I have not blogged here in over three months, but I cannot think of a better day to start again than today.

Today is an amazing day. The West Memphis Three were released from prison. This is both extraordinary and incredibly tragic, as they have served 18 years–half of their lives–behind bars for a crime that they did not commit.

I slept in today. When I woke up, I took it easy, made coffee and took my time getting to my computer and settling in for the rest of the day to work–something I have not allowed myself to do in months. When I checked in on Facebook, I saw one single story pop up declaring that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr. were finally given the freedom that they have always been deserving of. I didn’t believe it. By the time I made it half-way through the first article, several others had been posted, assuring me that it really happened. I immediately started crying.

I have been following the story of the West Memphis Three for the past ten years. When I first heard about their case and watched the documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, I was 14 years old. Like countless other people who have heard about the West Memphis Three, have seen the facts of their case and have long witnessed the corruption at work within an already incompetent justice system, as perpetrated by everyone who sought to convict them, I have developed a strong emotional connection to this case and to the three teenagers–now men–who had half of their lives literally stolen from them.

After they were tried and found guilty for the murder of three young, 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, Damien Echols, who was 18 years old at the time, was sentenced to death and spent the past 18 years on death row; Jessie Misskelley, Jr., who was 17 years old, was sentenced to life imprisonment plus an additional forty years and Jason Baldwin, just 16 years old at the time, was sentenced to life imprisonment.

One of the factors that made me so emotional from the very first time I ever heard of the West Memphis Three is that I saw so much of my teenage-self in them; a feeling that a great deal of other supporters have acknowledged as well. When I was 13 and 14 years old, I was beyond fascinated by the Salem Witch Trials (still am), and I had begun learning about as many different religious beliefs as I possibly could, including Wicca. The practice of becoming educated on the many different religious affiliations and beliefs that are out there in the world is what predominantly led to my now strongly-held staunch atheist beliefs. But at the time, up until I was 17 years old, I was a black clothes and fishnets-wearing teenage girl with knee-length, ass-kicking black boots, arms that were filled with black jelly bracelets up to my elbows and more black eyeliner on my face than what many probably have in their makeup collections. If these three teenagers could face murder charges and be convicted based mostly on the fact that the system had labeled them as the “town freaks”, surely I could have gone through the same ordeal; as could anyone who illustrated the same qualities in their teenage years.

That these men are finally able to go home after 18 years is amazing, but how they were made able to walk out of those prison doors is disgraceful both to the state of Arkansas, as well as to the entire justice system.

In order for the West Memphis Three to be released today, they were practically forced into accepting an Alford plea deal, in which they all pled guilty while being able to continue to claim their innocence. For their guilty plea, they were sentenced to 18 years with credit for time served, as well as a Suspended Imposition of Sentence for 10 years. It is also stipulated that if they “re-offend”, they can be sent back to prison for 21 years.

I say that they were practically forced to take the Alford plea deal because firstly, DNA evidence that was finally tested in July 2011 concluded that the West Memphis Three are not guilty of the crime in which they have been serving time for. After serving 18 years in prison for a crime that they now have proof that they did not commit, the state of Arkansas would only give them the freedom that they are entitled to as long as the state could protect itself from one of the most corrupt acts that they are totally and completely guilty of. That is outrageously disgusting and an obscene abuse of power.

In response to the plea deal that was accepted, a press conference was conducted with the West Memphis Three (video below); here is what Jason Baldwin had to say about taking the plea deal:

“This was not justice. In the beginning we told nothing but the truth–that we were innocent and they sent us to prison for the rest of our lives for it. We had to come here and the only thing the state would do for us is say, ‘Hey we will let you go only if you admit guilt,’ and that is not justice any way you look at it. They’re not out there trying to find who really murdered those boys, and I did not want to take the deal from the get-go. However, they are trying to kill Damien, and sometimes you just got to bite the gun to save somebody.”

A portion of Damien Echols’ statement is below, you can read it in its entirety here.

I have now spent half my life on death row. It is a torturous environment that no human being should have to endure, and it needed to end. I am innocent, as are Jason and Jessie, but I made this decision because I did not want to spend another day of my life behind those bars. I want to live and to continue to fight for our innocence. Sometimes justice is neither pretty nor is it perfect, but it was important to take this opportunity to be free.

I am not alone as there are tens of thousand of men and women in this country who have been wrongfully convicted, forced into a false confession, sentenced to death or a lifetime in prison. I am hopeful that one day they too will be able stand with their friends and family to declare their innocence.

That last part is incredibly important. The West Memphis Three were lucky. They have an incredible amount of supporters and people who have dedicated so much of themselves to doing everything in their power to ensure that these three men would see the freedom that they deserved; including an entire film crew who have worked through the years to put out two documentaries on their case. These documentaries have reached an astounding number of people, making this case known around the world. Without the notoriety that these men received at the hands of their many high profile supporters, they would still be in prison and Damien Echols would have likely been executed years ago.

They were lucky, and yet there are so many people living right now behind bars who had never committed the crimes that they were found guilty of. So, with that in mind, check out The Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing and who strive to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.

Here is a press conference conducted with Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr.:

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In 1971, Dr. Patch Adams founded the Gesundheit! Institute where each year, he organizes a group of volunteers from around the world to travel to various countries dressed as clowns in order to bring humor to people, patients and orphans of those countries. Everything Dr. Patch Adams does in his life is because of the compassion he has in his heart. I never saw the movie “Patch Adams” starring Robin Williams. Everything I know about Dr. Patch Adams is because International Day of Compassion was created in his honor and naturally, I did a bit of research on him. I can now say that I am truly and completely blown away by this man, especially, I must admit, because he is completely against insurance policies being used to dictate who is worthy of receiving the highest quality of medical care and in essence, who is worthy of living a happy, healthy life and who must suffer because of their lack of finances.

I took part in International Day of Compassion and wrote a post for my other blog, Woman Tribune, also known as my day job. While writing this post, I noticed that I was writing from a place I haven’t really touched on in months–the place within myself that oozes passion and heart and everything that has always bubbled within me and kept me blogging here on Menstrual Poetry for years.

Woman Tribune is my livelihood; it is the reason why I have a roof over my head and food in my refrigerator, but the reason why it pays is because it is all facts, fun and frivolous. It has a completely different tone than anything I have ever written here. At times, well, most of the time really, it lacks heart. When Woman Tribune took off and started receiving more attention and thus my bank account started seeing more action, Menstrual Poetry took the backseat in my daily life in a pretty extreme way. As a result of that, it has been over a year since I have blogged here more than two or three times a month.

It has been so long since I have written with the amount of heart that I wrote with last night and once I felt that vulnerable, excited and sort of anxious feeling in my gut–the same feeling I have had while writing every post on this blog–I knew that my passion had finally returned. And it is amazing.

And as for that post for International Day of Compassion…

There is so much in our world that needs to changed. It is possible and do not ever, not for a second, let anyone tell you that the world you envision living in isn’t possible or that you don’t have the power within yourself to initiate or contribute to lasting change in the world. Take the lead of Dr. Patch Adams and other revolutionaries throughout our history and every time you get knocked down, stand up again and declare your truth louder each time.

Compassion is what contributes to the greatness of humanity; if more people were to look inside themselves and exhibit compassion in everything they do, we would see so much less suffering in the world. We would see the world in the way we have always envisioned it to be–with less struggling, less hunger, less homelessness, less ignorance, less sickness, less silencing, and with more love, more understanding and more peace.

Continue reading at Woman Tribune »

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Women have accomplished absolutely amazing things throughout history and we continue to do the same today. Without the diligent, shameless, kick ass and inspiring activism of women, we as a collective people would not be who we are today and our worlds, no matter how seemingly different in culture from one location to the next, would not be what it is today. And there is so much more to do.

There are countless women’s rights activists, feminists, womanists, humanists and socially-conscious people who participate in celebrating International Women’s Day every year. There are currently upwards of 1500 events taking place all over the world this year alone posted on the official International Women’s Day website. Bloggers have also come to celebrate this day through their blogs, such as the series of interviews the super amazing and fantastic Renee Martin of Womanist Musings conducted with bloggers who make up a good portion of the society and culture blogosphere in 2009. Then again, I could be biased since I was one of the women she interviewed, which you can still read here.

Gender Across Borders is urging more bloggers to step up and recognize and celebrate International Women’s Day with their second annual Blog for International Women’s Day (Blog for IWD for short). Each year, there is a running theme associated with International Women’s Day; this year’s theme is “Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women.” Going along the vein of this theme, Gender Across Borders is asking bloggers to think about any of the following questions in regards to the U.N.’s theme for International Women’s Day:

• What does it mean to have equal access to education, training and science and technology for women, and how do we get there?

• Describe a particular organization or moment in history that helped to mobilize a meaningful change in equal access to education, training and science and technology for women.

If you plan to participate in Blog for International Women’s Day, add your blog to Gender Across Border’s link roundup of participating blogs and spread the word on Twitter using hashtag #BlogforIWD.

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I have been known to get disheartened and downright angry over a number of political moves that have been made in the name of the American people. I have been told for far too long that I take politics too seriously and that I feel too much. I have never been able to understand that line of thinking. How is it possible for someone to take the state of their country and the rights being given and taken away from the people of that country too seriously? Apathy for politics, for the rights of the people and for what state representatives are saying in Washington in the names of their constituents scares me. Frankly, apathy is what makes representatives who author, sponsor, cosponsor and vote “yes” on highly offensive, discriminatory and dehumanizing bills announce that they are truly representing the people whom they have been elected to work for. If your representatives do not hear your objecting voice, they believe they have free reign to trample all over your rights. That is exactly what the majority of the new, Republican-led Congress is doing with the introductions of H.R. 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act”, H.R. 358, the “Protect Life Act”, and the House passing of the Pence Amendment.

The Pence Amendment is a direct attack on Planned Parenthood and subsequently, on the health and lives of American women, the vast majority of them low-income. Passing in the House with a vote of 240 to 185, this amendment not only aims to completely defund Planned Parenthood, but would also eliminate the entire Title X program; the only federal grant program dedicated solely to providing comprehensive family planning and preventative health services.

This is not about abortion, regardless of how much the majority of the House would like you to believe it is. No funds from Title X are ever used for abortion services; none. So why the elaborate stories of the sanctity of human life from the supposed “pro-life” politicians of the house? Deception, clear and simple. Hiding amendments under “hot button issues” such as abortion is sadly, politics as usual. The Pence Amendment is not about defunding abortion and it is by no means a victory for the “sanctity of human life”; it is quite literally just the opposite. Title X funds are used for cancer screenings, STI tests, mammograms, HIV testing and diagnosis, sex education, contraception, and pregnancy screening and counseling. Last year, approximately 5 million people benefited from the services funded by Title X. Without Title X, millions of American people would lose affordable access to these health care services.

I have read a lot of blogs, websites and comments about the passing of the Pence Amendment and a lot of people’s thoughts resonated with me. One comment on Feministe’s post, in particular, really stood out to me: “240 people — 240 national elected officials — have just demonstrated that they hate me (and others who’ve depended on PP) and don’t think we’re deserving of sexual and reproductive health care.” That is essentially what the passing of this bill and the future votes on other discriminatory, anti-womens-lives bills that will continue to be put to a public vote boils down to. The majority of the House has spoken loudly and clearly that they hate those 5 million people who have depended on the care and services that they received at Planned Parenthood. Myself included.

I first walked into my local Planned Parenthood seeking reproductive health care services when I was 15. Unlike many teens in the same position I was in at the time, I was not alone. I had a great pillar of support in my decision to take control over my sexual health; my aunt. Beginning in my adolescence, I was raised by a single father with the help and unwavering support of my grandmother and aunt. I knew I had three people in my life who loved me unconditionally, but when it came to the topic of sex, which I was consensually having, and my interest in obtaining additional information and tools to protect my health, I knew that my aunt was the person in my family who I could go to with this request without feeling as if she was going to reprimand me. I wasn’t interested in the “you shouldn’t be having sex” talk; that talk hardly ever works with teens and it wouldn’t have worked with me, either. Instead, my aunt could relate to me on this level and helped me make the responsible decision to take control over my sexual health and presented me with the steps in order to put that decision into action. For that reason, and so many others, I will always be thankful to my aunt for her willingness to see me as a responsible teenager who was in need of her guidance as I took this monumental step in treating my sexual health with respect. More teens in exactly that same position should be so lucky.

The fact of the matter, however, is that a lot of teens do not have that adult in their lives who are capable of putting aside any judgment, ideology, or reprimanding tone of voice and just be there for the teens in their lives who need them. It is judgment and ideology that teens see throughout their upbringing that leads them to not reach out to those adults in their lives when they need guidance, support and tools, especially when it comes to their sex lives.

Thankfully, Planned Parenthood is there for those teens and for the women and men who also walk into their health care clinics every day looking for knowledge, support, tools and guidance. If the Pence Amendment were to pass, Planned Parenthood would be unable to help most of those same people who walk into their clinics and that is completely and utterly devastating.

I have always gone to Planned Parenthood for all of my reproductive health care needs. There are several different reasons for this, but the most prominent of the reasons is that I have never been able to afford to go anywhere else. That doesn’t mean that if I were able to afford to go somewhere else that I would stop going to Planned Parenthood. I wouldn’t. I would instead feel fantastic about being able to fully pay for the services that I have received, but even though I cannot, I have not once ever been judged or turned away by Planned Parenthood because of my inability to fully pay for the services that I have needed.

It is easy for people who have never needed Planned Parenthood to not only oppose them, but hate them. The people who voted “yes” on the Pence Amendment and those who support the passing of this amendment, do not just hate Planned Parenthood; they are telling every single person who has ever needed health care services that they couldn’t afford that they don’t deserve to be healthy because they are poor.  They are telling these people–they are telling me–that I do not matter and that they want me dead. That is not “pro-life” by any stretch of the imagination.

That is what really must be understood about this entire amendment and its passing. The passing of the Pence Amendment is the people in government–people who were elected to represent their constituents–using life-saving health care services as talking points and playing politics with real human lives. Lives that matter. Lives that mean something. Lives that deserve to be lived.

Speak out about this amendment. Just because it passed in the House does not mean it is destined to pass in the Senate. Call and write your Representatives and urge them to reconsider their stance on the Pence Amendment if they support it or thank them for standing up for the reproductive health and rights of women if they voted “no”. If you’re on Twitter, tweet with the hashtag #SaveTitleX and stand with Planned Parenthood.

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Earlier this month, news spread and subsequent outrage arose from the introduction of H.R. 3, deceivingly-titled the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act”, sponsored by Chris Smith, the vehemently anti-choice Representative of New Jersey and co-sponsored by 68.5% of the new Congress. The hottest topic of debate concerning this bill was how it proposed to redefine rape, claiming that the only rape victims who would be given federal funding for abortion would be victims who could prove their rape was “forcible.” Days later, the “forcible rape” amendment was taken out of H.R. 3 and with that decision, many thought we had something to celebrate; that the voices of those who had dedicated their time and efforts to raise awareness of this bill by blogging, tweeting as part of the #DearJohn Twitter protest, writing letters and calling their Representatives had made a significant difference. Maybe they had. Maybe we had. Then again, maybe removing the most radical language from this bill, which just so happened to be one of the only parts of this bill that people had been paying attention to, was just politics as usual.

Without the forcible rape amendment, this legislation is still just as devastating and misogynist. If passed, it could restrict incest victims over the age of 18 from receiving federal funds when in need of an abortion and remove the exception for women’s health, allowing federal funds to cover the costs of an abortion if, and only if, a physician certifies that continuing that pregnancy would kill that woman. If a pregnant woman would become terribly ill if she were to continue that pregnancy, well, that doesn’t mean she would die and therefore an abortion would not be covered. This legislation would also require that the government continue funding agencies and programs that, in addition to not performing abortions, do not refer women to other health care facilities, agencies and programs that do; because of the GOP’s constant attack on all of women’s reproductive health choices, this bill could very likely also affect access and funding for emergency contraception and birth control. This bill would also cut tax benefits to organizations and individuals who select an insurance policy that covers abortion.

Transcript for this video is after the jump.

As of February 8th, committee hearings have been held in regards to H.R. 3 in the House Judiciary. It will surely move through the house and come up for vote in the House and Senate.

But GOP leaders are not stopping with H.R. 3; the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act does not shamelessly and deliberately trample on the basic, fundamental rights of women enough.

Enter H.R. 358, another ill-titled bill that deserves a freakin’ award when it comes to deceptive, anti-choice politics; and I’m just talking about the title of this bill. H.R. 358 is entitled the “Protect Life Act” and is sponsored by Rep. Joseph Pitts (R-PA) and is co-sponsored by 121 other members of the House, including a few Democrats. Wait for the facepalm-inducing action.

The Protect Life Act aims to encourage and allow physicians and entire hospitals to refuse to perform an abortion even if a woman would die without one. If a woman is having a risky pregnancy and is in imminent danger of losing her life, her doctor or the hospital in which she seeks immediate emergency care from could lawfully put the future-life of her fetus above her own life.

This is not just a war on women’s rights. This is a war on women’s lives. And Joseph Pitts had the audacity to title this lawful killing of women bill the Protect Life Act. It is very clear that the lives of women are not the lives in which the new Congress aims to protect. To them, the lives of women are disposable and the future-lives of the fetuses in which these politicians, physicians and anti-choice populace who are in agreement with these misogynist bills will become disposable once they are born; especially if they are born female.

I have always had a problem with conscience clauses, which is essentially what this legislation is. Conscience clauses give employees the freedom to not fulfill the duties that are required of them, that they were hired to do, and hide it under morality. If a person has a moral objection to a particular job, then why would that person study, train and become employed in that field? It is really a common sense approach I have here: If you cannot do your job, you should not be allowed to continue working in that field. For instance, if you are a pharmacist and you refuse to sell emergency contraception to a person who needs that medication, then you should be fired. There should not be more to it than that.

This bill is very literally giving elected officials free reign to allow physicians to kill people. So, what do we say to these elected officials? To quote Sady Doyle, “We should tell Congress that we hear they are planning to kill us, and are pretty upset about it, because we want to live.”

For a transcript of the video above,

Congrats, John Boehner and Chris Smith. You took out of the word “forcible” in the phrase “forcible rape” in H.R. 3, misnamed the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act”, and you think this somehow means that it’s not as misogynist as it was before. Okay, so you’re not saying that a rape victim has to be beaten within an inch of her life to count as a rape victim, but the change is mostly symbolic. This bill is still an attack on women’s basic rights and humanity. Plus, it’s an attack on private enterprise, since it raises taxes only on businesses that cover abortion in their health care plans and it prevents women from using private funds in health savings accounts to pay for abortion.

Let’s talk about rape exceptions. You claim your bill would allow rape victims to access insurance funds to pay for abortion. In theory, it does. In practice, however, we know the majority of rape victims under Medicaid who need abortions don’t get funding. Filling out the paperwork, have bureaucrats question if you were really raped, trying to get someone to believe you–it ends up failing most rape victims. You think taking the word “forcible” out will distract us from how sexist this bill is, but all that word did was highlight how the rest of the bill demonstrates cruel, demeaning beliefs about women. Let’s take ranking women who have abortions, for instance. Building exceptions is basically saying that some women are “good girls” who deserve their full human rights, but women who have sex without wanting to get pregnant somehow forsake their basic human rights. When are we going to have a bill that deprives men who have sex for pleasure of their basic right to make private medical decisions for themselves?

And let’s not forget how much the topic of women just doing what they want with their own vaginas appears to obsess conservative men. The economy is in the tank, we have two wars going on and making sure women don’t get abortions funded by their own private insurance has taken up way more of the House Republican’s energy than any of these issues. Not only are you sexist, but being sexist is, to quote John Boehner, a top priority.

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Activism is extremely important, especially when legislation like the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act is introduced and has a high probability of passing. Then, activism becomes crucial and it’s your right to stand up, speak loudly and demand to be heard.

There are many ways you can get involved in stopping the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, including online activism as well as contacting your Representative directly.

#DearJohn Twitter Protest

If you are on Twitter start following and contributing to the #DearJohn Twitter protest. Fabulous feminist and pro-choice folks who are really staying on top of this bill and the protest are Sady Doyle (who also created the #DearJohn campaign), Amanda Marcotte, Shelby Knox and Steph Herold. And, you know, myself, but that really goes without saying, doesn’t it? Oh well, shameless Twitter plug for me!

You can also tweet at John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) as well as the co-sponsors of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act who are on Twitter by looking them up here. Remember, if you are engaging via Twitter, keep your inquiries and tweets directed at representatives productive without offending or insulting.

Contact Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey and Co-Sponsors

The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act is sponsored by Chris Smith. He authored this bill and should rightfully know how we feel about it and about his position on stripping rape survivors and women of their reproductive rights. You can find his office mailing addresses, phone numbers and fax numbers here.

You can find the list of all 173 co-sponsors of this bill as well as information on how to contact them here.

Contact Your Representative

You have the undeniable right to contact your representative and voice your position on this bill. You can easily find out exactly who your representative is and what their contact information is here.

To quote Sady Doyle on contacting your rep:

Look that person up on Wikipedia, to get a sense of who they are, if you don’t already know. Then, CALL THEM. Be polite; be professional; do not threaten or use violent or abusive language under any circumstances. Explain to them that their constituents don’t support this bill, explain how and why it’s a bad bill, and let them know that if they support or fail to oppose this bill, they can expect that to impact them in a very bad way when it comes to the matter of keeping their jobs. We hired them; we can fire them. We want to flood them with calls, today and tomorrow. We need to stand up and be counted. And we can. But we need to make sure they don’t just see us talking on the Internet. We need to make sure they hear our voices, one by one by one.

If you’re like myself, you really, really want to get involved and contact your representative but because you’re socially awkward and have a hard time with that whole talking to people thing, especially about something you get very emotionally charged about, this can prove to be quite difficult and you may not come off as professional and respectful as you should. Sady Doyle, the lifesaver of activism that she is, worked out a script she used when calling the short list of Democrats who have co-sponsored H.R. 3 and posted it for others to use. If your Representative is not a Democrat, this script is still a really good start to working out what, exactly you want to say.

Hi, I’d like to leave a comment for the Congressman in regards to a bill that was recently introduced.

[They’ll say okay: It’s their job to be open to comments from the public, remember.]

The bill is HR3, which is an extremist anti-choice measure that would strip rights from rape survivors and people who need abortions in an unprecedented way. Even under the Hyde amendment, there were exemptions for survivors of rape and incest, and they received federal funding; this strips that back by saying that only people who are “forcibly raped” will be covered. And 70% of rapes aren’t “forcible.” Not only that, but it makes it much harder for insurance companies to cover people who need abortions, regardless of why they need them, and it strengthens “conscience” restrictions, which means that doctors can refuse to provide reproductive medical care to anyone at any time, if they can claim that their conscience was involved. [Representative] is one of the very few Democrats who has co-sponsored this bill. I’m very disappointed in him. Most Democrats don’t support these extremist anti-choice restrictions, and most Democratic voters won’t be willing to overlook this when it comes to the polls. I’d appreciate it if you could pass that comment on to the Congressman.

[They’ll say yes.]

Great. Thank you so much for your time.

I also came across a really awesome letter written by a young woman in high school to representative about this bill. Check it out here and write your own!

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Within about an hour of opening my eyes, picking up my computer and starting my work day, I saw the Twitter hashtag #DearJohn start appearing throughout my Twitter stream. If you follow me on Twitter or are friends with me on Facebook, or if you follow any other feminist/outspoken pro-choice folks, you most likely saw the same thing.

#DearJohn was started by feminist social media superhero Sady Doyle, who also created the #mooreandme protest. This hashtag was created as a response to the newly-introduced bill, H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, sponsored by Chris Smith, the vehemently anti-choice Representative of New Jersey and co-sponsored by 68.5% of the new Congress.

With numbers like these, this is not a bill that has been introduced as a politician’s pipe dream of stripping women of their right to a safe and legal abortion in this country. John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House and mouthpiece of the new Congress has dubbed this bill “top priority.” This is something that could very well become reality. Who knew Margaret Atwood was writing of what could become the future of women when she penned The Handmaid’s Tale.

The wording of the title of this bill is a lesson in classic anti-choice tactics. It’s deceptive. “No taxpayer funding for abortion” says to people who identify as pro-life, as well as those who aren’t necessarily against abortion but have anti-choice-leaning views about it that, if this bill was to go into effect, their hard-earned tax dollars would not go towards funding abortions. Anti-choice and anti-choice leaning folks agree with this sentiment. However, what the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act really does is so much more, and worse, than that. It goes far enough where if you have any compassion for women and most notably, rape victims, you should wholeheartedly oppose this bill at all costs.

Here is a breakdown of what the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act will do:

• Redefine rape
  The federal law, as it is seen and goes into effect today, does not use federal tax dollars to cover abortion unless it is an unwanted pregnancy resulting in rape or incest, or if the pregnant woman’s health or life is at risk. Under the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, the rape exception would only cover “forcible” rape. Ironically enough, the word “forcible” is not defined in the bill. What this means is that if a minor child who is, say, 13 years old, is coerced into a sexual relationship with a man who is not a minor, let’s just say he’s 40, and that girl becomes pregnant as a result of that rape, well, that rape doesn’t count. If a woman is drugged and then raped, that rape doesn’t count. If a woman is unconscious and is rapes, that rape doesn’t count. If a woman is mentally disabled and cannot consent to sexual activity and is raped, that rape doesn’t count.

• Put an age restriction on incest
  If a woman is raped by her father, brother, uncle, grandfather or a member of their family, and she is 18 years old, she cannot use federal funds in order to obtain her abortion. Also, let’s say a 17-year-old girl is raped by her father and she is just shy of her eighteenth birthday. If she was raped when she was 17, but is seeking an abortion when she is 18, would she be eligible? I suppose that’s up to the Chris Smith and John Boehner Official Rape Panel to decide.

• Remove the exception for women’s health
  This bill will allow federal funds to cover abortion if, and only if, a physician certifies that the pregnancy will kill her. If continuing her pregnancy will damage her organs in some way or she will become terribly ill, having to live on medications, dialysis, in a wheelchair or what have you for the rest of her life, she will not get coverage because that isn’t life-threatening.

• Require government to continue funding agencies and programs that discriminate against women and endanger women’s health
  Currently, it is law that doctors and nurses do not have to provide elective abortion services, nor are health care facilities required to offer abortion services. Under the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, these facilities are given free reign to discriminate when it comes to a woman’s reproductive health care by in addition to not providing abortions, also refusing to refer women to other health care facilities, agencies and programs that do and the government cannot withdraw funds. Due to the GOP’s constant attack on all of women’s reproductive health choices, abortion is being regularly redefined to include emergency contraception and even birth control, which could also be effected by this bill.

• Cut tax benefits to organizations and/or individuals who select an insurance policy that covers abortion
  Today, most private health insurers cover abortion services. Under the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, tax subsidies that are given to small business owners and individuals who purchase insurance that covers abortion would be cut. This bill would, in fact, ensure that all private insurance companies stop covering abortion services, even when abortions are medically necessary.

This bill has given me some serious Whoopi Goldberg on the topic of Roman Polanski “rape rape” flashbacks. I am highly uncomfortable with–and downright refuse to allow–a group of men to sit around and dictate to women and girls of this country what, exactly, constitutes real rape. Rape that matters. Rape that counts.

The reason why I was so provoked to speak up on Twitter, on Facebook and on this blog, and gladly give up a day’s work, is because this bill is a blatant, shameless attack on women and girls who are already marginalized and stigmatized in this country. More than half of the rapes that occur in this country go unreported. The reason for this is because there is already too much in the way of rape survivors who report their attacks. In rape cases, it isn’t the rapist who is ever on trial, it’s the victim. It is the victim who is asked:

“What were you wearing?”
“How much alcohol did you consume?”
“How many people have you had sexual relationships with?”
“How frequently do you go out partying?”
“Did you previously know the man you’re accusing of raping you?”
“Have you ever been sexually active with that man before that night?”
“Were you flirting with that man or giving him mixed signals to make him think you enjoyed his advances?”
“How many times did you say no?”
“Did you try to fight him off of you?”

And the list goes on and on.

Rape cases, as they are prosecuted in this country, are fed to a jury as a woman filing charges after experiencing “buyer’s remorse” and it is an ugly, misogynistic process. Until we stop putting the victim on trial and actually start giving rape and sexual assault survivors the justice they so rightly deserve, we will not see an increase in people reporting their attacks.

Another reason why I feel so strongly about doing whatever I can to spread the word about this bill and how downright wrong, unjust, and shameful for women and girls is because this bill could have affected me. As a survivor of childhood sexual assault and multiple rape, this bill could have limited my rights to reproductive health care and services that I could have needed as a result of my attacks. Who are Chris Smith, John Boehner, any of the 68.5% of Boehner’s Caucus, or anyone who actually supports this attack on the female gender, to tell me that my attacks weren’t real; that the extreme, traumatic and mental-illness-inducing violations of my being, when I was a child and again when I was a teenager, didn’t matter or didn’t count?

They can’t. No one can. We won’t let them.

For information on how to make your voice heard and stop the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act read here.

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Yesterday I started reading Salome Wilde’s contribution, “Too Wondrous to Measure” and at just the third line I got a little confused, as if I had missed some very pertinent information that the storyline relied on. The two words that tripped me up were claw and tip. Claw tip. By the seventh line it was all cleared up. Godzilla had entered the picture and I could do nothing but wonder, and perhaps halfheartedly hope, that Godzilla was what we were calling an unnamed, mysterious lover who happened to be, well, too wondrous to measure, if you will.

By the third paragraph we get into the Godzilla movies–the original movie is the only one that depicted him correctly, by the way–and with a turn of the page I read the sentence, After a few mishaps requiring stitches and a bit of psychotherapy, turning me on and getting me off was relatively simple to achieve. Immediate thought? Not a euphemism. Definitely not a euphemism.

An erotic story written from the perspective of a woman in love with and fucking Godzilla is certainly interesting and by far the last thing I would have thought I would read in this book. It took me by complete surprise, hence my absolute need to share it with all of you. However, by the time I got to the second-to-last paragraph and learned that this woman thought she was pregnant and had been having odd dreams of (and I quote) “little lizards skittering across my bed and newts in my bathtub,” I had about all I could take of the Godzilla fantasy of Salome Wilde.

All things considered, this story left a lasting impression, and for that, Salome Wilde, you win.

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So, take a look at the video below. Lyrics are after the jump. You’re welcome.

‘Atheists Don’t Have No Songs’ Lyrics:
Chris­tians have their hymns and pages,
Hava Nag­i­la’s for the Jews,
Bap­tists have the rock of ages,
Athe­ists just sing the blues.

Ro­man­tics play Claire de Lune,
Born agains sing “He is risen,”
But no one ever wrote a tune,
For god­less ex­is­ten­tial­ism.

For Athe­ists there’s no good news. They’ll never sing a song of faith.
In their songs they have a rule: the “he” is al­ways low­er­case.
The “he” is al­ways low­er­case.

Some folks sing a Bach can­ta­ta,
Luther­ans get Christ­mas trees,
Athe­ist songs add up to nada,
But they do have Sun­days free.

Pentecostals sing to heav­en,
Cop­tics have the books of scrolls,
Nu­merol­o­gists can count to seven,
Athe­ists have rock and roll.

For Athe­ists there’s no good news. They’ll never sing a song of faith.
In their songs they have a rule: the “he” is al­ways low­er­case.
The “he” is al­ways low­er­case.

Atheists don’t have no songs.
Chris­tians have their hymns and pages,
Hava Nag­i­la’s for the Jews,
Bap­tists have the rock of ages,
Athe­ists just sing the blues.

Catholics dress up for Mass,
And lis­ten to, Gre­go­ri­an chants.
Athe­ists just take a pass, Watch foot­ball in their un­der­pants.
Watch foot­ball in their un­der­pants.

Atheists don’t have no songs.

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A man in Calgary who admired the amount of toys collected by the Salvation Army had volunteered to sift through a southeast warehouse that housed unused, donated items. This volunteer learned that toys depicting Harry Potter and Twilight were left undonated due to the themes of wizardry, vampires, and werewolves that are “incompatible” with the Christian beliefs the organization holds. The volunteer said he was told by Salvation Army officials that these toys are “disposed of” and are not given to other charities, which Capt. Pam Goodyear refuted in an interview with the Toronto Sun, saying that the toys are given to other agencies and are “distributed in another manner where parents can choose.” An odd statement to make when she then was unable to provide even the name of one of these “other agencies.” Not surprisingly at all, the Calgary volunteer asked an official what was to be done with a donated plastic M-16, in which he was told, “That’s for the 10-year-olds.”

So to recap, toys that are linked to stories, figments of their author’s imagination (with added Mormon ideology mixed in for fun in Twilight’s case), are ungodly and immoral enough to be banned from being given to underprivileged children during the holiday season, yet plastic depictions of very real weapons used in war in which countless innocent people are left for dead are just fine and dandy. That is some stellar logic!

I know of several people who buy brand new toys every year just to put them in collection boxes of the Salvation Army’s toy drives. Considering the popularity of Harry Potter and Twilight over the recent years, I would be willing to bet that several people have bought these toys for the sole purpose of donating them only to, unbeknown to them, have their money completely wasted by this “charity” organization by the decision to dispose of these toys.

This isn’t the only thing the Salvation Army has done to make people question the authenticity of the word “charity” in conjunction with their name. No, they have been doing some pretty horrific and utterly sickening things for quite some time now, including getting into bed with politics.

Another issue that is “incompatible” with Christian beliefs are the rights of GLBTQ people. Among the Salvation Army’s list of invested interests, along with quite literally throwing away money by disposing of donated toys they don’t agree with for one reason or another, is actively denying GLBTQ people help, support, and rights.

The Bilerico Project wrote about how the Salvation Army insisted that they and their partner break up and leave the “sinful homosexual lifestyle” in order to receive assistance while homeless. When they refused, the Salvation Army turned these two homeless people away and they were left to sleep on the streets.

In 2001 it was found out that the Bush Administration had made a “firm commitment” to the Salvation Army that would have allowed them to disobey state and local laws that prohibit discrimination against gay people when administering programs with federal funds. When this secret deal was made public, that firm commitment didn’t hold up very well and the Salvation Army was held to the same law everyone else was; as it should be. Not wanting to grant domestic partner benefits to their staff, in 2004 the Salvation Army threatened to close soup kitchens, homeless shelters, foster care programs, and HIV services in New York City if they were to be expected to follow the law that insists city contractors must extend benefits to domestic partners.

You can find out more about the Salvation Army’s list of anti-gay stances in the video below:

When I mentioned on Twitter that I was writing a post about the Salvation Army, a friend of mine tweeted back with a link to a post he wrote about how he was personally attacked by the Initiative Against Sexual Trafficking, a branch of the Salvation Army.

maymay talks openly, honestly and intelligently about sex and is the creator of Kink On Tap. In his own words, he works to “[empower] sex-positive activists and educators to put together low-cost, high-value, fast-paced, user-generated sexuality conferences called KinkForAll unconferences.” These conferences (or unconferences) operate on the belief that sexuality affects all aspects of life; they are open to anyone who has an interest in learning or contributing to an open and safe discussion about sexuality. The Initiative Against Sexual Trafficking, which is a tremendously misleading title when you really just begin to dig into the ideology that surrounds this group, sent out an email to their mailing list subscribers painting maymay as a child molester, a sex slaver, and a “nightmarish creature.” They described the KinkForAll unconferences and thus sex-positivity as a whole as “slimy, putrid, decaying, nasty, trash.” This is seriously wrong.

So when you’re walking in or out of a store and a Salvation Army bell ringer starts calling after you and asking you to donate, feel good about declining and walking away, knowing that your money is not being used to forward a bigoted and shamelessly discriminatory agenda.

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The Transgender Day of Remembrance was started in 1999 after the November 28th, 1998 murder of Rita Hester. Gwendolyn Ann Smith was discussing this murder, as well as the wrongful death/survivor’s action for Tyra Hunter on a message board and realized that so many people had forgotten some of the individuals who have been lost at the hands of anti-transgender violence just in those recent years. Smith felt that by so many forgetting those people, society as a whole would be doomed to see their deaths repeated, and so she created the Remembering Our Dead web project to make sure that no one would forget those around the world who had been murdered for merely being themselves.

Honestly, I have been struggling with what, exactly, to write all day. Some have made excellent points about the involvement of cis people on this day, pointing out that while it is important to remember the people who have died, it is equally as important to remember how they died and why they are no longer here. It is because of cis people and it is because of a society of cis privilege that allows for more people to join the list of Remembering Our Dead. But even so, as a cis person, while I humbly respect those who have been speaking out today against transphobia, violence, prejudice and hate, I still remain adamant on the fact that my voice is not the voice that needs to be dominant today and to think that it is, is to marginalize an already marginalized group of people even further. That is not something I am interested in doing. So instead I would like to share some of the posts I have been reading today from people who have proven that they are more than capable of speaking for themselves and it would be in our best interests to listen.

It makes sense from Questioning Transphobia:

And yet, whenever a trans person is murdered, the very first thing we trans people have to do is sort through the layers and layers of transphobic misinformation from police, media and families in order to work out who that person was, how they lived their life, what their appropriate pronouns and identifications were.

Because the words are almost always wrong, and almost always an act of erasure. First they will begin by making a reference to assigned sex, as something this person “is” – most commonly, “a man was found in woman’s clothing.” And it’s like, ok it’s certainly possible for it to have been a male crossdresser. We must be cautious and not jump to conclusions, because that would be an act of erasure. And it is after all being reported as a fact by the media. It “makes sense,” because the “knowledge” of the majority always makes sense.

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TDOR Lives So The Trans Community Never Forgets The People Who Died from TransGriot:

As someone who was around and part of the local and national trans leadership when the TDOR started in 1999, as time inexorably marches on I have seen eleven previous TDOR’s come and go. I have that intimate understanding of why we have them and militantly resist the calls from some transpeople to change the focus from a memorial ceremony to a happy-happy joy-joy event because it’s in their words ‘morbid and depressing’

70% of the transpeople we memorialize are people of color. I don’t want people forgetting that salient point either as we read this year’s list of names.. Until anti-trans violence is reduced to nothing and the people who perpetrate it get properly punished for doing so, there will continue to be a need for the ‘morbid and depressing’ TDOR.

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Transgender Day of Remembrance: Living with the threat from Queen Emily at Hoyden About Town:

As a trans woman, I have learned to live with the the threat of violence. In my first year of living out in Perth, I was assaulted, threatened with death, sexually assaulted numerous times, called various slurs by random strangers, spat on, harassed by Transperth guards, and given appallingly substandard medical care.

You learn very quickly that you are not valuable, you are despised, disposable, always in a precarious position (especially with regard to institutions). Every time you have to show your identification and it has the wrong sex, every time you have a cold and your voice has dropped to a gravelly rasp. You never really know when it might come, or how bad it might be.

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12th International Transgender Day Of Remembrance, 20th November 2010 from bird of paradox:

Yet so many cis people continue to make snap value judgements about us, to label us outcasts and pariahs, freaks and perverts, less than human in every way they can think. And having made that judgement, many will act on it with a myriad forms of violence, from the everyday microaggressions they inflict on us, the jibes, the slurs, the hate speech, the rapes, the beatings – every form of oppression available to them – and for some, that includes murder.

This is transphobia writ large, the manifestation of cis privilege as an irrational fear of, and/or hostility towards, people who are transgender or who otherwise do not conform to cultural stereotypes of what is meant by ‘male’ and ‘female’.

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International Transgender Day of Remembrance: Remembering Together from Matt Kailey at Womanist Musings:

The transphobia inherent in these attacks is obvious. And the damage that is done extends far beyond the victim and her immediate family and friends, as trans people everywhere suffer the psychological damage of living in fear as they wonder if they are next.
But the racism, misogyny, and homophobia reflected in these deaths cannot go unacknowledged. All these factors come together to make these crimes particularly horrendous and hate-filled – which is why all of our communities must come together to put a stop to this violence and all violence against marginalized people.

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November 20 from eastsidekate at Shakesville:

The day of remembrance is a time to bring transphobia front-and-center in discussions of violence. It was conceived of, and still is, a radical act– the public commemoration of our dead in a world that trivializes our existence.

Everyone on this planet who cares to live in a safe world should care passionately about transphobic violence. If we send the message that ‘you’re trans?… and you’re dead.’ is anything short of a crime against humanity, we have failed.

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Transgender Day of Remembrance from C.L. Minou at Feministe:

The fact of the matter is that at any moment, I could be at risk simply for being trans. Simply for being me. This is something all marginalized people face–certainly, it’s something every woman in the world understands. But just as it’s possible for the shielded women of the world to sniff at the poor and unprotected and blame them for their own misfortunes, so its possible for the lucky trans people of the world–the professors with tenure, the software engineers with rare abilities, the fortunate few who have managed to avoid most of the ways society turns people into others, to disclaim connection with the rest of the trans world. Rape happens only to people who live in slums, and transphobic murder only to prostitutes turning tricks for street ‘mones.

Except when it doesn’t.

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Remembering Our Other Dead from Sadly So:

I wanted to do something different for this TDOR. I wanted to talk about the fact that the transphobic violence that kills us does not always come at the hands of another. Sometimes it’s at our own hands. Almost half of living trans people have attempted suicide. I am one of them.

While many factors contributed to my suicide attempt the primary one was the transphobia I had internalised over years. The self-loathing from knowing how abject a person I was built to self-hatred and, when I lost my primary emotional support, finally to the calm assurance that the way to deal with transphobia was to kill myself. Because I had not transitioned at that time. I knew lots of things. I knew that I would always look like “a man in a dress”, that I would never be truly accepted among lesbians (even though cis lesbians had always been very supportive of me, a rarity for a trans woman), that no one could truly love me as a woman because I had the wrong genital configuration, but most of all that I was a freak and a pervert. Does any of that sound familiar to you? It should as that’s the transphobia that surrounds us and pervades our culture.

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Firstly, here are the facts we know only from Noirin Shirley’s blog post:

And then I went to the loo, and as I was about to go in, Florian Leibert, who had been speaking in the Hadoop track, called me over, and asked if he could talk to me.

He brought me in to the snug, and sat up on a stool. He grabbed me, pulled me in to him, and kissed me. I tried to push him off, and told him I wasn’t interested (I may have been less eloquent, but I don’t think I was less clear). He responded by jamming his hand into my underwear and fumbling.

I broke away, headed back to the group, and hid behind some of the bigger, burlier infra guys, while Bill sorted out all the people who’d left stuff in my room, so that I could reasonably escape. We headed back, people got their stuff, Bill stayed around, and I slept.

When Bill woke up, I pretended to still be asleep, because I couldn’t deal with speaking to anyone. I sent a mail to our planning committee to say that I’d been assaulted. Charel came to talk to me, and then I e-mailed Nick, who came up and helped me sort things out so I could get to the keynote and feel safe. Florian didn’t turn up today, and it’s probably for the best.

I had a few drinks. I was wearing a skirt of such a length that I had cycling shorts on under it to make me feel more comfortable getting up on stage and dancing. I had been flirting with a couple of other boys at the party.

It’s not the first time something like this has happened to me, at all. It’s not the first time it’s happened to me at a tech conference. But it is the first time I’ve spoken out about it in this way, because I’m tired of the sense that some idiot can ruin my day and never have to answer for it. I’m tired of the fear. I’m tired of people who think I should wear something different. I’m tired of people who think I should avoid having a beer in case my vigilance lapses for a moment. I’m tired of people who say that guys can’t read me right and I have to read them, and avoid giving the wrong impression.

But I don’t give the wrong impression, and it’s simply not true that guys can’t read me right. I don’t want to be assaulted, and the vast majority of guys read that just fine. It is not my job to avoid getting assaulted. It is everyone else’s job to avoid assaulting me. Dozens of guys succeeded at that job, across the week. In the pub, in the stairwell, on the MARTA, in my bedroom.

One guy failed, and it’s his fault.

Thanks to Google Reader, if you’re subscribed to Tech Crunch, you may still be able to access the now-deleted article. Here’s how it ends:

It is notable that the allegations of wrongdoing now have a realtime venue to play out, primarily because the players in the drama have tech community prominence and are both on Twitter. Neither Leibert or Shirley have tweeted anything since Shirley sent out her blog post about the incident.

I have contacted Leibert for his side of the story and will update this post when he responds. Shirley makes no indication she has filed any formal complaint.

So, let’s clear some important stuff up here first. Noirin Shirley sought the help of friends to ensure she was no longer in imminent danger and she emailed her employer, make them aware of what had happened to her. She also added to the bottom of her blog post, “My heartfelt thanks to the Atlanta police for their sensitivity and professionalism.” One could assume that Shirley has indeed filed a formal complaint, but even if she has not and doesn’t plan to, that is completely her decision. There are a large number of sexual assaults and rapes every year that go unreported and there are a great deal of reasons for that; all of those reasons are those of the victim and it never means that an assault never happened or that the person who has been assaulted “had it coming.” More often than not, when a person files a complaint and decides to press charges against their abuser, it is their choice of attire, alcohol level, and sexual history that are put on trial, not the person accused of abuse. Until we stop blaming the victim in a court of law, there will not be an increase in reported abuse; re-victimizing the victim is not the path to justice, nor should it ever be used as such.

Also, why would Noirin Shirley write a blog post about her sexual assault? Frankly, because she damn well can. Period. End of story. She can. And she did. Shirley took to her own blog, her own space, to write about her experience. She has the right to do that, as does anyone else with access to the internet. Sadly, with the internet also comes trolls; people who insist on blaming the victim at all costs, who repeatedly claim that, women especially, have what’s coming to them based on what clothes they were wearing at the time of the assault or if they had been flirting, or what they would personally define as flirting, or if they had alcohol in their system. By these people making their narrow-minded and despicable comments known all over the internet, it in fact deters more people from taking to their own personal and safe spaces to speak out about their own experiences. I, for one, am happy that Noirin Shirley felt safe enough to take to her own space and to speak out about her own experience, it may have surely inspired other people who may have went through the same experiences to talk about it and refuse to be silenced.

Tech Crunch, however, is all about silencing, as proven by their deletion of the post about Noirin Shirley and Florian Leibert. Obviously they have no intention of editing their post, or publishing anything about Florian Leibert’s “side of the story.” It wouldn’t surprise me if they went on from here as if they never published the story in the first place. You can speculate a great deal of reasons for this, but I think it’s because they have indeed talked to Leibert.

After a little poking around here and there, I found that Tech Crunch had a party of their own back on October 7th at their new headquarters. Their Beer & Data Salon featured four speakers within the tech industry. One of those speakers just so happened to be Florian Leibert. Obviously someone high up at Tech Crunch has a relationship of some sort with Leibert which may have led to the deletion of the article.

Another speculation, Leibert is very well-known within the tech industry as an engineer for Twitter. It isn’t a big secret that the tech industry of note is made up of mostly men and thus operates as any other boy’s club, or it just may seem that way since we’re still operating within the atmosphere that any woman who can talk about technology on the same level as a man is considered “hot.” Women are still very much seen as inferior within the tech industry, their experiences and expertise being diminished to nothing but a sexual fantasy by the majority of their male colleagues. It’s pretty damn common for women at fan conventions, tech conferences, as well as in other atmospheres, to be propositioned, harassed, and assaulted for merely being women. It is for this reason that the Open Source Women Back Each Other Up Project & Gentlemen’s Auxiliary was created. So, to get to the point, well-known techy male is accused of sexually assaulting lesser-known techy female and the article mysteriously just disappears from well-known techy website? Not so coincidental.

Regardless of the reason, or the canned response Tech Crunch may or may not ever give for removing the article, removing the article in its entirety instead of editing or adding to it at all, reflects horribly on Tech Crunch and is an action that can only be seen as siding solely with Leibert, an accused sexual predator.

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So, Coming Out Day. I like this day; I like it a lot. I like that, as Feminist Hulk put it yesterday afternoon on Twitter, it completely trumps the colonialist and genocidal day that is Columbus Day and I like that during the breaks I took throughout the day from my looming workload, that I was able to read so many awesome, inspiring, kick ass Coming Out Day blog posts from a variety of really amazing people.

Coming Out Day is important. It is crucial. In the wake of the recent heart wrenchingly tragic suicides of LGBTQ people and the daily harassment and bullying many LGBTQ people are still going through today, Coming Out Day presents a great opportunity for those who are in a safe space and who have the ability to come out to do so and share their stories, their experiences and their points of view; no one ever knows where their stories will go, who will find them at perhaps the time when they needed them the most, or who they just may help in some way just by putting it all out there. When you’re sharing your thoughts via the internet, there are no limits and that is why a day and a movement dedicated to empowering people and never settling for less than complete equality for everyone, regardless of their race, ability, location, sexual orientation or identity has the power to do so much.

So I suppose now is the time where I share with you, dear readers, a little bit of myself. Coming Out. I have never actually come out, as in announced to my family, friends, acquaintances and so on that from this point forward I will be identifying as [insert identifying label of choice here.] I have merely just existed and have presented myself to the people around me as exactly who I am, or as who I was at the time they connected with me. I have never made a formal announcement about what words sum me up completely.

I am a cisgender pansexual woman. The word pansexual is newer to me, not because I have not always felt attracted to people of all genders, orientations and identities, but because I just didn’t have a word that best described that for me in a way I was comfortable with. I know that some people find the word pansexual as being a privileged term, as Shanna Katz mentioned in her own coming out story. I have heard this before, but have yet to find another word that I am personally as comfortable with as I have come to be with pansexual.

I questioned for a very long time what I was in terms of my sexuality. I knew I wasn’t straight; some of my first childhood crushes were on other females, I have always been attracted to females, at times even more-so than males. I have dated women, have had flings, romances, and my heart broken by women. The same has happened with men. At first, I self-identified as bisexual which worked fine for me because I thought that pretty much encompassed my sexuality. I wasn’t straight, I wasn’t gay, I could see myself settling down and being happy with either gender, but as a young woman I was told some pretty horrible things by some people who I had told, in which they replied with “Of course you’re bi, all young women are nowadays.” That felt like shit, as if people felt it was okay to invalidate me and other bisexual young women because they have been presented with a warped view of bisexuality after seeing way too many late night ads for Girls Gone Wild. I also received some pretty narrow-minded advances from men who thought they had hit the mother load when they learned that I was bisexual, thinking that I should have no problem having a threesome with them and another woman and not just that, but that I actually owed it to them to do so. However, I should also probably mention that I have had threesomes on solely my own terms. With the right people, under the right circumstances, and with the ability to make your thoughts and preferences known, it can be tremendously fulfilling and enjoyable. No one should ever make you feel like you owe them something when it comes to sex. How and with whom you share your body is completely and totally up to you, no exceptions.

When I found myself absolutely attracted to people who were trans or questioning, I didn’t feel as if bisexuality was enough to identify my own sexuality. So, I went where all people go when they are looking for information of any and all kinds–the internet. I found the word pansexual and it immediately clicked for me. It made sense. I liked it. And that’s where I am now, today. My self-identified labels may change in the future, for instance, I just may find a word other than pansexual that resonates with me more intimately, but what I have shared with you today is who I am and I guess that means I have formally come out.

If you’ve written about Coming Out Day, feel free to share your link in the comments. I have really been enjoying reading what others have had to say about sexuality, gender and sexual liberation and would love to read more.

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We named him Vincent and he was eight weeks old when he first came to live with us, making him about ten weeks now. He came to us after his previous owner found him to be too needy and he needed to be in a place with people who were home a lot and who could give him the attention he craves so much. He’s needy in the sense that he is pretty adamant on being on you whenever possible and if you don’t pick him up as soon as he sits near your foot, he will cry and if you still don’t pick him up, he will walk around the house crying until you can’t take it anymore, give in, and suddenly spend the next half hour petting and playing with him. What better a match for him than someone who doesn’t leave the house very often and who works in front of a computer all day with ample space for him to crawl up on their lap and nap?

The first week was a pretty intense adjustment for all of us, since we have a cat, Devin, who is nearly four years old who was none too pleased with a new kitten attempting to take over. Devin had a whole lot of jealousy going on and was very territorial; for a few days she was downright pissed at me and my partner and every time we would even pet Vincent, she would give us this look that I could only decode as “How could you do this to me!?” but now she has taken Vincent under her wing so to speak, and they’re sleeping all curled up together every day and playing whenever they’re not sleeping or fighting over each other’s food bowls.

More pictures after the jump.

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After sitting on this for a few days and seeing the news stories die down, I figured that I would be coming in a little late with this and decided to scrap the whole post and just move on. Then the news stories picked up again and to this day, you can’t spend a few minutes online or pick up a newspaper or magazine without seeing this whole insidious debate continue. After reading a whole lot of news stories about this, the only thing I have deduced from the dissenting viewpoints, the outrage and the political commentary is that what this “Ground Zero mosque” debate has really turned into is Muslim panic.

Just like with the Red Scare where the American people were hunting down Communists who were believed to be influencing society and the government from 1947 to 1957, the same is being done today; we have merely just replaced the word Communist with the word Terrorism. We are feeding off of the fear that has been instilled into the American people’s minds, just like it was in the ’40s and ’50s, in order to create Muslim panic. There is a very strong “us and them” vibe to the country right now where no one has yet realized that there are Muslim people and Muslim extremists and they are different.

Another thing that hasn’t received much media coverage, surprise surprise, is that there was a real “Ground Zero mosque” and it was on the 17th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower. Muslims had a place within the World Trade Center, so why should they not be allowed to even have something to do with a building in Manhattan blocks away from Ground Zero? Well, your guess is as good as mine.

Keith Olbermann aired a Special Comment in mid-August about the community center, not a mosque, that will be built blocks away from Ground Zero, not right on top of it and not right across the street. As always with Keith Olbermann Special Comments, he got it right.

Transcript after the jump.
Transcript:

Finally as promised, a Special Comment tonight on the inaccurately described “Ground Zero mosque.”

“They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

Pastor Martin Niemoller’s words are well known but their context is not well understood. Niemoller was not speaking abstractly. He witnessed persecution, he acquiesced to it, he ultimately fell victim to it. He had been a German World War 1 hero, then a conservative who welcomed the fall of German democracy and the rise of Hitler and had few qualms the beginning of the holocaust until he himself was arrested for supporting it insufficiently.

Niemoller’s confessional warning came in a speech in Frankfurt in January, 1946, eight months after he was liberated by American troops. He had been detained at Tyrol, Sachsen-hausen and Dachau. For seven years.

Niemoller survived the death camps. In quoting him, I make no direct comparison between the attempts to suppress the building of a Muslim religious center in downtown Manhattan, and the unimaginable nightmare of the Holocaust. Such a comparison is ludicrous. At least it is, now.

But Niemoller was not warning of the Holocaust. He was warning of the willingness of a seemingly rational society to condone the gradual stoking of enmity towards an ethnic or religious group warning of the building-up of a collective pool of national fear and hate, warning of the moment in which the need to purge, outstrips even the perameters of the original scape-goating, when new victims are needed because a country has begun to run on a horrible fuel of hatred — magnified, amplified, multiplied, by politicians and zealots, within government and without.

Niemoller was not warning of the holocaust. He was warning of the thousand steps before a holocaust became inevitable. If we are at just the first of those steps again — today, here — it is one step too close.

Yet, in a country dedicated to freedom, forces have gathered to blow out of all proportion the construction of a minor community center; to transform it into a training ground for terrorists and an insult to the victims of 9/11 and a tribute to medieval Muslim subjugation of the West.

There is no training ground for terrorists. There is no insult to the victims of 9/11. There is no tribute to medieval Muslim subjugation of The West. There is, in fact, no “Ground Zero mosque.” It isn’t a mosque.

A mosque is a Muslim holy place in which only worship can be conducted. What is planned for 45 Park Place, New York City, is a Community Center. It’s supposed to include a basketball court. And a culinary school. It’s to be thirteen stories tall and the top two stories will be a Muslim prayer space.

What a cauldron of terrorism that will be. Terrorist chefs and terrorist point guards. And truly those will use the center have more to fear from us, than us from them. For, there has been terrorism connected to a mosque. In this country. This year.

May 10th. Jacksonville, Florida. A pipe bomb at the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida. The FBI thinks the man in this surveillance video could be the bomber. It went off during evening prayers, and it was powerful enough to send shrapnel flying 100 yards.

Fortunately the bomber didn’t know where to place it, so the 60 Muslim worshipers were uninjured. If he’d put it inside and not outside they’d have been dead. And you probably would’ve heard about it on the news. Or maybe not.

Maybe those exploiting 45 Park Place would still shake their fists and decry terrorism by extremists who happen to be Muslim, and never face the shameful truth about our country: As the Jacksonville mosque bombing shows, since Sept. 11, Muslims have been at far greater risk of being victims of terrorism in the United States, than have non-Muslims.

But back to this Islamic Center. Its name – Cordoba House – is not a tribute to medieval Muslim subjugation of Spain. Newt Gingrich has been pushing that nonsense, that “Cordoba” is a Muslim dog-whistle for “triumphalism.” “It refers to Córdoba, Spain – the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex. Today, some of the mosque’s backers insist this term is being used to ‘symbolize interfaith co-operation’ when, in fact, every Islamist in the world recognizes Córdoba as a symbol of Islamic conquest.”

Those “Muslim conquerors” are a figment of Mr. Gingrich’s lurid imagination. In Spain, in Cordoba, though the Muslims established multi-cultural, non-denominational institutions of learning, they were under constant attack from Christians, and from a series of internal all-Muslim Civil Wars. The Muslims lost Cordoba, and the Christian church they transformed into the “world’s third-largest mosque complex?” It was turned back into a Christian Cathedral. In the 13th Century. And it has been that, ever since.

And is there not a logical extension to Mr. Gingrich’s conclusions about Cordoba and “triumphalism?” Virtually every church, every synagogue, indeed every mosque built on this continent stands where a Native American lived, or died, or was buried, or saw his world — his religions included — wiped out. By us.

What are we then, Mr. Gingrich? And by the way, a point Mr. Gingrich has not even whispered as he has shouted fire in a crowded theater—when the historical implications of Cordoba were made clear to the backers of this project, the property developer, Sharif Gamal, changed the name. They already compromised.

“We are calling it Park 51 because of the backlash to the name Cordoba House,” he told the Financial Times. “It will be a place open to all New Yorkers and that is a very New York name.” A very New York name. Like “Ground Zero.” Except this place — Park 51 — is not even at Ground Zero, not even ‘right across the street.’ Even the description of it being “two blocks away” is generous.

It is two blocks away from the northeast corner of the World Trade Center site. From the planned location of the Sept. 11 memorial it is more like four or even five blocks. You know what is right across the street? I went there yesterday, to refresh my sense of the World Trade Center, in which I worked nearly 30 years ago.

At Church and Veezy, so close that the barbed wire of Ground Zero obscures its spire? St Paul’s Chapel. Been there since 1766, where Washington went the day he was inaugurated, where the first responders came for relief nine years ago. You know what’s also closer to Ground Zero than this Muslim Community Center? Church of St. Peter — at Church and Barclay Streets. As the sign says, New York’s Oldest Catholic Parish.

People hear “Ground Zero Mosque” and they think Mecca in the backyard and a loud call to prayer and they take umbrage.

“We got no more than a few inches of skin and a couple of pieces of bone. Ground Zero is the burial place of my son,” said Joyce Boland at the public hearing about the Center. “I don’t want to go there and see an overwhelming mosque looking down at me.”

I honor her pain, and her fear, but Mrs. Boland has nothing to worry about. Unless she walks directly to it, she’ll never see it. This is what you see from where the Center will be. Another non-descript building across the street. This building and others like it will block views of the Trade Center, and views from the Trade Center.

It certainly will stand out on the north side of Park Place, but amid the canyons of lower Manhattan, it’ll just be a distinctive building that if you happen to wander down a side street near the Trade Center, you might see. You know what you’ll see there now? This. The Burlington Coat Factory, abandoned since 2001 when the landing gear from one of the planes fell 90 stories and went through the roof. For nine years nobody’s been willing to buy that building, just to knock it down and build a new one.

It sold for four million 850 thousand dollars. In New York City real estate, that is spare change.
And you know why it’s spare change? Because — walk around Ground Zero any day of the week and it’s packed, with tourists and our version of pilgrims. But walk two and three blocks away and… not so packed. Not packed at all.

Empty stores. Boarded-up windows. Nine years later, and two and three blocks from the action and it’s a ghost town. What was that about government not getting in the way of private business? What was that about letting the private sector spur new jobs in blighted areas? Oh, and what was that about Iraq?

Why did we go into Iraq, again? I don’t mean the real reasons or the naked vengeful blindness that enabled the forging of a non-existant connection between Iraq and 9/11. I mean, the official explanation. To free the world — and especially Iraq’s citizens — of the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. That’s its supporters’ defense of the invasion, to this day. Well, who lives in Iraq? Muslims.

I hate to reveal this to anybody on the Right who didn’t know this, but when they say Iraq is 65% Shia and 32% Suni you do know that Shia and Suni are both forms of the Muslim religion, right?

We sacrificed 4,415 of our military personnel in Iraq to save Muslims, and there are thousands still there tonight to protect Muslims, but we don’t want Muslims to open a combination culinary school and prayer space in Manhattan?

From the beginning of this nation we have fought prejudice and religious intolerance and our greatest enemy: stupidity, exploited by rapacious politicians. It’s just 50 years now since Americans publicly and urgently warned their country-men not to support a Presidential candidate because he was a Roman Catholic. He would bow to the will not of the American people, but the Pope. He would be a “Papist.” He would be the agent of a foreign state.

His name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Despite the nobility of our founding and the indefatigable efforts of all our generations, there have always been those who would happily sacrifice our freedoms, our principles, to ward off the latest unprecedented threat, the latest unbeatable outsiders. Once again, at 45 Park Place, we are being told to sell our birth-right, to feed the maw of xenophobia and vengeance and mob rule.

The terrorists who destroyed the buildings from which you could only see 45 Park Place as a dot on the ground, wanted to force us to change our country to become more like the ones they knew. What better way could we honor the dead of the World Trade Center, than to do the terrorists’ heavy lifting for them? And do you think 45 Park Place is where it ends?

The moment this monstrous betrayal of our America gained the slightest traction, the next goal was unveiled. ‘No more building permits for any mosques in this country,’ brayed a man from the euphemistically-named “American Families Association.” Of course, he said, maybe the permits could be granted if the congregation quote “was willing to publicly renounce the Koran.”

“They came first for the building permits.” But back to Downtown. Does the name “Masjid-Manhattan” mean anything to you? Let me take you, in conclusion, to 20 Warren Street. Not much to look at. Not from across the street Not from up close. That open door is the only thing that distinguishes it from the rest of the grill-fronts of the neighborhood.

That, and the yellow sign there. “Entrance To Islamic Center.” It’s in the basement. It is a Muslim house of worship. Masjid-Manhattan. It lost its lease in a larger building down the street, two years ago. The new facility is so small that only about 20 percent of worshipers can use it, at a time. But “Masjid-Manhattan” opened in early 1970. Four blocks away, the World Trade Center opened, in December 1970.

The actual place that is the real-life equivalent of the paranoid dream contained in the phrase “Ground Zero Mosque,” has been up and running, since before there was a World Trade Center, and for nine years since there has been a World Trade Center.

Running, without controversy, without incident, without terrorism, without protest. Because this is America, dammit.

And in America, when somebody comes for your neighbor, or his bible, or his torah, or his Atheists’ Manifesto, or his Koran, you and I do what our fathers did, and our grandmothers did, and our founders did you and speak up.

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And so I started writing about sex and sexuality. I haven’t written much, just a few articles so far with quite a few more ideas jiggling around up there in that brain of mine that I have yet to sit down and type out. After writing a few articles, working through ideas for a few more and pitching some other ideas for the go-ahead to start writing them, it became very clear what I would mostly be writing about, and that would be BDSM.

BDSM essentially breaks down into bondage, discipline, domination, submission and sado-masochism. While the feminist blogosphere and community at large like to think they are educating and encouraging people to explore their sexuality in a safe, responsible manner that fulfills them, I think there is a severe lack of discussion on BDSM when it comes to sexuality and sex-positivity. There’s a lot of reasons for this, primarily because of the amount of negativity that has already been attached to BDSM and also because of the gross misconception that strong, independent women cannot or should not find immense happiness and fulfillment by allowing another person to dominate them. But that’s a discussion for a whole other article–an article that I actually plan on writing soon, so I’ll let you all know just as soon as something comes of that.

For now though, I wanted to share with you all one of my articles that was recently published over in the sex education section at Fascinations, Defining Safe Words and How to Choose One. Here’s a taste:

A safe word is a word, or phrase if you prefer, that has been previously talked about and agreed upon that when said, will immediately bring a scene to an end without anything being left up to interpretation. Safe words are important, and in my opinion, absolutely necessary. It does not matter whether you have a long-term partner that you trust completely or are just starting out with someone new; safe words keep everyone involved safe, comfortable, and secure in knowing that at all times, the other person is fully consenting to what is going on.

The reason why safe words exist and why people who engage in BDSM insist upon having one is because it is easy for the words “ouch”, “stop”, and “no” to slip out without really wanting your partner to stop what they are doing. In a considerably “normal” sexual encounter, when a person says “no” for any reason, it is meant for the person that they are with to stop what they are doing and if they fail to stop, then that is called sexual assault and that is a crime. When it comes to BDSM, or really any sexual encounter where you have communicated to your partner that you may not want them to stop as part of play or fantasy—even if you tell them to or when you say “no,” that is when your previously agreed upon safe word will come to save the day. Again, if you do not use your safe word throughout your encounter, you will be letting your partner know that you are comfortable, feel safe, and are consenting to what they are doing. It is for that reason that I think that the use of safe words are tremendously important and non-negotiable; they must be implemented for the safety of everyone involved and they must be respected and adhered to at all times.

Continue reading at Fascinations »

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In Constance’s case, Itawamba Agricultural High School ultimately paid Constance $35,000, as well as her attorney’s fees and a court entered a judgment against the school. They school also agreed to create a Student Non-Discrimination Act to protect students from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

While most, if not all of us have heard all about the discrimination and just plain hurtful things inflicted upon Constance McMillen by people in authority, apparently news of retribution doesn’t travel very fast in Mississippi since another Mississippi school is openly discriminating against a GLBTQ student. This time, the case is about a Mississippi school feeling that it is well within their rights to erase a student from her yearbook because she does not fit into a traditional and accepted gender stereotype.

Wesson Attendance Center excluded Ceara Sturgis from her senior class yearbook because she wore a tuxedo instead of a drape for her senior portrait.

In the high school yearbook portraits for some schools, all of the boys wear tuxedos and all of the girls wear a drape–a piece of fabric that is draped (ah, I get the name now!) across the chest and is made to look like a dress or nice blouse. Ceara, who is said to have always dressed in clothes that are “traditionally associated with boys,” a remark I could not help but made a very ugly facial expression towards when reading, attempted to pose for her portrait wearing the drape, but felt extremely uncomfortable doing so. She asked her mother to request that she wear a tuxedo instead, which the photographer agreed to. While the photographer didn’t have a problem with Ceara wearing a tuxedo instead of a drape in her portrait, the principal of her school sure did and he told Ceara that he would not allow the photo to be published in the yearbook. Ceara’s mother as well as the ACLU attempted to resolve the issue with Ceara’s senior portrait not appearing in the yearbook quietly, but despite their best efforts, when Ceara received her yearbook, not only was her senior portrait missing, her name was also excluded.

The ACLU has filed a complaint against Copiah County School District in Ceara Sturgis’ name, saying that Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on sex and sex stereotypes, and the Constitution’s 14th Amendment for the guarantee of equal protection, prohibit school officials from forcing students to conform to gender stereotypes.

For a school to downright exclude a member of their student body from something that is indeed a rite of passage for graduating students is appalling, especially when the reasoning behind it is based on nothing but ignorance and bigotry. But close-mindedness can only be used as a reason for discrimination for so long. We teach children when they are toddlers that it is okay to be themselves and that they are going to meet other kids who may be different than they are–and that’s okay. It isn’t such a radical idea to accept someone as they are and to extend to them the same rights that are given to others. Someone please, give the Wesson Attendance Center administration a copy of Free to Be…You and Me. We have some major schooling to do.

Help raise awareness and support for Ceara Sturgis and for equality regardless of gender identity and expression by joining the Facebook support page and contact your legislators and urge them to sign the Student Non-Discrimination Act so GLBTQ students do not have to live in fear of simply being themselves, knowing that at any time they can be openly discriminated against by the very same people they are told they should respect.

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“Survival is testament of someone’s strength.
Healing is testament of the community surrounding her.” –LFB

Call For Submissions

Dear Sister, edited by Lisa Factora-Borchers, is an anthology of letters and other works created for survivors of sexual violence from other survivors and allies. It is a collection of hope and strength through words and art.

The pathway for a survivor of rape and sexual violence is an unlit road of pain, isolation and doubt. In the weeks, months and oftentimes, years following, the healing process can be difficult to navigate without a community surrounding her. Imagine a compilation of literary arms bound together to offer words of understanding, solidarity and love. Dear Sister is an accessible and inclusive offering of hope, voice and courage; seeking writers and artists who wish to light a piece of that road and lift up other women in her healing.

It is an impossible task to write a letter to every survivor of rape, to every woman who lives with an invisible scar. Instead of thinking of the face of the person you are writing to, reflect on the image of an unlit path, a road with no clear footing. Your offering will be one light, among many, to make visible what was previously unseen, to illuminate what was hidden. You are providing a few more steps for someone to walk steadily toward their own recovery. Your words can be an anchor, a meditation, a prayer, a strong embrace or a gentle touch. The purpose of this anthology is not to retell stories of assault, but to help others regain a sense of balance and wholeness.

Mindfully move beyond what is commonly said and reflect upon radical companionship. Write what you wish for her to know and never forget. And if you lose focus, look deep into a mirror and reflect: What would you want to be told if you were in the darkness?

Information

Dear Sister primarily seeks letters but will accept poems, prose, essay and drawn art that can either be scanned for entry. Maximum word count is 1,000. Deadline for submission is November 1, 2010.

Women and transpeople of any race, creed, background, citizenship or non-citizen, ability and identity are encouraged to submit their words and work to uplift others in the healing stages of post trauma and violence. Both English and Spanish are accepted. All questions can be directed to dearsisteranthology@gmail.com.

Submissions can be emailed as an attachment with “Dear Sister Entry” in the subject to dearsisteranthology@gmail.com.

Hand written letters can be address and mailed to:
Dear Sister Anthology
P.O. Box 202468
Cleveland, OH 44120

Note from the Editor

Rape and sexual violence thrive in the silence of our homes and communities. Outreach must be wide and intentional if we seek to hear from those who are silenced. Please forward this to as many individuals, groups, organizations, listserves, websites and agencies that come to mind.

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We know the runaround and this summer is, of course, no different. Summer 2010 holds many little gems we have been told, are currently being told, and will be told we must go see or we will positively die! But when you get right down to it, summer blockbusters are generally a dime a dozen; there are a few chick flicks, a few movies for the kids, a few action-packed thrillers, and in essence, they all have pretty much the same ingredients that go into a summer blockbuster–and yes, most of them suck. But I recently came across a movie that is due out July 9th that looks like it won’t suck; in fact, I’m pretty excited about it.

Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right was a major success at Sundance and looks so promising that of course, I knew right away that it would not receive the amount of recognition that it most likely profoundly deserves. And what initially made me think it was a promising piece of work? It got the thumbs up from Women & Hollywood, the same blog that pumped me up and proved to be exactly right when it came to the film Sunshine Cleaning, and it also garnered a rundown of promising qualities from Jezebel.

The Kids Are All Right is a film that took seven years to finish, although its timing could not be better with the topic of same-sex marriage still very much on the minds of politicians and their critics across the country. The film stars Julianne Moore and Annette Bening in a refreshingly real, undeniably human (and yes, lesbian) marriage as they parent their two teenage children.

From the trailer alone, because I am not special and do not get to see it before it is released, there are a great deal of obvious warm and fuzzy moments that are a real treat to see being put in a film that could be for the masses–if only Hollywood would let it.

First of all, Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are amazing actors. They are both phenomenal women with impressive bodies of work who seem to jive and play off of each other very well. There is humor and quirkiness and real obstacles that long-time married folk find themselves in at some point or another.

In this case, their family is thrown through a loop when the eldest of the children, played by Mia Wasikowska from Tim Burton’s recent Alice in Wonderland, has just turned 18 and now as a legal adult, possesses the power to find out more about the sperm donor who helped to create her and her younger brother Laser; no I am not kidding. So she calls the sperm bank to find out more about this guy, played by Mark Ruffalo, and then after the kids meet him, they want to spend time with him, get to know him and, from what I have gathered, propel him into the role of ‘father’. And that is where the conflict comes in–Annette Bening’s character, Nic, feels like she and her partner aren’t enough for their children.

There are, of course, parts of the trailer that kind of make my stomach lurch in terms of ‘Yes, we know this is a story about a lesbian marriage and we know that they are lesbians, and oh yeah, lesbians‘ but that doesn’t take anything away from what looks to be a great journey in this coming-of-age story.

So hello summer movie that I am actually excited about. Of course, this movie is only being released in select theaters and seeing as how I live in the Middle of Nowhere, it will most likely not make it to a theater near me, leaving me very eager for the day it is released on DVD so I can go pick it up. I’ll let you know how the movie as a whole pans out for me and hopefully it’s worth the hype we’re seeing across the woman-written blogosphere.

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This website isn’t merely a hub of information; there are websites out there dedicated to merely being information hubs–and a lot of them make a damn good living doing it. Menstrual Poetry however, is personal and it always has been. Instead of merely posting about whatever the “breaking news” in the world is with a one-sentence description of what I’m quoting so I can feel like I wrote something meaningful for the day, I have always chosen to make this more of a personal space. That’s probably also the reason why I haven’t had the same amount of time I once had to dedicate to it. Sure, you can find a lot of information here, but you won’t find it without somewhere around 500 words at the very least about what I think about the topic at hand. I choose not to post about something unless I feel as if I have something meaningful to say about it or something of substance to add to the already on-going conversation. What can I say, I like to rant and I like to have a space where I can be myself and share just a small part of myself with anyone who chooses to read this website.

One topic I feel very strongly about, on a social issues level, as well as on a deeply personal level is sex-positivity. I have brought up the topic of sexuality as a whole, most frequently about church groups counseling women in porn and sex addiction only to come up with the conclusion that these groups are brainwashing women into believing that their sexuality in its entirety is shameful. I have posted information as well as a video review for Babeland’s not-so-recently-published but still very awesome book, Moregasm: Babeland’s Guide to Mind-Blowing Sex. I spread the word about Babeland donating 20% of their revenue throughout the month of April to Grist to celebrate Earth Day. Each of these three posts went over well and I felt that they were not only really informative and important, but I felt that they were also very much necessary.

Earlier this month, also known as the last time I blogged here, I wrote a review for Courtney Trouble’s Seven Minutes in Heaven 2: Tender Hearted. This post also went over well, which made me a happy little feminist blogger. Like I briefly stated in the beginning of the review, feminists have long been very much divided when it comes to porn and the sex industry as a whole. I don’t personally feel as if those who identify as feminist should be oppressing the very same people they claim to want to help. It feels very much like the pro-life debate when someone who identifies as pro-life states that bombing abortion clinics, killing doctors who perform abortions, nurses who help that doctor and the women who are there to see that doctor is what it takes to “help women” or “help fetuses.” To quote myself because I put it perfectly the first time–I don’t like that kind of negativity in my movement and I don’t like it being used to oppress my people.

Obviously, writing about Courtney Trouble’s Seven Minutes in Heaven 2 was something I felt very strongly about and I took it under careful consideration before posting it. I know that I have a pretty fabulous group of sexual assault survivors who frequent this website and because I’m considerate and know what it’s like to click over to a website only to become triggered by the content, I hid the entire review from the main page. Not only that, but I also hid the image accompanying the article and I included an adult/trigger warning in bold at the very top of the entire post because that’s just what it means to be considerate of the people who happen to stumble upon your space not knowing what, exactly, to expect. Everything above the fold was completely safe to read and you had to click over the jump in order to see the content. I figured that would be the best unspoken compromise I could have, considering that Courtney Trouble’s film is very much a woman-friendly, body-loving, feminist piece of work that I loved and felt compelled to share.

Luckily, I did not receive a comment, an email, Tweet, Facebook message, instant message, or anything else people use to communicate with me telling me that what I wrote was in any way inappropriate, misguided, offensive, or triggering. That is, until I received an email from my ad network.

I used to have BlogHer ads both in my header and sidebar. You will notice that obviously, I no longer have network-supported ads on this website. The reason for this is because I received an email from the producer of the BlogHer Publishing Network informing me that my ads had been suspended and would remain suspended until my review of Courtney Trouble’s film was moved to a page that did not contain the BlogHer Publishing Network code. Ultimately, my entire post would need to be removed from Menstrual Poetry and moved elsewhere because I was told that not one of the advertisers working with BlogHer would feel comfortable with their campaigns running alongside “graphic adult content.”

The review did at first contain screenshots taken directly from the film itself and they were pretty graphic. That was fine, I removed them and moved on. No big deal. I emailed this woman back and told her the graphics had been removed with the exception of the image of the DVD cover; that is important and by removing it I would not only be censoring Menstrual Poetry, I would be censoring Courtney Trouble. The DVD cover does not contain anything super graphic, it merely pictures women’s breasts in a pretty non-sexual way. I also informed them of the measures I had taken to keep the so-called graphic content off of the main page of the blog, therefore the only people who would see the content in question are those who are interested in reading the post. I also took the time to remind this woman that Menstrual Poetry is listed under the feminism and gender section of BlogHer ads and because of that, I thought that those same feminist ideals and nice, warm feelings of sex-positivity goodness would also be held by the people of BlogHer. Turns out I was wrong.

After sending my pretty lengthy email, my ads were reinstated for exactly one day. I then received yet another email from the same woman, informing me that they were suspended again because I did not remove the image of the DVD cover. I thought that I had compromised enough and I’m generally not willing to bend over backwards to appease the ad network gods. In the end, I feel that the content I wrote and published on this website was important and again, very much necessary. It’s about time that we start to remove the stigma from porn, especially porn made by women and starring diverse casts, safe sex practices and everything we expect from feminist directors; because that is what Courtney Trouble is. But one thing was very, very clear; my review of Seven Minutes in Heaven 2 and my BlogHer ads could not live happily ever after on the same website. We had irreconcilable differences. So I took them down and now, approximately 12 days later, I still feel like this was the best decision I could have made.

If I learned one thing from this entire experience, it is that writing about sex and sexuality and the positive, enriching experience it brings to one’s life can get you into trouble. It can make big businesses, corporations and the ad networks that depend on them quick to censor someone because they rely on the incredibly uptight and naive. More than anything, I find this to be severely devastating and I’ve never been one to play that game and I don’t intend to start now.

I chose to incorporate ads on this site because frankly, money is good. I like money and I would like to have more of it. As many of you may know, I work from home and spend all day, every day blogging, doing sporadic web design and development and freelancing where and when I can. If I could make a few bucks from the hard work I put into this blog and have put in here over the years, then why not? I think bloggers who dedicate time to their websites and share a little of themselves with the people who choose to click onto their sites deserve something in return for their dedication; especially since most of the people out there doing amazing work shedding light on important things and talking about things that not many other people have the guts to talk about aren’t getting lavish book deals, appearances on morning television and opportunities to write for the biggest publications.

I was going to keep the name of the ad network out of this blog post, but I chose not to when a good friend of mine and fellow blogger who is consistently fighting the good fight told me about a recent altercation with the same ad network recently and how it was completely unwarranted and I found it downright ridiculous. So remember this–when an ad network tell you that they like what you’re doing and they are lucky to have you as part of their network, it’s only until the corporations they work with say something differently and they are always, always willing to back peddle for the money they make. You are but yet another number and the amount of money you make every month from your ads is only a considerably small fraction of what they are making. They need you as much as you need them. Perhaps more people should let the people behind these ad networks know that.

So, if you enjoy reading Menstrual Poetry or merely agree with what I have to say on this topic (and of course, want to read more about what I think of sex-positivity), I have added a donation button to my sidebar and I would greatly appreciate it if you could donate to keep this website, as well as myself, up and running.

Also, if you’re in the market for some great sex toys, or yes, porn, please consider purchasing from the awesome companies that I am an affiliate of–Fascinations, Good Vibrations and Babeland. They are all fabulous companies with hard-working, loyal and appreciative people behind them. The only other avenues in which Menstrual Poetry makes money is through Blogads, so if you have a website, book, independent film, or anything else you think the readers of Menstrual Poetry would be interested in, please consider purchasing an ad. Menstrual Poetry will not be making any income aside from these sources from now on because it isn’t easy to censor someone who is on a mission and I won’t compromise what I believe in when it comes to this website.

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I am by no means an expert when it comes to feminist porn directors. Tristan Taormino has long been one of very few who came to mind just because of her film Rough Sex, so when I heard that Courtney Trouble had made quite the name for herself in the world of feminist porn, garnering recognition large and vast, I needed to see what was so impressive. I have long been lusting after seeing what she was capable of, and when Babeland presented me with the opportunity to see for myself, I jumped at the chance.

First of all, let’s make something clear, shall we? Feminists have long been divided when it comes to porn. I happen to love porn. I have always loved porn; ever since I knew I was a sexual being and was first introduced to it as a naive teenager. (Hey internet, you listening? Yeah, thanks for that!) As I grew older and started reading anything and everything I could get my hands on in the realm of women’s studies and gender studies and started to identify as a feminist, one of the biggest things that has disappointed me within the feminist movement is the radical hatred a lot of feminists have when it comes to porn. I don’t like that kind of negativity in my movement and I don’t like it being used to oppress my people.

So with that out of the way, back to Courtney Trouble!

Courtney Trouble has won awards for the most diverse cast for Roulette, she was a 2009 Feminist Porn Award recipient, a 2010 AVN nominee for best soundtrack in both Roulette and Speakeasy, and she has also won an award for best queer porn site with NoFauxxx.com by the SF Bay Guardian. Yeah, she is crazy impressive.

So I recently had the chance to see Seven Minutes in Heaven 2: Tender Hearted. You will notice that there is no post anywhere on here about the first Seven Minutes in Heaven, but I haven’t seen that one and I went out on a limb and thought you don’t necessarily need to see the first installment to understand the second–and I was correct with that assumption!

With that being said, Seven Minutes in Heaven 2 features a diverse, amateur cast consisting of Puck Goodfellow, Chocolate Chip, Cyd Loverboy, Red, Soma Stardust, Akira Raine, and James Darling. Every actor in the film is making their porn debut, with the exception of Puck Goodfellow and Chocolate Chip, who also starred in the first of the Seven Minutes in Heaven series.

This film revolves around an amazingly hot slumber party where Spin the Bottle turns into a lot more than just kissing the person the bottle lands on, and then the cast moves on to the hottest game of Truth or Dare you will probably ever see.

I really loved this film particularly because of the cast. It is completely diverse, made up of different body types, races, and gender identities. Everyone picked the person whom they would like to appear on-camera with and that really adds a level of chemistry that is not scene in most porn out there. There is laughing, actual conversation, joking around, and you can tell every single person seen in the film is enjoying themselves and they are happy to be together, whether it’s in their specific scene, or just talking into the camera. There is quirkiness, fun, and a unique sense of playfulness that you really can’t help but smile or laugh along with.

But don’t think that because there is some joke-cracking and playfulness that Seven Minutes in Heaven 2 isn’t hot, because it is. Incredibly, in fact. Sure, it has a few flaws, like the fact that Akira’s moaning sounded a little too similar to my own, which just ended up freaking me out so much that whenever she was moaning very loudly, my state of arousal decreased. That is pretty much the worst reaction someone can have when watching porn. Also, Akira moans too much. Yes, too much; almost constantly and way too loudly; or I could just be thinking that because of how freaked out I was that there was someone else out there walking around with my sexy time sounds. There was also the fact that Jiz Lee dropped off some black latex gloves and…immediately left. That made no sense to me at all.

But there are far more pros than cons to this film. Firstly, the presence of distracting and sometimes ridiculous music that is a staple in porn of all kinds, is only played in Seven Minutes for Heaven 2 at the very beginning and end of scenes. Secondly, this film features safer sex practices! There a scene in the film of Courtney Trouble on the phone asking if more black latex gloves could be delivered because they had run out; she continues with the conversation about the importance of safer sex. We later find out the person she was on the phone with, is of course Jiz Lee or the person who sent her–who only dropped off the gloves and nothing more. Yeah, I am not going to get over that, especially since she is hot as hell and should have done something! ANYTHING! In addition to black latex gloves being used whenever someone’s hands are getting close to other people’s intimate areas, we also see condoms being used, dental dams, and there is even an instructional scene where Puck Goodfellow demonstrates how to create a dental dam out of a basic male condom. Incredibly useful information!

While I naturally liked some scenes more than others, I was completely taken with Puck Goodfellow and James Darling–and I have not been able to stop talking about them since I finished watching Seven Minutes in Heaven 2 the first time. It’s hard to put my finger on why Puck enthralls me to no end, but I like it. From his overall style and demeanor to the magnificence that occurs when he puts on a strapon–the entire package that is Puck Goodfellow will captivate you until you find yourself repeatedly flipping back to the beginning of one of his scenes to watch it all over again.

James Darling is just the cutest boy I have ever seen! Very much in that “Oh my goodness, I could just pinch your cheeks!” kind of way, but he will also turn you on at the same time. The only thing missing as far as scenes go, is a scene with Puck Goodfellow and James Darling together. That would have been amazing, but you won’t see that in Seven Minutes in Heaven 2, which made me sad.

The “grand finale” of the hot slumber party is an all hands on deck, seven-person gangbang where everyone does a little something to give Red one hell of an orgasm.

I absolutely loved Seven Minutes in Heaven 2. It was refreshing to see such intense chemistry on-camera and it is most definitely a feminist porn must-have. Courtney Trouble, I am impressed.

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The first time I had ever even heard of Sarah Palin was when John McCain announced she would be running alongside him for the vice-presidential seat and within 11 minutes of hearing her name and doing some very mild research on her, I was seething from the amount of people saying she was a strong, positive, feminist role model. A woman who does not support pro-woman legislation does not a feminist make, folks. I wrote about Sarah Palin and how she has proven to not be worthy of the feminist label nearly two full years ago and at that time (and since) I have received nearly 100 comments, some from people who agreed with me and many others who did not and told me basically, that just because Sarah Palin is not “my kind of feminist,” doesn’t mean she cannot call herself one.

Sarah Palin and the word feminist seem to have a habit of coming up in the media quite a bit. It seems that whenever Sarah Palin emerges from her Alaskan bunker to face the world or to give a speech (that she is now charging upwards of $100,000 a pop for), the media is so eager to slap the title of feminist on her. Not so surprisingly, the only time that the media as a whole chooses to run a “feminism is positive” feel-good story, it is when they are attributing the title to someone grossly anti-woman who supports tragic, anti-woman policies.

During a speech earlier this month to the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List, an extremely modest spin-off of the pro-abortion-rights group, Emily’s List, Palin brought up feminism, feminists and sisterhood. She told the more than 500 women in attendance that they are “responsible for an “emerging, conservative, feminist identity” and have the power to shape politics and elections around the issue.” To complete this point, she also told these women that they should only support candidates for public office who are uncompromisingly opposed to abortion.

Is this sentiment a nod to the fact that she will, indeed, be running for president in 2012? Oh I’m pretty sure that’s a yes.

Also appearing in her speech were a few words for us other feminists out here, you know, the feminists who work hard and wholeheartedly believe in passing legislation that supports women and gives women the power to make choices that affect their lives. After speaking about her decision to not abort her youngest child because she found out at 12-weeks of pregnancy that he would be born with Down Syndrome, she said that women are strong enough to handle having a family in addition to “pursuing career and education and avocations.” A sentiment that feminists do in fact believe in; we actually want legislation passed that would make it easier for women to realistically have everything they want and work for in life. But then she goes on to say, “Society wants to tell these young women otherwise. These feminist groups want to tell these women that, ‘No, you’re not capable of doing both.’ … It’s very hypocritical.”

Sarah Palin is not new to the buzz word-invoking tactics she uses in speeches and interviews. When she was interviewed by Katie Couric she said that she was a feminist, but later told NBC’s Brian Williams that she was not going to label herself anything. In the world of politics, that is called a definite flip flop and apparently Sarah Palin is now making herself comfortable by calling herself a feminist, but only when it suits her needs and viewpoint.

As Jessica Valenti put it in the Washington Post, “It’s not a realization of the importance of women’s rights that’s inspired the change. It’s strategy. Palin’s sisterly speechifying is part of a larger conservative move to woo women by appropriating feminist language. Just as consumer culture tries to sell “Girls Gone Wild”-style sexism as “empowerment,” conservatives are trying to sell anti-women policies shrouded in pro-women rhetoric.”

So I’m just going to come out and say it, and yes, I know some of you out there were waiting for it. I’m sorry, but you don’t just get to say you’re a feminist and automatically be one. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not allowed.

Meghan Daum wrote an entire article for the LA Times about how Sarah Palin has “made peace” with the “F-word” and how now that it’s a word that she can use to work for her to win more people over by spinning its connotations completely backward, we should be all be overjoyed with this. Daum’s own view of feminism, as she highlights in her article, is pretty much something anyone can relate to and attribute to themselves regardless of where they stand practically anywhere on the political scale. Can a man who hates gay people, goes to pro-life rallies and has everything Rush Limbaugh has ever said recorded for repeated listening be a feminist? In Daum’s world, absolutely!

I don’t necessarily believe that people must be able to go down a list of viewpoints and be able to check most, if not all of them off as something they agree with before being able to be called a feminist, I just think that people who openly call themselves feminists should probably have a good grasp over the women’s liberation movement and where feminism gained its roots. I want people who call themselves feminists to know what they are talking about and I want them to work hard to make sure legislation and policies on a country, state and a community level are passed that will help more women than hinder them. Feminists should want to make sure that children today are raised with the knowledge and with the confidence to know that they can do anything and nothing can stop them from fulfilling the dreams that they wish to some day accomplish. I want someone who calls themselves a feminist to believe that people deserve to live in a world without gender stereotypes or roles, without bigotry, without hate or discrimination, without sexism and misogyny and yes, I want them to believe that women deserve to make their own choices, not only when it comes to their bodies, but when it comes to every single aspect of their lives.

Kate Harding wrote over at Jezebel about the 5 Ways Of Looking At “Sarah Palin Feminism” that is both incredibly hilarious and informative.

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A few days ago I re-published maymay’s article from Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed, Edenfantasys’s unethical technology is a self-referential black hole. The article not only uncovered, but also proved without a shadow of a doubt the unethical linking technology used by popular sex toy shop and community, EdenFantasys. But this isn’t just a matter of ethics; it isn’t that simple and if it were, some of their most prolific and popular reviewers and contributors wouldn’t be walking away from the site completely because of it. Well, the reviewers who haven’t already been banned by the so-called transparent, honest and accepting forum, anyway.

The way EdenFantasys’ linking technology works is actually quite simple and you don’t need to understand any technological jargon to see what’s really going on. Throughout EdenFantasys’ entire website, as well as their SexIs Magazine, when you click on a link, it works just as it does on any other kind of website. It brings you to the destination it is intended to. That is, if you have JavaScript enabled on your browser, which your browser should automatically have enabled. If you disable JavaScript however, and try to click on a link, it does nothing. While the link looks the same, when you try to click, it does nothing. While you may be thinking “So what? If my browser has JavaScript enabled and I can click on the link, then what is the problem?” Well, Googlebot and search engine spiders do not see JavaScript, meaning they do not see the link on EdenFantasys and SexIs Magazine in any way and cannot give that website credit for being linked on such a prominent website. Not only that, but by hovering over a link on these websites and looking in your status bar, you will see that the link is showing up as the destination of the same page you are already on. They have successfully cloaked links so that if you have JavaScript enabled and you click on a link, it will bring you to that website, but the back-end code is really functioning as giving EdenFantasys another incoming link to themselves. The only one who benefits from this linking technology is EdenFantasys.

What this means is that those who have done off-site reviews for EdenFantasys and have their reviews that they have written on their blogs linked on EdenFantasys, thinking that their Google pagerank would increase because they have been linked by such a huge website, are mistaken. In fact, if you check your website statistics, you will never see an incoming link from EdenFantasys show up. Their unethical technology is not only screwing you out of backlinks that lead to a Google pagerank increase, but also hits to your website completely. Anyone who runs a website of any caliber knows how important incoming links and hits are.

A number of months ago when I was propositioned through my other website to begin reviewing for EdenFantasys, one of the “perks” outlined in that proposition was being linked by EdenFantasys when I wrote an off-site review on my blog. When the woman I initially worked with from EdenFantasys stopped working with the company and after the person who replaced her also left the company, I was contacted by the third off-site review manager for EdenFantasys who once again gave me a run-through of the entire program and spent more time on why it was so great to be linked by EdenFantasys, focusing a great deal on the number of people who are part of the community who would see my reviews and be introduced to my website because of them. After I had been reviewing for EdenFantasys for a few months I received another email by a link manager for the website whose job it is to set up “link exchanges” between their site and blogs. The person whose responsibility it is to set up link exchanges did not even bother to look at my website, because if they had, they would have noticed that not only did I have a text link for EdenFantasys on my website, but I also had a banner present on my sidebar. I am not the only one who has received an email of this nature and what this proves is that EdenFantasys is employing someone to only set up link exchanges with blogs and they receive hits and Google pagerank increases because of the amount of links they garner from other blogs, not to mention that a reviewer must place no less than three links to EdenFantasys in every review they publish on their blog, but EdenFantasys never returns the favor because of their horrendously unethical linking practices. The people who they set up link exchanges with have been lied to and cheated by the entire company.

Obviously, when maymay’s article was published almost a week ago uncovering the unethical linking practices of EdenFantasys, people were outraged. A thread was started in the EdenFantasys forum with a link to the article and immediately, people wanted an explanation from the EdenFantasys staff. This is only natural and something people would expect from any company. Please note that EdenFantasys has gone above and beyond to try to solidify themselves as being transparent, honest and a sex shop you can trust. They showed a very hypocritical nature, however, when they decided to delete the thread that was started about their linking practices when it had gained 28 responses by concerned and respectful contributors. Luckily, a screenshot was taken of the forum before it had been deleted, just to prove that it had indeed been there. So much for that whole transparency thing.

Sex & Law started another thread in the forum asking about the phantom post and why it had been deleted, obviously by the EdenFantasys staff. She noted that there was really no need for the staff to delete a post where everyone was being very respectful of each other and also of the company as a whole. Simply, we all just wanted answers. Well, we demanded answers, just like any contributors of any website would demand answers from a company they are affiliated with that they feel may be giving them the short end of the stick.

After five posts in this newly-created thread, a staff member commented, saying that the thread had been pulled due to “inflammatory allegations.” Let’s take a look at that screenshot again. Where are these “inflammatory allegations,” because I see none. Oh well, EdenFantasys and their dedication to transparency is getting thinner and thinner.

After the second thread was closed for comments, a thread was started by the president of EdenFantasys. It attempted to explain away why the company was doing nothing wrong by misleading people who they have set up link exchanges with or lying to those who were promised real links to their off-site reviews. The response claimed that EdenFantasys’ linking practices are the same as the user-generated content of sites like CNN, USA Today, LifeHacker, Io9, Cele|bitchy and The Indy Channel and mixed this blatant lie with some technological terms that would bore anyone who had absolutely no idea what they meant. It claimed that because EdenFantasys is so user-generated and because the site receives thousands of attempts daily to insert malicious content into the website that the technology they use allows them to remain safe and reliable.

That is another lie. While the threat of malicious content is very real when it comes to any user-generated website, this linking technology does nothing to help avoid the threat of the site being attacked by viruses. Furthermore, if you disable JavaScript in your browser and go to any of the sites mentioned by the president of EdenFantasys in his response, all of the links work. Why is that? Because they are not using the same linking technology as EdenFantasys. They are in fact providing real links to outside websites. EdenFantasys’ technology merely exists to bump EdenFantasys up higher in ranking and in search engine results and those who thought EdenFantasys were being malicious themselves and lying to their community when maymay’s article was published were entirely correct.

I had attempted to say just that in a response on the forum. Twice. Both times my responses were deleted after about five seconds after I pressed the post button. But I shouldn’t take offense to EdenFantasys not wanting the truth on their forum from someone who does not get bored by reading through technological terms and actually understands JavaScript very much, because I wasn’t the only person whose responses were deleted. Five other replies from different people were also deleted and not only that, but a number of people whose comments were deleted were also locked out of their accounts. Britni, Sex & Law and myself were locked out of our EdenFantasys accounts without so much as an email. It has been a few days since this happened and still, no email giving a reason why. But there is a thread in the forum dedicated to it! The post states that a few accounts have been disabled and it’s just a “cooling off period.” And for good measure, because they know that disabling the accounts of those who had the audacity to speak out against their smoke and mirrors response to this whole ordeal is not right and very much against that whole transparency thing they say they’re so fond of, the thread is closed for replies.

This isn’t the only bit of drama EdenFantasys has had as of late. Last week, in the name of transparency, EdenFantasys announced the banning of an extremely prolific and well-known reviewer, Epiphora. They claim they receive continuous complaints about her drama, rudeness and overall negativity, but after going through the forums that Epiphora herself cited in her blog post about her banning, I saw nothing that was worth a permanent banning. Not only that, but Epiphora claimed that she had received no warning of being banned, just a terse email saying that the decision is final. This in itself goes against EdenFantasys’ own policies.

Epiphora’s banning alone had caused some reviewers to take stock of what was really going on behind the scenes of EdenFantasys and were walking away from the site because of it. The most-recent unveiling of how unethical they are, not to mention dishonest to their contributors, reviewers and even the companies whose sex toys they sell, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Over 16 reviewers and contributors of EdenFantasys’ have since walked away from the site.

If one thing is clear throughout this entire situation, it is that EdenFantasys is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They do not stand for anything that they claim to and in fact take advantage of those who see them as a company worth doing business with.

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Note: This post is republished with permission from maymay from Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed. Anyone who is concerned, offended and/or appalled by the unethical linking practices done by EdenFantasys and their defense and smoke and mirrors response about the situation are urged to excerpt, tweet, and cross-post it with proper attribution.
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A few nights ago, I received an email from Editor of EdenFantasys’s SexIs Magazine, Judy Cole, asking me to modify this Kink On Tap brief I published that cites Lorna D. Keach’s writing. Judy asked me to “provide attribution and a link back to” SexIs Magazine. An ordinary enough request soon proved extraordinarily unethical when I discovered that EdenFantasys has invested a staggering amount of time and money to develop and implement a technology platform that actively denies others the courtesy of link reciprocity, a courtesy on which the ethical Internet is based.

While what they’re doing may not be illegal, EdenFantasys has proven itself to me to be an unethical and unworthy partner, in business or otherwise. Its actions are blatantly hypocritical, as I intend to show in detail in this post. Taking willful and self-serving advantage of those not technically savvy is a form of inexcusable oppression, and none of us should tolerate it from companies who purport to be well-intentioned resources for a community of sex-positive individuals.

For busy or non-technical readers, see the next section, Executive Summary, to quickly understand what EdenFantasys is doing, why it’s unethical, and how it affects you whether you’re a customer, a contributor, or a syndication partner. For the technical reader, the Technical Details section should provide ample evidence in the form of a walkthrough and sample code describing the unethical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques EdenFantasys, aka. Web Merchants, Inc., is engaged in. For anyone who wants to read further, I provide an Editorial section in which I share some thoughts about what you can do to help combat these practices and bring transparency and trust—not the sabotage of trust EdenFantasys enacts—to the market.

Executive Summary

Internet sex toy retailer Web Merchants, Inc., which bills itself as the “sex shop you can trust” and does business under the name EdenFantasys, has implemented technology on their websites that actively interferes with contributors’ content, intercepts outgoing links, and alters republished content so that links in the original work are redirected to themselves. Using techniques widely acknowledged as unethical by Internet professionals and that are arguably in violation of major search engines’ policies, EdenFantasys’s publishing platform has effectively outsourced the task of “link farming” (a questionable Search Engine Marketing [SEM] technique) to sites with which they have “an ongoing relationship,” such as AlterNet.org, other large news hubs, and individual bloggers’ blogs.

Articles published on EdenFantasys websites, such as the “community” website SexIs Magazine, contain HTML crafted to look like links, but aren’t. When visited by a typical human user, a program written in JavaScript and included as part of the web pages is automatically downloaded and intercepts clicks on these “link-like” elements, fetching their intended destination from the server and redirecting users there. Due to the careful and deliberate implementation, the browser’s status bar is made to appear as though the link is legitimate, and that a destination is provided as expected.

For non-human visitors, including automated search engine indexing programs such as Googlebot, the “link” remains non-functional, making the article a search engine’s dead-end or “orphan” page whose only functional links are those whose destination is EdenFantasys’s own web presence. This makes EdenFantasys’ website(s) a self-referential black hole that provides no reciprocity for contributors who author content, nor for any website ostensibly “linked” to from article content. At the same time, EdenFantasys editors actively solicit inbound links from individuals and organizations through “link exchanges” and incentive programs such as “awards” and “free” sex toys, as well as syndicating SexIs Magazine content such that the content is programmatically altered in order to create multiple (real) inbound links to EdenFantasys’s websites after republication on their partner’s media channels.

How EdenFantasys’s unethical practices have an impact on you

Regardless of who you are, EdenFantasys’s unethical practices have a negative impact on you and, indeed, on the Internet as a whole.

• If you’re an EdenFantasys employee, people will demand answers from you regarding the unethical practices of your (hopefully former) employer. While you are working for EdenFantasys, you’re seriously soiling your reputation in the eyes of ethical Internet professionals. Ignorance is no excuse for the lack of ethics on the programmers’ part, and it’s a shoddy one for everyone else; you should be aware of your company’s business practices because you represent them and they, in turn, represent you.

• If you’re a partner or contributor (reviewer, affiliate, blogger), while you’re providing EdenFantasys with inbound links or writing articles for them and thereby propping them up higher in search results, EdenFantasys is not returning the favor to you (when they are supposed to be doing so). Moreover, they’re attaching your handle, pseudonym, or real name directly to all of their link farming (i.e., spamming) efforts. They look like they’re linking to you and they look like their content is syndicated fairly, but they’re actually playing dirty. They’re going the extra mile to ensure search engines like Google do not recognize the links in articles you write. They’re trying remarkably hard to make certain that all roads lead to EdenFantasys, but none lead outside of it; no matter what the “link,” search engines see it as stemming from and leading to EdenFantasys. The technically savvy executives of Web Merchants, Inc. are using you without giving you a fair return on your efforts. Moreover, EdenFantasys is doing this in a way that preys upon people’s lack of technical knowledge—potentially your own as well as your readership’s. Do you want to keep doing business with people like that?

• If you’re a customer, you’re monetarily supporting a company that essentially amounts to a glorified yet subtle spammer. If you hate spam, you should hate the unethical practices that lead to spam’s perpetual reappearance, including the practices of companies like Web Merchants, Inc. EdenFantasys’s unethical practices may not be illegal, but they are unabashedly a hair’s width away from it, just like many spammers’. If you want to keep companies honest and transparent, if you really want a “sex shop you can trust,” this is relevant to you because EdenFantasys is not it. If you want to purchase from a retailer that truly strives to offer a welcoming, trustworthy community for those interested in sex positivity and sexuality, pay close attention and take action. For ideas about what you can do, please see the “What you can do” section, below.

• If you’ve never heard about EdenFantasys before, but you care about a fair and equal-opportunity Internet, this is relevant to you because what EdenFantasys is doing takes advantage of non-tech-savvy people in order to slant the odds of winning the search engine game in their favor. They could have done this fairly, and I personally believe that they would have succeeded. Their sites are user-friendly, well-designed, and solidly implemented. However, they chose to behave maliciously by not providing credit where credit is due, failing to follow through on agreements with their own community members and contributors, and sneakily utilizing other publishers’ web presences to play a very sad zero-sum game that they need not have entered in the first place. In the Internet I want, nobody takes malicious advantage of those less skilled than they are because their own skill should speak for itself. Isn’t that the Internet and, indeed, the future you want, too?

• See for yourself: First, log out of any and all EdenFantasys websites or, preferably, use a different browser, or even a proxy service such as the Tor network for greater anonymity. Due to EdenFantasys’s technology, you cannot trust that what you are seeing on your screen is what someone else will see on theirs. Next, temporarily disable JavaScript (read instructions for your browser) and then try clicking on the links in SexIs Magazine articles. If clicking the intended off-site “links” doesn’t work, you know that your article’s links are being hidden from Google and that your content is being used for shady practices. In contrast, with JavaScript still disabled, navigate to another website (such as this blog), try clicking on the links, and note that the links still work as intended.

• Here’s another verifiable example from the EdenFantasys site showing that many other parts of Web Merchants, Inc. pages, not merely SexIs Magazine, are affected as well: With JavaScript disabled, visit the EdenFantasys company page on Aslan Leather (note, for the sake of comparison, the link in this sentence will work, even with JavaScript off). Try clicking on the link in the “Contact Information” section in the lower-right hand column of the page (shown in the screenshot, below). This “link” should take you to the Aslan Leather homepage but in fact it does not. So much for that “link exchange.”
  
  (Click to enlarge.)

TECHNICAL DETAILS

What follows is a technical exploration of the way the EdenFantasys technology works. It is my best-effort evaluation of the process in as much detail as I can manage within strict self-imposed time constraints. If any of this information is incorrect, I’d welcome any and all clarifications provided by the EdenFantasys CTO and technical team in an appropriately transparent, public, and ethical manner. (You’re welcome—nay, encouraged—to leave a comment.)

Although I’m unconvinced that EdenFantasys understands this, it is the case that honesty is the best policy—especially on the Internet, where everyone has the power of “View source.”

The “EF Framework” for obfuscating links

Article content written by contributors on SexIs Magazine pages is published after all links are replaced with a <span> element bearing the class of linklike and a unique id attribute value. This apparently happens across any and all content published by Web Merchants, Inc.’s content management system, but I’ll be focusing on Lorna D. Keach’s post entitled SexFeed:Anti-Porn Activists Now Targeting Female Porn Addicts for the sake of example.

These fake links look like this in HTML:

And according to Theresa Flynt, vice president of marketing for Hustler video, <span class="linklike" ID="EFLink_68034_fe64d2">female consumers make up 56% of video sales.</span>

This originally published HTML is what visitors without JavaScript enabled (and what search engine indexers) see when they access the page. Note that the <span> is not a real link, even though it is made to look like one. (See Figure 1; click it to enlarge.)

• Figure 1:
  

In a typical user’s browser, when this page is loaded, a JavaScript program is executed that mutates these “linklike” elements into <a> elements, retaining the “linklike” class and the unique id attribute values. However, no value is provided in the href (link destination) attribute of the <a> element. See Figure 2.

• Figure 2:
  

The JavaScript program is downloaded in two parts from the endpoint at http://cdn3.edenfantasys.com/Scripts/Handler/jsget.ashx. The first part, retrieved in this example by accessing the URI at http://cdn3.edenfantasys.com/Scripts/Handler/jsget.ashx?i=jq132_cnf_jdm12_cks_cm_ujsn_udm_stt_err_jsdm_stul_ael_lls_ganl_jqac_jtv_smg_assf_agrsh&v_14927484.12.0, loads the popular jQuery JavaScript framework as well as custom code called the “EF Framework”.

The EF Framework contains code called the DBLinkHandler, an object that parses the <span> “linklike” elements (called “pseudolinks” in the EF Framework code) and retrieves the real destination. The entirety of the DBLinkHandler object is shown in code listing 1, below. Note the code contains a function called handle that performs the mutation of the <span> “linklike” elements (seen primarily on lines 8 through 16) and, based on the prefix of each elements’ id attribute value, two key functions (BuildUrlForElement and GetUrlByUrlID, whose signatures are on lines 48 and 68, respectively) interact to set up the browser navigation after responding to clicks on the fake links.

var DBLinkHandler = {
pseudoLinkPrefix: "EFLink_",
generatedAHrefPrefix: "ArtLink_",
targetBlankClass: "target_blank",
jsLinksCssLinkLikeClass: "linklike",
handle: function () {
var pseudolinksSpans = $("span[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix + "']");
pseudolinksSpans.each(function () {
var psLink = $(this);
var cssClass = $.trim(psLink.attr("class"));
var target = "";
var id = psLink.attr("id").replace(DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix, DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix);
var href = $("<a></a>").attr({
id: id,
href: ""
}).html(psLink.html());
if (psLink.hasClass(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass)) {
href.attr({
target: "_blank"
});
cssClass = $.trim(cssClass.replace(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass, ""))
}
if (cssClass != "") {
href.attr({
"class": cssClass
})
}
psLink.before(href).remove()
});
var pseudolinksAHrefs = $("a[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix + "']");
pseudolinksAHrefs.live("mouseup", function (event) {
DBLinkHandler.ArtLinkClick(this)
});
pseudolinksSpans = $("span[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix + "']");
pseudolinksSpans.live("click", function (event) {
if (event.button != 0) {
return
}
var psLink = $(this);
var url = DBLinkHandler.BuildUrlForElement(psLink, DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix);
if (!psLink.hasClass(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass)) {
RedirectTo(url)
} else {
OpenNewWindow(url)
}
})
},
BuildUrlForElement: function (psLink, prefix) {
var psLink = $(psLink);
var sufix = psLink.attr("id").toString().substring(prefix.length);
var id = (sufix.indexOf("_") != -1) ? sufix.substring(0, sufix.indexOf("_")) : sufix;
var url = DBLinkHandler.GetUrlByUrlID(id);
if (url == "") {
url = EF.Constants.Links.Url
}
var end = sufix.substring(sufix.indexOf("_") + 1);
var anchor = "";
if (end.indexOf("_") != -1) {
anchor = "#" + end.substring(0, end.lastIndexOf("_"))
}
url += anchor;
return url
},
ArtLinkClick: function (psLink) {
var url = DBLinkHandler.BuildUrlForElement(psLink, DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix);
$(psLink).attr("href", url)
},
GetUrlByUrlID: function (UrlID) {
var url = "";
UrlRequest = $.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "/LinkLanguage/AjaxLinkHandling.aspx",
dataType: "json",
async: false,
data: {
urlid: UrlID
},
cache: false,
success: function (data) {
if (data.status == "Success") {
url = data.url;
return url
}
},
error: function (xhtmlObj, status, error) {}
});
return url
}
};

Once the mutation is performed and all the content “links” are in the state shown in Figure 2, above, an event listener has been bound to the anchors that captures a click event. This is done using prototypal extension, aka. classic prototypal inheritance, in another part of the code, the live function on line 2,280 of the (de-minimized) jsget.ashx program, as shown in code listing 2, here:

live: function (G, F) {
var E = o.event.proxy(F);
E.guid += this.selector + G;
o(document).bind(i(G, this.selector), this.selector, E);
return this
},


At this point, clicking on one of the “pseudolinks” triggers the EF Framework to call code set up by the GetUrlByUrlID function from within the DBLinkHandler object, initiating an XMLHttpRequest (XHR) connection to the AjaxLinkHandling.aspx server-side application. The request is an HTTP POST containing only one parameter, called urlid, and its value matches a substring from within the id value of the “pseudolinks.” In this example, the id attribute contains a value of EFLink_68034_fe64d2, which means that the unique ID POST’ed to the server is 68034. This is shown in Figure 3, below.

• Figure 3:
  

The response from the server, shown in Figure 4, is also simple. If successful, the intended destination is retrieved by the GetUrlByUrlID object’s success function (on line 79 of Code Listing 1, above) and the user is redirected to that web address, as if the link was a real one all along. The real destination, in this case to CNN.com, is thereby only revealed after the XHR request returns a successful reply.

• Figure 4:
  

All of this obfuscation effectively blinds machines such as the Googlebot who are not JavaScript-capable from seeing and following these links. It deliberately provides no increased Pagerank for the link destination (as a real link would normally do) despite being “linked to” from EdenFantasys’s SexIs Magazine article. While the intended destination in this example link was at CNN.com, it could just as easily have been—and is, in other examples—links to the blogs of EdenFantasys community members and, indeed, everyone else linked to from a SexIs Magazine article or potentially any website operated by Web Merchants, Inc. that makes use of this technology.

The EdenFantasys Outsourced Link-Farm

In addition to creating a self-referential black hole with no gracefully degrading outgoing links, EdenFantasys also actively performs link-stuffing through its syndicated content “relationships,” underhandedly creating an outsourced and distributed link-farm, just like a spammer. The difference is that this spammer (Web Merchants, Inc. aka EdenFantasys) is cleverly crowd-sourcing high-value, high-quality content from its own “community.”

Articles published at SexIs Magazine are syndicated in full to other large hub sites, such as AlterNet.org. Continuing with the above example post by Lorna D. Keach, Anti-Porn Activists Now Targeting Female Porn Addicts, we can see that this content was republished on AlterNet.org shortly after original publication through EdenFantasys’ website on May 3rd at http://www.alternet.org/story/146774/christian_anti-porn_activists_now_targeting_female_. However, a closer look at the HTML code of the republication shows that each and every link contained within the article points to the same destination: the same article published on SexIs Magazine, as shown in Figure 5.

• Figure 5:
  

Naturally, these syndicated links provided to third-party sites by EdenFantasys are real and function as expected to both human visitors and to search engines indexing the content. The result is “natural,” high-value links to the EdenFantasys website from these third-party sites; EdenFantasys doesn’t merely scrounge pagerank from harvesting the sheer number of incoming links, but as each link’s anchor text is different, they are setting themselves up to match more keywords in search engine results, keywords that the original author likely did not intend to direct to them. Offering search engines the implication that EdenFantasys.com contains the content described in the anchor text, when in fact EdenFantasys merely acts as an intermediary to the information, is very shady, to say the least.

In addition to syndication, EdenFantasys employs human editors to do community outreach. These editors follow up with publishers, including individual bloggers (such as myself), and request that any references to published material provide attribution and a link back to us, to use the words of Judy Cole, Editor of SexIs Magazine in an email she sent to me (see below), and presumably many others. EdenFantasys has also been known to request “link exchanges,” and offer incentive programs that encouraged bloggers to add the EdenFantasys website to their blogroll or sidebar in order to help raise both parties search engine ranking, when in fact EdenFantasys is not actually providing reciprocity.

More information about EdenFantasys’s unethical practices, which are not limited to technical subterfuge, can be obtained via AAGBlog.com.

EDITORIAL

It is unsurprising that the distributed, subtle, and carefully crafted way EdenFantasys has managed to crowd-source links has (presumably) remained unpenalized by search engines like Google. It is similarly unsurprising that nontechnical users such as the contributors to SexIs Magazine would be unaware of these deceptive practices, or that they are complicit in promoting them.

This is no mistake on the part of EdenFantasys, nor is it a one-off occurrence. The amount of work necessary to implement the elaborate system I’ve described is also not even remotely feasible for a rogue programmer to accomplish, far less accomplish covertly. No, this is the result of a calculated and decidedly underhanded strategy that originated from the direction of top executives at Web Merchants, Inc. aka EdenFantasys.

It is unfortunate that technically privileged people would be so willing to take advantage of the technically uneducated, particularly under the guise of providing a trusted place for the community which they claim to serve. These practices are exactly the ones that “the sex shop you can trust” should in no way support, far less be actively engaged in. And yet, here is unmistakable evidence that EdenFantasys is doing literally everything it can not only to bolster its own web presence at the cost of others’, but to hide this fact from its understandably non-tech-savvy contributors.

On a personal note, I am angered that I would be contacted by the Editor of SexIs Magazine, and asked to properly “attribute” and provide a link to them when it is precisely that reciprocity which SexIs Magazine would clearly deny me (and everyone else) in return. It was this request originally received over email from Judy Cole, that sparked my investigation outlined above and enabled me to uncover this hypocrisy. The email I received from Judy Cole is republished, in full, here:

From: Judy Cole
Subject: Repost mis-attributed
Date: May 17, 2010 2:42:00 PM PDT
To: kinkontap+viewermail@gmail.com
Cc: Laurel

Hello Emma and maymay,

I am the Editor of the online adult magazine SexIs (http://www.edenfantasys.com/sexis/). You recently picked up and re-posted a story of ours by Lorna Keach that Alternet had already picked up:

http://kinkontap.com/?s=alternet

We were hoping that you might provide attribution and a link back to us, citing us as the original source (as is done on Alternet, with whom we have an ongoing relationship), should you pick up something of ours to re-post in the future.

If you would be interested in having us send you updates on stories that might be of interest, I would be happy to arrange for a member of our editorial staff to do so. (Like your site, by the way. TBK is one of our regular contributors.)

Thanks and Best Regards,

Judy Cole
Editor, SexIs

Judy’s email probably intended to reference the new Kink On Tap briefs that my co-host Emma and I publish, not a search result page on the Kink On Tap website. Specifically, she was talking about this brief: http://KinkOnTap.com/?p=676. I said as much in my reply to Judy:

Hi Judy,

The URL in your email doesn’t actually link to a post. We pick up many stories from AlterNet, as well as a number from SexIs, because we follow both those sources, among others. So, did you mean this following entry?

http://KinkOnTap.com/?p=676

If so, you should know that we write briefs as we find them and provide links to where we found them. We purposefully do not republish or re-post significant portions of stories and we limit our briefs to short summaries in deference to the source. In regards to the brief in question, we do provide attribution to Lorna Keach, and our publication process provides links automatically to, again, the source where we found the article. As I’m sure you understand, this is the nature of the Internet. Its distribution capability is remarkable, isn’t it?

Also, while we’d absolutely be thrilled to have you send us updates on stories that might be of interest, we would prefer that you do so in the same way the rest of our community does: by contributing to the community links feed. You can find detailed instructions for the many ways you can do that on our wiki:

http://wiki.kinkontap.com/wiki/Community_links_feed

Congratulations on the continued success of SexIs.

Cheers,
-maymay

At the time when I wrote the email replying to Judy, I was perturbed but could not put my finger on why. Her email upset me because she seemed to be suggesting that our briefs are wholesale “re-posts,” when in fact Emma and I have thoroughly discussed attribution policies and, as mentioned in my reply, settled on a number of practices including a length limit, automated back linking (yes, with real links, go see some Kink On Tap briefs for yourself), and clearly demarcating quotes from the source article in our editorializing to ensure we play fair. Clearly, my somewhat snarky reply betrays my annoyance.

In any event, this exchange prompted me to take a closer look at the Kink On Tap brief I wrote, at the original article, and at the cross-post on AlterNet.org. I never would have imagined that EdenFantasys’s technical subterfuge would be as pervasive as it has proven to be. It’s so deeply embedded in the EdenFantasys publishing platform that I’m willing to give Judy the benefit of the doubt regarding this hypocrisy because she doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a search query and a permalink (something any laymen blogger would grok). This is apparent from her reply to my response:

From: Judy Cole
Subject: Re: Repost mis-attributed
Date: May 18, 2010 4:57:59 AM PDT
[…redundant email headers clipped…]

Funny, the URL in my email opens the same link as the one you sent me when I click on it.

Maybe if you pick up one of our stories in future, you could just say something like “so and so wrote for SexIs.” ?

As it stands, it looks as if Lorna wrote the piece for Alternet. Thanks.

Judy

That is the end of our email exchange, and will be for good, unless and until EdenFantasys changes its ways. I will from this point forward endeavor never to publish links to any web property that I know to be owned by Web Merchants, Inc., including EdenFantasys.com. I will also do my best to avoid citing any and all SexIs Magazine articles from here on out, and I encourage everyone who has an interest in seeing honesty on the Internet to follow my lead here.

As some of my friends are currently contributors to SexIs Magazine, I would like all of you to know that I sincerely hope you immediately sever all ties with any and all Web Merchants, Inc. properties, suppliers, and business partners, especially because you are friends and I think your work is too important to be sullied by such a disreputable company. Similarly, I hope you encourage your friends to do the same. I understand that the economy is rough and that some of you may have business contracts bearing legal penalties for breaking them, but I urge you to nevertheless consider looking at this as a cost-benefit analysis: the sooner you break up with EdenFantasys, the happier everyone on the Internet, including you, will be (and besides, you can loose just as much of your reputation, money, and pagerank while being happy as you can being sad).

What you can do

• If you are an EdenFantasys reviewer, a SexIs Magazine contributor, or have any other arrangement with Web Merchants, Inc., write to Judy Cole and demand that content you produce for SexIs Magazine adheres to ethical Internet publication standards. Sever business ties with this company immediately upon receipt of any non-response, or any response that does not adequately address every concern raised in this blog post. (Feel free to leave comments on this post with technical questions, and I’ll do my best to help you sort out any l33t answers.)

• EdenFantasys wants to stack the deck in Google. They do this by misusing your content and harvesting your links. To combat this effort, immediately remove any and all links to EdenFantasys websites and web presences from your websites. Furthermore, do not—I repeat—do not publish new links to EdenFantasys websites, not even in direct reference to this post. Instead, provide enough information, as I have done, so visitors to your blog posts can find their website themselves. In lieu of links to EdenFantasys, link to other bloggers’ posts about this issue. (Such posts will probably be mentioned in the comments section of this post.)

• Boycott EdenFantasys: the technical prowess their website displays does provide a useful shopping experience for some people. However, that in no way obligates you to purchase from their website. If you enjoy using their interface, use it to get information about products you’re interested in, but then go buy those products elsewhere, perhaps from the manufacturers directly.
  • On the recommendation of my friend Dr. Charlie Glickman, I suggest Good Vibrations.
  • On the recommendation of my friend Shanna Katz, I also recommend Fascinations.

• Watch for “improved” technical subterfuge from Web Merchants, Inc. As a professional web developer, I can identify several things EdenFantasys could do to make their unethical practices even harder to spot, and harder to stop. If you have any technical knowledge at all, even if you’re “just” a savvy blogger, you can keep a close watch on EdenFantasys and, if you notice anything that doesn’t sit well with you, speak up about it like I did. Get a professional programmer to look into things for you if you need help; yes, you can make a difference just by remaining vigilant as long as you share what you know and act honestly, and transparently.

If you have additional ideas or recommendations regarding how more people can help keep sex toy retailers honest, please suggest them in the comments.

To report website spamming or any kind of fraud to Google, use the authenticated Spam Report tool.

Google provides much more information about why the kinds of practices EdenFantasys is engaged in degrade the overall web experience for you and me. Read Cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages at the Google Webmaster Tools help site for additional SEO information. Using Google’s terminology, EdenFantasys’s unethical technology is a very skilled mix of social engineering and “sneaky JavaScript redirects.”

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It’s no big secret that I am a survivor of child abuse, neglect, sexual assault and rape. I have written about all of this on this website many, many times and a few years ago I had given an interview to the Scranton, Pennsylvania Times Tribune about being an adult survivor of childhood sexual assault and also made my childhood life experiences public to a crowd of a few hundred people at the Scranton, Pennsylvania Take Back the Night rally at Courthouse Square. But regardless of the amount of times I write about it or talk about it, the gut-wrenching, crippling, bottomless pit of emotion does not go away. Sure, I have learned healing techniques from the Women’s Resource Center, whom I sought help for my anxiety, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression from after calling the RAINN hotline one day when I was alone in my first apartment, feeling defeated and as if I were trapped inside a bubble of negativity. There are also some amazing resources online for survivors, like the Survivor Manual, started by Angela Shelton, a survivor, filmmaker, author, comedian, writer, actress, model and all-around fabulous and inspiring woman. If the amount of resources made available to survivors tells us one thing, it is that we are not alone and that sentiment inspires and motivates us to heal and to help others in their own healing journeys in any way they will allow us to. But healing is a journey–a very long journey and in the end, while you may have come to terms with what happened to you, there are still days when you can do nothing but “sit in your shit,” a term I could not help but adopt from my counselor at the Women’s Resource Center.

Having a “dark day” or period of time where you can do very little but “sit in your shit” is perfectly okay and it is completely normal. Wallowing and grieving is part of the healing process and you have to allow yourself to do that throughout your entire healing process. I remember reading that on any major given holiday, there are twice as many phone calls made to rape crisis and assault hotlines than any other time of the year. Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Easter, parent-specific days of recognition and all holidays in between are major triggers for those affected by assault in some way.

Mother’s Day has been my biggest trigger for over ten years.

While I have written posts about Mother’s Day and how it affects me on a severely personal level for the past three years, this year I contemplated what I would write about and kept coming up with virtually nothing. I have said it all before and nothing about this aspect of my life has changed, so what else was there to say? This year, Mother’s Day seemed to be on steroids. Between two email accounts, Facebook, Twitter and the general blogosphere, for a week I have not been able to get away from the “Happy Mother’s Day” sentiments and this year, I really wanted nothing to do with it. So my approach for this year’s Mother’s Day post? Complete and utter avoidance. But that didn’t necessarily work out the way I thought it would–obviously.

While visiting my daily reads around the feminist blogosphere, Mother’s Day was undoubtedly a major topic of discussion and conversation.

• The Undomestic Goddess listed things her mother had done for her to shape her into the woman she is now; from being her Girl Scout troop leader and “room mom” in school to teaching her the importance of friendships and how to not let people take advantage of her in any situation.

• The Pursuit of Harpyness made a list of the best advice given to them by their moms (or maternal role models) and asked for the best advice or “how it’s done” statements made by the mothers of their commenters.

• Our Bodies Our Blog featured a fun video that will insert the name of the woman of your choice in a faux news story awarding that person with the “Mother of the Decade Award” from MomsRising

• Girl with Pen compiled a wish list for Mother’s Day including ideas like “A world in which being born a girl is not a risk factor for malnourishment, hunger, neglect, discrimination, poverty, abuse, sexual violence, forced labor, trafficking or death.” and “A newspaper filled with stories about the new global peace: no environmental disasters, no bombs exploding, no torture, no hate crimes, no war.”

• fbomb dedicated their ongoing series of articles of ‘Support Women Artists Sunday’ to Mother’s Day and to Carly Simon because their mother was obsessed with the artist.

• Jezebel featured quite a few different posts about and in dedication of Mother’s Day, including an article republished by Morning Quickie about how her mother had not attended a school play when she was 10 because it conflicted with a Buddhist retreat she needed to attend and how that moment taught her that you can be a wife and mother without completely giving up your sense of self.

• Pandagon and Feministe posted the new video My Mom is an Inspiration from the Center for Reproductive Rights that thanks moms everywhere for raising a generation who care about and who are passionate about choice.

• Womanist Musings has a new post over at Global Comment about Mother’s Day and what it really means to celebrate motherhood when in the wake up Mother’s Day or any recognition honoring mothers and motherhood brings up the conversation of choice and a woman’s right to choose abortion.

• Chloe at Feministing wrote an article about the glorification of motherhood in our culture while American mothers are still denied basic rights like paid maternity leave, how women can be kicked out of public places for breastfeeding, the pay cut women take when they become mothers and the fact that single mothers earn between 34% and 44% less than men in the same field.

It was the Feministing article that really struck a chord with me–and not necessarily in a completely good way. It is definitely an inspiring and motivating piece for those who find themselves “with-mother,” with sentiments like “you only get one [biological] mother” and “it isn’t fair that mothers only get one special day a year,” but to someone tragically without, I can’t imagine being this high-strung, this emotional and this triggered more than one day a year.

But as a self-identified feminist who runs a feminist-centric blog, one must ask themselves–is it my “duty” as a feminist to blog about Mother’s Day regardless of my personal triggers and downright discomfort with the subject? Motherhood and a woman’s right to bear children is a major feminist issue. From the absence of paid maternity leave as a fundamental right to women with careers to women being formally and socially judged if they receive welfare and choose to become mothers; not one of the road blocks women hit repeatedly from the time of pregnancy to actively parenting are okay and I try to blog about these problems as much as I can, but this conversation becomes more involved, wide-spread and more passionate on Mother’s Day. The day I cannot bring myself to see the silver lining if said silver lining hit me over the head like a baseball bat.

To the credit of the Feministing article, it did mention “sparents,” a term coined by Mia Freedman. Sparents (or “spare parents”) are those nurturing and responsible adults who play essential roles in shaping the lives of children who may not be biologically theirs, but that doesn’t stop them from teaching, sharing, guiding and experiencing.

I didn’t have “sparents” exactly, but I did have a kick-ass, liberal grandmother who gave me the foundation to grow into the woman that I am today.

So, to my GramPat–

Thank you for showing me exactly what a proud, independent woman looks like. For your undeniable and unwavering love, regardless of the mistakes I have made in my life and will continue to make throughout it. For raising me with the respect to make my own decisions and form my own point of view and for your guidance. For reminding me to never be too proud to ask for help and never judging me. For instilling in me the knowledge that women can do anything and giving me the courage to speak my mind and do what I believe in. For not making too much fun of me for being 23 years old and still not knowing how to cook. For all the school projects, middle-of-the-night Walmart runs, early-morning deep, philosophical conversation accompanied by cup after cup of coffee and for teaching me who is on the 50 dollar bill, which to this day I still know the answer to (Grant.) Thank you for making me look up how to spell certain words in the Dictionary, you’re probably single-handedly the one to thank for my excellent spelling skills and for making me look up anything I wanted to know more about in the Encyclopedia first before you gave me your point of view on the subject.

Thank you for your infinite wisdom and thank you for helping me become the woman I am today. I hope to one day become even a fraction of the empowering and inspiring woman you are.

But even though I have been fortunate enough to have a deeply inspiring grandmother who is still a tremendous mother-figure in my life, that cannot erase the sense of loss that is felt when you have a mother out there, who is not deceased, but just doesn’t want you. To realize that you are not wanted by the very person who brought you into this world is a deeply damaging and tragic realization. My mother does not want me and she never has; when she had me, she did nothing but make my life into yet another statistic–another case of child neglect and emotional and physical abuse, another case of childhood sexual assault, another case of irreversible mental illness.

So last night, when sitting here thinking of the day in which we recognize the good in motherhood, I sobbed. I sobbed for the mother I have never had; for my loss of a fit and capable mother that I deserved. But what gives me that little comfort I need is the fact that there are people in my life who want to be in it and who deserve to see the woman I continue to become.

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