(no subject)
Been a busy few days. This Monday a UK MP, Nadine Dorries, appeared on national television to talk about her agenda for introducing girls only abstinence sex education into schools. To be clear, as a teacher, I can confirm that both sexes receive plenty of advice on waiting until they are emotionally ready and the legal age limit, and what she is proposing goes beyond this, although she keeps changing the story and is now claiming she did not choose the term abstinence (odd as it is her bill and hours go into putting them together and choosing the terminology).
In the process she made the following very ill-advised comments:
“If a stronger ‘just say no’ message was given to children in school then there might be an impact on sex abuse … if we imbued this message in school we’d probably have less sex abuse.”
Having worked with the victims of sex abuse in my role as a tutor I was deeply concerned with the message these comments give out to young people and the victims of sexual abuse, and put together an online petition asking the prime minister to call for her resignation here:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/dorriesresignation/
I have no expectation that this will have any effect but I felt it was important for the electorate to have a place to voice their opposition to her wording. Looking through the signatures there are responses from people from a range of perspectives, from the heartache of the survivors, to the indignation of forward-thinking conservatives, a surprisingly small amount of comments focussing on the view that offenders are evil, and a large number of concerned liberals.
Yesterday the spectre of the right's return to pre-feminist values continued as the justice secretary (generally a figure to the left in his party) made some badly worded comments on there being different types of rape, including what I would see to be the rational point that consenting sex between minors (which I personally don't see as being usefully tackled by criminalisation anyway though I admit I don't have a well thought out alternative) is different from other forms of rape but then dragging date rape into the equation as well in a move I feel is fairly unforgivable.
Needless to say my responses and similar ones have been dismissed in a few places as hysteria. I am getting fairly fed up with strong and emotionally elaborated responses to political events being labelled as hysteria (generally by the right wing, though it does happen the other way as well). It seems to me to be typical of an archaic understanding of thought and language which doesn't acknowledge that the distinction between "rational thought" and "emotional thought" is far from straight forward. I certainly don't advocate "string-em-up" politics or "knee-jerk" statements but what I do acknowledge which others don't is that there is no such thing as "rational thought" in an emotional vacuum and including emotional language within a reasoned response may be more honest than attempting to present one's views as "pure" logic.
I could perhaps just add that the labelling of women as emotional has been used to discredit our arguments for centuries.
In the process she made the following very ill-advised comments:
“If a stronger ‘just say no’ message was given to children in school then there might be an impact on sex abuse … if we imbued this message in school we’d probably have less sex abuse.”
Having worked with the victims of sex abuse in my role as a tutor I was deeply concerned with the message these comments give out to young people and the victims of sexual abuse, and put together an online petition asking the prime minister to call for her resignation here:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/dorriesresignation/
I have no expectation that this will have any effect but I felt it was important for the electorate to have a place to voice their opposition to her wording. Looking through the signatures there are responses from people from a range of perspectives, from the heartache of the survivors, to the indignation of forward-thinking conservatives, a surprisingly small amount of comments focussing on the view that offenders are evil, and a large number of concerned liberals.
Yesterday the spectre of the right's return to pre-feminist values continued as the justice secretary (generally a figure to the left in his party) made some badly worded comments on there being different types of rape, including what I would see to be the rational point that consenting sex between minors (which I personally don't see as being usefully tackled by criminalisation anyway though I admit I don't have a well thought out alternative) is different from other forms of rape but then dragging date rape into the equation as well in a move I feel is fairly unforgivable.
Needless to say my responses and similar ones have been dismissed in a few places as hysteria. I am getting fairly fed up with strong and emotionally elaborated responses to political events being labelled as hysteria (generally by the right wing, though it does happen the other way as well). It seems to me to be typical of an archaic understanding of thought and language which doesn't acknowledge that the distinction between "rational thought" and "emotional thought" is far from straight forward. I certainly don't advocate "string-em-up" politics or "knee-jerk" statements but what I do acknowledge which others don't is that there is no such thing as "rational thought" in an emotional vacuum and including emotional language within a reasoned response may be more honest than attempting to present one's views as "pure" logic.
I could perhaps just add that the labelling of women as emotional has been used to discredit our arguments for centuries.