Posts by mark taslov
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@Hilary, Sacha,
I wish I could say it’s my pleasure.
We’ve had our communications intercepted, our data hacked. The proposed MSD data collection is only going to increase our chances of being doxxed, deadnamed and clocked and misgendered. It was suggested to me a couple of years back on here that my interest in the Snowden et all might be a swoon to the popularity of the issue at the time. As an assumption that couldn’t be wronger.
Any institutions or individuals using this site or any of its associated sites for studies or projects -You DO NOT have permission to use any of my profile or pictures in any form or forum both current and future. If you have or do, it will be considered a violation of my privacy and will be subject to legal ramifications.
When joining the online transgender community a decade or so ago these warnings were on almost every profile, fueled by the common knowledge that details of our lives were being used without our consent for research, our images are regularly stolen and disseminated. These activities are carried out against a community riddled with mental illness, whose marginalisation compels prioritising privacy above all else.
Although these notices have become less prevalent since Edward Snowden’s revelations, the revival of The nothing to hide argument is incredidbly problematic to closeted gender nonconformist and trans people who by virtue of societal attitudes remain compromised in terms of openly challenging surveillance legislation.
As for rape culture in New Zealand, I noticed this today.
Before her trial, Reriti rejected an offer to plead guilty to a less serious charge of having consensual sex with an underage boy, and be sentenced to six years’ jail, less an unspecified period for her mental health problems.
Our justice system was prepared to knock 4 years off a prison sentence if a rapist was prepared to acknowledge that she did have sex with the 10-13 year old boy …and he wanted it. A symbolic gesture.
But we’re to assume that this is not why high profile commentators are calling for our sons to be taught about consent. The system is infested with double standards. People scratch their heads as to why it’s dysfunctional.
It’s time to teach teenage boys about consent – whether they like it or not
Rapiest headline I’ve ever seen.
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Hard News: The long road to Hit and Run, in reply to Neil,
The old imperialist feminism angle.
Imperialist feminism and liberalism
As several Third World Feminists have argued, a historical weakness of liberal feminism in the West has been its racist, patronizing attitude towards women of color who have been seen less as allies/agents and more as victims in need of rescue.
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Yes. I thought Marama Fox got a much warmer reception, as did the amazing Adair Hannah. But hardly surprising given the crowd.
I wish I had been there, so much, because the media coverage, the messaging is kind of frightening. From what I saw of the placards, the focus was on consent, rape, my body my choice etc. Then the headlines read: It’s time to teach teenage boys about consent – whether they like it or not or Dear parents. We need to talk about your sons or the articles stating:
"it should start with a father or mother or both telling their son that no means no. This is about respect. This is about boundaries"
We were taught about consent at school. I remember that class, I remember sitting in that class with my future rapist, learning about consent, it was discussed in the same gendered heteronormative cisnormative way New Zealand media voices continue to, like it’s 1999.
Alison Mau’s piece contains this unusual quote:
"Women and victims are expected not to get raped, rather than rapists being expected not to rape."
“Women and victims”, it’s an odd pairing or words, not the usual collocation, unusual in context, almost as if there’s an ideological barrier our messaging just can’t breach:
We raise people (most often men, t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶s̶u̶r̶e̶, but people of all genders can be both the victim and the aggressor) to believe that rape is a very specific crime which happens when a stranger forces himself on a woman in a dark alley against her will. It is repeatedly framed in this way, and rarely are the myriad other ways in which we can violate another person sexually discussed. This leads to countless “normal, good” people who will engage in a sex act with someone who cannot or has not provided consent, who is perhaps even moderately resisting, and think that it is a perfectly healthy example of what sex can look like. Because we don’t often enforce the idea that rape can happen between friends, at a party, within a marriage, or in any combination of genders, we leave many people believing that what happened to them (or what they enacted on another person) is not at all a crime.
So when we here the familiar refrain “we need to teach our sons consent” the implication is that we need to teach our sons to respect others right of consent. Right? The implication is not that we need to teach our sons that they also have the right to consent. Yet we expect them to recognise others’ rights to consent. In Alison Mau’s article on misogyny she does donate some space to paraphrasing one of the protest organisers, Wellington East Girls’ College student Sorcha Ashworth:
She says it’s common for people to take advantage of others when they’re drunk. It happens to boys and girls, she says (are you surprised?) and there’s “a disgusting double standard” where there’s less of an outrage when a girl takes advantage of a guy.
Makes sense to me. If we’re going to have a serious conversation about rape culture. We’re not going to see a notable improvement unless we teach *everyone* about consent, and teach it right. That doesn’t begin in school or even in the home, it begins with a media whose record appears to be broken, there’s no new messaging and progress? The evidence may be found in the dessert.
Why do we need to teach our sons about consent? How would that have prevented me from being held down and forced to penetrate? How would that have in anyway influenced the stranger who decided it was ok to wake me by performing oral sex? How effective would that have be in dissuading the people who have jumped on me, held me down? How does that work? Those ones weren’t our sons, they were daughters. If we’re talking strictly about #rapeculture, this is rape culture.
Rape culture is a sociological concept used to describe a setting in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality.
We’re either advocating and working to improve the visibility of all rape, regardless of sex, class, ethnicity, gender or we’re perpetuating rape culture, we’re obscuring the rapists, we’re aiding them, taking the focus off them and the rape they commit.
Rape is about power, it’s about dominance about taking what is not yours, about not respecting another will. When I was a teen the meme going around was that “rape isn’t about sex it’s about violence”. This knowledge was of scant use, as it is to anyone who has been raped without violence. Flawed messaging obscures rape, it protects rape and rapists.
Why are we calling for consent to be taught in school when our laws aren’t concerned with consent? What is knowing about consent worth if we can’t prosecute our rapists as rapists, all of them. Where is New Zealand’s No means no law? Why are the media not asking this? It’s glaring that it took the WC boys and not the outcome of the Kuggeleijn trial to set the opinion mill turning?
The media’s insistance of the binary structure, of these bizarrely specific stereotypes of boys and girls, of men and women, laid article by article, mortared in, does nothing to dismantle the gender construct, in fact quite the opposite. It mains the gender construct, it’s the sustenance, it’s the misdirection of the rapist, catering to demographics. Rape is a platform to discuss education policy.
I don’t in any way doubt these journalists’ best intentions, but the framing, that frame they’ve been given, the one they’re expected to trot out every time rape comes up for serious discussion? It’s anachronistic and it has been for as long as I can recall.
Rape is power, Donald Trump is the most alarming symptom of rape culture I have ever seen, but we have our own Trumps here, lurking in plain sight, some of them prosecuted even, tucked away. We keep their secrets safe. The messaging – we shouldn’t talk about rape itself, we shouldn’t report rape, the New Zealand Government does not recognise equally every individual’s right to consent to sex. Not on our own terms, that just hasn’t yet become a practical concern for it as an entity.
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Access: Privacy and the right to consent…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Yet with this policy (above) the Government denies and disregards the right to consent. We need to join the dots –
Consolidating – from the unconsented cosmetic surgery on the genitals of infants, onto the “rights of the child”, through the systemic abuse of the young by employees of the state, via the fight for sovereignty of our bodies, confronted by the lack of explicit consent legislation, the summary incarceration and solitary confinement of “at risk” individuals, the criminalisation of euthanasia, the theft of land and displacement of culture, the exploitation of our natural resources, over the consent needed to build a fence higher than 2.5 metres, mass surveillance, the erosion of privacy and ignored advanced care plans – through the myriad other failures of our collective humanity – over such a very short history – all converging on consent of the governed – our tacit assent of this abomination. The winds asking where we draw the line – the white washing no longer quite fully masks the stench of our degenerate underbelly.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to WH,
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Up Front: For Your Own Safety, in reply to ,
As funny as the toilet is
It’s a peculiar thing to observe, because the last place I’d expect to get clocked is in a bathroom. Unless there’s an ambusher lurking to try and “grab ‘em by the pussy”. Personally I’m more concerned about this type of grabbin’ occurring in the meetings between a JP/MP/Lawyer and transgender person as required by the DIA to verify a NZ passport gender change.
There is something amusing I guess when one considers that separate bathroom advocates are calling for women to share facilities with dudes like these.
Meanwhile in the past week AUT has made its bathrooms all gender and Canterbury schools have announced plans for gender-neutral toilets and uniforms.
It’s disappointing but expected that this bathroom use issue seems to have been imported pretty much wholesale from the states, as if the development of the excretory systems in transgender people is a recent turn of events.
It's difficult to ignore that we are living in a time of increased fundamentalism in all corners of society.
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Thank you Emma!
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Access: Privacy and the right to consent…, in reply to mark taslov,
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Paora Crawford Moyle on Te Wahanga Parakuihi.
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Ursula Cheer says the new rules have an element of compulsion and raise questions of consent.
These proposed requirements are devastating and potentially life threatening for those whose identities are not legally recognised
Each refuge within the collective is run independently, so they will each have their own policies, but in general our policy is that refuge is open to anyone who self-identifies as a woman, no identification necessary.
Hadassah Green
info@refuge.org.nz