[Good Title]

Imagine if schools of criminal justice allowed you to major in sexual assault prevention and prosecution. Imagine these programs were incredibly well run, so you’d learn both how to shoot a gun and run a sting, and how to get survivors the services they need. I’m sure more women would sign up. Imagine that all kinds of female officers with degrees in this, and excellent physical training, were embedded in military units, hanging out at bars, talking their way into fraternity parties, and jogging alone.

Imagine an officer, dressed in a sparkly top, gets onto a car with a real nice guy. Sometimes, this will go just fine. The FTA hasn’t wasted its time when its agents ride on a plane and no terrorists strike. That’s fine! That’s a day’s work well done.

But sometimes, something will happen. And of course the officer is wearing a wire, so we’ll have it on tape when she expresses a clear lack of consent and some guy makes his move. And maybe she’s packing a gun, or maybe she sends a signal that brings in backup. Cops swarm the car and the guy is all like, “This was a setup!” And society is like, “Yes! A setup for catching rapists before they strike!”

The value of stings is also, of course, their deterrent effect. Imagine a world in which a potential rapist first has to worry about whether you might be a cop. Rapists would be constantly looking over their shoulders. Because they’re the ones who should be.

-

http://www.thegloss.com/2013/04/02/culture/i-have-a-new-idea-for-how-to-reduce-rape/#ixzz2PSWB4pnM

Law enforcement should set up Stings to catch rapists the way they do for other crimes

(via kittensandskeletons)

There aren’t many concerts that follow up Debussy with Elton John. This is one of them.

- My choir director, Oberlin’s Women’s Chorale

Evil is suffering passed to someone else.

When I was two, my mother broke my arm because I couldn’t stop crying.

Part One - suffering in

In the early 1960s childhood beatings were called accidents. My mother had dreamed of having children, but she struggled with rage. Looking back now, I know she was horrified and ashamed by what she had done.

To my mother, evil was something that made her feel bad, after my broken arm that something was me. It eased her discomfort to believe that she was only responding to my true nature. She was a victim, if you will, of her child’s darkness. She was able to convince each or her four children, including me, of this “truth” and disastrous consequences curse my family to this day.

And yet, I am quite lucky.

Part Two- suffering out

When I was about four, my father found me in the backyard killing insects. He told me later that he saw some joy in my body language, some delight in my eyes that frightened him and he tried to imagine what his father would have done. He sat down near me and saying nothing, he started looking at one of the bugs I’d smashed. Soon I came over to see what he was doing.

“Look,” he said, “Where do you think he was going?”

I squatted beside him and looked.

“His mommy is very busy with the littler bugs at home,” he said. He told me a story about a little bug who was always getting in trouble, but this morning his mommy trusted him to go to the store for her. She gave him a quarter and told him to bring home a loaf of bread.

“Is she waiting for him?” I wanted to know.
“I imagine she is,” he said.

I started to cry. I sat in his lap and sobbed and hiccupped and cried again. I covered his shirt in tears. (He tells me he was sure he had screwed everything up.) Finally I stopped crying. I told him, “I know what we can do.”

We picked up the little bug, very carefully in a leaf and carried him to where we decided his mother’s house was. We set him gently in the dirt and went to have some ice cream. For much of that summer I could be found squatting over ant hills, following little beetles, watching, wondering.

Part Three - The dynamics of suffering and compassion and evil

If you have ever had your heart broken or lost someone you love, you know the way emotional pain can move around inside you - shutting your throat, twisting in your stomach, pressing down on your heart. This traveling pain is my definition of suffering - “emotion” comes from the Latin emovere, which literally means to move.

When suffering is upon us we have two options. We can process and digest it or we can pass it on. Processing emotional pain can be as silent as pressing our hands to our chest and rocking back and forth, or it can be as loud as a scream that starts in your throat and tunnels down through your gut, through your knees, and tears a channel into the earth. Working through pain can happen in an instant, when you finally stop running, drop your hands and invite what’s been chasing you to kill you if it must. Or the process can last years, playing hide and seek with the sweetness of a memory. In time, the processed suffering may transform into wisdom or compassion.

My definition of evil is suffering passed along to someone else. In the process, whatever started the pain is lost and the energy moves as revenge or cruelty until someone else can bring it to ground.

In July 1995, 8000 men and boys were massacred in Srebrenica. Later, there was an interview where a man justified his part in the murder. He explained that his son had been killed by Bosnian Muslims. I remember being floored. How could it be that someone who had suffered the loss of a child could ever want anyone else to feel that way? But of course, what he was hoping to do was to not feel the loss, to turn it into heat and blast it on to someone else’s heart.

Tears are the original holy water. I learned how not to be evil on my father’s lap.

- Diane Meriwether, via Quora (via stophelping)

when Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric”

I know what he
meant
I know what he
wanted:

to be completely alive every moment
in spite of the inevitable.

we can’t cheat death but we can make it
work so hard
that when it does take
us

it will have known a victory just as
perfect as
ours.

- Charles Bukowski, “a song with no end,” adapted (via violentwavesofemotion)

The unfounded fear that young children will somehow become “impure” if they learn about a dirty subject like sex is deeply rooted in American culture. Our society assumes that human sexuality is dark, dangerous, and shameful — something we need to protect teens from, rather than teach them about. Teens consistently learn that it’s not okay to talk about sex because it’s supposed to be totally off-limits to them, constrained to the bounds of a traditional marriage. But this attitude has led to disastrous consequences: damaging women and LGBT Americans’ sense of sexual self-worth, fueling the STD epidemic, and creating a moral environment where rape culture has flourished.

- “Kindergartners Shouldn’t Be Taught Sex Ed” — And Other Myths Endangering America’s Youth (via think-progress)

It’s not that I like girly things and I want to be a girl because of them—it’s that I’m a girl and I do things which are feminine to express that.

- Khaos Komix, Charlie’s Story, page 21 (via queer-oranges)

I convinced myself by the end of it that being with Tom would make me happier than being a girl would.

-

Khaos Komix, Charlie’s Story, page 18

Oh, honey.

We didn’t agree with her “choice” argument but it did raise an interesting side topic—should it matter if it’s a choice or not? The LGBT community has been working so hard to get people to believe we have no say in our sexuality, as if it’s a handicap we can’t be blamed for. What if it was chosen? Would that mean we’re any less deserving of equality?

- ‘Cynthia Nixon Clarifies: “Bisexuality Is Not A Choice, It Is A Fact”’ (via queer-oranges)