Voter intimidation has long been a practice of conservative parties. From the beginning of this democracy there has always been a divide between those who believe that everyone should be able to vote and those that believe that only certain people are responsible enough to be allowed to vote.

In the beginning, the divide was over whether a free, white male had to be a landowner in order to vote. The idea behind this is that men who didn’t own land had less of a stake in the country, but in reality it was meant to keep the poor and uneducated from voting. Fortunately, all that was required to vote was that you were a free, white male citizen with no property restrictions.

Then with the end of slavery and the establishment of blacks as citizens came the right for all men, regardless of color, to vote. That was 1870, but it wasn’t until the Voting Rights act of the 60’s that there was any teeth in the law to back it up. Still, the black men had the right to vote way before us girls did. At least they could get to the polling station to fight for the right.

We girls were kept in the kitchen lest the big ideas behind democracy confuse out little girly bird-brains or tarnish our pure spirits. Seriously, the arguments against women voting were that we weren’t capable of rational thought, or that the dirtiness involved in politics would injure us in some way.

It wasn’t until the 19 mother-fricken 20’s that us American women were allowed to vote, less than 100 years ago. In Switzerland, women were only given full voting rights in 1990! (Yes, one more reason to hate the Swiss other than the stupidity of the International Red Cross, and that when I traveled there I felt like I’d been dumped into the land fascism aspires to). In Lebanon, women have to prove they have been educated in order to vote, but men don’t.

But I digress..

So in the history of the world and more specifically, our country, those who think that suffrage should be universal and treat voting as something so fundamental to our continued democracy that anyone should be allowed to vote without restrictions have fought for those rights even for people with diametrically opposed political views. I told a couple of students to go vote a few minutes ago and one cheekily responded by saying he’d “go vote straight republican”. I said fine as long as he votes. And I mean that.

Then there are those who treat the right to vote like it is some delicate object that would be fractured if everyone were allowed to use it. These are the people who are now requiring ID from voters where none has been required before. While this sounds like a good idea, the only people who this presents a problem for are poor and often minority folks who don’t have the $35 it might take to get a state ID card. Guess who they aren’t likely to be voting for?

The same people who would disallow felons who have served their time from voting. Why? Hasn’t the person in question paid their debt to society with prison time? Hasn’t the person in question resumed the obligation of being a contributing member of society? And once again, the people who will be kept from voting in this case are most likely poor and minority.

There is no history of the rich being subjected to voter intimidation. There is no history of the powerful being subject to voter intimidation. But today, the Bushies are crying that “Boo hoo hoo” there’s not enough ballots in Republican districts or “Wah wah wah” Democrats are trying to intimidate us at the polls. All while scary men with fake badges are doing actual voter intimidation of Latino voters in Arizona and in Pennsylvania (home of the closely watched Rick “anal leakage” Santorum senate race) black voters are being shut out because of voting machine issues.

So you don’t want to vote. Fine. You don’t think the 2 party system is working and you don’t want to contribute to it. Ok. But don’t, for one minute think that I am going to respect you for your choice. Besides voting for politicians there are numerous initiatives and referendums concerning how our local government works that have nothing to do with parties in particular but have everything to do with running a functional democracy. You, Mr. Non-voter won’t be voting on those issues, but your children will go to school because of the bond measures that are passed and you will drive your car on the roads that are built because other people did the responsible thing and voted.

People have been fighting for and dying for the right to vote for centuries. That you would so callously throw away something like that means that those rich white guys with all the power have one less sucker to intimidate. You are doing their job for them.

Tomorrow is election day. If you can’t manage to get off your ass and go vote while our country is in a shambles you are a waste of space.

I know, it’s been pouring rain to near flood levels and you have all sorts of work to do and the stupid paperless ballot machines are all rigged anyway. So why should you go vote?

You are part of this society, so it is your responsibility. If you are part of a family you have responsibilities like making sure the rent is paid or the trash is taken out. Voting is the only effective way we citizens have of taking the trash out of government. Those of you who don’t vote remind me of the girl in the Shell Silverstien poem who lets the trash overtake everything out of laziness.

Look, I have to spend tomorrow morning with my feet up in stirrups getting my annual exam. Then I have the thankless task of putting together the student newsletter and to top it all off the Kiddo is grounded because he decided that being in 6th grade meant not doing homework. So I have been playing prison guard, making sure that the only thing he does is homework. No tv, no video games, no computer, no hanging out with friends, and no extra-curricualr reading. (I know- I may be the only parent on earth who has to ground their child from books). All I want to do is curl up with a big gulp sized vodka tonic and watch gay porn. But I will be slogging my way through our local monsoon to go vote.

If I am giving up booze and porn, the least you could do is get off your ass and vote. Or I will hunt you down and bludgeon you with a hanging chad. Seriously.

And since we’re on the gay porn/ voting topic- here’s a little video to remind you of all the trash that needs to be taken out.

The new boyfriend and I were having a chat about going to Canada when he was here this last weekend. Conversation went something like this:

Me: (head sunk in shame) I live just a few hours from the border and I’ve never been to Canada

Boy: Really, we can totaly fix that. But you know, I’m brown. I’m going to get harrased at the border.

Me: Hey, that’s ok. I maybe look Italian or Spanish and my luggage gets “randomly searched” 90% of the time that I fly.

Boy: You do look generic european. It’s probably cause they know you’re trouble.

Me: Or it’s that I insist on bringing vibrators with me on vacation.

So when I read about this artist today, my heart skipped a beat. Conceptual art that thumbs it’s nose at the invasive nature of society, halleluja!

Hasan Elahi is a conceptual artist whose life is an ongoing work about surveillance. He starts by telling us a chilling story – his detention by the INS at Detroit Airport after returning from a trip from overseas. An immigration officer scanned his passport and blanched, then led Alahi through a maze under the airport to an INS detention facility. As a US citizen, this was pretty odd – he tried to talk with the guards to figure out what was going on. But it all became clearer when the man from the FBI in the dark suit came to talk with him.

For the next few months, every trip Elahi took, he’d call his FBI agent and give the routing, so he didn’t get detained along the way. He realized, after a point – why just tell the FBI – why not tell everyone?

So he hacked his cellphone into a tracking bracelet which he wears on his ankle, reporting his movements on a map – log onto his site and you can see that he’s in Camden. But he’s gone further, trying to document his life in a series of photos: the airports he passes through, the meals he eats, the bathrooms he uses. The result is a photographic record of his daily life which would be very hard to falsify. We all know photos can be digitally altered… but altering as many photos as Elahi puts online would require a whole team trying to build this alternative path through the world.

And while we’re on the subject, the new boyfriend found a copy of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish next to my bed. He thought it was going to be about a naughty subject, but no. It is about how a society allows itself to be placed under constant surveillance because of fear and what the consequnces are. It’s about the panopticon society, where everyone is watched all the time but transgressions are only punished when the punishment will benefit the state.

Think about it. None of us are perfect 100% of the time. We litter or jaywalk. We commit tiny infractions all the time. But in a panopticon society those transgressions are captured forever to be used against us when it’s convientent. Society is placed under the perpetual fear of discovery. Neighbors and family members turn into the people we fear most. They see us and all our faults. Big brother is not just an Orwellian idea or something that happened in those grey states of oppression like Stalinist Russia or Hitler’s Germany.

The idea of the panopitcon, or the all-seeing prison came out of the prisoner reform movement of the late 1700’s, early 1800’s.

“A building circular… The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference—The officers in the centre. By blinds and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed… from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence—The whole circuit reviewable with little, or… without any, change of place. One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell.”

Jeremy Bentham
Proposal for a New and Less Expensive mode of Employing and Reforming Convicts (London, 1798)

Today we are monitored by video cameras and credit card purchases. In the very near future people will be able to google someone by photo alone (think of the implications when your prospective employer uses your photo to see which anonymous dating sites you use or what your myspace profile says). I am a fairly open person. Hell, you all know about my love of vodka, stable boys and things that go buzzzz with batteries. But my boss doesn’t need to know any of that. It has no relation to my ability to work.

Actually, I’m sitting in my lab right now drinking a coke and eating chips directly under a sign that reads in large type “NO FOOD OR DRINK IN THE LAB!” There is an agreement between the students and I that I will look the other way at their food and beverage consumption in the lab right up until they spill something and ruin a keyboard and they will ignore the delicous smell of chili cheese fritos wafting from my desk. This is one of those small transgressions that happens everyday without causing harm. But under the panopticon society, when I was threatening to sue because the administration was neglecting to pay me last summer, this little transgression would have been enough for them to threaten me with. The all seeing society puts way to much power to punish in the hands of those who already have power and eliminates the power of the individual to fight back. Mr. Elahi and his total survellience art project has shown us how to turn the panopticon back on itself.

Damn. This is what happens when someone who is a little slow on the uptake posts a comment full of previously disproved bullshit on a post written weeks before.

Now I know I am a bit slow on the uptake for not seeing his comment earlier, but I thought I would point out his rehashed, recycled, reheated and well, boring rhetoric just to remind you all of what we are dealing with. Folks who don’t read or reason.

Man, do you think that someday conservative blowhards will come up with a new line of crap to feed us, or is part of being conservative the inability to formulate new arguments based on aquired facts? Oh wait, they don’t believe in science either, so they have no aquired facts.

All I have to save to our little friend is not worry, nobody wants to clone his ass.

So here’s a little test to see what you know about our lovely government.

I got 51 out of 54 (I’ll tell you what ones I missed in comments) and I didn’t google a damn thing.

I’m curious to see how you all do. Post results if you dare.

After a week of crappy news on the girly front- I thought I would break it down for you boys so you can see the twisted circles of logic us girls have to go through when it comes to autonomy over our own bodies.

My body is not my own if…

1) I am pregnant. Suddenly I am worth less than the clump of cells in my uterus.

2) If I say no after sex has started. It’s not rape, even if sex goes from being enjoyable to violent, painful and dangerous I’ve already said yes and can’t take it back. Even if the guy decides that old fashioned sex isn’t good enough and he wants to give it to me up the ass with no lube- I already said yes at the beginning and can’t change my mind once the circumstances change.

3) According to some, if I am in a violent relationship I must be addicted to violence and therefore have consented to being beaten. My body is then the property of my abuser.

However, I am totally responsible for my own body if….

1) I am pregnant and not cautious enough in my behavior towards that clump of cells in my uterus.

2) I wear something provocative or go out of my house alone at night or try to be nice in turning a guy down and then I get raped. See, I was asking for it.

3) I am in a violent relationship and my abuser dies while I am defending myself. I will probably serve a longer prison sentence than he would have if he had succeeded in killing me.

But I am kept from taking adequate responsibility for my body by…

1) Increasingly limited access to birth control and emergency contraception. I strongly suggest that all you boys check out this story and then go read the rest of BB’s blog.

2) Stupid media images of a man and a woman fighting where the woman is saying no until the man forcefully kisses and or gropes her and she suddenly decides that yes- she does want to fuck him after all. This doesn’t actually happen in real life (trust me- if she says yes after that it’s only because it’s easier to submit than to keep fighting). It is a pervasive enough image to negate the idea of no meaning no.

3) Lack of domestic violence laws that actually offer some protection for women and children from their abusers. Even when abusers are arrested they are usually out in 24 hours and a restraining order is just a piece of paper, not some incredible teflon shield that will deflect blows.

And one more fun fact for you all out there-
One of the greatest risks to a pregnant woman’s life is not the pregnancy, but death at the hands of her partner.

Being a woman is definitely not for sissies, it’s no wonder you boys are so scared of us. Look at all the crap we put up with already. Imagine if we were treated like *GASP* human beings instead of walking breeding machines, fuckholes and punching bags. Just having the time it takes during a single day to avoid being any of those things would give us enough time to invent a perpetual motion machine and create cold fusion.

Oh- and in case you thought us girls saying that we don’t like to be treated like pieces of meat was just an expression, you must read this. We are actual pieces of meat. It is nice that this guy just comes out and says it instead of using quasi-understanding fake liberal psychobabble though.

So let’s recap:
Women are not responsible enough to have control over their own reproductive choices and if they enter into a sexual or romantic encounter they forfeit the right to say no or keep from being beaten. But women are totally responsible for things that happen to their own body on a cellular level and for the reaction of SOMEONE ELSE to their own body. They are also not supposed to fight back if someone is trying to kill them, except they are supposed to fight back or we are considered to be addicted to violence. And no only sometimes means no but wearing someone down till they say yes is acceptable behavior from boys. My head hurts from the contortions I have to go through just figuring out where my body ends and societies right to my body begins.

****Bonus points if you’ve read the story the title comes from******

The atrociousness of some of the political ads out this election cycle are shocking in their bad taste and jackass style sense of humor, but this blatantly racist ad from Tennessee makes my skin crawl.

See, Harold Ford Jr. is a black man running for the Senate in the south. If he wins he would be the first black senator from the South since reconstruction. So if your an old southern cracker like Ford’s adversary, Bob Corker, you get the red-necks in Tennessee to forget that their healthcare has been gutted and jobs are seriously scarce and scare them into thinking the big black senator is going to take their pretty white girls.

Here’s some advice for any of the good old boys who really are scared of losing their pretty white girls to someone like Ford- you guys are not losing your girls because of his giant black cock but because he still has all his teeth and bathes regularly. Hygiene will alot further in driving off the big black menace* than voting yet another racist white idiot into office.

* I have no fear of an actual big black menace because I think it’s as much a figment of a cracker imagination as the idea that the South actually won the civil war is.

since I’ve been on a feminist rant. I don’t know if I can do a whole rant as I am still nicotine free and rants are usually fueled by chain smoking and coffee, so here is a mini-rant with links to make ya puke.

I was cruising google image search for some inspiration. I need to paint and I want to do a big agit-prop piece. I also need to replace a collage that used to live in my kitchen because it now resides in the office window of my anthropology professor. I was thinking of going with a feminist workers theme for the collage and I got some really cool stuff. Then I came across this…..
It’s from one of those freakish father’s rights groups, though this one is Canadian instead of good old red-necked American chauvinism. But it just shows how universal the idea of “scary man-hating feminists” is.

Just to give you an example of the kind of crap these people spew- here is a WOMAN (dear gawd, these let her recover from the concussion she must have received as a result of the obvious dick slapping done to her by the patriarchy) writing about a battered woman who came to her for help.

You are not a battered woman,’ I said with a sigh. I define a battered woman as a woman who is a genuine victim of her partner’s violence. ‘You are a violence-prone woman, a victim of your own need for violence.’

That’s right, Blame the Victim. She hasn’t been battered because she asked for it by being a violence prone woman with a need for violence. WTF!

My brain needs to be scrubbed clean now. I feel dirty just for reading this site.

why this boy makes me silly

1) We have a thing for the same campy British TV shows like Red Dwarf and The League of Gentlemen
2) He doesn’t listen to country music because he doesn’t want to support something that is racist. “Have you ever seen the audience at a country music concert, it’s a sea of white”.
3) When I said I was all Wallace and Grommity about cheese, he got it.
4)He has a filthy, filthy mind. Possibly more filthy than mine. I didn’t know that was possible.
5) When he gets excited his London accent gets really thick and it’s adorable.

And proof of how silly I am for this boy- I am still not smoking. But the cravings today are killing me so I am playing hermit. I’m even making the kiddo go to the grocery store for dinner because I don’t want to be tempted to blow 6 bucks on a pack.

When I was south of the border this song was played every hour, on the hour, by every damn radio station from Cancun to Villahermosa to Belize (it was even played on the $2 bus ride we took to cross the border- both there and back).

Oh baby when you talk like that
You make a woman go mad
So be wise and keep on
Reading the signs of my body