So let’s get this out of the way first: Those boys are not tragic heroes. They treated another human being as an object for their amusement, and then bragged about it. They are going to be on the sex offender’s list for life because they are convicted sex offenders. I’ve heard that the judge met calls for leniency by saying that the court showed leniency by trying them as juveniles, and frankly given what I know about the case that does indeed sound very lenient.

If they are victims in any way, it is of living in a culture suffused with the idea that they are somehow above others because they’re good at playing games with balls. Like the Roman gladiators they are showered with money, fame, and blind adulation, but ultimately they’re disposable and inconsequential. Though not actually slaves, so they’re one up on the Romans there.

The social media aspect of this is interesting, too. This case probably would never have gone to trial if there hadn’t been so much of it on the internet. It would most likely have been swept away as so many similar incidents are.

Finally there is the talk of “ruined lives”. This is where I get angry, because nearly every time I’ve seen that phrase  with regard to this case it’s been about the rapists. Never the victim.

Yes, they are going to feel repercussions from this for the rest of their lives, but don’t pretend that she isn’t either, and don’t pretend that these are equal terms. The rapists had agency in this, they made choices and took actions which directly led to their conviction. Their consequences are relatively light, and these consequences are impersonal. They will not have nightmares and trust issues for years to come, for example. They mostly have extra paperwork.

Compare this to the victim, whose only failing was a poor choice of social circles. Not only does she have to recover from the traumas visited upon her, but the social fallout has been harder on her than on the rapists. She has received death threats for the heinous crime of speaking out. Fucking death threats, people!

That’s what “rape culture” means. It’s a society that punishes a rape victim for reporting a crime more harshly than the rapists for committing it.

It’s truly appalling to see people reaching to find a way that this was okay. To excuse or justify treating her like a thing. Look, how drunk she was or how she was dressed is irrelevant, it does not excuse the total failure to respect her humanity.

Stop trying to find excuses to be horrible to people.

And to say that it was her fault for being in that situation in the first place is not only demeaning to her, but to all people, women and men, everywhere. It puts the burden of civilization squarely on women, by assuming that men are beasts who cannot be trusted to behave with the slightest amount of thought or compassion. It calls for a return to the dark old days when women were more property than people, who must stay at home under the protection of their father or husband.

Fuck that.

I’ll leave you with a thought experiment.

Supposing, for a moment, that the football players were the rape victims here. Let’s not just switch roles in this scenario, let’s have some hypothetical random group of men who got these boys passed-out drunk and raped them. Were the boys at fault in that scenario, or the men? How do you decide that?

I can understand why the leaders of these things do it, for example Mitt Romney declaring opposition to marriage equality will make him more likely to get elected. What I don’t get is the masses, the individual people who work really hard on these things and don’t seem to get any benefit other than the dubious joy of causing human suffering. Seriously.

The most common explanations for these things are religious, and I still don’t get it. Okay, so your religion says X is a sin, but unless your religion also says you should be cruel to people who commit sin or are sinful by nature, why spend so much of your precious time and energy on it?

Pastor Charles Worley went full-nazi and said that gays should be rounded up and put in concentration camps. Bizarrely, he seems to think after they die of old age there won’t be any more. Not sure if he believes that “recruiting” crap or if he thinks they’re actually a different species. Think of the scale of that project, the cruelty it would impose on tens of millions of people.

When I say tens of millions, that’s not hyperbole. There are at least 9 million gay people in the United States. Maybe as many as 50 million. Plus all the pain you’re causing their loved ones, and anybody who is mistaken for gay and all their loved ones, and anybody else who has a shred of empathy.

What would it accomplish? I suppose there’d be a booming job market for people who are willing to do the work of investigating, capturing, and interning a sizable chunk of the population, but that’s the most positive thing I can think of. They’ll have job security, too, because about a tenth of all babies born will continue to not be heteronormative. Congratulations pastor, you’ve created a thriving new industry in human misery!

When 2,000 people protested outside his church in North Carolina, a small group of counter-protesters drove all the way from Georgia, about five hours, to stand up and support hurting people who are different from them. Why? I can’t make sense of it, why drive all that way and use your time and money to fight for hurting others? What do they get out of it?

The best answers I can come up with is they either think they’re scoring brownie points with God or they genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing. I can’t come up with any way to believe that’s the right thing, it doesn’t make sense no matter how I look at it. I can kind of understand attacking gays because you think God hates them and you’re trying to suck up, repulsive though that is, but I just don’t see how hurting people who are no threat to you is the right thing to do.

The attacks on women are in a way harder and in a way easier for me to understand. On the one hand, you could be in denial about your gay kid, but not your female kid. So it seems just batshit insane to try to make second-class citizens out of them. On the other hand, to many men there’s a definite order to how they expect their families to operate, and widespread empowerment of women will make it difficult for them to find a wife who’ll be submissive in the way he wants. So I can kind of see how they’d be willing fight it, if I squint just right and try to imagine being so outrageously selfish that I’d put my personal comfort over the self-determination of half of humanity, including those closest to me.

It really puzzles me to see people working so hard to be cruel for no gain to anybody. Yet I see it almost every day.

Remember search terms are bold while my commentary is italic. 

sandor sansa fanfic Starting off with the San/San, I see. I’m starting to want to not ever write it just for spite. 

19th century sex videos Seriously, if you actually find some from the actual 19th century send me a link!

cycling in tights Might be just the thing if you live in a cold area. I’m not sure, I’ve only actually worn tights once or twice, many years ago. 

nudephotorevolutionary I love that it exists, but hate that it’s needed. 

what does janie qs mean ? If I ever find out, I’ll be sure to pass it on!

maja wolna nude Possibly my favorite picture in the nudephotorevolutionary calendar, it’s very striking and very human. 

the dangers feminism Might be a good name for a band!

what’s up with npr What, indeed?

subculture – girl scouts The girl scouts are a subculture now? What?

tarvi That’s me!

mantyhose My favorite summer outfit is cargo shorts and a loose floral print button shirt, and it just occurred to me that if I added hose I could wear that well into autumn, even early winter! Of course, by the time it cools off I’m usually sick of wearing that, but it’d be nice to have the option…

leo tarvi Hi!

alyaa magda elmahdysex For fuck’s sake, people, there’s a whole internet of porn out there! She’s just standing there nude, it’s not sex pics, it’s not porn, it’s not even very erotic. The whole point was “I can wear as much or as little as I damn well please”, if it’s that hard to find nude photos in your country then clearly you need to tell your government to back off the restrictions. 

http://www.homo tarvi läll.com If you’re the person who entered this search, please tell me what you were looking for, the curiosity is driving me mad!

sandor clegane sansa stark fanfic I’m going to be seeing this on my stats page for the entire life of this blog, aren’t I.

carol ann skjellerup Is awesome. But who was looking for her?

kristina arden Is also awesome, and the same question applies!

history of human fucking how start Well I think I’ve found this month’s winner! Of course, human fucking predates history by a long, long time, and in fact started at the same time as humanity. A subgroup of primate fucking, human fucking originated with the very first humans, and remains a popular form of fucking to this day. I must admit it’s my personal favorite. 

battlestar galactica crazy stuff No kidding, in the fourth season it kinda felt like the writers were in a corner, getting desperate, and started hitting the controlled substances looking for a way to end the show. They did find one, but I wasn’t especially satisfied. 

spider jerusalem writing style I don’t think I did a great job capturing his style, but it was an awful lot of fun to try! I should do that again sometime.

tarvi j No no, this is tarvi l, you’ve gone too far, j is two doors back. 

sex.vdo If you find any on my site, I’d be very interested to know where they came from! I’m also fascinated by “vdo” as an abbreviation for “video”, it’s so clear what it means, yet I’ve only ever seen it here in my search stats. 

dana mccaffery Poor kid never had a chance. Heartbreaking. 

we are not anti gat we are pro marriage Not quite, check for typos and try again!

“we are not anti-gay; we are pro-marriage,” That’s what they said. It’s hard for me to see that as anything but a transparent lie. I suppose they might really believe it, but actions speak louder than words and changing state constitutions is a pretty clear action.

sandor sansa review Sorry, if I ever get around to writing the thing you’re welcome to come back and review it!

leo supernatural Well if I were I certainly wouldn’t admit it here!

sex from the 19sentury sex tube I’m not sure what the 19sentury sex tube is or was, but I’d be interested in learning a little about it!

feminist marriage  One of the more laughable concepts I’ve heard of. I never did work out why straight men would be marrying each other in that crazy fantasy world. But then I couldn’t understand how or why straight women would be marrying each other for a profit, either. Something about the bizarre belief that children with no men around somehow translate to money. Bizarre.

theory of evolution Well, if you were looking for something scholarly I hope you kept searching and found it! 

sandor clegane fanfiction The simple truth is that I really don’t know how to write fiction. I keep meaning to take a creative writing class, or something along those lines. 

mouthyb Had a rough life, and wrote about it very well. 

“atheist census” I’m not opposed to the idea in principle, but something about the way it’s being handled sets off warning lights in my head. It just feels wrong somehow.

women of walmart I’m not exactly sure what you were looking for, but if it was the origin of the phrase “little janie qs” I’m still in the dark myself. 

what does “janie q” mean It means that the “war on women” is not a new, recent thing, but the same one women and feminists and those who want equality have been fighting throughout history. It’s the same war fought in the 60s, the same one fought in the 20s. The same war that saw underwire bras hailed as a sign of women’s freedom and then burned a generation or two later as a symbol of oppression. The same war that saw women slowly claw their way into property rights, voting rights, and equal footing in the marriage contract. Gradually becoming complete people not just in the eyes of individuals, but in the eyes of the law. It fell out of the public eye for a bit, but with the GOP launching aggressive new offensives it’s clearly not over yet. 

homeopathy Bunk.

sandor clegane and sansa stark fanfiction When I do this search term roundup for the very last time, I’m probably going to see this. Even if it’s two hundred years from now and I’m just a brain in a jar or something. 

atheist census Wish I knew more about the people behind it. 

amanda palmer middle name “Fucking”, obviously! Well, if you must know, it’s in the tags on my post about her kickstarter.

And that’s all for this month! This month’s favorite was easily history of human fucking how start. It just makes you wonder what they meant, doesn’t it? Still way behind on my posts, and not likely to do any catching up today. I mean, usually this is my slacker easy day for the month, but search term day is always a fun day!

Have a great evening, or whatever’s appropriate for your time zone.

Asserting conscientious objections, nurses in New Jersey have said they would not check the vital signs of patients recovering from abortions.

I want to make it crystal fucking clear what I’m seeing here. I’m seeing that nurses, people who are well-trained professionals in taking care of sick or injured people, will not make the basic checks necessary for the safety and well-being of their patient if they don’t like the procedure that patient is in for. And they’re calling it a decision of “conscience”, apparently without irony.

How dare you call that conscience? The word should die on your tongue.

Is New Jersey so hard up for nurses that this is acceptable? I would expect a nurse to check the vitals of anyone, to provide the best care possible for anyone, to think of the comfort and well-being of anyone in their care. I include rapists, mass murderers, and space zombie Hitler in that. Not only because a nurse is a professional and it’s their job, not only because if we start performing background checks for medical care people will start dying while the staff decides whether the feel like treating this patient, but also because every human being (or space zombie) deserves a modicum of compassion & dignity.

I’ve often felt that the push to ban abortion had a strong misogynistic element, since so many arguments seem to assume a fetus is more important than a woman, but rarely have I seen it expressed so clearly that a woman who gets an abortion is no longer considered a person. Instead she’s some abomination, something icky to even touch, who deserves neither compassion nor sympathy, whose basic health needs can be ignored. Do you assholes even know what empathy is?

And yet somehow this is conscience. This is moral. If this is the moral conscience you have chosen, that a woman’s ability to control her own destiny should be subject to the whims of biology, then I have to ask why you’re willing to have anything to do with medicine at all. Who are you to question that heart murmur?

Like most batshit insane movements that are bereft of logic, compassion, or basic human decency, this stems mostly from religion.

It’s not clear to me why Jesus needs people to wave signs and scream at emotionally vulnerable people and murder doctors for him, seems to me that if was important to him he could do it himself. But I have to ask, why is terminating a pregnancy interfering with God’s Plan, while extending a life isn’t? Surely if you’re going to be consistent about this, my father must have stolen more than two decades of life when he had bypass surgery in the 80′s, right? Why is your god ok with that, but angry about an abortion?

Really, though, I’m tired of people speaking for Jesus. It feels dishonest on its face, I mean, have you some sort of authorization to speak for him? Power of Attorney, perhaps? Something signed and notarized, something that makes it clear that yes, you are representing him with his full permission and confidence. Because otherwise, I don’t see why I shouldn’t just assume that you’re speaking for yourself, and trying to claim authority that isn’t yours.

I’d stop if I were you, I know it pisses me off when someone puts words in my mouth.

Last weekend New York passed a bill legalizing gay marriage. I haven’t talked about it here because I kind of felt that everything had been said already, but you know what? They haven’t been said by me, and that’s already bitten me in the ass once, so here’s my say.

If this looks too long to read and you just want to know in simple terms how I feel about it so you can categorize me or something, I’m saying “Marriage bans do nothing but prevent some people from marrying the person they choose. Way to go New York, hope the remaining 44 states follow you into the 21st century soon!” If that’s all you need to know, then there’s no point in reading past the cut. Those of you who want details? Onward!

Still with me? Good, let’s begin.

I’m going to take a moment to define terms here. I know the current terminology is LGBTQ (and possibly a few other letters). I’m not going to use this, I’ll be using “gay marriage” as a very inclusive generic term instead and after you’ve read my reasons if you still think I should have said something else feel free to tell me why in the comments. Here’s why I’m saying gay marriage instead of same-sex marriage or QTBGL equality: First, it’s really a mouthful. I know this is text but in my mind I’m always hearing it and it’s just too awkward. Second, it’s far too likely that I will (or already have) miss a letter and by implication exclude someone, and I’d rather deliberately misuse a term in a far broader meaning than usual than do that. Finally and by far most importantly, because this isn’t about any one group of humans or the rights of any one group of humans, this is about human rights. So when I say “gay marriage” what I am talking about is the right of any consenting adult to marry any other consenting adult. Any details about them not pertaining to their ability to give legal consent is completely and very seriously irrelevant. This means everybody.

In November 2008 I watched my home, the state of California, pass Proposition 8. A bill that was described on the ballot with the words “Eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry.” I voted against it, and when the subject came up I spoke against it, sometimes strongly, but I never really worked against it. It was just unthinkable to me that Californians would vote to eliminate a right. I didn’t understand then and still don’t understand now how people could be so motivated and work so hard to pass a law, an actual amendment to the California constitution, that hurts people and does absolutely nothing else. I will never hold my tongue again.

Something that I kinda noticed then but which never really struck me until later was that discussions about the subject were almost always framed as “allowing” gay marriage. Make no mistake, gay marriage was perfectly legal in California for the four months leading up to the election. There were, and still are, some 18,000 married same-sex couples in this state. I remember someone saying “Things will change” apparently without realizing that things already had. I think this shifting of the burden of proof probably did a lot to get prop8 passed.

For future reference, a free society should always ask “Why should we prevent people from doing this” rather than “Why should we allow it”.

I have never yet heard an argument for banning gay marriage that holds water. I don’t mean one that sounds at all convincing to me, I mean one that’s a solid argument in its own right. Religious arguments are perhaps stronger than most in a strange way as a direct appeal to authority, but also irrelevant to law thanks to the first amendment. Most of the others seem to be talking about something else entirely, often children or anal sex for some reason, or are patently dishonest, such as the claim that churches will be forced to conduct ceremonies.

I think perhaps the most honest, the most true claims are the ones along the lines of “If we allow gay marriage, then schools will tell little boys that they can grow up to marry another boy.” You don’t have to think about this too hard to see that strictly speaking it’s absolutely true, though I doubt many teachers will waste space on the lesson plan for it. Because I’m often not all that bright, for a while I actually wondered why anyone would complain that a school wasn’t going to lie to their children until I saw someone write, to paraphrase, “If we let them get married, people will think it’s normal.” That, I think, is the big cultural change that is really threatening here, people might start to think it’s normal.

It is normal. It always has been. Being gay is as normal and natural as being left-handed. So is being bi, or trans, or completely asexual, or probably a dozen other things I’m too ignorant to comment on. Just because someone is on the edge of a bell curve doesn’t make them any less human, especially a bell curve as trivial as their average romantic interests. I say “average” because whatever their usual dating pool is like, nobody marries a demographic, they marry a person.

Roughly one-tenth of your children are gay. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from or what you try to do to stop it. That’s just how humanity is, it’s part of what humanity is. You can probably get them to pretend otherwise through some combination of fear or shame, but you can’t change it. If you are seriously opposed to the idea of gay marriage, and by extension gay people themselves, being normal, I want you to play along with a thought experiment.

Try to imagine for a moment two worlds, one where society thinks it’s normal and one where it’s so successfully suppressed that there isn’t even a word for it, which world would you rather have your gay children live in? How would their lives be different in these two worlds?

Better yet pretend it’s the other way around. Pretend most people are gay and you’re the different one, you’re the freak who, for whatever reason is attracted to people of the opposite sex. Imagine having to hide, lying to everyone you care about, afraid a glance might give you away. Think about marrying someone of your own sex to maintain the lie. Think of the life you would be condemned to. The life that millions of real people in the real world live right now because being gay isn’t seen as normal.

Yes, the more gay people get married, the more people will think it’s normal and I think that’s a great reason for it to happen. There’s enough human misery in this world naturally, we don’t need to keep making more.

At this point, I think equality is inevitable. Marriage equality in six U.S. states and countries such as South Africa and Argentina, and straight couples still love each other. The longer this goes on the more normal it will seem and the more places will adopt it. The only real question is how hard people will fight to hurt others at no benefit to themselves, and that can only delay it. If there isn’t equality in my lifetime, there will be in the next generation’s.

I’ve no doubt there’s at least one person reading this who’s poly and perhaps thinking that it’s not enough. I’m all about freedom of consenting adults, so I feel awful for saying this, but I really think that it’s gotta take a back-burner on practical grounds and should be a lower priority than equality on idealogical ones. Also, as a group voters apparently aren’t very bright, and can be swayed by people to whom the idea of “consent” is a difficult concept. I mean, I seriously read a major community leader in NY quoted as having said “The state should not be concerned about regulating affection.” while complaining about this law that removed state regulation of, if not affection, legal vows of it. I think we need to get those hard to understand principles like “rule of law” and “equal protection of law” and “you can’t change the rules for someone because something about them makes you feel icky” into the general consciousness first before anyone has a chance at a legal poly union. Honestly I might have to sit that fight out anyways, I get headaches trying to figure out how such a legal contract might work & I don’t know if I could handle the screams of the insurance companies.

The idea of “civil unions” is beneath contempt. We already have a form of civil union in this country, we call it “marriage”. This is the United States of America, where less than 50 years ago we learned through blood and hate and violence that separate-but-equal does not work and is nothing more than a tool of injustice which only serves to prolong injustice. If you’ve forgotten that lesson already, and I’m speaking to you here President Obama, then shame on you and those who should remind you.

Marriage is a totally human construct that varies widely from culture to culture. Throughout human history the most common marriage was one man and many women, and the idea of what a marriage is, and the roles of the people within one, have been fluid and constantly changing. In the United States we have drastically changed the meaning of marriage in the last half-century by recognizing men and women as equal partners rather than a man and his subordinate, which was itself a change from the days when it was a man and his property.

If you could travel through time the marriage customs of your homeland a thousand years ago would seem every bit as strange and alien as the ones a thousand years in the future. Things have always been and always will be changing, but right now it’s our time and we get to decide what marriage means. New York has decided the same way I have, the same way I’m sure history will remember us deciding. All people are equal and the law should recognize that.