Standing sentinels, please get out of our pants!

“Sentinelle in piedi”, standing sentinels.  It’s an Italian movement that in the past five months -since talks of a new law on gay unions came out- has brought thousands of people into Italy’s squares to protest silently against said law.  These people basically meet, open a book in silence and light a candle by their feet, then walk away.  It’s a flashmob.  Their website is not entirely clear on what their mission is, but since the news section opens with “say NO to the law against homophobia” I gather that what brings them together is a varying degree of hate for gay people.

I am relatively young, so I have not seen millions of protests, but from what I know you generally protest against someone who is evil; against someone, to be more specific, who you know is evil because of their actions.  And as much as I believe there are evil gay people, I understand that these sentinels protest against ALL gay people.  They are protesting against a share of the population -their own population, same culture, same upbringing, same language, same schools attended, same favourite gelato flavor- because this slice of the population has something in common that they don’t have, namely sexual orientation.

But if this is so, why not protest against fat people?  Blondes?  Hot girls?  People who wear glasses?  I really cannot stand those who pick their nose at the red light, do I stand in a square surrounded by my peer nose-pickers-haters to request the Government to take away their rights (or, like in this case, not give them their rights?).  Do I say “people who pick their nose should not get married and have children because they’ll teach their children to pick their noses?”, do I stand there and request not to pass a law that condemns those who hurt them?

I do not, because I was raised to believe that one’s personal sphere is personal and as long as there is no violence against another human being (and as far as I know rapes in Europe are mostly perpetrated by men against women, I acknowledge and condemn the existence of same-sex rape but it is statistically less significant) no one is entitled to poke their nose into other people’s lives.

This, and I don’t mean to offend my enlightened religious friends, clearly has a religious base: by a mere misunderstanding of most scriptures homosexuality has been considered by many cultures as intrinsically wrong.  But are those who so vehemently defend the traditional family, God fearing catholics (in this particular case)?  The answer is: generally not.  They eat meat on friday (what’s aperitivo without prosciutto?), they have premarital sex and a loooot of them are divorced too.  Then there are all the minor things (not helping those in distress, beating wife and children, cheating on husband)… peanuts!  What really matters is fighting against gay people who corrupt our society!  So, I wonder, why is it that if we follow the scriptures to the word on homosexuality we break almost all other rules on a daily basis?

Because those who are different are scary.  Sex is pleasurable, so we do it.  The pleasure of sex makes up for the sense of guilt long enough so that we stop feeling guilty for having sex in the first place (which, I tell you as a happy atheist, you shouldn’t feel anyway!). But sex with a person of your same gender challenges you with something that you didn’t know and for that reason you feared.  A lot of men I talk to when I’m back home tell me “I don’t mind gay people, as long as they keep away from my ass”.  So please gay community, do me a favour and make it crystal clear that you don’t walk the streets of Italy swinging your birds left and right, hoping to find a nest for it every time you see another man.  On the other hand I also need to tell my lovely heterosexual male acquaintances: Flattered?  Don’t be.  Chances are that no gay men ever noticed you, you are far too straight!  It goes without saying, if the gay person involved is a woman most homophobic men will find themselves not so homophobic after all and will start drooling over the possibility of participating in a three some.  Shut out to you guys: not a porn movie, real life…

Anyway, although the reason why someone can be so scared of someone -guiltless- else (including their neighbour, their doctor or the guy at the counter of their favourite pub) to stage a protest against them escapes me, I do try and understand the reasons behind such movement.  The law clearly states that adoptions are not on the table, gay couple can get in vitro fecundation abroad but then the child/children are only the biological (and legal) children of the sperm donor, and have no legal relation whatsoever with his/her partner (the other one they call dad, just to make things clear).

So why, why, why on earth do you devote your energy to making someone else’s life worse?  They have the right to spend their life with whoever they want, to have their partners visiting them in hospital and make end of life decisions, they have the right to love someone and feel safe knowing that, should they die, he or she will inherit their home, their memories, their clothes.

As my friend Daniele rightly pointed out, a sentinel is generally one who watches over you, it does suggest a sense of protection: with a sentinel beside me, ready to protect me and warn me of dangers, what could I possibly fear?

In this twisted scenario, the one to fear is the one who is trying to protect you.  To protect you against gay people who will rule the world and force everyone into gaytude, enslaving them in a Dantesque inferno of sodomy and all sorts of perversions.  Should a law on gay union (not marriage people, less rights and no children!) pass, they will wipe out mankind with their insane sexual habits before you can scream “Noooooo!!!!”.

It is a sad sad world, diseases, violence, brutality.  I work on a programme trying to prevent child trafficking, every day I learn things that make me sick to my stomach and force me to look into the dark soul of men and women.  There is only one thing that I need to restore my faith in human kind: love.  I love Love, I want to be in love and be surrounded by people who love each other.

You, sentinel, if you put your rage against someone who has done nothing to you into loving someone you don’t know you’ll be happier.

(Healthy) Love tends not to kill, rage almost always does, so before you get an ulcer or before you kill someone because he or she is different, sentinel, stop being enraged and start loving!

 

No one needs saving, we all need equality

It’s been a long long time since my last post. During this year I started working in Vietnam, on a very interesting project on child trafficking in the Great Mekong Subregion and the time to write has been kind of limited. Actually, really, it hasn’t. It just took me a long long time to get used to this gigantic Asia where socialism, capitalism, shrines, malls, Sunday brunches, lunar calendars and scooters meet.
My work faced me with challenges: some were blatant (inefficiencies, delays, bureaucracy), and those were the easiest ones to overcome, some were so subtle that it was hard to even understand what was wrong.
One thing that I had time and several occasions to think about and metabolize is feminism.
2014 seems to be the year of feminism (and of course of the Horse, in the Chinese calendar…). Not only you have to be for or against feminism but you have to be openly so. If only you do your bit.. nah… totally not enough, you are not doing it right, as my sister would say.  I say this because Emma Watson’s speech at the UN Council is rather recent and I think that that was a bit of a turning point.

The first woman to speak before the UN Assembly was the Norwegian delegate in 1946, but very few mentioned that.  Everyone in the past two weeks was too busy siding Ms Watson “for her brave act and for speaking out loud, for nonchalantly mentioning feminism and for endorsing the #HeforShe campaign” or trying to destroy her for involving men in a women’s issue (both men and women were outraged).

Personally, think many missed the true meaning of this: Emma Watson is a symbol, she is what the majority of public opinions around the world can understand, relate to and digest with a slight degree of challenge.  She said “feminism”, she said she is a feminist.  And while people were either extatic or outraged she gave a rather bland speech that any politician could have given: including those who are often (and wrongly) perceived as “enemies”, dropping a bomb (the F(eminism) word) and explaining how this is a global issue.  She did what she was supposed to do, she is young, she is talented, has a degree from a prestigious university, she is also pretty (which in politics is always a bonus).  What did those who wanted her to say more expect?  I presume her speech was written months ago and rehearsed, rehearsed and rehearsed a little bit more.  What happens in politics, unless it’s in movies, is almost never an outburst of sincere passion.  In politics even passion is carefully staged.

I have trouble understanding those who clearly stated that “she said feminism concerns us all, even if we are men.  I tell you what.. not me!”, but then again, I feel towards those who refuse feminism as I feel towards those who don’t believe in human or gay rights: how on earth can you not believe that those who suffer from a disadvantage unrelated to their actions should not see said disadvantage erased?  To an extent I understand better those who are against abortion, I still strongly disagree and think they should be kept out of politics, but if you follow the word of God, as long as you do it with your own body, who am I to judge?  But denying that sexism exists, denying VAW, denying access to reproductive care is criminal.  And none of these things spring solely out of fundamentalist countries, all the above mentioned things happen on a daily basis in the US, Italy, the UK…

As I said before the fundamentals of feminism are: freedom from violence, financial autonomy and free choice on reproductive health, I honestly struggle to see what you might disagree with.

Anyway, back to Emma Watson, I liked her speech for what it was, a political, timed, speech.  If you were looking for a feminist revolution you were a fool to go and look for it at the UN Council.  Other than that I agree on the inclusion of men but warmly disagree with the terms and conditions: HeforShe  implies that the knight (any of the good looking actors who hold a #HeforShe paper) comes in to save the damsel in distress.

We are not damsels and we are not in distress, we don’t need your help: we want to walk holding hands, together.  He for she and she for he.  Once again, just to make it extra clear, no one needs saving, we all need equality.

Robin Thicke and the Dynamics of Abuse

Originally posted on The Belle Jar:

TW for domestic violence, abuse and rape

Robin Thicke is gross.

I mean, we knew that already, of course.

But today he has somehow managed to surpass his former grossitude and shot up through the I Can’t Even atmosphere and into the Outer Space Repository of Hella Gross Dudes.

But what could possibly have caused this intense leveling-up, you may well ask. How could he have done something worse than penning the summer’s unofficial rape album?

Well, for starters, he announced the release and official track list of his new album, Paula. Paula, by the way, refers to his estranged wife, Paula Patton. She recently left him. This album is his attempt to win her back.

Let’s take a look at the song titles, shall we?
1. “You’re My Fantasy”

2. “Get Her Back”

3. “Still Madly Crazy”

4. “Lock the Door”

5. “Whatever I Want”

6. “Living in…

View original 851 more words

A terrible lesson to learn

Originally posted on The CNN Freedom Project: Ending Modern-Day Slavery:

Editor’s note:  “Operation Hope” will air on CNN International on Saturday, December 8 at 0900 GMT and 2000 GMT. It will also air Sunday, December 9 at 0200 GMT and 1000 GMT; and Monday, December 10 at 0300 GMT.

(CNN) – It was the first lesson a taxi driver tried to teach me when I moved to India.

A woman cloaked in dirt-stained sari holding a child with a bandaged and blood-soaked hand knocked on the taxi window. She pointed to the child and held out her hand for money.

Filled with a combination of sadness, guilt and responsibility I began to roll down my window. “No madam!” my taxi driver implored. “This is very bad,” he continued, shaking his head ever so slightly.

View original 932 more words

Creepy comment of the day: If men can’t get “the steady love and wild sex of a valuable young girl,” naturally they’ll start shooting people.

barbaraviale:

…and this is why people are crazy…

Originally posted on we hunted the mammoth:

Banana slug: A better role model for horny humans than bonobos?

Sometimes I hunt the misogyny, sometimes it wanders up right up to me and says hello.

Today’s post is an example of the latter. Below, a slightly edited comment that someone left for me this morning. It’s a response to a post of mine about a dreadful post on Return of Kings in which a fellow calling himself Billy Chubbs argued, with absolutely no evidence, that a recent high school shooter was driven to murder because of his “probable sexual frustration,” Chubbs went on to argue that young women are “selfish” because they don’t have sex with guys they’re not attracted to.

Anyway, my new commenter – posting under the name “whogoesthere?” – thinks that I and the other commenters here were being too hard on Chubbs’ “very good argument.” And so he deposited this giant rant, which…

View original 1,342 more words

Why I care

The last few months have been intense: new job, new country, life-changing decisions to make…  So much has happened and every time I sat down to write all things invaded my brain at the same time and couldn’t put two words together.

One thing that really did gnarl my brain though is what really brought me back to the year I never said no.  The new law on abortion in Spain.  It’s a monday night, thirty degrees burn my Hanoian kitchen even though it’s almost midnight and I should really be in bed by now.  But I just created a new facebook page (it’s called Talk to me – Parla con me) and the first thing I wanted to publish was a collection of photos of women who are meaningful to me.

One of them is Anne Summers, whom I’ve met briefly at the Ubud Literary Festival in 2013, and who is an Australian feminist of outstanding charisma.  If she talks, all you can do is sit there and listen because her husky voice makes you feel you are in good hands.  She knows her shit!

We had a very short but extremely deep conversation about birth control and abortion and ever since that day I kept thinking about it.  The Mr Rajoy, PM of Spain, decides that 2014 is a good time to set the clock back to the middle ages and pushes for a law to make abortion illegal in Spain.

Now, Mr Rajoy, we have gone through this many many times.  Where do you have to keep politics?  Out of our pants and bodies?  And where do you keep the Church?  Wherever you wish, but again not in our pants.  The power of a woman to decide whether if and when she wants to have children is the scariest thing for some men.  It proves how we haven’t really changed from Eve’s days and we still go on and do what we want with our bodies.  But Mr Rajoy, and all the anti abortion campaigners, should realize that from the day Eve was kicked out of Eden onwards (abut 2300 years?) women did not have the freedom to decide.  

We have been abused, married as children, sold, bought, raped, forced to abort or to have children.  The body of women has been a battle field for over two thousand years.  Not even fifty years ago we manage to get some of the rights that are only fair (not a privilege!) like abortion, divorce and so on and now you want to take them away from us?  On what grounds exactly?  Do you also want to burn the formula of penicillin? Go back to street fires instead of central heating?  And why don’t we use all the black people in our cities as slaves?  Maybe burn lesbians as witches?

No, Mr Rajoy, when a right is acquired -and let me say, especially when it’s acquired through so much pain- you don’t go back.  We have a hard enough time to cope with bigotry on rights that we are still struggling to get, let’s not fuck up with those we have.  Please.

I come from a country where no one is considering making abortion illegal because technically it is already inaccessible (so why bother?) and this tears my heart apart.  Because laws are made by men, or by women who can afford to get an abortion within a week if they want to.  Because if someone said that gynaecologists who refuse to perform abortions should leave their (tax payers funded) jobs in public hospitals, abortion would become a much easier procedure.  Women wouldn’t have to wait for weeks and make the whole process more painful and traumatic.

In my job I advocate for the increase in use of birth control and a wider distribution of morning after pills to avoid surgical procedures which, in developing countries, could expose women to unnecessary danger.

I do this and know only too well that the first thing I would get in my country if I wanted to abort a foetus in my womb would be an evil look from the nurse and the doctor.  I’m almost twenty nine and I feel I have the right to decide freely.

But the evil eye is very democratic in Italy: you get it if you don’t want a child whom you’d have the possibility to raise as well as if you are a minor (who is entitled to finish the school cycle without having to care for a baby just because you made a mistake!) and, worst of all, if you are an immigrant.  Basically in Italy children have to be born, no matter what!

Our Minister of Health said in a recent interview that women should be “educated to maternity”.  We don’t have enough children in Italy because we are not educated to maternity, obviously.  Not because 43.6% of our youth is unemployed -and therefore has trouble caring for themselves, let a lone a child- and not because women who get pregnant are generally laid off.

All I can feel for this woman, beside the burning anger that stirs my primitive instincts like Goron Ramsey stirs his bisques and makes me want to punch her, is sorrow and pity.

I feel sorry for a woman who is evidently not qualified for her job and has been selling herself for so long that she’s not even able to see who she really is any more.  I feel sorry because I’m under the impression that she might believe what she says and if that’s the case she’s a victim like every one else.  A victim turned murderer, unfortunately.

Considering the past of both Spain and Italy it’s really hard to believe that this attitude of turning women into rights-less baby makers is unrelated to Catholicism.  The pope who everyone praises like a fantastic innovator so far hasn’t innovated much as far as rights are concerned: gays are still gays (when he said “I won’t judge them” the newspapers forgot to mention that the second part of the sentence said “God is the only one who can judge”, implying the the judgement is still coming… and not from him but from the Boss!), abortion is still a mortal sin and so on…

I would like to close with a thought on the title of this post: why I care.

I care because I am a woman and my body is no different to that of other women.  If I make a choice I want it respected.

I care because I want a more humane way to undergo what for many women is traumatic.  Stop this useless butchery!

I care because we have an alternative but we decide not to use it as if we wanted to punish those who have made a mistake.

I care because more than half of the parliamentarians of my country are sitting in the Parliament despite having been found guilty of crimes against the nation (affiliation with the mafia is a particularly popular one but there are others that are as interesting…) and still expect to make laws about my body and tell me that if I get rid of a blood clot I’m a murderer.

I care, you should care too.

What I’m reading: Are we creating informant society?

Originally posted on Global Public Square:

By Fareed Zakaria

“There has been exaggerated talk about whether the government intelligence community could create a police state,” writes Michael Chertoff in the Washington Post. “But the true horror of the East German Stasi or the Maoist Red Guard was the encouragement of informants – private citizens reporting on other private citizens and even family members. No police agency could be omniscient. The oppressiveness of those police states came from the fear every citizen had that another citizen would disclose deviations from the party line.”

“The relevant question here is: Are we creating an informant society, in which every overheard conversation, cell phone photograph or other record of personal behavior is transmitted not to police but to the world at large? Do we want to chill behavior and speech with the fear that an unpopular comment or embarrassing slip will call forth vituperative criticism and perhaps even adversely…

View original 313 more words