The modern feminist movement (humor me a moment here and let’s all pretend that we can speak of such an entity,) needs to move beyond simplistic statements such as ‘the solution to rape is for men to stop raping.’

Now, surely some of you are about to object that you or your buddies haven’t made such statements. Great! But there are plenty of people who *do*. The idea that men need to be ‘educated’ to not be violent against women has a lot of currency in the modern feminist movement.

That’s all well and good, but there’s one major flaw with this approach: it only addresses the abuser’s behavior.

“But talking about what the victim did is blaming the victim! What the victim did is irrelevant — they still shouldn’t have been abused!’

Oh SHUT THE FUCK UP.

My mother was abused, near as i can tell, by at least four men. i am in contact with two of her abusers; one of them i *know* was physically abusive. Nevertheless, both of them are now happy, functional people. THEY LEARNED TO NOT BEAT WOMEN. The feminist movement helped them become successful, emotionally-fulfilled, functional, happy people.

My mother, on the other hand, is STILL only barely socially functional. She’s separated from her fifth husband, dependent on medication, and unemployed because she keeps having panic attacks.

“Don’t abuse women” does a fine job of addressing the abusers’ end of things, but it does not help people who have not learned how to have functional social lives/relationships learn to have them — so they will continue having shitty relationships with people, even if those people aren’t abusive.

Mum’s in a new relationship, now. Makes me rather nervous.

This isn’t ‘blaming the victim’. This is a call to address their problems and help them. To ignore the problems which lead a person to become intimately involved with an abusive person in the first place is to leave them vulnerable to being hurt again and again.

It has recently been brought directly to my attention, though I’d known such had been occurring for some time on a general basis, that my website is being blocked by content filters on various educational facilities’ networks. Even more troubling, I’ve noticed, now that I’m actually paying attention, is that it’s being blocked by some public schools, even from their public libraries.

Students who attend institutions where internet access is filtered based on content aren’t being educated but rather indoctrinated. I understand there are certain limitations that need to be enforced to keep bandwidth usage to a minimum and prevent substantial distractions, but content-based filtration is a misguided and legally questionable approach. That this filter also extends to libraries is an anti-intellectual atrocity, as this extends denial of access to an even greater number of people, many of whom aren’t even students.

I also understand that private schools are a different story, but they’re often goofy and oppressive in even more ways than just this. While they do have the right to insist that their students wear pink chain mail uniforms and bring live chickens to stroke vigorously during lectures on how God grew the world out of a red bean by vomiting manna on it for six days, the “indoctrination, not education” factor still applies. But for now, I’ll stick with public schools, since I’m a little upset that my taxes are apparently ensuring that students are being denied knowledge.

As a public institution, one which has been given the mandate of intellectual edification, is suppression of publicly-available information really a course of action schools should be comfortable taking? I don’t want to sound like a Crazy Guy from the Internet, but the parallels to Communist China’s approach to internet access are clear and undeniable. And the idea that a student cannot access information — or that a writer’s point is unworthy of being read, or should be prevented from reaching readers’ eyes — simply because of the presence of, say, the “f word” is absolutely ludicrous.

Part of learning is figuring out how to pick and choose from all available information and making decisions and understanding things for yourself, not simply being presented with only the palatable, “acceptable” information that someone else has deemed safe to agree with. If you deny or oppress or in any way limit freedom of speech, you’re doing an intellectual disservice to the students who are relying on you to help guide them in the formation of their foundations for thinking.

Again, I recognize the need to keep students from downloading huge blocks of data, or from becoming a nuisance to themselves or others, but restriction of access is always a bad idea, and I’m fairly certain that as a public, tax-funded institution, doing so is a violation of First Amendment rights. I’m personally offended by the
situation on multiple levels, and am weighing the costs versus benefits of seeking legal action to prevent this kind of rights encroachment being systematically perpetrated by government institutions.

What do I propose instead? Well, do what offices that are concerned with productivity do: Throttle transfers of large incoming or outgoing chunks of data. Send up a flag for persistent transfers that last longer than a few minutes, and shut them down. Hard disk space is cheap — keep logged records of students’ internet access, and if they use the internet in a manner that is harmful to other students or themselves, take disciplinary action. If someone reports that Billy Johnson has been looking at porn, then pull the log and give him detention if it’s true. If Kevin Harris’s grades are slipping because he’s getting distracted by the internet, maybe place time restrictions on his account. But if Julie Hernandez wants to visit MySpace, or read polemic essays with vulgar language, if it’s not affecting her grades and she’s not hurting anyone else, then there is no problem. Don’t turn it into one.

To any teachers or members of school administration reading this, please take this advice into consideration. If the problem persists, you may — will, if I have anything to do with it — one day all find yourselves facing a class-action-wrought injunction from writers the world over that will force you to remove content restrictions. To any students reading this whose schools have such a content-based filter, if you send me the name of your school and the e-mail addresses of the school’s administration, I’ll be more than happy to pass this message along to them.