The following is excerpted from a call to action by our executive director, Gina Scaramella. Please do take a moment to make a call!

Sexual assault and domestic violence services face significant budget cuts unless the U.S. Senate takes action soon!  We need your help with one more round of calls and emails to make sure that local programs can meet the needs of sexual assault and domestic violence survivors in their communities.
 
Please take a minute to contact Senator Scott Brown and urge him to vote to stop the filibuster that is holding up $600 million that will come to Massachusetts to fund these services among other crucial items.

Senator Scott Brown
Phone: (202) 224-4543

Not sure what to say? Here are some talking points:

* Introduce yourself and say where you live (you will probably be speaking with one of his staff).

* Ask that Scott Brown support HR 4213.

* Tell him that you know that Massachusetts needs the federal dollars from the FMAP Relief Fund for many reasons, including for funding that supports child, teen, and adult survivors of sexual violence.

* Rape Crisis Centers are already facing a cut of 25%; additional cuts are likely to cause center closings and a severe decrease in available services for victims of crime.

* Encourage the person you speak with to visit the BARCC website to learn more about the critical services that will be drastically cut.

* State that victims of sexual violence are some of the Commonwealth’s most vulnerable citizens and need expert coordinated, effective, cost-efficient services that have been demonstrated by the programs funded through these line items.

* Thank them for listening and for encouraging Senator Brown to support HR 4213.

Thank you so much for your help. Every call shows that Massachusetts’s rape crisis centers have your support and makes future threats to funding less likely.

It appears this past week has been a good one on the internet for self-reflection.  Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown, as always, rocked the casbah with her article about taking a deeper look at ourselves, especially within the context of social justice movements, which can prize doctrinal purity over…truth?  Hard work?  Ugly situations?  All of the above plus more?  One of my favorite excerpts, that unfortunately hits a little close to home for me:

At some point, we learn what we’re rewarded for saying, how we’re rewarded for seeming, and then we say those things and seem that way, for the reward. It’s like any other set of social norms. But when feminism is used this way, not as a means to get into truth, but as a means to make truth easier or even to avoid it, it’s really not all that different from, say, reading a lot of Ayn Rand. Granted, the results of its clueless or selfish application will probably be better than what the Objectivists have managed thus far. But it’s still something you do for you, rather than for the sake of doing it; it’s a means of propping yourself up. Of self-glorification.

.

I don’t think we’ll ever end the epidemic of sexual violence in our culture (never mind the rest of the world) until we find a way to effectively redefine masculinity for men.  I don’t think we’ll ever truly fight back against rape until we find a way to cripple patriarchy, somehow.  We might be able to patch up some of the damage here and there, but without addressing the root of the problem, the causes of sexual violence in the first place, we’ll never reach a lasting change.  I truly believe these things.  I want to help smash the patriarchy like Feminist Hulk, crush the violent and emotionally constrained mechanisms of contemporary American masculinity, and change our culture.  I write about those big picture ideas because they make sense to me.  But I also write about them because it gives me credibility without having to actually do any of the boring, difficult, or stressful day-to-day work of actually changing any of it.

I want people to think I’m really smart.  I want people to think that I understand anti-oppression work, even if I really don’t.  I want people, especially the progressive people that I tend to spend a lot of time around to talk about me with some form of admiration, and I want those people to accept me as part of their community.  I write and talk about big, amorphous concepts like the patriarchy and rape culture on this blog and in other places partially because I really do think in a pretty meta way about social issues, but also because it’s a way to impress my peers and colleagues, and to sound like I know more about the world than I really do. 

The theoretical world of sexual violence prevention, and feminism as a whole, is a lot…easier…for me to work with and understand than the actual day-to-day work.  I don’t really have to do anything to encourage all of you to fight patriarchy in a blog post; and what does that even mean, in a concrete sense?  I’ve tried to give a couple of examples in previous posts: changing the language we use around friends so they know we don’t blame victims of assaults, producing our own media with new narratives that help to redefine gender roles, etc.  Honestly, though, giant social constructs like patriarchy aren’t ever destroyed or even challenged directly; not successfully at least.  They are defeated gradually as bits and pieces of their various supports are knocked out from under them.

Knocking out those supports means a lot of sweat and a small amount of inspiration.  It means calling legislators, over and over and over again, to support the restraining order bill 258E (which thankfully, passed).  It means constantly raising money by calling donors, calling legislators, calling friends, calling anyone, to keep programs like SANE running.  It means staffing things like the BARCC hotline 24 hours a day and talking to survivors who need help.  It means standing outside in Downtown Crossing, trying to hand out flyers about the Clothesline project for hours.

With the recent spate of violence in Boston, I’ve been thinking a lot about the success of the early ‘90s Operation Ceasefire initiative.  Operation Ceasefire didn’t succeed because Boston officials and community members decided to tackle giant issues of oppression and injustice - those aren’t things you can fight with specific action.  It was targeted at stopping the flow of guns into Boston, decoupling drug issues from violence, and getting faith communities and activists mobilized.  It took local, state, and federal government money and personnel, and neighborhood activists and organizations all working in concert, and on specific tasks to accomplish Ceasefire’s goals.  Not surprisingly, ending the physical manifestation of violence in Boston’s inner-city neighborhoods did help to address larger social inequalities as well (and then Ceasefire lost funding and momentum, and we’re crawling back up to where we were.  Great). 

I don’t really like confrontation very much.  I’m not very good at it.  I’d much rather write a post about fighting rape culture than actually have to, say, call my state senator and yell at them for not supporting the restraining order bill.  Every now and then, though, I need to remind myself that as much value as writing or shouting “fight the patriarchy!” or “fight rape culture!” have as slogans, they aren’t particularly helpful in actually changing the state of affairs in the wider world.  We will better fight rape culture by taking on specific issues - how can we make reporting sexual assault to local police easier?  How can we make it easier for male survivors to find a therapy or discussion group when they need help?  How can we help universities create more coherent rape policies on their campuses?  Each one of those specific issues requires a lot of hard work that is often boring (stuffing envelopes, handing out flyers), confrontational (calling decision-makers, working with officials), or stressful (fundraising), but it also results in concrete victories like new legislation, new health clinics, more staff members for a local rape crisis center that actually change the world for survivors of rape and sexual assault.

I have, historically, avoided that work because I’m not great at it, and because it find it boring (because it sometimes is), confrontational, and stressful.  It’s so much easier to sound like I’m fighting the good fight, than to actually do it by getting my hands dirty and jump in.  If I don’t, then a lot of the rest of this is hot air; feminism and social justice as accessory, or a line on a resume.

Dave’s slammed at work and has been paying more attention to soccer than rape culture this week; I spent the first hour of my day fixing the server and am still twitchy, and my own focus on rape culture has been diluted by packing and sending my teenage daughter to a foreign country for the first time.. Hi. How’s by you? We hope you don’t mind a link roundup today; we promise a return to our regular incisive commentary Monday!

* Remember my previous post about prison rape, and the new standards the DOJ was supposed to be implementing? They’re going to miss that deadline.

* Wherein the police are pressured into not pursuing rape cases.

* The police have released photos, video, and audio recordings of Ben Roethlisberger’s most recent victim. If anyone can help me figure out how that doesn’t violate rape shield laws, I will give them a cookie. Either way, it’s a tremendous violation of the victim herself, and one we’ll be talking about on the blog soon.

* In the wake of January’s earthquake, there is a rape epidemic in Haiti. (BARCC is sending resources in Creole to Haiti, but of course we wish there was more we could do. This was, unfortunately, expected; it’s common in the wake of such an overwhelming natural disaster. But knowing it’s likely to happen doesn’t make it not happen.)

* Al Gore has been accused of sexual assault.

* Great post on abuse of power by police officers.

* Holly Pervocracy points out the absurdity of all risk-reduction tips being aimed at preventing stranger rape when most perpetrators are someone you know.

* Jessica Stern has a great op-ed on how her trauma history led her to a career examining terrorism.

* Silvana responds to Stern’s op-ed - “I thought, maybe this is my healing. I can’t undo what was done to me. I can, however, stop the state from inflicting pain and injustice on people who are on the lowest rung of our bogus humanity-ladder, forgotten by everyone and championed by no one. Even those people, even them, they do not deserve wanton pain and suffering. Maybe by doing this, I establish my firmest principle: that there is no reason in tragedy, no blame appropriate to explain ill fate - that the entire enterprise of deciding how pain and suffering are meted out according to some invented and constantly-shifting scale of goodness, is wrong.
But no. Just, no. I am not a slave to trauma. I am grown. I have chosen this. Because sometimes there is no rhyme or reason for why people do the things they do, and giving even one of the people who hurt me the power to determine my life is too much already. I respect what Jessica Stern has to say about the healing that understanding her PTSD has brought her. But I can’t forget that feminism taught me that there isn’t always a reason. I don’t do this work because I am damaged and trying to avenge some other injustice. I do it because this is who I am: I identify with the underdog. I am motivated by challenge; the harder and more intractable a problem seems, the more I want to solve it. It may be comforting to think that there are reasons for the choices we make, but we also have to embrace that there is chaos.
I am not pre-determined. I have autonomy, and I chose this road. And I will choose to choose, and not be chosen.”

(My response: “I am a social justice superhero (I fight crime!), but also there is more than a little bit of engineer in me. I see a problem, I start working on solving it. Rape culture is a problem. Okay then, brew up some coffee and hand me my sword, let’s get to the bottom of this. That’s who I am. That’s who I always would have been, I think, trauma history or no. In my prehistory before I had a trauma history, my parents said I looked like I’d've made a great lawyer - but that’s more because I was persuasive and logical than for any prekindergarten fascination with lawyering. Persuasive and logical: That was me at 3. This has always been me.”)

In conclusion, I give you the awesomest video I have seen all week.

You may not like Ke$ha, but you totally have to love that video. I do, anyway. I share because I care.

Have a great weekend!

Quick disclaimer: I had this awesome, tortured metaphor post that I planned to write today, and I’m still going to try to do it, but the US Men’s National soccer team just won probably the most dramatic game it’s ever played, scoring a 91st minute goal against Algeria and sending us to the round of 16 in the World Cup for just the second time in our history (I don’t count our 3rd place finish in 1930).  I’m a little giddy and emotionally spent right now, so the normal flowing prose and incisive ideas you’ve come to expect from me might be a little lacking today.  The immodesty, however, will continue unabated.

Now back to your regularly schedule rape prevention.

I’m a huge Star Wars nerd.  I don’t use the title nerd lightly; I take great pride in my Star Wars nerdery, and I work hard to keep it at respectable levels.  I have a lightsaber, my parents called me Yoda when I was a baby, and we named our family dog Wicket (because he looks like the Ewok, although he doesn’t like rice cakes).  I was more heartbroken when I learned that Jedi weren’t real than when I learned that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the tooth fairy were equally fictional.  It’d be pretty easy to say that I filter a lot of the experiences in my life through a (somewhat humorous) lens of Star Wars ideas.

This is true for my feminism, as well.  I may be one of the few people on the planet to have used Star Wars concepts to help me better understand the world of oppression, and that may be ridiculous, but I’ve found it useful in the past.  One of the areas where I’ve found it most useful is understanding some of the big picture concepts of anti-oppression work - things like Patriarchy.  Patriarchy gets a bad rap from two sides: from the folks who have an idea of what the word means, it gets the rightful derision as a system of oppression and control that subordinate women and non-conformists.  From people who don’t really know what it means, it gets a bad rap for being too academic, too women’s studies-ish, too victimy.  In my limited understanding of the world, I believe that Patriarchy as a subtle social force is one of the major causes of rape, indirectly, and of a lot of gender- and sex-based violence overall.  As I’ve mentioned before, I believe strongly that if we want to get rid of sexual violence, we can’t just fight the obvious aspects of sexism; it wouldn’t have the type of chain reaction we want (“negative, just impacted on the surface…”).

Ok, I promise no more cheesy Star Wars lines in here.  Mostly.

BUT, here’s the problem - Patriarchy is not a real easy to understand concept.  Laura Kipnis wrote in her awesome book The Female Thing that “the top-down management of women’s lives (and everything else) by men was called “patriarchy” by second-wave feminists, and blamed for the various ills besetting the female condition.” And that sort of helps things, but not entirely, because dominance and control are complicated subjects.

What helped me understand Patriarchy better was, shocker, Star Wars, and here’s where the tortured metaphor starts (bear with me for a minute).  The Patriarchy is not that difference from the Force, in a couple of important ways:

1. You can’t usually see it with your eyes; it’s not obvious
2. It surrounds us, and often binds us
3. It feeds off of life (you can’t have dominance or oppression with no people)
4. Like force-sensitive and not force-sensitive folks, some people are better at recognizing Patriarchy than others.

Now, granted, this metaphor is not at all complete.  Here are the very reasonable objections that my fellow Star Wars nerds may bring up:

1. Patriarchy is not benevolent, like the force (although there is some question as to whether the force is benevolent in any sort of moralistic way)
2. Patriarchy does not give those of us who can sense it the ability to shoot lightning, throw objects with our minds, jump really high, or wield lightsabers (that we know of).  Although, if being feminist really gave me super-powers….

What I will note, though, that IS similar between the two is that, much like the Force, Patriarchy can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.  It can also give those who benefit from it (men) powers that everyone else doesn’t share - like not getting harassed, not having to haggle for low car prices, etc.

The most useful part of this metaphor for me, though, is not in the super-specifics.  It’s in the idea that Patriarchy permeates our world; it saturates every social setting in which I will ever find myself.  It shapes our perceptions of people.  Some of my favorite writers and bloggers disagree with me on this (Holly even uses Star Wars terminology to not agree with me!), but I have a hard time understanding where they come from in this particular case, although Holly’s post is more sophisticated than “there is no patriarchy” - as always, I highly recommend checking her stuff out.

As Kipnis notes above, Patriarchy is the top-down management of women’s lives (and I would add, the lives of anyone who does not fit a culturally mandated and narrowly focused version of manhood), but it’s also a way of branding all of us.  And women are always branded worse or less.  Women are consistently considered less competent, less skilled, or less capable than men even when their performance is exactly the same.  As I wrote before when thinking about gender branding, Patriarchy is the overall force that not only pushes stereotypes of what men and women ARE in our society, but provides the rubric for which of those genders has value.  There’s a great article from Slate, published a couple of years ago about unconscious bias that touches on these things - the author there doesn’t use the word Patriarchy, but definitely could have.  Anytime something is colored with the same brand that women are, whether it be a profession, a color, a type of food - it immediately gets the Patriarchy stamp of denigration.

Now, obviously, the Patriarchy is not a conscious thing, nor does it pervade so much of our society that absolutely everything is formed by it, at all times.  Gravity doesn’t really have a gender bias; driving on the right side of the road instead of the left isn’t really a gendered decision.  But pretty much every interaction between people is going to be influenced by it - the Patriarchy is the overall system of organization and power distribution in our culture, and right now, it distributes a lot more power to men than women, and perpetuates itself by making women worth less.  While this is hard to see at times, it has a pretty damn big impact, just like the Force.

And rape and sexual assault are a tight nugget of the Patriarchy.  As long as one of the major forces of social cohesion in our society, the force that provides messages that tell all of us what, exactly, men and women are and what their value is denigrates women and everything associated with them, rape and sexual assault will be practically impossible to fight effectively.  It will be labeled a “woman’s issue” which, right now, is practically synonymous with labeling it a “non-issue.” One of the big fights feminists have, especially in the violence prevention arena, is the fight to legitimize women and gender non-conforming folks as people with agency and ideas worth taking seriously, in any field - from music to politics.

The Force can be used for good or evil - whether it is depends mostly on the individual who make use of it.  The big, difficult to see, but powerful forces that direct our social lives are not unchangeable, and just because we’re currently in a world where those underlying dynamics are often hate-filled doesn’t mean that’s the way things have to be.  We’ve successfully challenged a lot of those assumptions, through the hard work of civil rights activists, feminists, and all sorts of rebels (rebels!) and artists.  I like the idea of creating a new set of social assumptions for our world, both to make it more fair and equitable, and also because I like the idea of being a gender-justice Jedi.  I mean, I’ve already got the lightsaber.

I ran a panel at a feminist science fiction convention a few weeks ago. The entire panel deserves a writeup - it went wonderfully, we covered so much, and we got to go beyond 101, which is a thing I don’t get to do nearly enough. It brought up a bunch of topics that I’ll be parceling out here over the next few weeks. What I wanted to talk about first, though, since it stuck in my head, was an audience member’s description of one book in particular. I don’t remember the title - we had over 50 titles flying around the room, I think! But the audience member described the rape-specific part of the plot as being that the female protagonist was raped by a male acquaintance (or friend, I don’t know how well she knew him). When describing it to her friends, who automatically responded with “that’s rape and we’re going to kick his ass”, she said that she didn’t know if it was really rape. So essentially: It is clearly rape in the text and her friends, upon hearing what happened, are instantly convinced that it was rape, but the survivor herself is saying she’s not sure.

Several audience members felt that that was full of fail, was the author trying to get around it being actual rape. But. You guys. That response? Is actually pretty normal. And by painting it as wrong, we silence survivors who are struggling to deal with their assaults but aren’t ready to say That Word yet.

Let’s face it: rape is a big word. It’s a life-changing word. It’s a word that can rearrange your entire sense of self. And it is normal for a survivor - particularly one who knew the perpetrator - to go through a period of “that couldn’t really have been rape.” Because if it was rape, you have been raped. You are a rape victim or rape survivor. (I prefer survivor, but people have the right to self-identify.)

And your friend is a rapist.

And nothing will ever be quite the same. Not for you, not for the rapist, not for your community. Standing up and saying “I was raped”, especially for the first time, can be abjectly terrifying.

So it’s normal. It’s normal to try to tell yourself that that can’t be what that was. It’s normal to shove it aside and try to go back to your previous normal. Is it the healthiest thing ever? Probably not. But there’s no one true way to deal with the emotional fallout of a sexual assault. If you’re dealing in a way that doesn’t involve immediate reporting to the police and going to court, you’re not doing it wrong. When people are in shock, denial is a natural response.

So I have problems with this exactly as I have problems with the cultural narrative that if you’re just tough enough, rape won’t really affect you. And the ones that say that consensual sex with your one true love will magically heal you. Et cetera. The truth is always more complicated than that, and therefore more complicated to write - which is why many writers don’t bother. But we should. Because, dear writer, you don’t know how many people reading your book are rape survivors. And I don’t think you want to tell them they’re doing it wrong.