Friday Links

Posted on by Karen

1. If yesterday’s Judiciary Hearings left you incandescent with rage, well, you’re not alone and I don’t have a good way to fix it. (Although my deadlifts were FLYING up last night.) This is a letter I sent to Orrin Hatch (a lost cause and a withered asshole) yesterday, via Resistbot:

Dear Senator Hatch:

Today’s hearings have shown us Brett Kavanaugh is too emotional to serve on the Supreme Court.

Also: MERRICK GARLAND.

Sincerely,
Karen Kaminski

 

2. Did I mention rage?

3. Why our stories matter, which we have to keep telling ourselves: When The Muzzle Comes Off

There may not be a legal or political outcome that is satisfying: The perpetrators may not face real repercussions. But part of what #MeToo has always been about — despite the obsessive focus on the consequences faced by men — is what happened to the women (and to the men who’ve spoken out about their own abuse). It’s been about the exposure of their realities.

The telling of the stories, the raising of the voices, does its own political work and reveals things that we may have known at some level but have never been able to see so plainly: the connection between policy—the desire to control women’s bodies via restricting and policing their reproductive autonomy—and the personal treatment of individual women. The connection between a desire for legal or political domination—over workers’ ability to bargain, citizens’ ability to vote, black people’s ability to walk the streets without fear of being indiscriminately accosted by the police—and the drive toward personal, physical domination.