Linklog

[tinyjo]

Two links from my friends page which caught my eye.

First, No pity. No shame. No silence. Personally I've never been a victim of violence, sexual or otherwise, which makes me very lucky. I still found the post very affecting and I want to support the idea of bringing the scope of this into the light. I've seen a few people on my friends list make this declaration and I want to bear witness.

Secondly, and completely unrelatedly, http://www.electoral-vote.com/, which is a predictor of the electoral college results, based on polls in all the states. I thought the graph of how the votes are shifting was particularly interesting - I noticed that the democrats actually took a dip after Farenheit 911 came out.

Third and last, a rant by swisstone about the King Arthur film and Arthurian scholarship generally. I do plan to see the film but the historical Arthur? Come off it!

Comments

Re: No pity. No shame. No silence.

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

" don't want to seem like I'm equating it with the serious stuff "

Faulty thinking. It's all part of a continuum. The line: don't sweat about the small stuff, oh and it's all small stuff also applies in the opposite direction. The fact that this wasn't "so serious" doesn't remove the seriousness of the intent -- and some of the things I've heard described as not really serious beggar belief.

" not much more than a bit silly for having been caught walking home alone "

You had been asked/told by your parents not to at the time, I take it? A lot of teenaged girls don't report sexual violence because it occurs while they are doing things their parents have forbidden -- come to think of it, the worst incidents I recall happened at an extremely forbidden teenage party.

hmmm. It's a funny old world.

Re: No pity. No shame. No silence.

[greengolux.livejournal.com]

" not much more than a bit silly for having been caught walking home alone "

You had been asked/told by your parents not to at the time, I take it?

No, when I say "caught walking home alone" I mean it happened when I was walking home alone. My parents hadn't forbidden me to do so.

hmmmm

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

then you mean that *you* were silly for walking home alone? Come on!

... sorry, this is one of my pet peeves; that for some reason a woman (or worse, a girl) is inviting violence or harassment by walking around on her own. The acceptance of this as a "fact" (despite statistics reflecting that the victims of street violence are usually male) I think actually makes the harassment more likely to happen, as people feel it is commonly accepted or understood that under these circumstances men behave this way and women should expect it.

When in fact the harassers are an aberrant minority when you tot up how many times it hasn't happened compared to how many times it has in your mind.

Re: hmmmm

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

which isn't to say I haven't had some nasty moments, of course.

Re: hmmmm

[greengolux.livejournal.com]

then you mean that *you* were silly for walking home alone? Come on!

... sorry, this is one of my pet peeves; that for some reason a woman (or worse, a girl) is inviting violence or harassment by walking around on her own.

Yes, I did feel silly for walking home on my own. But I didn't think it was silly because I was a girl. All of us, girls and boys, knew we should be careful about walking alone on the streets late at night. In actual fact, I walked my male friends home more often than they walked me home, because we'd heard the figures about young men being the most likely victims of street crime.

One of my male friends from school refused point blank to walk alone on the streets after dark. If there was no one available to walk him home he called his parents, or made sure to leave while it was still light. He took more precautions than me or any of my female friends.

Re: hmmmm

[littlegreenboat.livejournal.com]

I agree with the point that (as I understand it) Cleanskies was making. If you really couldn't afford to walk home alone, that wasn't because streets, or lateness, are intrinsically dangerous, that was because some people some of the time act very badly. And the less the rest of us let them get away with it, the better.