The American Fuckwad Association wants you to know that their limp-dicked boycott of Target is approximately maybe kinda slightly 0.1% less flaccid than it was this time last year.
We are VERY close to reaching the 1.5 million signature goal on the Target boycott. Your help is critical as we approach the one-year anniversary since we launched the boycott.
At the time I send you this email, 1,484,630 people have pledged to boycott Target until it reverses its dangerous policy of allowing men into women’s restrooms and dressing rooms. You can see the very latest count here. Once we reach 1.5 million, I will personally deliver the signatures to Target’s headquarters in Minneapolis, MN.
Of course, as Zack Ford reported, their signature process is far from rigorous:
But here’s what AFA doesn’t list on its site: who signed the pledge. It’s completely anonymous. There is no way of tracking the validity of the number of signers.
In fact, ThinkProgress successfully “signed” it three different times from the same web browser using the names “I disagree With this,” “I really think this is stupid,” and “This isn’t A real email.” All that it required was using a different email address each time. As the last name suggests, it was also possible to sign the pledge using a gmail.com address that does not even exist. Thus, there’s nothing stopping anyone else from doing the same to inflate the numbers, or even for AFA to do so to generate further buzz.
As per usual, the AFA’s appeal to gather more “signatures” involves instructing cis men to act in predatory ways to somehow prove that trans women act in predatory ways. Because, hey, if you have no evidence to substantiate your beliefs, why not fucking fabricate some?
-Shiv
I grew up in that culture and I’ve been shaming the part I’m still attached to on Facebook. They act as if they care about (always female, mostly child) victims but they make no effort at all to understand what the predators actually look like. The fact that bathrooms, children and people of both sexes were already parts of society where sexual assault was a problem is actively ignored. They don’t actually care about sexual assault and I won’t pretend otherwise. The fact that trans people face the same abuse at higher rates is very suggestive of the depth of the problem. The pieces are related.
Psychologically conservatives place a lot of stock in the idea of duty so I’ve been putting social pressure there. They have a duty to confront the actual social and physical threat, not the scapegoat that let’s abusers hide what they do in thier own damn groups. The need for a means of social control based on sex is the point. They don’t show any actual signs of caring about victims.