This November, Mississippi will be voting on an anti-abortion ballot measure to amend the state constitution by redefining the meaning of the word “person” to include fertilized eggs. Under the proposed language, personhood would begin at the moment of conception, granting full rights to zygote Mississippians. While the Personhood amendment would have amusing implications for everything from carpool lanes to redistricting, what’s not amusing at all is what would happen to reproductive rights if Ballot Measure 26 becomes law.

The Personhood amendment would outlaw all abortions in the state. Also under attack is emergency contraception. And in neither case would there be an exception for victims of rape or incest. While the amendment, if passed, is likely to be challenged in federal court and declared unconstitutional, it’s the increasing hostility toward rape victims I want to discuss.

It used to be that most forced pregnancy activists supported rape and incest exceptions. Whether it was compassion for the victims, or a desire to punish only “sluts” who willingly had sex, or wanting to protect men from the possibility of having to raise the offspring of their wife’s rapist, or perhaps a combination of those factors–until fairly recently, most anti-choicers were not advocating prolonging the torture of a 13-year-old incest victim by forcing her to give birth to her own sister. “No exceptions” was largely the battle cry of the farthest right fringe.

In the last 2-3 years, however, this fringe position was propelled into the mainstream by the likes of Sarah “No Mercy for Rape and Incest Victims” Palin, and minds began to change. For Personhood Mississippi, though, they’re not changing fast enough, and so the group pushing Mississippi’s Personhood amendment decided to launch a “Conceived in Rape” Tour. Yes, you read that right. The “Conceived in Rape” Tour’s featured speaker is professional forced pregnancy activist and family law attorney Rebecca Kiessling, who is an excellent example of why I would always abort the spawn of rapists.

Last week the glorious US justice system brought us the acquittal of two NYC cops accused of raping an intoxicated woman they had escorted back to her apartment–this despite the fact that one of the cops admitted to climbing into bed with the nearly naked woman while his partner stood guard. This week we have a Pennsylvania jury failing to reach a verdict in the rape case of 31-year-old Jacquay Hall–this despite the fact that there’s a 911 recording of the assault in which the victim can be heard begging her attacker not to rape her while he tells her to “shut the fuck up” and threatens to “bust [her] up.” The same jury acquitted Hall of kidnapping, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, unlawful restraint and resisting arrest, but found him guilty of making terroristic threats and carrying a gun without a license.

According to the 18-year-old victim, Hall followed her down the street, pointed a gun at her and threatened to kill her if she didn’t come with him. Unbeknownst to him, she had a cell phone in her pocket and managed to dial 911. For the next 24 minutes, she kept her phone turned on while he grabbed her by the arm and led her to an abandoned parking garage, where he raped her. On the 911 tape, the victim can be heard trying to talk herself out of being raped:

“I’ll give you my phone number and we can hang out or something… I wish you would let me go.”

She also offers to give him her bank card and asks him, again and again, to leave her alone:

“Please don’t do anything to me, please. Please leave me alone. Please. No. Please don’t do anything to me.”

Hall is heard repeatedly telling the victim to “shut the fuck up” and threatening to “bust her up.”

At one point, she tells him:

“Please don’t do this. I don’t want to have sex.”

To which he responds:

“Too late. Shut the fuck up.”

Eventually she says:

“I’ll do anything you want. Please don’t hurt me, please.”

911 dispatchers were able to determine the victim’s general location based on the closest cell phone tower, but Hall had already raped her by the time police arrived. When Hall and the victim heard the sirens, she told him she had no idea why police were in the area, reminding him that she hadn’t screamed. She then told him she urgently needed to use the bathroom and when he allowed her to go, she ran toward the approaching cop cars.

I bet you know the answer to this one: When are hate and bigotry considered cutting-edge, forward-thinking entertainment? When the targets are women, of course! I was going to write about this post at Feministe in which a male guest blogger twists himself into a pretzel trying to justify the violence-soaked misogyny of a rap crew he likes, but I see the Red Queen has already beaten me to it. So I’ll talk a bit about the incredibly positive reception outspoken misogynists bigots like Odd Future get from the predominantly male journalists at the New York Times, The Guardian, The Village Voice and other so-called “serious” publications.

For those who don’t know, Odd Future lyrics go way beyond the now-accepted-as-mainstream notion of women as bitches and hos who exist only to be fucked and need to be slapped around sometimes. Most Odd Future tracks dwell in graphic detail on the kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder of women bitches. And yet countless dudes who consider themselves progressive and claim to abhor bigotry are engaging in Olympian mental gymnastics to come up with reasons the creators of this hate are not only decent guys but important artistes.

For instance, when group leader Tyler says that rape is fun, that is “likely a metaphor for something else.” Why? Because no one could possibly think rape is fun? Newsflash: One in four women in the US will experience a completed or attempted rape. There are a lot of men who think rape is fun. They’re called rapists. Or perhaps these enlightened dudes just can’t see someone whose music (or movies or books or athletic performance) they like as a rapist. Rapists are 100% unadulterated evil with zero positive characteristics. I guess that’s why they’re always lurking in bushes wearing ski masks; everyone would immediately recognize their evil rapeyness if they showed their faces. How could someone as “undeniably charismatic” and “irrepressibly goofy” as twenty-year-old Tyler possibly be a rapist? Oh, I don’t know. It’s not like there’s a connection between rape and viewing women as subhuman fuckholes. Or between rapists and sociopathic assholes who think the damage they do is irrelevant as long as they’re having a good time.

I don’t know whether the man whose hate-drenched lyrics advocate the rape and torture of people like me really commits such acts. I do know that this type of violent bigotry set to a seductive beat has real-life consequences. Very bad ones. Advertisers spend billions of dollars every year on TV commercials to influence behavior. Why? Because that shit works. Yet there are those who argue with a straight face that music they consider far more powerful than any corny commercial does not influence behavior?!? It’s bullshit and I suspect they know it.

“Boys and girls are equals,” we tell kids, and then we send them to school to learn about presidents and emperors and generals and religious leaders and explorers and astronauts and civil rights activists and revolutionaries and judges and scientists and inventors and philosophers and composers and painters and sculptors and poets and novelists–almost all of whom were men. Of course kids can’t help but wonder how it is that men achieved so much and women so little. Did women try to accomplish great things as much as men but weren’t smart enough, talented enough, driven enough, strong enough, good enough? Or perhaps women were perfectly content to be wives and mothers because women are meant to raise sons and support husbands who do great, important things instead of doing great, important things themselves?

If we don’t teach kids the truth about our history, those are the type of conclusions they’ll draw. The truth, of course, is that for thousands of years, women were chattel. A girl was her father’s property from birth. When she reached a certain age, she was given or sold to another man in an arrangement called marriage. Her purpose in life was to serve her family (first her father’s, then her husband’s) and bear her husband’s–preferably male–children. She had no choice in the matter, and her owner/husband was socially and legally empowered to beat and rape her if she disobeyed his orders or attempted to resist his sexual advances. Even murder was often permissible, particularly if her husband could argue convincingly that she was an adulteress.

Unlike boys, girls were not raised to be individuals with interests and aspirations of their own. The goals of a woman’s father or husband became her goals. The traits valued in men–intellect, creativity, curiosity, leadership, courage, ambition, self-determination, individuality, independence, and so on–weren’t valued in women. A woman’s life revolved around serving her family–particularly its male members–and her value was in her sexual attractiveness and reproductive capacity. The “good woman” was obedient, nurturing, chaste, and above all, selfless. Women had no access to political power (including voting rights), higher education (go back far enough and most women were deprived of even an elementary education), the marketplace (outside of prostitution and a few low status, low pay positions), or the world of ideas (not only were women considered incapable of all but the most rudimentary logical and analytical reasoning, but depending on the time period, women who dared to challenge the status quo ran the risk of being shunned, killed, or institutionalized and lobotomized). A woman wasn’t able to sign contracts or own property because she was property. A crime against her was literally considered a crime against the man who owned her–her father if she was unmarried or her husband if she was married.

The term “Oppression Olympics” refers to the claim that the oppression faced by one group of marginalized people is somehow worse than the oppression faced by another group. Competing to see who’s more oppressed is rightly viewed as counterproductive and a derailing tactic in social justice activism. Aside from the general futility of such arguments, competitors in the Oppression Olympics ignore the reality that many people face intersecting oppressions. Therefore it’s far more helpful to think of individuals as privileged in some ways and disadvantaged in others, rather than attempt to create a hierarchy of oppression in which the most oppressed is considered the winner.

One thing I’ve noticed is that feminists are more likely than other social justice activists to call each other out for “engaging in Oppression Olympics.” However, most of the people called out for this offense aren’t saying sexism is worse than other *isms. What they are usually saying is that sexism is considered more normal and acceptable than some other types of bigotry. Simply pointing to the success of another social justice movement and asking, “How can we learn from that?” is enough to get feminists accused of playing Oppression Olympics (interestingly, several of the commenters in the Feministe thread making the Oppression Olympics charge are serious competitors in the games themselves).

As I’ve mentioned before, the male hosts of our local radio station’s morning show are unabashedly sexist. In fact, that’s true for the hosts of every single morning radio show I’ve ever had the misfortune of hearing. They may very well be racist too. I suspect that they are. But they know better than to make racist jokes on the air. Not because racism is a thing of the past, but because the anti-racism movement has succeeded in making racist on-air pronouncements more or less unacceptable. I’ve noticed the same thing slowly starting to happen with anti-gay jokes, thanks to the work we’ve been doing in the LGBTQ rights movement. Sexist and misogynist jokes, however, remain as acceptable and noncontroversial as ever. But we’re not supposed to talk about that? Or we can talk about it only if we neglect to look at other social justice movements that have been more successful to see what we can learn from them? No wonder we’re not making more headway.

I just learned about a new privilege I have: blonde privilege (no, I ain’t linking that crap; go Google if you must). It’s true; my hair is naturally blonde. Light blonde even. Now let me tell you how great it was to grow up with all that blonde privilege.

First, there was the steady flow of dumb blonde jokes ranging from the idiotically sexist to the viciously misogynistic with such hilarious punchlines as the one about women who look like me being too dumb to know when we’re being raped. I know, right? That’s a real thigh-slapper. Particularly when told to a girl who’s both blonde and a rape victim. Hearing that shit on the radio or TV was bad enough, but it was even worse when people I knew, supposed friends even, told such “jokes” right in front of me, expecting me to do what? Laugh?

Then there were the wonderful assumptions many people routinely made about my intelligence and supposed shallowness. Not only was I often presumed to be dumb unless and until I repeatedly provided evidence to the contrary, but lots of people also figured I had neither knowledge of, nor interest in “serious” stuff like politics, law, environmentalism, and social justice movements. Because everyone knows that girls who look like me are airheads who are all about fashion and guys and parties and shopping.

Another huge advantage of being blonde was the type of guys I attracted. Thank goddess I have small breasts or I would have hit the trifecta. Still, talk about being a magnet for the biggest assholes around, the type of guys who think of their girlfriends as trophies. When I was too young to know better, I actually dated a couple of guys who introduced me to their friends like a prized possession while I stood there wishing the earth would swallow me. Meanwhile the progressive and alternative dudes I was interested in thought they were “protesting” mainstream culture with its constant messages that all guys prefer blondes by NOT being into blondes. It wasn’t until I was a little older that I realized any guy who thought a woman’s hair color was this important wasn’t worth my time.

A recent post at Racialicious alerted me to the fact that white women don’t just have regular old white privilege (indisputably true), but that we also possess white female privilege, which, in some situations, privileges us even over white males.

How does this white female privilege manifest itself? Well, it turns out that the majority of items on the White Female Privilege list are simply examples of straight up white privilege. But there are a few that are indeed specific to women.

For instance, did you know that many dudes think we’re so emotionally fragile and overwrought that we’re liable to burst into tears at any moment? These guys are so terrified of provoking a crying jag (described as the “sheer fear of tears”) that they’ll do anything not to upset us. And that’s an enormous privilege we can use to our advantage.

Okay, first, I don’t know how many dudes actually think that (white) women are this fragile, and of those who do, how many would get a kick out of making women cry? But even if I’m wrong and fear of “white lady tears” is actually a common phenomenon (maybe it’s a class thing?), I question whether privilege is the right word for it. Most women I know try to avoid public tears at all costs. No matter how much we’re hurting, we try to hold it together. That’s because our tears are not only perceived as a sign of weakness, which is bad enough, but they can also be seen as manipulative in a way male tears aren’t.