evidence of bleeding, and then claiming the rapists stopped when they saw blood. (Apparently, also, stopping at the sight of blood is "not typical behaviour for rapists", a statement Benjamin Cheah supports with absolutely zero evidence, as if rapists are by definition also necessarily men who don't mind getting blood all over their penises or don't find bleeding a turn-off.) I will also pass over his bringing in irrelevant factors like the victim engaging in underaged drinking or having sex with someone who isn't her boyfriend, as if it's more OK to rape women who meet this arbitrary designation for "irresponsibility".

No, I want to highlight Benjamin Cheah's serious, Rational^TM consideration of the possibility that AWARE opposes victim-blaming because of a "rape agenda" which might bring in "big money". There's only one possible response to this idea...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Oh God, I do love being a Magical Chicken: you human beings are so gosh-darned funny. "Big money"! A "rape agenda"! Those terms certainly don't apply to the vast pop media and advertising industries which continually tell us that violence against women is sexy, the enormously rich and powerful "family values" lobbies who tell us that merely being female is inherently obscene, or the multi-billion dollar global pornography businesses who consistently push the narrative that rape is what women are for. No, the "big money" is in feminism, who have invented a "rape agenda" of - lookit, this term is also in inverted commas! - women's "rights".

Thank the Heavens I'm a Magical Chicken, or this would all be enough to make me weep.

The revolution will not apologise

With apologies to Gil Scott-Heron.

So Dana Lam, President of AWARE, has written to the Straits Times to address the fetid boghole of misogyny that is the OverEasy drinks-for-breasts promotion.

Quoth Ms Lam:

There is nothing free about letting a room of people gawk at your breasts. Even if a woman is willing to pay the personal price of loss of dignity, there is still a cost suffered by other women.

The women who participated have contributed to the objectification of women, to reducing a woman's value to her breast size, and have helped reinforce the belief among men that this is not only acceptable, but welcome. Staging this event in itself is extremely distasteful.

Just because sexism is profitable does not make it right. For the organisers to say the event was merely for 'good fun and not sexist or sleazy' is insincere. The indignity is suffered only by one gender.

It is unfortunate there are women willing to make this choice so light-heartedly. The individual woman may view her participation as an act of empowerment. Perhaps she feels she should use whatever assets she has to secure favours for herself. In our sex- and youth-obsessed culture, it is not surprising some women would grow to be so cynical.

Yes, women have the right to choose, but individual choices are made in a social context. And in our current social context, women have a much harder time to be esteemed as individuals above and beyond their value as sex objects.

This event perpetuates the notion of women as sex objects and makes it that much more difficult for each woman who wants to be valued for her character and contribution, rather than how she stacks up to a distorted image of the ideal body.

The personal choice (of the participants) and the private choice (of the corporation) has had a detrimental social impact.

Choice works both ways. The organisers may have packed their venue that evening, but they may well have lost future business at OverEasy and their sister establishments.

I have no Magical bone to pick with Ms Lam's letter, but something that it reflects has got me rubbing my wattle with worry.

To wit: so much of the conversation going on here is about the women who may obtain a drink at OverEasy, and whether they are harming or "denigrating" themselves or other women. Ms Lam has clearly - correctly - intuited that defenders of misogyny will fall over themselves to sound the battlecry of Choice, and has made a strategic decision to pre-emptively focus attention on this argument.

Your resident feathered friend is in full agreement that women may participate in promoting misogyny, and that misogyny should be criticised regardless of from whom it issues. I recognise, you will recall, that anyone living in a misogynist society, which is to say all of us, will participate in promoting misogyny, with varying levels of frequency and wilfulness.

But. Quiz time! Which of these is a shittier thing to do, and by how much?

A. Staging an event to financially profit off promoting the idea that women, and our breasts, exist to be Sexxxay for the sexual titillation of others.

B. Responding to a lifetime of being told "Be Sexxxay or you're worth nothing - less than nothing, you're a waste of space" by... well, surprise, being Sexxxay, and getting a free drink to boot.

It is a sad indictment of Singapore's attitudes to women that so much of Ms Lam's letter has to focus on item B, and seems almost to frame them as equal.

By objectifying women for a buck (and let's face it, probably also because they rather enjoy treating women as playthings), OverEasy are assholes. The minor fact that some handful of women will overlook their assholedom to get a free drink is of so little relevance that I'm surprised it hasn't upped and moved to Antarctica already, to spend several lonely decades contemplating my penguin cousins. The sooner we can unapologetically critique assholes who hurt women, without taking seriously any excuse that women are "asking for it", the better.

OverEasy: "Let's reduce women to their body parts"

I am late in putting this up, but our sharp reader, Dysgrace, wrote in to highlight a rather questionable event organised by a popular (so I hear) watering hole occurring this evening:

(For a larger version, see the original, or our copy.)Dysgrace puts it to us simply:

feast your eyes on this brilliant idea from OverEasy. it's one of those 'let's reduce women to their body parts, objectify them, and then compare them while pretending to celebrate all body types' things. hah. in one's cups. more like poisoned chalice, can?

The animals on this farm are undecided on what sorts of action can be taken against OverEasy for their lousy marketing. While the common vote is to boycott the establishment, Angry Alpaca keenly reminds everyone that OverEasy is linked to a whole chain of other joints, such as The Loof, Timbre chain, Butter Factory Club, etc, so if we wish to hurt them monetarily, alcoholics out there may not have many popular options to quench their thirst.

So I recommend Cat in the Cream's strategy instead: bring your double-d friends there, and drink them out of profiteering. Building on that, you can also give them a good earful AFTER you get your bottle. Please feel free to puke all over the establishment as well.

(H/T Dysgrace.)

***
ETA - Complaining Cow informs me that I got it wrong. Lo and Behold Group runs OverEasy, and they're primarily in charge of Loof, OverEasy (in partnership with Butter Factory), White Rabbit and The Shack (previously KM8). (More info here.) I apologise for any confusion caused. (Sorry, Timbre!)

Public service announcement from AWARE: "It's your space!"

(AWARE ZoCard, circa 2002.)

It's your space!

Public contact cannot be avoided but sometimes you may feel someone has come too close and made you angry, or upset you by saying something about your body or touching you without permission. It's a criminal act that only you can stop.

[On the back of the card] If you have been a victim of sexual harassment, or you know someone who may be a victim, we're here to help. You have the right to say no. Call us at 1800 774 5935. [Phone number still functional.]

It's 2010! It's real shitty that any of this has to be repeated at all, or even ever to begin with.

The world hates women

The world hates women.

That can be the only plausible explanation for the invention of this device, described as an "internal bra" (via Echidne).

The internal bra is a harness-like device is inserted under the skin using a local anaesthetic. The procedure should also be cheaper than a traditional breast lift, which costs around £4,000 and often requires an overnight stay in hospital.

It is similar in shape to a fabric bra, but is made of silicone, the plastic already used in breast implants.

Surgeons make two tiny cuts less than a centimetre wide underneath each breast.

Silicone cups like the ones used in a traditional uplift bra are then are then inserted around 1cm below the skin.

Then surgeons fit fine straps made from a strong material that will hold the bra in place without it sagging These are attached to the ribs between the breast and the shoulder with a pair of titanium screws.

Pardon me. I had hoped to have something suitably Magically incisive to say, but after reading that description I need to go throw up for a bit.

Those deadly pincers

The Magical observation has previously been made that Family Valuez and Porn Nation are close allies in the war of Bullshit against humanity, and in particular against women.

The battles in this conflict, and other combatants, sometimes take unexpected forms. Consider this case from Zambia:

The trial of a news editor in Zambia, accused of distributing obscene material, is coming to an end. Chansa Kabwela says she sent photos of a woman giving birth without medical help to senior government officials to highlight the effects of a nurses' strike. [...]

So far, it has amounted to a succession of trembling ministerial secretaries expressing their humiliation and shock that a woman in childbirth, the most private moment of her life, had been photographed.

Shock, not over the fact that she had given birth in a hospital car park. Or that her baby had suffocated. But that the pictures had been seen by men - an absolute taboo.

This is not to say the photographs are not terrible. When I saw them, it took me several seconds to focus, as though my brain was refusing to process the images.

The most graphic shows a woman from the waist down, lying on a plastic sheet, with the bloodied torso of a baby between her thighs. The head is still inside her.

This is what Zambia's President, Rupiah Banda, declared pornographic, when he called for the photographer to be arrested. [...]

Fred Mmembe is the editor-in-chief of The Post newspaper. He hates the government and his paper shouts it loud and clear.

Stage whispers hint that he is the real target.

On the one hand, the idea that pictures of a woman giving birth are "obscene" or "pornographic" is unmitigated bullshit. You can only consider these visual images obscene, in the sense that traditional obscenity law means the term, if you consider the female body obscene - if, addled by dietary and atmospheric sexism, you are unable to look upon the vulva without reading it as sex.

The vulva is not sex. It is sometimes used by the woman to whom it belongs, in sex. But it is not, itself, sex.

So the dehumanising characterisation of pictures of childbirth as necessitating suppression because somehow of prurient interest and corrupting tendency is an anti-woman act, performed by a government - a familiar entity in the pantheon of oppressors - seemingly in order to suppress criticism of women's healthcare and the state of healthcare workers' rights. This is not intuitively difficult to grasp as potential institutional misogyny.

But wait a minute. On the other hand, these bold governmental critics, with their noble aims of spreading awareness of a vital political issue, and asserting their freedom of speech against the heavy arms of the state: surely they don't hate women too?

One issue which appears to have gone largely unreported in major newspapers is whether the woman whose suffering was to be the subject of this burning crusade for justice actually consented to the pictures being taken, or to their subsequent circulation.

If this was done against her will or without consultation, what the world has witnessed is the objectifying exploitation of her body, in a private moment, for a political cause. However well-intended that cause may be in principle, this Magical Chicken cannot help but wonder if it is making gains at the expense of a woman's dignity, or by positioning her as a pawn.

Winging it

Let me tell you a secret: even the most Magical of all Chickens would have been a fluffy wee chick once. And long before my adult plumage appeared, I knew I really liked them Roosters. (Yeah, yeah, I'll save you the trouble of saying it - this Magical Chicken was into Cocks.)

Children, as Badly Drawn Pig so ably expounds, have sexualities. And sometimes they will explore them. This shouldn't be alarming. Many people find that life is a lot better when they enjoy a little friendly human contact which helps them get off every now and then.

So I second my porcine friend's call to give children some room in which to experiment with one another without having their sexualities judged, even as I repeat my urgent advice to adults ("Don't fuck children").

Children do not benefit from condemnation for having and acting on sexual feelings. They benefit from the information, skills and social environment that will encourage them to make the decisions that best serve their interests. They should know:

the health risks associated with sexual activity, including the possibility of unwanted pregnancy;

that many people experience sexuality as something private and emotionally significant, and that they may be one of them;

that they should be able to relax and live in and from their bodies so they know what they enjoy and what they don't, and feel confident in saying "no" to anything which doesn't suit them;

that sexual activity with another human being requires paying attention to that person's needs and desires, and communication and trust are important.

And they should not feel tainted by the process of figuring themselves out. Sometimes you try something and it doesn't work for you. You move on, and you don't do it again. No fundamental tear has appeared in the fabric of the universe.

Freaking out about sexuality because it is sexual may, ironically, lead to more of the teen sexual activity that so horrifies the defenders of Family Valuez. Their portrayals of sex communicate something brutal, dirty, and compulsive, best regulated in the confines of heterosexual marriage, and even then as a kind of dreary duty by wives who must satisfy their husbands' "urges" (a distinctly erotically unappealing word). Any sexual contact other than some piston-like penetration seems not to be imaginable.

It's hard to understand why, in this vision of sex, anyone would genuinely, positively, healthily want to do it. And if you don't know why you might say "yes" (except that you absolutely mustn't until you get married and then you absolutely always must), it becomes difficult to weigh this up against the reasons to say "no".

There's a hair's breadth between Family Valuez and porn culture:

Conform to seXXXay visions of womanhood for social approval. Ensure you look modest for divine approval. Get as many notches on your belt as you can, "score", to prove your manliness. Real men save it for marriage. Don't have sex because it makes you a dirty slut. Don't reject sexual advances because that makes you a frigid prude.

It is wrong to assume you can only swap one set of commands for the other. In fact, the two are mutually supporting. We should drop the command approach altogether - stop slut-shaming, and decry sexual objectification wherever we can. Boys and girls who are secure in their own individuality, sexualities and self-worth, who are taught that their feelings and autonomy as well as those of their sexual partners matter, will be confident in saying "no".

Rather than mapping out the True Path to Enlightenment and chaining others to it, I humbly recommend winging it, and creating for children the space (and giving them the appropriate navigational skills) to do the same.

The Ministry of Truth

The astute visitor to our humble yard will have noticed The Poultrygeist's horror that an "APEC launch party" was being organised by the elegantly named Butt Cheeks Creative, complete with casting call full of barf-inducing sexism.

But were you alert enough to have noticed the latest, extraordinarily subtle update to the Butt Cheeks site?

Behold: between The Poultrygeist's post and this one, a mysterious additional 'P' has appeared.

It would appear that this was never an APEC launch party. It was an APPEC launch party.

Truly Magical! History has been revised with the insertion of a letter.

Are you seeking capable events organisers who pay attention to detail and offer fresh, inventive ideas? My suggestion is, don't hire the company which promotes woman-hating. As a bonus, you might also get your name spelt right.

...two steps back?

Forget beauty pageants. Hell, forget the Formula 1 "grid girls", the scantily-clad purveyors of cheap tequila shots or even the skin-tight pleather-clad automobile accessories at car shows.

WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS?!?

So Singapore is hosting this year's APEC Summit and we have chosen to welcome the foreign delegates with a launch party featuring "slim" and "attractive" girls in "body-hugging mini tube dresses". Said girls have been informed that this event is BYOB (that's Bring Your Own Boots, yo). Girls to turn up at casting call dressed "appropriately", ideally in a bikini.

The mind, it boggles. Did I miss the memo? Because to me, this is shows a total lack of a sense of occasion. Did something happen and suddenly an APEC Summit becomes a reason to conduct a female flesh parade? Say it ain't so.

This is completely ludicrous. Someone please hand me (and maybe the older delegates while you're at it) a defibrillator.

Update by the Magical Chicken: The plot, it thickens here.

A Feminist Walks into a Pole...

...and says, "Ouch".

One of my best friends is getting married soon and as part of her Hen's celebrations a few of us trooped into an introductory pole dancing class.

Certainly this post could be a dissection of how our festivities involved honouring the male gaze and how the men's (so-much-more flatteringly named Stag's night) involved some rather misogynistic undertones (multiple strippers descending on the Buck with the aim of "humiliating" him) but I'd rather focus on what was done amazingly right.

I braced myself before entering the class. For one thing, I'm fat so I'm already being told in many small ways daily that there's no possible way anyone would want to see me in any context approximating sex. For another, I'm a feminist. I didn't know if I could safely withstand 90 minutes of flinging myself at a hard phallic object with the goal of titillating some generalized male stereotype.

Amazingly, it wasn't like that.

The first thing that blew me away was that the instructor unobtrusively left out the gender of the assumed audience. She always spoke of "the person you are dancing for". As in "make sure you stand right in front of the person you are dancing for so your bum is in their face when you bend over". No gendered pronouns, no awkward linguistic acrobatics to get around it. Also, the hypothetical audience was only referenced in the lap dancing portion of the class - i.e. where it was strictly relevant. Dropping the gaze (male or otherwise) from her patter took the element of sexual objectification out of the moves we were doing.

The other was that there was no body shaming at all. She never talked about toned bodies (even though there was a heavy focus on fitness, more on that later). She tried to stay with moves that most bodies that have a normal range of motion can do. When she ventured into harder territory (for example for moves that required far stronger core muscles than this fat cat possesses) she took pains to ensure that these were moves typically tackled in later weeks of classes and to not be bothered if we were unable to execute them perfectly. She even offered alternative moves to the ones she was demonstrating so we could all finish the routine she was teaching us when it came time. We all had fun and revelled in the movements our bodies could make, which is important (but sadly lacking) in any fitness class. Most of all, she was liberal with her compliments (never singling out any one person) and she sounded sincere the whole time.

Where she did foray into talking about "looking sexy", she made it all about the way you held your body. She demonstrated the quintessential look-at-me look (shoulders back, boobs out, knees cocked so that the bum is primed) and said, "standing this way radiates confidence, and that's hot". Sure it fell a little bit into 90's era GIRL POWER! but since there was no mention of how the actual body in question needed to look the idea was anyone could be that hot. It was inclusive. Something I certainly did not expect it to be.

The pole-dancing-as-a-workout fad has been around for several years and since this class was designed to be a sampler for all the classes offered at the centre, there was some talk of fitness. The instructor never once ventured into "reduce and tone" territory, however and spoke mainly the muscle groups that are key to pole dancing. Again, greatly body positive.

I do have some problems with the pole-dancing-as-a-workout, mainly that it feeds into the larger porn culture that is ultimately hurtful (bikini waxes, sapphic tendencies [Ed: what I meant was girl-on-girl action with the focus on a male audience and not that lesbians/bisexuals enjoying their sexuality are automatically part of porn culture. Phrase redacted due to ambiguity.], etc.). The idea that keeping "healthy" is a moral obligation in tandem with the increased pressure on women of all ages to be sexaaay has given women an excuse to be "hot and slutty" via pole dancing without having to worry about actually being slut-shamed. Framing pole dancing as something even YOU can do is tangled in all kinds of gendered messes including the issues surrounding professional pole dancers, the restrictions of performative gender/sexuality and the norming of sexual objectification (see here for more). Oh and of course there's the kiddie stripper poles. Acknowledging these issues does not a discussion make, but these issues have been hashed over by people more eloquent than I and I intended this piece to be a way to demonstrate how even mired in of all these issues - Pole Dancing Class, UR DOIN IT RITE. So I'll leave it at that.