20 FUNNY MOMENTS WITH REPORTERS IN SPORTS
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIwA0TG5Oho
Si on continue comme ca bientôt il y aura une journée Abdul-Kerim Edilov.
▻https://www.freitag.de/autoren/the-guardian/der-mysterioese-tod-von-ramsan-kadyrows-mma-lieblingskaempfer-in-tschetschen
C’est très très beau, ce qui se passe en ce moment : le quotidien Le Parisien, propriété du groupe LVMH de Bernard Arnault (dont la fortune personnelle est estimée à 212 milliards de dollars par Forbes), se passionne pour le sort de Hamid, qui ne peut pas télétravailler et craint pour son travail. C’est sensible et humain, un milliardaire.
VIDÉO. Grève dans les transports : l’inquiétude des employés qui ne peuvent pas télétravailler - Le Parisien
▻https://www.leparisien.fr/info-paris-ile-de-france-oise/transports/video-greve-dans-les-transports-linquietude-des-employes-qui-ne-peuvent-p
« Je ne sais pas par quel moyen je vais aller au boulot ! », s’agace Hamid. Car avec cette nouvelle journée de grève intersyndicale contre la réforme des retraites, la circulation était perturbée sur le réseau RER et de métro. À la station Châtelet, Hamid, qui travaille dans la fabrication de l’inox, ne cache pas son inquiétude : « Je ne peux pas télétravailler, j’ai peur pour mon poste », explique cet employé, qui doit aller sur le site de son entreprise au Blanc-Mesnil.
Pour Bryan, stagiaire dans une agence immobilière à Paris, même anxiété : « J’arrive de Suisse, donc c’est intéressant de voir une grève… On n’a pas forcément ça chez nous. Et c’est très gênant pour aller au travail », confirme le jeune homme de 24 ans, qui parvient à monter dans l’un des derniers métros en circulation ce mardi matin.
Journaliste, ce sacerdoce…
Tu t’en doutais, mais l’élément de langage lancé par la Macronie hier, c’était « La France qui trinque, c’est la France qui trime ».
Ici dans l’Hérault, la France qui trime, elle trinque dès 11 heures le matin et elle trouve ça très bien, alors ce joli slogan du gouvernement, ça risque de pas bien être compris :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/992914
Burschenschaft Zella
▻https://www.bszella.de/trinksprueche
Trinksprüche
In einem kühlen Teiche schwamm einmal ein Leiche,
sie schwamm mal links, sie schwamm mal rechts,
sie war des weiblichen Geschlechts.
Auf ihren Brüsten saßen zwei Frösche, die sich küssten.
In ihrem Geschlechtskanal da tummelte sich ein Aal.
Ihr Schoß, der war bemoost – in diesem sinne Prost!
Ja, wenn es sein muß,
muß es sein.
Ja, wenn er rein muß,
muß er rein.
Ja, wenn es sein muß,
daß er rein muß,
dann Prost....
Es lebe die Liebe, das Bier und der Suff,
der uneheliche Beischlaf, der Papst und das Puff!
PROST!
Red’ was wahr ist,
Iß’ was gar ist
Trink’ was klar ist
The Mythology of Karen
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/08/karen-meme-coronavirus/615355/#Anchor%201
L’article discute la discimination des femmes « blanches » en comparaison avec celle des hommes « noirs » et des femmes « non-blanches ». Ses points de départ sont le meme des « Karen » et le roman de Harper Lee « Ne tirez pas sur l’oiseau moqueur ».
C’est une bonne analyse d’un point de vue progressiste étatsunien. Pourtant l’auteur Helen Lewis n’arrive pas à cerner la force derrière les différentes formes de discrimination et n’essaye pas de décrire leurs relations dialectiques. Elle nous fournit quelques informations et éléments de réflexion utiles pour une analyse approfondie qui prendrait en compte les relations de classe et le processus de production capitaliste qui forment la perception et les mobiles des protagonistes et antagonistes de la discrimination.
L’article partage ce point faible avec toutes les analyses féministes et identitaires qui passent à côté de ces méthodes analytiques pourtant connues depuis la rédaction de « L’Idéologie allemande » en 1832. On parle alors de critique bourgeoise ou petite-bourgeoise pour définir ce type de réflexion limitée par la situation de classe de ses auteurs.
Ce n’est pas un exercice académique. Ces textes et idées sont des outils dangereux dont l’utlisation entraîne le risque de nous monter les uns contre les autres alors que libres de la confusion semée par ces idéologies fallacieuces on s’unirait dans le combat contre nos ennemis et exploiteurs communs.
19.8.2020 by Helen Lewis - The meme is so powerful because of the awkward status of white women. (image: design showing the haircut typically associated with “Karens”)
Updated at 10:24 a.m. ET on August 24, 2020.
What does it mean to call a woman a “Karen”? The origins of any meme are hard to pin down, and this one has spread with the same intensity as the coronavirus, and often in parallel with it. Karens are “the policewomen of all human behavior.” Karens don’t believe in vaccines. Karens have short hair. Karens are selfish. Confusingly, Karens are both the kind of petty enforcers who patrol other people’s failures at social distancing, and the kind of entitled women who refuse to wear a mask because it’s a “muzzle.”
Oh, and Karens are most definitely white. Let that ease your conscience if you were beginning to wonder whether the meme was, perhaps, a little bit sexist in identifying various universal negative behaviors and attributing them exclusively to women. “Because Karen is white, she faces few meaningful repercussions,” wrote Robin Abcarian in the Los Angeles Times. “Embarrassing videos posted on social media is usually as bad as it gets for Karen.”
Sorry, but no. You can’t control a word, or an idea, once it’s been released into the wild. Epithets linked to women have a habit of becoming sexist insults; we don’t tend to describe men as bossy, ditzy, or nasty. They’re not called mean girls or prima donnas or drama queens, even when they totally are. And so Karen has followed the trajectory of dozens of words before it, becoming a cloak for casual sexism as well as a method of criticizing the perceived faux vulnerability of white women.
To understand why the Karen debate has been so fierce and emotive, you need to understand the two separate (and opposing) traditions on which it draws: anti-racism and sexism. You also need to understand the challenge that white women as a group pose to modern activist culture. When so many online debates involve mentally awarding “privilege points” to each side of an encounter or argument to adjudicate who holds the most power, the confusing status of white women jams the signal. Are they the oppressors or the oppressed? Worse than that, what if they are using their apparent disadvantage—being a woman—as a weapon?
One phrase above all has come to encapsulate the essence of a Karen: She is the kind of woman who asks to speak to the manager. In doing so, Karen is causing trouble for others. It is taken as read that her complaint is bogus, or at least disproportionate to the vigor with which she pursues it. The target of Karen’s entitled anger is typically presumed to be a racial minority or a working-class person, and so she is executing a covert maneuver: using her white femininity to present herself as a victim, when she is really the aggressor.
Call Donald Trump “the ultimate Karen” if you like, but the word’s power—its punch—comes from the frequently fraught cultural space white women in the United States have occupied for generations. This includes the schism between white suffragists and the abolitionist movement, where prominent white women expressed affronted rage that Black men might be granted the vote ahead of them. “If intelligence, justice and morality are to have precedence in the government, let the question of women be brought up first and that of the negro last,” declared Susan B. Anthony in 1869 at a conference of the American Equal Rights Association. (She was responding to the suggestion by Frederick Douglass that Black male enfranchisement was a more urgent issue than women’s suffrage.) There are also echoes in the Scottsboro Boys case, where eight Black men were wrongly convicted of raping two white women in 1930s Alabama; and the rape of the “Central Park jogger,” where the horrifying violence suffered by a white woman was the pretext for the state’s persecution of innocent men.
The tension is even more obvious in another infamous case. In August 1955, Carolyn Bryant Donham was 21 years old, and working in a store she owned with her husband, Roy Bryant, in the Mississippi Delta. A Black teenage boy walked into the store, and then—well, no one knows, exactly. Bryant Donham’s initial story was that he wolf-whistled at her. In court, later, she said he grabbed her, insulted her, and told her he’d been with white women before. Decades later, she said that she had made it all up, and couldn’t remember exactly what had happened.
None of that made any difference to the boy, who was hunted down by Roy Bryant and killed. His body was found days later, so mutilated that his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral, which would force the world to witness what had been done to him. His name was Emmett Till.
That story is vital to understanding America’s Karen mythology. A white woman’s complaint led white male authority to enact violence on a Black person, and neither she nor they suffered any consequences. Roy Bryant and his half brother were put on trial for Till’s murder, but acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. Within a racist, patriarchal system, Bryant Donham’s fragility—her white femininity—was not a weakness, but a weapon, because she could always call on white men to protect her. (Yet even that case is more morally complex than it once seemed. In 2017, the Duke University professor Timothy B. Tyson, who was researching a book on the case, discovered that Roy Bryant was physically abusive to his wife. “The circumstances under which she told the story were coercive,” he told The New York Times. “She’s horrified by it. There’s clearly a great burden of guilt and sorrow.”)
All of this is why the earnest feminist contribution to the Karen debate—why isn’t there a name for haughty, shouty men who make customer-service complaints, or call the police on Black people, putting them in danger?—is irrelevant. There doesn’t need to be a word for that, because the concept being invoked here is the faux victim. Although they differ vastly in magnitude, a direct line of descent can be traced from the Till case to the “Central Park Karen,” a white woman named Amy Cooper who called the New York City police earlier this year claiming that a Black male bird-watcher was threatening her. (Cooper lost her job and is facing criminal charges for filing a false report.) A white woman’s tears were, again, a weapon to unleash the authorities—still coded white and male, despite the advances we have made since the 1950s—upon a Black man.
The potency of the Karen mythology is yet more proof that the internet “speaks American.” Here in Britain, there is no direct equivalent of the Till case, and voting rights were never restricted on racial lines. The big splits in the British suffrage movement were between violent and nonviolent tactics, and on whether men under 30 should receive the vote before women. Yet British newspapers have rushed to explain the Karen meme to their readers, because Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram—the prime sites for Karen-spotting—are widely used in this country. (In fact, the Karen discussion has spread throughout the English-speaking internet, reaching as far as New Zealand.)
At some point, though, the particular American history behind Karen got lost. What started as an indictment of racial privilege has become divorced from its original context, and is now a catchall term for shaming women online.
Not very much unites the rapper Ice T and the “alt-right” activist Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars, but both can agree on this: Karens are a menace. In July, Ice T identified a “Karen of the Day,” tweeting a video of a woman who refused to wear a mask in a dentist’s office. It was another instance of the meme’s suspicious flexibility: Is a Karen a woman flouting the rules or pettily enforcing them? (Never mind the fact that research shows men are less likely to wear masks, anyway.)
Watson’s take was even more revealing, because he was not playing to an audience that considers itself progressive. That means he can say the quiet part out loud. In one YouTube video with nearly 1 million views, Watson defines a “Karen” as “an annoying, interfering female adult, who complains about everything.” The first clip in his compilation is of a man cycling past a woman, who tells the cyclist briskly but not angrily: “That’s not social distancing.”
Cut to Watson: “Okay, Karen.”
Cut back to the man on the bike, incredulous at being challenged. “Stupid bitch, shut up.”
This is the hazard of memes, as well as the phenomenon of viral shaming more broadly. There’s no arbiter to decide which Karens are really acting in egregious or racist ways before the millionth like or view is reached, or their names are publicly revealed. Karen has become synonymous with woman among those who consider woman an insult. There is now a market, measured in attention and approbation, for anyone who can sniff out a Karen.
Whenever the potential sexism of the Karen meme has been raised, the standard reply has been that it originated in Black women’s critiques of racism, that white women have more privilege than Black women, and that therefore identifying and chastising Karens is a form of “punching up.” In February, Aja Romano of Vox defined Karens as “officious white women ruining the party for everyone else,” adding that “Black culture in particular has a history of assigning basic nicknames to badly behaved white women … [from] Barbecue Becky and Golfcart Gail to Permit Patty and Talkback Tammy.” Calling the Karen meme sexist, according to The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah, “only trivializes actual violence and discrimination that destroy lives and communities. And to invent oppression when none is happening to you? … That is peak Karen behavior.”
The best way to see the Karen meme is as a “scissor,” an idea popularized by the writer Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex to describe an incident or a statement that drives people to such wildly divergent interpretations that they can never be reconciled. Because white women can be both oppressors and oppressed, Karen is a scissor. Does the word describe a particular type of behavior that resonates because of the particular racial history of the United States? Yes. Is that the only way it is used? No.
As it happens, the casually sexist roots of the meme are as deep as the anti-racist ones. One of the foundational internet Karens was the ex-wife of a Redditor who chronicled their fraught relationship in the subreddit r/FuckYouKaren, created in December 2017. The intensity of the blowback when pointing facts like this out is itself instructive. The chorus of disdain that greets any white woman who questions the Karen meme comes from a broad, and unexpected, coalition: anti-racists and bog-standard misogynists. (Finally, a political stance to bring this troubled world together.)
For the same reason, the Karen meme divides white women themselves. On one side are those who register its sexist uses, who feel the familiar tang of misogyny. Women are too loud, too demanding, too entitled. Others push aside those echoes, reasoning that if Black women want a word to describe their experience of racism, they should be allowed to have it. Hanging over white women’s decision on which way to jump is a classic finger trap, familiar to anyone who has confronted a sexist joke, only to be told that they don’t have a sense of humor. What is more Karen than complaining about being called “Karen”? There is a strong incentive to be cool about other women being Karened, lest you be Karened yourself.
In her 1991 essay “From Practice to Theory, or What is a White Woman Anyway?” the feminist and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon referenced the Till case to explain the malignant stereotype that has grown up around the “white woman” in the United States. “This creature is not poor, not battered, not raped (not really), not molested as a child, not pregnant as a teenager, not prostituted, not coerced into pornography, not a welfare mother, and not economically exploited,” wrote MacKinnon. “She is Miss Anne of the kitchen, she puts Frederick Douglass to the lash, she cries rape when Emmett Till looks at her sideways, she manipulates white men’s very real power with the lifting of her very well-manicured little finger.” She might have added, echoing the LA Times: Nothing worse happens to the white woman than a viral-video shaming.
MacKinnon’s point was that sexism existed, and even whiteness did not protect women from suffering it. (A response to MacKinnon by the Yale Collective on Women of Color and the Law contested some of her points, but agreed that feminism had to address the “very real oppression suffered by women, despite any access women may have to social privilege.”) Call the Karen meme sexist, though, and you will stumble into the middle of a Venn diagram, where progressive activists and anti-feminists can agree with each other: When white women say they’ve been raped, we should doubt them, because we know white women lie. And underneath that: What do white women have to complain about, anyway?
Ageism is also a factor. As a name, Karen peaked in the U.S. in the 1960s, and is now rare for newborns, so today’s Karen is likely to be well into middle age. As women shout and rant and protest in out-of-context clips designed to paint them in the most viral-friendly light possible, they are portrayed as witches, harridans, harpies: women who dare to keep existing, speaking, and asking to see the manager, after their reproductive peak.
In her essay, MacKinnon wrote that it was hard for women to organize “as women.” Many of us, she wrote, are more comfortable organizing around identities we share with men, such as gay rights or civil rights. “I sense here that people feel more dignity in being part of any group that includes men than in being part of a group that includes that ultimate reduction of the notion of oppression, that instigator of lynch mobs, that ludicrous whiner, that equality coattails rider, the white woman,” she added. “It seems that if your oppression is also done to a man, you are more likely to be recognized as oppressed as opposed to inferior.” That is the minefield that anyone who wants to use the Karen meme to “punch up” has to traverse. You will find yourself in unsavory company alongside those who see white women as ludicrous whiners.
In 2011, writing in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates acknowledged the sexism that suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sarah Grimké faced from fellow abolitionists, and their sense of being told again and again that women’s rights were important, sure, but not urgent. Coates does not acquit these white suffragists of racial entitlement, but adds: “When the goal—abolition—was achieved, they hoped for some reciprocity. It did not come.” Without excusing their lack of solidarity, he attempts to understand it. The Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote, came nearly 50 years after the Fifteenth, which ruled that voting rights could not be restricted “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
This uneasy history explains why the Karen debate has become so furious. It prods at several questions that are too painful for many of us to address. How far does white skin shield a woman from sexism? Do women “cry rape” with enough frequency to concern us, or is that another misogynist myth? How do Black women navigate competing demands for solidarity from their white sisters and their Black brothers? Does it still feel like punching up if you’re joined by anti-feminists such as Watson, and a guy on a bike who shouts “stupid bitch” at women he doesn’t like? And why is it okay to be more angry with the white women questioning the Karen meme than the white men appropriating it?
The Karen debate can, and perhaps will, go on forever, because it is equally defensible to argue that white women are oppressed for their sex, and privileged by their race. (“Half victim, half accomplice, like everyone else,” in Simone de Beauvoir’s phrase.) If successive generations of schoolchildren can see that, maybe adults can too. After all, the most potent echo of the Till case in literature comes from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, published five years after the 14-year-old’s murder. In the book, “white trash” Mayella Ewell testifies that her family’s Black neighbor, Tom Robinson, raped her.(1) It is a lie. The book’s hero, the lawyer Atticus Finch, exposes that lie only by also revealing Mayella’s real trauma: She came on to Tom, and was beaten savagely by her father, Bob, as a result. Bob Ewell’s capacity for extreme violence is further demonstrated when he attempts to kill Finch’s children in revenge for being humiliated in court. Mayella Ewell is half victim, half accomplice—a victim of male violence, and an accomplice to white supremacy.
Her story, therefore, is one of both complicity and oppression. It is not simple or easy. No wonder it was so challenging then, and no wonder our feelings toward her daughters, the internet’s hated Karens, are so challenging now.
(1) This piece previously mischaracterized the relationship between Tom Robinson and the Ewell family in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Walking Home Alone: Why women feel unsafe in public places
This short story combined with statistical data about sexual assault and violence against women, describes the anxiety of navigating public spaces while trying to stay safe. In a short 20-minute walk, the writer examines the effects of street harassment, sexual assault in taxis and public transport, and the inadequate response by the justice system.
n 10 hours’ time, the sun will thaw the frost that has coated the world in glitter. It will rise after a long night behind black skies. People will leave their homes, rushing to see family, finish last minute shopping, or saying goodbyes on their last day of work. The world will feel safer. Perhaps the terrors who lurk in the dark are scared of the light because it illuminates the lives they ruin.
*
The walk home only takes 20 minutes. I’ll take the high street, past the shops, cinema, supermarket, chip van, restaurants, cafes; turn right, on the main road, past the taxi rank, petrol station, corner shop, hairdressers; turn left, past the park entrance, down the lane, across the junction; home is on the left. It’s been a good night. No one is going in my direction, so I’ll walk home alone.
Everyone is filing out of the bar – it’s not that late but it’s almost Christmas and everyone is happy and drunk. The best kind of drunk. Someone catcalls and whistles. Four girls are laughing, bantering back. It feels later than it is as the winter fog curls around the road signs. It’s a small town – there’s no trouble here. Twenty minutes and I’ll be home.
The streetlights are casting the town in an orange glow. The shops are mostly dark, their grills locked up. A child’s toy is slung over a bollard. Litter has been blown across the pavements; a tin can is scrunched on the road.
I’ve left the crowd and now the street is deserted. Voices are fading down the alleyway to my right: a couple going home together. Car doors slamming, engines whirring, getting quieter… silence. After a day and night surrounded by people and noise, my ears are now muffled.
I should have worn something warmer. Away from the bar, I stand out in a short skirt, strappy top and denim jacket. I’m not used to walking far in heels and I’m worried I look alone and drunk.
I need to walk faster. I’m cold and the wind is seeping through my jacket. This walk seems much longer at night and I can’t listen to music. What if someone sneaks up on me? It wouldn’t happen, but what if? I don’t want to take my hands out of my pockets anyway. The last few shops are lit with Christmas decorations. Maybe it’ll snow. I have a good week ahead – drinks, food, family, friends.
I can hear the thud of a bass. There’s a car approaching from behind.
Pull down your skirt, hide your stomach, hold your keys tight.
Is it slowing down? Am I being paranoid? No, it is slowing down. I can hear the brakes. It’s stopping…
Nearly half of all women in the UK (41%) say they take steps on a regular basis to protect themselves from sexual assault. One in five women never walk alone at night. Half of the female population do not feel safe walking alone at night even in busy places. The constant threats are not worth a quick walk home. Perpetrators are trained in gaslighting their victims to make them feel as though they’re overreacting.
‘Slut.’ ‘Slag.’ ‘Whore.’ Almost every woman has received these comments. Quite often, they have also described someone else with them. It’s a cycle of misogyny, veiled through jokes. And these jokes lead to some individuals utilising these attitudes for their own gratification. A study found that 55% of men deem women to be more likely to be harassed or assaulted if she wears more revealing clothes. From a young age girls report making clothing choices to ensure they are less vulnerable.
Clothing has no correlation with sexual assault. Women are harassed in jeans or skirts, in winter or summer, bundled up or showing skin. Rape has been committed since the beginning of time, through the ages of petticoats trailing the floor, and impenetrable corsets. The only common theme is the assaulters’ decisions. Clothing is not consent.
*
BEEP.
I can’t breathe. This is it. What will they do? Why are they stopping? 999 on speed dial. I’m ready to press green. The car is moving again, speeding up, screeching. It’s driving past me – fast. Water splashes my ankles but no one’s honking anymore. They were waiting at the roundabout. Someone wasn’t paying attention. Nothing to do with me. I’m overreacting. I have cramp from gripping my phone. My keys are cutting my hand. I need to relax.
Deep breath. Turn right.
Fifteen minutes to go. The road is getting darker. The council hasn’t decorated this street in Christmas cheer. It’s quieter too. Less traffic… fewer witnesses… Don’t be stupid –I’m almost there. Today’s been a good day. I’m excited for a hot chocolate. Maybe some snacks. My mouth is really dry.
It seems quieter than usual. The chip van is already closed. There’s no sign it was open except a polystyrene carton discarded on the ground. The fog is muting the world. Maybe an Uber is available. It’ll be expensive at this time of year though. It’s only a 10-minute walk… that’s such a waste. Besides, why should I have to pay for an Uber? My guy friends could do the walk for free. I’m being pathetic. I’m not changing my life to appease my anxieties. I’m overreacting. But I’d be out of the cold, and safe in a car…
*
Six thousand sexual assaults were reported to Uber in the US in two years. UK statistics are unknown. The 6,000 allegations include 235 rapes, 280 attempted rapes and 1,560 instances of unwanted intimate touching. The taxi company has more than 70,000 drivers across the UK. Its busiest day saw more than one million trips. The chances are so small, yet the threat is continuous. A 27-year-old woman was assaulted as she was vomiting. She was at her most vulnerable, trying to get home, yet someone took advantage. What alternative is there? Ubering is the “safe” route.
In one year, there were more than 400 reports of criminal offences by taxi or private hire drivers in London alone, with 126 accused of violent or sexual offences. Only one in six sexual assaults is reported. 300,000 taxi journeys per day in the UK. A minuscule chance, but not impossible.
You could be unlucky. This one trip could ruin your life. It could end it.
Don’t sit in the front seat. You are making yourself available to the driver. It might be seen as an invitation. You wanted the attention. You wore a short skirt and sat next to him. Don’t sit in the back seat, you won’t be able to get out if he puts the child lock on. It was your own fault – you didn’t think it through. Why did you even get in the cab? It was a short journey, there was no need.
*
Two options: make the short walk home or order the Uber now. It’s quicker to drive but I’m halfway home already. It’s a quiet road – no one will be out at this time. I’ll freeze waiting for the car and my phone battery is low. I’ll brave the cold.
There are no more streetlights. The fog is settling, dampening the world and illuminating my torchlight like a movie scene. My heart is racing. Either the cold or my pace is making me breathe loudly. The shadows look like people. The world is still, except me and the darkness that follows me.
Turn left.
Eight minutes to go. The town centre has dissolved into darkness. There’s no traffic anymore. Everyone is inside, safe. The lights are off in all the houses. I’m the only one awake. My phone pings.
“Home safe, see you all soon xx” “Great night! Going to bed!”
“Omg how COLD was that walk!!! Night x”
Everyone is home. No disasters – not a surprise. It’s too cold to type – I’ll reply later. We all turned our locations on before we left – just in case – so they know where I am.
Headlights. The road is lit up. It sounds bigger than a car. A lorry? A bus. The bus! I have my pass with me. It’s fate. I need to run the final few steps. In one stop it will drop me right outside my door. Safe and sound. I’ll go inside, turn the TV on and watch something before bed. I’ve got the blankets down, hot drink, some chocolate…
It’s pulling over now. There’s no one on it at all. Just the driver. He looks fine, but what does ‘fine’ look like? It’s only one stop. Is it a bit weird that he’s pulling over even though I’m not at the stop yet? I’m sure it’s fine… he’s fine… everything is fine…
*
Murat Tas. The name of a bus driver who searched social media for details of a teenage girl who had boarded his bus, before sexually assaulting her. No one else was on the bus. There were no witnesses. He got 200 hours of community work and 60 days rehabilitation, as well as being ordered to pay £500 court costs and a £140 victim surcharge. £140 in exchange for lifelong recollections. £140 in exchange for being too scared to take public transport, petrified of it happening again.
Gulam Mayat. The name of a bus driver who sexually assaulted a female passenger on the night bus, waiting for her to be alone, moving the bus to obscure them from view. She tried to move away but he persisted.
The report said she had been drinking alcohol earlier – why does it matter? It was 4am. She was trying to get home.
Mark Spalding. The name of a bus driver who committed a string of sexual assaults on passengers. He locked two young women on the bus. He groomed two young girls, stopping in secluded areas to assault them. The girls and their parents trusted they could travel home safely, without being traumatized.
*
It really isn’t far. The bus takes a longer route, I can go down the lane and be home within minutes. I’ve done the scariest part, no need to get the bus for a single stop when I can walk.
“Sorry, my bad” I put my hand up as the bus door opens. “No problem, have a good night.”
I watch the bus engine restart and steadily trail down the road. He seemed nice enough… My feet are aching now.
Down the lane…
Somehow, it’s even darker here. The trees are bare, so bare you can see the sky through their silhouettes. Thousands of stars, so high and bright the fog doesn’t obscure them. Most people would be scared here, but I can walk this avenue with my eyes closed. No one comes down here, not at this time.
On the left. Finally, I’m here. My hands are so cold I’m struggling with the key. As I open the door, I can feel the heat. Home and safe. It wasn’t even a bad walk. Refreshing. I knew it would be okay.
I’ll put the TV on, make a hot chocolate and find a film to watch before bed. Maybe a Christmas film. The blaring TV cuts through the night silence. Background noise is comforting after the quiet. The forecaster is predicting snow tomorrow. My blankets are ready on the sofa. Maybe I’ll boil the kettle for a hot water bottle too.
“BREAKING NEWS
“A woman, aged 20, has escaped a man who followed, raped and threatened to kill her. Police are examining CCTV footage and carrying out enquiries. They are asking anyone with information to contact them immediately.”
This is our local news. That man is still out there. That woman could have been me. I’m so lucky. I’m lucky that I was the one who got home safely tonight. One town over, one hour earlier. God, that could have been me.
*
Over 70% of women in the UK say they have experienced sexual harassment in public. 25% of women have been sexually assaulted. Only 4% of sexual assaults are reported to official organisations. 5 in 6 rapes against women are carried out by someone they know. And 5 in 6 women who are raped don’t report.. Why? Embarrassment, fear of being humiliated, fear that no one will help. Why do women feel this way?
1. ‘As the gentlemen on the jury will understand, when a woman says no she doesn’t always mean it.’
2. ‘The victim in this case, although she wasn’t necessarily willing, she didn’t put up a fight.’
3. ‘Why couldn’t you just keep your knees together’
These three statements were made in court by judges during rape trials – in the UK, US and Canada.
1. ‘Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.’
2. ‘If a woman is wearing provocative clothing, the change needs to come from her.’
3. “We know you are making this up.”
These three statements were made by police officers – in Canada, Egypt and US.
So, how would you get home? Would you feel safe to walk alone in the dark? If not, you’re not alone, even if you feel it.
▻https://lacuna.org.uk/justice/walking-home-alone-women-feel-unsafe-in-public
#espace_public #femmes #sécurité #insécurité #harcèlement #sexisme #harcèlement_de_rue #anxieté #transports_publics #taxis #agression_sexuelle #justice #alcool #nuit #sexisme_ordinaire #mysogynie #habits #vêtements #viols #uber
Ousted Ubisoft developer Ashraf Ismail quietly working for Tencent
▻https://www.axios.com/2022/07/28/ashraf-ismail-tencent-ubisoft
Ashraf Ismail, former top developer on Assassin’s Creed games for Ubisoft before his dismissal from the company in mid-2020, was hired last year to help lead development on a game at Tencent, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The new role amounts to a second chance for a developer whose fall from Ubisoft amid allegations of abusing his power was part of the MeToo reckoning in the game industry two years ago.
Ousted Assassin’s Creed Valhalla creative director now working for Tencent
►https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/ousted-i-assassin-s-creed-valhalla-i-creative-director-now-working-fo
Ashraf Ismail left Ubisoft Montreal following allegations of misconduct towards young female fans, and is said to have been quietly working with Tencent since 2021.
#jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo #ressources_humaines #ashraf_ismail #méconduite #harcèlement_sexuel #mysogynie #homophobie #ubisoft_montréal #tencent #jeu_vidéo_assassin_s_creed_origins #jeu_vidéo_assassin_s_creed_valhalla #timi #serge_hascoët #yannis_mallat #cécile_cornet #jeu_vidéo_skull_and_bones #a_better_ubisoft #metoo
Let’s call the Isla Vista killings what they were: misogynist extremism
▻http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/05/lets-call-isla-vista-killings-what-they-were-misogynist-extremism
The ideology behind these attacks - and there is ideology - is simple. Women owe men. Women, as a class, as a sex, owe men sex, love, attention, “adoration”, in Rodger’s words. We owe them respect and obedience, and our refusal to give it to them is to blame for their anger, their violence - stupid sluts get what they deserve. Most of all, there is an overpowering sense of rage and entitlement: the conviction that men have been denied a birthright of easy power.
(...)
Violent extremism always attracts the lost, the broken, young men full of rage at the hand they’ve been dealt. Violent extremism entices those who long to lash out at a system they believe has cheated them, but lack they courage to think for themselves, beyond the easy answers they are offered by pedlars of hate. Misogynist extremism is no different. For some time now misogynist extremism has been excused, as all acts of terrorism committed by white men are excused, as an aberration, as the work of random loons, not real men at all.
(...)
Why can we not speak about misogynist extremism - why can we not speak about misogyny at all - even when the language used by Elliot Rodger is everywhere online?
(...)
We like to think that violent misogyny - not sexism, but misogyny, woman-hatred as ideology and practice, weaponised contempt for one half of the human race - isn’t something that really happens in the so-called West. No matter how many wives and girlfriends are murdered by their husbands, no matter how many rapists are let off because of their “promising careers”, violence against women is something that happens elsewhere, somewhere foreign, or historical, or both. So anxious are we to retain this convenient delusion that any person, particularly any female person, who attempts to raise a counter argument can expect to be harassed and shouted down.