Lisa Shannon has a wonderful op-ed about how sexual violence is not “cultural”. Cara at the Curvature unpacks that a little more. I’ve been sitting here trying to come up with something to add, but really, they have said it all, and very well. Please go read!
You may have heard about Rape-aXe, the anti-rape female condom. Many people are calling this a great idea. I do not find it to be a great idea. This is a device that only “works” if you are already being raped. And the inventor is recommending that it be part of a woman’s daily safety ritual - that women should shower, brush their teeth, and insert a bear trap in their vagina in case someone rapes them that day. I find this ludicrous. It also puts all of the responsibility on the woman, and teaches them to live in fear, neither of which is healthy. How about we put that time and energy into social change? Some good posts about why Rape-aXe is an awful idea can be found here, here, here, and here.
Amanda Hess writes about Olivia Munn’s Playboy shoot. No, wait, this is relevant! See, Munn was very clear in her contract about what she would and would not do or show - and the photographer spent the entire shoot attempting to coerce her into doing things she had not consented to. It’s not rape, but it’s absolutely a product of rape culture.
What you should know about this - nonconsensual touch by strangers - is that it happens all the time. I have blogged about that before. It is still true. And unfortunately, that blogger’s correct in that people tend to not yell, not bring attention to it. I’m glad that the convention I’m going to this weekend has a very clear anti-harassment policy and a history of banning people who violate it.
Harriet J. has another great post here, particularly the rape-apologism bits.
I will conclude for now by reminding you that our next volunteer training is in late August, with information and interview sessions August 2 and 11. Click here to apply!
Good morning good people! I hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July, if it is a holiday you celebrate! I hope you didn’t catch on fire in the heat! And I hope that you watched Germany trounce Argentina on Saturday, because it sets up a salivating Germany versus Spain semi-final in the World Cup!
I did have a good 4th, and I did watch the Germany vs. Argentina game, and I did melt in the heat, but what is catching my attention this morning is a wonderful article from the font of cultural wisdom known as Men’s Health: 25 Secrets She Wished You Knew. It’s a really good thing that Men’s Health has taken on the incredibly difficult task of teaching me, a normal human, how to understand the confusing and alien mind of a human female. If it weren’t for this article, I wouldn’t know that I should approach women in my life as if they were mewling pre-pubescents, forever incapable of using language to communicate with me and the outside world. I wouldn’t know things like secret #2, “Women speak a different dialect than men. For example, “I’m fine” means “I’m so not fine,” just as “No dessert for me” means “I’ll be polishing off yours.” Or maybe secret #5, “Always tell me when I look hot; never tell me when I don’t. And don’t forget: I need 20 compliments to offset one thoughtless remark.” This lets me know that women are, much like young children, attention-hogs who must be placated at all times. It helps me a lot, as a rational, thinking human, to know that these rules apply universally to all women, too. It sure is a good thing we don’t trust them with important things, like governance or war, amiright?
To cut the Tuesday morning snark a little bit, though, I can’t really blame Men’s Health that much. I mean, I can pick at the article and dislike it and find every single flaw there is with it from a reasonable-person perspective (and there are many), but they are just parroting a long-standing cultural view of women. Amongst my favorite words to use when I need to impress people with both my vocabulary and also the breadth of my reading is infantilization, and the second definition there is really the kicker - “To treat or condescend to as if still a young child.”
A lot of the workshops the CAPS volunteers do for BARCC focus on respecting boundaries - the lines of behavior each of us set up to make it through the world. Everyone’s boundaries are different, and the same person can have very, very different boundaries depending on the type of behavior or activity in which they are engaging. I’m really comfortable speaking in public; I’ve been doing it a long time, I have what I’d like to think are decent skills, and pretty much the only situation where I don’t feel OK talking is when I don’t know if my audience speaks the same language I do. Conversely, I hate singing. I have a terrible singing voice, and going to things like Karaoke make me exceptionally uncomfortable. I know that friends who don’t know me well enough to know that I don’t really like it will pressure me to do so, and I’ll get really anxious to the point where my body reacts physically. It’s not traumatizing, but it does make me deeply uncomfortable.
One of our missions in CAPS is to find ways to help make people more cognizant of boundaries, and to respect them more. Thanks to the work of researchers and academics, we know a lot more about how predators operate. While stranger rape does happen for sure, more rape and sexual assault is committed by someone a survivor knows, by a factor of pretty close to 3:1. We know that most predators test their intended victims by purposefully violating their boundaries and seeing how they react. They deliberately target people who cannot easily enforce their boundaries. Our goal in CAPS is to help everyone recognize when someone is crossing boundaries, and give people the necessary skills to step in and stop that type of behavior. The thought process is that if (most) predators can’t test the boundaries of their victims because everyone else surrounding them constantly steps in to prevent it, then eventually, the predator won’t have access to anyone to victimize.
This is a good idea. I like the work I do in CAPS, and I think it’s effective. Teaching people how to enforce their boundaries, though, often assumes that we’re in situations where there is at least some tacit approval for us having boundaries in the first place. This type of training is great when aimed at groups of peers: high school students, college students, generally adults, too. It’s less effective when we’re trying to train groups where there is no assumption that either one subset of the group is allowed to have boundaries, or that the other subset needs to pay attention to them. The best example of this type of relationship? Parents and their children.
This type of relationship is not completely without boundaries, of course - there are many lines that parents cannot cross with their children. But in most cases, if a child does not want to do something, or is uncomfortable about doing it, or feels hesitant, a parent can make the kid do it anyway and there is general social approval for that type of parenting. A father who makes his son or daughter try out for, say, a little league team, even if the kid hates it, is not generally going to be shunned socially by other parents or friends. This is what a parent is supposed to do, sometimes - show their children that life is often unpleasant and we have to do things we don’t want to. Part of the reason that parents get social backing to (occasionally) cross their children’s boundaries is that we, as a culture, generally recognize that adults are more aware of their world than children are. I hated telephones as a kid - I had a couple of bad experiences accidentally hanging up on people, and they came to represent scary, unknown things for me. My dad forced me to answer phones at his office for a summer as a 14 year old, partly because I needed a job, but partly because he knew I was going to need to learn how to use a phone proficiently as a life skill. I hated it, but I eventually came to understand his decision (although my friends might still question whether I have truly changed my opinion on phones; the truth is, I still sort of hate them). It was more important for my dad to help me develop life skills than it was to shelter me from feeling anxious and miserable. He crossed my boundary there in a benevolent way, the way that parents are SUPPOSED to every now and again.
Here’s where this gets tricky, though. There is no shortage of pop culture, media, old fables, and general social messages that tell us that same thing…about women. While I could link up a thousand and one miserable articles, I feel like a basic jaunt through Sociological Images or, if you have a particularly thick skin, AskMen.com, would give you MORE than enough examples of the types of messages our culture provides about how women are basically children: they never say what they mean, they are fickle, confused, ruled by emotion, completely unable to concentrate on important tasks (or any tasks aside from picking out shoes, hurr hurr) and need constant attention or else they pout. Of course, these messages are always provided as an absolute: ALL women act this way, no exceptions! We expect kids to act this way. We expect children to throw temper tantrums, to lie when they steal a cookie, to be easily distracted. But culture tells men that women are the same way.
As a straight man, I was the prime recipient for most of this messaging: from Maxim and other lad-mags, when I was young enough for them to seem sexy; from the vast majority of dude-focused TV and movies, and from the men in my life. Even I’ve repeated some of those tropes at times, when I was in a space where I felt like I had the social support to say it, and when I had an ax to grind against some particular woman who I felt had wronged me (yes, I’ll turn in my feminist card now).
So, what happens when we live in a culture that tells us that it’s ok to transgress on the boundaries of children (for their own good!), and then tells men that women are, essentially children? BARCC training can help us recognize that boundaries are important and that they shouldn’t be violated, but that training has to push back against a lot of social expectations that position men as the adults of society, and women as the kids. I think this idea can be easily summed up by the pro-rape slogan, “no means yes.” In what kind of 1984 hellhole does that make any sense at all? The answer is simple: in a culture that thinks that half of the adult population is, in fact, not adult, it makes perfect sense. If women aren’t capable of using that sophisticated adult language that real humans use, if women aren’t even really capable of understanding the repercussions of their actions, and if they lie all the time anyway, like children, then why wouldn’t no mean yes?
I do have hope, though. In that article linked above, Amanda Hess cites a study from Yale Law professor Dan Kahan that found that men and women with a more egalitarian world view didn’t treat women like children. Hooray!
And now, only because I got into an argument with someone this weekend about who wrote the song for the new Kia Soul commercial (which I got wrong; I thought it was Tribe Called Quest, they thought it was De La Soul), here’s Black Sheep’s 1991 classic “The Choice is Yours” (check the second verse for a mildly anti-DV message!)
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.
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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.
* 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.)
* 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.
