In order to become fully human, men must reject the Masculine Mystique. Men must accept women fully into society as humans who are identical to themselves. Men must give up the entitlement of sexual access to any women they encounter, and take responsibility for the rape and abuse that they have wrought upon the whole of women across the globe.

Q: Why did you do it? Do you regret hurting them? (I mean, actually, not just "I regret going to jail for it".)
A: It's not very satisfying, but I did it because I wanted it. I wanted them, I wanted to do what I did to them. The sexual arousal was intense, but the desire to overpower them, to take control was even more so. It was an urge that built and built until I surrenered [sic] to it.

BARCC started out in 1973 as a totally volunteer-run organization. We have staff now, but we still have 100-150 volunteers at any given time; those volunteers contribute enough time to make up 19 staffers, almost doubling BARCC’s service capacity, and that is *awesome*. We have such a tremendously dedicated bunch!

Both of the volunteers nominated for the ServiceHero contest were CAPS volunteers - but that’s just because Dave nominated me and I caught the Google Alert just in time to go “ha!” and nominate him right back! In reality, every single one of our volunteers deserves an award. In the coming weeks, I hope to highlight our hotline and medical advocacy programs as well.

This is a short post for a good reason: we have a new volunteer training happening down the hall right now! Twenty new volunteers and ten new interns are joining the BARCC family this week, and we’re thrilled to have them. Maybe one of them will win next year!

If you’re interested in volunteering with BARCC, hie thee to our website, because we have yet another volunteer training coming up in October! Join us! Fight rape culture! Perhaps win fabulous prizes! The world can be yours! And you’d be joining a group of wonderful, passionate, dedicated, fantastic people.

I just got back from vacation and my brain is still mostly on the beach, and so this is a good time to write a movie review!  Yay movies!  Last night I got out to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, based on the comic series by Brian Lee O’Malley.  First thing to note: this is a fun movie.  It speaks pretty directly to the heart of the (male) gamer, and the number of asides, homages, and tributes to video games and gaming culture made it a jolly good time.  For someone like me who also has a weak spot for fight choreography, the movie’s also got a lot of fun glitzy wushu-esque fight scenes with lots of spinning jumping twirling rotating madness.  I do so enjoy my twirling madness.  All in all, it’s a hilarious, feel-good movie with great art direction, a solid sense of humor, and fun action sequences that both give action-movie addicts a little dose of the violence they need while also lampooning violence in video games.  I’ll probably buy it when it comes out.

My only disappointment with it is perhaps an unfair one.  I was hoping, really hard, that this wouldn’t be a romantic movie with the standard geek-boy plotline.  I kept my fingers crossed really hard that maybe, since this one had such an over-the-top tone, that it wouldn’t just be about an outrageously awkward mid-20’s guy who wins a token hot girl by doing something traditionally masculine that no one thought he could do.  You know, the plot of every romantic comedy ever that’s aimed at men?

I understand that movies need to use short-hand for describing emotional arcs.  Filmmakers don’t have enough time to detail how two characters fall in love, so they use lighting, slow-motion, close-up shots, etc, to give the audience the idea of what’s going on in the minds of the characters.  Except, in this type of film (the romantical comedyish film aimed at dudes), it’s usually only the dude who gets that treatment.  Ramona, Scott’s main squeeze in this film and the girl for whom he is willing to fight to the death seven times has as major personality traits...what, exactly?  She changes her hair color every couple of weeks!  She delivers packages for Amazon.ca!  She...sometimes wears gloves when she’s inside!  We think she likes indie music (the type that Scott plays, perhaps) but we’re not entirely sure!  Mostly, the only thing we know about her is that Scott thinks she’s hot.  He was completely transfixed by her hotness, and he is now willing to put himself in mortal danger over and over and over (and over four more times) again because he presumably wants to sleep with her.  Who is she?  Why is she Scott’s dreamgirl, as he mentions?  Does his dreamgirl not possess any persona of her own?

Ramona probably isn’t quite quirky or sprightly enough to be considered a manic pixie dream girl, but a good chunk of the criteria for being one are present:

As the A.V. Club deftly notes, “Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She’s on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness.”

I never quite understood why Ramona was interested in Scott.  She never indicates that she thinks he’s hot.  She never really indicates that she likes his music.  They have awkward, stilted conversation, mostly about their exes.  She even tells him “we don’t really know much about each other, do we?” It would have helped make her a better, more fully fleshed out character if we had at least one scene where she indicated, somehow, that she actually liked him, and why.  She does tell Scott a couple of times that he’s the “nicest” boy she’s dated.  Why?  He’s continually passive-aggressive, kind of surly, and awkward.  Why are we sympathizing with him?  He does pull a pretty badass 540 kick, but I wasn’t of the impression that that’s the only thing a dude needs to do to get into a lady’s heart.

So this movie, while having a really cool veneer and presentation, is pretty much the same story about boy falling for hot girl and then doing all sorts of things to win her, so he can have sex with her.  The female love object isn’t really a character; she’s a cypher, a symbol at best, for the male protagonist’s desires.  She is the other, the non-default.  We don’t see anything from her perspective.  Of course she can be won!  Of course our protagonist, once he learns the correct sequence of moves and/or actions, can will her to his side.  Does she want to be there?  Does she perhaps have some already existing interest in him?  It doesn’t matter because she’s not a real person with interests and desires.  She is, basically, not a human; she’s a plot device.

Just like telling men that women are children, telling men that women aren’t human isn’t going to help open up gender relations.  Why should men care about, listen to, or respect the boundaries of these strange creatures who so fascinate our libidos?  They are so strange and fickle and weird, but they certainly aren’t human.

Now, to be fair, this movie IS better than most in this genre - Wallace, Scott’s roommate, is openly gay and not particularly effeminate.  He sleeps around a lot and isn’t penalized for it or shown to be mentally messed up as a result (he’s actually much more normal than Scott).  Likewise, in an early scene, Ramona decides not to have sex with Scott and he respects her wishes.  That’s a good thing.  On the level most directly related to rape and sexual assault, this movie gets an A+ for respecting consent and boundaries.  I’m a fan of that.

I’ve mentioned media before and its ability to shape the social narratives that make up our lives.  This movie is a good example of the types of messages our culture is currently kicking out at us.  “Seriously,” a hypothetical reader might say, “are you nit-picking on a comic-book movie for not having progressive feminist undertones?  Really?  This is a cute story about a boy who falls in love!  And then fights bad guys by tiger uppercutting them.  That’s awesome and why are you so full of haterade?” And that hypothetical reader would be completely correct - this story falls exactly in line with the cultural script for what young straight-boy love looks like.  But that’s the problem!  The social script for young straight-boy love doesn’t include a real woman!  If this is what we think of as a standard, if this is the typical story we tell both men and women, that makes everyone think of women as strange non-human beings who need to be won, like a video game.  Scott Pilgrim vs. The World joins a lengthy list of movies, many of which have been critical and commercial successes, like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Garden State, and Elizabethtown (maybe not so much the success on that last one) that have as a major plotline: boy loves girl, except that it’s really boy loves object.  Ramona is, for all intense and purposes in this movie, a macguffin with boobs.

None of this helps create a cultural narrative where we take women seriously, especially not the young men that this film targets.  As much as I like it (and again, I really did like this movie!) I keep wanting to see a film that has the sense of humor this one does, but also does open up the conversation a little bit more.  As bad as the movie itself was, one of my favorite films in this mildly subversive category was the Amanda Bynes film She’s the Man, a mostly goofy take on Twelfth Night.  The main protagonist is female, she tries to win over a boy, and the boy gets a (for a teen movie, anyway) reasonable inner life.  It’s not a good movie, but it’d be nice to see a couple more major media products start to move towards that idea of full personhood for female characters. 

So a little bit about gender performance, by which I mean that gender is indeed a thing that we choose to perform. We are taught how to perform gender from a very young age. I started ballet classes when I was four. I was doing department-store runway modeling in third grade. I had long blonde impeccably styled hair; I remember brushing it backstage before a recital sometime in elementary school and knowing that it had to be perfect. I did not own jeans; I was the only person in my fifth-grade class picture in a dress and kneesocks. My parents were very, very invested in coding me as female, with all of the cultural implications involved.

My adolescent rebellion was visually interesting. Lots of trenchcoats, combat boots, deliberately unflattering haircuts. I grunged myself up quite deliberately.

What happened?

Well. Adolescent rebellion is generally ‘nuff said. But also, sexual assault.

RuPaul has a new show; it’s called RuPaul’s Drag U, and in it, previous Drag Race contestants perform dragtastic makeovers on what they call biological women. (Nod to the fact that science is more complicated than that; I am using the show’s terminology because I’m talking about the show). Unrelated to anything else: the opening credits of this show look like the Lisa Frank folders I had in elementary school came to life. I want to go to Drag U and frolic with rainbow unicorns. I’m just saying.

On the very first episode, “Tomboy Meets Girl”, one of the contestants was a rape survivor. She used to dress girly, but after her rape, she switched to baggy jeans, oversized t-shirts, no makeup; she desexualized herself as much as possible.

This should sound familiar to anyone who went to high school with me.

There are many reactions to rape; no one reaction is universal or right or wrong. But this is a common one, and I bet it’s not the last time it shows up on Drag U. It’s a common one because of what society tells us about gender and sexual assault. In brief:

1. Rape is something that happens to women.
2. Rape is not something that happens to men or people who look like men.

Both of these things, of course, are totally wrong. Yes, rape happens to women more than it happens to men, but visually coding yourself as more masculine is no cure. Rape is not a thing that happens exclusively to pretty or gender-conforming people.

But it can feel safer to hide your body. Temporarily. Even though it does not actually make you any less likely to be raped. Society tells you it is safer, and we are so hardwired to obey society.

So I spent years deliberately coding myself as less female. I’m genderqueer to begin with, so this was not a huge mental shift. I went from bad haircuts and sullen glares to Oxford shirts and vests to jeans and T-shirts. And eventually, after many years, I got back to skirts and dresses. I’m equally comfortable now in menswear or a Trashy Diva dress. It depends on my mood. It depends what gender I’m choosing to perform that day.

And as someone who is aware that she is choosing to perform gender, I am fascinated by drag queens. They do the ultimate gender performance - most drag queens are cisgendered gay men, so the genderqueer element isn’t generally there. This is a group of men looking at our society’s set of standards for gender performance and saying “What is feminine?”

And they come up with so many different answers, from Nina Flowers’ severe androgyny to Jujubee’s va-va-voom to the queens who do their best to look naturally female.

What is feminine? What does a woman look like?

The women on Drag U are not going to do stage drag in their real lives, most likely. But what they take from the experience is that question: What does it mean to be female? And the answer: It’s up to you.

As Dave mentioned Monday, we are up for an award! If you like our volunteer work, click here and vote for Dave or Shira!

I’m really excited because Shira and I are nominated for a Service Nation Hero award here in Boston, a project of Be the Change Inc., which is seeking to strengthen American democracy through service collaboration.  It’s a cool honor, and we could win burritos!  Seriously, you should vote for us, and all of your other favorite community change leaders and good samaritans on their voting page.

I’m writing about this here because nominating my mentors and friends, and getting nominated, has helped me continue some of my thinking about service, and what it means (it’s also a good way for me to shamelessly self-promote).  In my junior or senior year of high school (I’m a little hazy on the timeline), a soup kitchen opened up on the street behind my dad’s office in New Haven.  About once every two weeks or so for about six months, I joined a couple of other friends and we went to help out at the soup kitchen on a Thursday or Friday night, preparing food for the evening meal.  I’d get there at around 2 or 3 p.m., and hang around until probably 5:30 or 6 making the food and getting it ready, and then we’d rotate out for the next crop of volunteers who came in to actually serve the food and interact with the patrons.  It worked well for me because I could keep a change of clothes at dad’s office, and because I could still get home by 6ish to do my homework.

I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time volunteering for what I felt were social change organizations and vehicles, because I liked working with ideas and trying to build something that would last long enough to challenge our current system.  I worked with a middle school education program for a while, and was drawn to work at BARCC and NOMAS-Boston because I felt like they all worked to create a new platform for either education or survivors or gender relations that could reform the broken and rotten parts of society.  I could devote an awful lot of time to those types of causes, but I’ve never equalled my time at the soup kitchen since with any other direct service volunteering.

The really good thing about that type of volunteering was that it let me do something immediate and direct.  Someone would eat better, for one night at least, as a result of the food that kitchen made, and I’d had a hand in making it the nights I was there.  I could devote an evening of my week to doing that, and it wasn’t an all-consuming life passion, it didn’t take a huge amount of my time, and it didn’t require that I knew a ton about the economics of food preparation and distribution.  In essence, the cost of getting involved in that work at the soup kitchen was really low: I needed to show up and be enthusiastic and willing to help.

One of the seemingly intractable problems of pushing back our epidemic of rape and sexual assault in the US is the fact that rape is so intimately tied to so many other aspects of our culture: to gender, to sex, to power, to the criminal justice system.  To fight this one issue, we’re really taking on a much bigger picture than that - it’s like trying to take out a weed in your backyard and realizing that it belongs to a redwood.  In my case, fighting for a more just society without the threat of sexual violence (or at least AS MUCH sexual violence) gets intensely frustrating because I never get enough time or opportunity to talk to groups or people about all of these other issues that are tied into rape.  And, while I might be able to get most people to agree with me that rape is bad and we should prevent it, I’ll lose some of those folks when I start to talk about changing gender roles.  I’ll lose more of them when I start to talk about power issues.  Eventually, I’ll just be hanging out with a small group of people who are already on my side.  In fact, they’ve been doing the same things I have, saying many of the same things, and seeing many of the same glazed-over eyes and losing more and more of their audience as they get deeper in the rabbit hole of issues that rape touches.  If I want to keep doing culture change, I need to stay up on current research, I need to learn new mechanisms for reaching people who don’t share my cultural backgrounds, and I need to learn how to deal with constant defeat, rejection of my ideas, and slow, slow, slow progress.  In many cases, the cost of culture change work is really high.  We ask activists and visionaries to give up a LOT of time, energy, emotional balance, and personal life for difficult fights and little visible progress.  That’s not all that appealing to a lot of folks.

The individuals who create, manage, and run things like soup kitchens, Community Servings, and other similar direct service programs face the same problems, with the added burden of not getting the recognition they deserve.  In general, though (with the exception of BARCC!), direct service organizations have done a way better job of making volunteering easy and fun and available than culture change organizations.  Sexual violence, much like hunger, won’t be eradicated by the work of an organization: it will be reduced and eventually eliminated because of the elbow grease of millions of volunteers.  The more sustainable that service is, the less it requires people to completely change their lives to do it and the more people you can bring into the work because the costs of doing that type of work aren’t as high.  This is not at all true for the people doing the higher-level work in direct service organizations, of course, and many organizations have dual-missions (including BARCC).

I’m probably not going to stop throwing myself into culture change work full-force because this is what I want to do for my career, and for my life.  I am recognizing now, though, that I’m probably be spending a lot of my time with a small knot of people who think the same things that I do.  If I want to truly expand the movement to end sexual violence, I need to find ways to enlist friends, associates - my community - to help me do the basic, low-level work of making our world better.  I can’t ask every one to “stop rape.” Even the small, committed group of social-change revolutionaries can’t.  Asking the rest of the population to stop rape is going to turn them off and push them further away from our movement and our goals.

Can we pitch smaller things though, smaller actions and activities as service?  Most of us already have an experience like mine at the soup kitchen - many of us already volunteer and do so because we like it.  Asking friends to do something that makes them feel good and is quick to do - that’s going to build the movement.  Asking them to walk in the BARCC walk, or donate $5, or to just not call their female friends sluts, or to start practicing really low-level enthusiastic consent is fast, simple, and makes people feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves, and in many ways, we already have a model for talking about this low-level society changing work in the form of volunteering and service.  I’m going to try it out and see if I can’t start making some small but essential changes and bring some additional people into this movement that way. 

I’ve written before about gender branding - how all of us are labeled with social symbols based on how we identify, and how those symbols are an obstacle to ending rape.  This is on my mind this morning because of a case I heard about recently (it’s a few weeks old, but I’m only hearing about it now): a woman in St. Louis lost a lawsuit against soft-porn peddlers Girls Gone Wild when a judge determined that she implicitly consented to baring her breasts for the camera, even though she explicitly did not.

A Missouri jury has gone wild in a case of involuntary nudity, finding that a woman consented to appearing topless in a “Girls Gone Wild” video by playing to the camera before another person pulled her top down.

The woman, identified only as Jane Doe, had no expectation of privacy, the St. Louis Circuit Court jury declared last week, even though she said “no” when a “Girls Gone Wild” crew asked her to bare her breasts as they were filming at a St. Louis bar in September 2005 and never signed a release allowing any use of her likeness in a video.

...Doe sued Mantra in 2008 for negligence, invasion of privacy and misappropriation of her likeness after a friend of her husband told him he had seen her in the video “Girls Gone Wild Sorority Orgy.” She was seeking at least $2.4 million in damages for post-traumatic stress and psychological injuries.

But the jury, which deliberated only 90 minutes, bought what was in effect a “blame the victim” defense - that Doe consented to being filmed topless by being in the Rum Jungle bar and dancing for the cameraman. Another patron grabbed the shoulder straps of her tank top and pulled them off her shoulders, causing the top to fall down and expose her breasts.

“Through her actions, she gave implied consent,” jury foreman Patrick O’Brien told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “She was really playing to the camera. She knew what she was doing.”

The 26-year-old mother of two said she was “flirting with the camera” but “never, ever planned on crossing the line of being exposed in a sexual manner or being on this DVD. I didn’t show my boobs. They did.”

Implied consent is consent that is not formally expressed but can be “manifested by signs, actions or facts, or by inaction or silence which creates an inference that consent has been given.” Most states no longer allow implied consent as a defense in sexual assault cases. (emphasis mine)

To review what I know of this case:

1. A woman was dancing in a bar.
2. Girls Gone Wild was also filming in the bar, but she didn’t know that.
3. A member of the GGW staff asked her to take her top off; she said no.  Explicit non-consent.
4. Someone else in the crowd pulled her shirt off against her will.  This is sexual assault, and a pretty well-known form of it.
5. GGW filmed that, put it in a video, and sold it for what the defendant believed was about $1.5 million.
6. The woman never signed a consent form, never indicated written permission to be in the video, and received no compensation for appearing in it.
7. Judge in Missouri finds that she gave “implied consent” to be filmed, to be filmed topless, and to be distributed nationally because...well, she’s a woman, right?  They never say what they mean.

That the jury only took 90 minutes to deliberate is a pretty good indication of how branded gender is, and how much we all buy into it.  This woman explicitly said she would not strip for the camera, but her use of actual English words with specific denotations didn’t matter in this case - this was as clear a “no means yes” situation as I’ve found.  Even if she was giving the camera all sorts of sex-eyes and gyrating all kinds of hypnotic on film; she said no.  I’m not a lawyer (yet!), but I can’t understand how explicit, verbal, recorded non-consent can somehow be magically translated to consent during trial.

One of the major aspects of gender-branding for women is that women are coy; women are indirect, women say no when they mean yes.  I’d like to think that in reality, most reasonable people understand that these associations we have with women are wildly untrue, but stories like this one make me wonder how reasonable people really are.  Because women have been branded as fickle, deceitful, and manipulative, it’s depressing but not surprising that so many folks can handle the double-think necessary to assume that a woman can say “no” and really, deep-down, mean yes.  As I wrote earlier, it’s really hard to fight for good criminal justice procedures for crimes like rape and sexual assault with this type of branding hanging over every legal interaction a survivor faces.  Every report he or she makes gets extra implied meaning attached to it, and those extra ideas generally water-down or hurt the survivor’s chances of getting to trial.

The other reason this is in my head this morning: Judge Walker’s decision on Prop 8 in California.  I know I already waxed ecstatic about it last week, but I can’t help but feel positive about the future with his decision, and not just for the future of LGBT civil rights.  Walker’s decision was one based on fact, not on the branding of gays or lesbians; in fact, he and his clerk specifically point out that the stereotypes of gays and lesbians had long been an obstacle to justice.  Judge Walker, in my mind, seems to have staged a judicial war on the harmful social view of the LGBT population using reason, facts, and research as his ammunition.

And this is what we need in the fight for more reasonable rape and sexual assault policies, too.  As long as idiots believe they knew what a survivor really meant when she said “no,” we’ll have a hard time getting survivors justice.

On a side note, for more fun with gender-branding, check out Leah of Not a Dirty Word and her awesome post on ”How to Hang On to Your Lady,” a hilarious reversal of all the dating/sex guidelines we give women about how to trap/keep a man.  I’m really trying to think of good things to add to her list.  We’ll see if I can come up with anything interesting. 

“Proposition 8 cannot withstand any level of scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause,” wrote Judge Walker. “Excluding same-sex couples from marriage is simply not rationally related to a legitimate state interest.”

This is very exciting!  This is a day when our legal system has functioned correctly, to uphold the civil and human rights of our citizens, and bring the light of reasoned law against bigotry and hatred.  Decisions like this are what the law is for, in my mind: to make sure that all citizens are equal; that they all receive the same rights in front of the government, and that outrage based on lies and falsehoods are struck down.

What’s remarkable about Judge Walker’s decision (based on blogs written by lawyers who know these things better than I do) is that he presents a very, very, very lengthy account of the facts in this case.  Thomas over at the Yes Means Yes blog did a great job of pulling out Judge Walker’s findings of fact (as opposed to law).  This is important for two reasons: first, it’s a lot harder for the Supreme Court to overturn a decision on the facts - while it can make the determination that Walker just completely got all the facts WRONG, it would be hard to do that in this case because his decision is well put together and quite long (136 pages, with citations).  This means that if Perry vs. Schwarzenegger does go to the Supreme Court, they will have the same set of facts to investigate.  They might determine that Walker’s application of the law was wrong, but they’d be hard pressed to do that with the facts he compiled.

The reason this case is so exciting to me, aside from that it takes a grand blow against the idea that the LGBT population is a little less human than everyone else and therefore entitled to less rights, is that Walker heard a lot of testimony from actual experts on issues like child development.  The facts (again, as summarized by Thomas) that he laid out in his decision are not at all “new” or “surprising;” they are what any LGBT person or ally knew already: humans are humans, being gay isn’t being broken, and children aren’t harmed by gays and lesbians.  A selection of the facts that all of us already knew, but are nice to see on paper in a legal decision (these are from the decision itself, minus the many, many supporting paragraphs of citations and expert witness testimony):

46. Individuals do not generally choose their sexual orientation. No credible evidence supports a finding that an individual may, through conscious decision, therapeutic intervention or any other method, change his or her sexual orientation.

80. The campaign to pass Proposition 8 relied on stereotypes to show that same-sex relationships are inferior to opposite-sex relationships. Emphasis mine.

I like Pam Spaulding’s take on why Prop 8 was overturned:

In the courts, you must defend your position. And in the long run, you couldn’t. Or rather many of you wouldn’t. Again, the specters of gay bogeymen were invoked as your leaders spun false images of avenging hordes for their reluctance to be questioned in the courts about the unprovoked lies they said in pulpits, in speeches, and on commercials.

This time, it didn’t work. The court saw through the phony claims and realized something, which I hope that many of you now do - you have no logical reason to either deny us the right to love or to deny us the ability to protect the ones whom we love.

I’m trying to calm down and to look at this from a more nuanced and distanced perspective.  This decision did not grant federal marriage rights to the LGBT world; it may not even stand up to a SCOTUS review.  But it was a strong blow for equality.  Even more than that, though, it was a strong blow for reason, and that’s why I’m writing about it here (aside from that I’m really excited and just want to write about it everywhere).

Judge Walker’s decision was, once again, based on actual facts.  It was based on the objective reality that scientists studied and codified.  I’m not saying that scientists are without their own biases as individuals, or that all science is great at measuring reality (there’s a lot of really bad science out in the world), but in general, this was a legal decision informed by truth.  Gays and lesbians are not child molesters, pedophiles, or any less capable of love and marriage than straights.  The stereotypes of what the LGBT population is like are hard to budge, culturally, but major legal victories like this can help dramatically.  We now have, in a very formal legal document that collects a lot of valuable research, a refutation of pretty much all of those social stereotypes and bigotry that homophobes have tried to use to prevent LGBT people from gaining access to equal rights.  Their bigotry was exposed for what it is - completely unfounded, not based on any objective reality, and full of haterade.

How will this decision send ripples through other anti-oppression work fighting the same sort of bigotry, bigotry that’s been accepted as social truth for so long that even acres of research proving it false won’t make it go away?  For the purposes of BARCC in particular: how many of the cultural messages that we get about rape (and which we have tons of evidence to disprove) might we be able to weaken or destroy if we had something comparable to this decision?  I don’t know, and I’m not even sure what form that would take in the court system, but Walker’s decision gives me a little bit of hope.  Clearly, there are people all over the country who are willing to fight back against stereotypes, falsehood, and policies based on them.  If we can do this with Prop 8, maybe we can start to apply the same sort of thinking to rape culture.  Then, maybe, we can get some support for policies that will actually help prevent rape (because they are based on reality and not crap), and stop hearing stories like this. 

1. My fabulous co-blogger Shira raised some crazy moneybucks for BARCC with her blogathon!  I also won a cool pendant-thing in her auction that I’ll probably give to my mom!  So Mom, if you don’t get a cool pendant-thing from me soon, it’s because I decided to keep it for myself instead!
2. My men’s group NOMAS-Boston had a really successful ”Dating While Feminist” event on Thursday night last week!  We had some great speakers, cool discussions, and I got to wear ridiculous nametags!
3. After not being at Fenway for like six years, I’ll have gone to three Sox games in a weekend!  Let’s hear it for visiting friends from out of town who are obsessed with the Sox and who have unreasonable good luck with scalpers.

So in general, it’s a better Monday morning than most.  What I’m thinking about today, though, is sex: sex and its relationship to rape, or more precisely, how we think about its relationship to rape.

How many of you have heard the oft-used anti-rape line/slogan “rape is not sex” at some point?  How many folks agree with that idea?  I generally do.  Now, let’s take this a bit further - how many of you have heard the line “rape has nothing to do with sex?” I have, a couple of times, and I cannot agree with it, and I think that trying to see rape as completely separate from sex wildly hinders our ability to do good work to stop rape.  At its core, we need to fix the way we think about sex to undercut support for rape.

Amongst our speakers at Dating While Feminist was Jaclyn Friedman, one of my feminist heroes and co-author of the book Yes Means Yes, which both Shira and I have mentioned before.  Jaclyn writes all over the place, but she was doing a guest stint over at Feministe recently and she put up a powerful piece about taking control over her sexuality.  Her piece helped continue my thinking about sex.  Sex is really cool.  Sex is good, for those folks who want to have it.  Sex is a basic and intrinsic part of my experience of the world.

A corollary to that: sex is powerful, because my sexuality is a huge, massive part of how I see myself.  My gender presentation, for example, is heavily based on what I think I need to look, sound, and act like in order to make women interested in me as a sexual partner.  I dress, act, and behave in a pattern that I think indicates, based on social symbols, that I am what society (mostly) expects a man to be.  Who I want to sleep with, and how I try to get them to want to sleep with me is a pretty damn fundamental piece of who I am, overall.

And wow, have we used that fundamental nature of sexuality to control, manipulate, abuse, and dominate society or what.  We use sex to sell products, to push social conformity, to scare populations into submission.  There are very real social sanctions for not at least paying lip service to the social models we’re supposed to emulate to attract a mate.  I will buy any product, act in any way, and generally chase whatever expectations society tells me I need to chase in order to be considered a sexual being and make it possible for me to find sexual partners.  Holly has, as usual, explained this better than me:

Man, there’s not much of a slot in the gender spectrum for being butch, female, and straight. Maybe in San Francisco? If it were a viable, non-social-life-killing option I’d take it. I used to be a lot manlier, used to have super-short hair and dress like a dude, and it just didn’t work out. I loved how it felt, but people’s reactions sucked: strangers would be jerks about it and guys told me they really weren’t attracted. Now that I’ve got long lovely red hair and wear skirts and push-up bras and shit, life is better. I still love my flannel and my steel-toe boots and my power tools, but I don’t have the patience or drive (or the she’d-be-hot-in-anything bone structure) to swim against the current on this. Part of attracting boys is wearing the “I’m attracted to boys” uniform, and, well, I know it’s weak but I’d rather have the boys than be a Gender Revolutionary. emphasis mine

And of course, we’re all told that by and large, there is one “I’m attracted to boys” uniform, and to a lesser extent that there’s one “I’m attracted to girls” uniform.  There isn’t any space in that uniform for non-gender conforming people.  There isn’t any space in that uniform for more genuine desires.  There isn’t a lot of space in that pre-fabricated notion of sex that we’re sold to express something as complex and interesting as human sexuality.

Telling people “you can’t have sex unless...” is a powerful force for social control.  You can’t have sex unless you make a certain amount of money.  You can’t have sex unless you pluck and wax yourself into oblivion.  You can’t have sex unless you act passive and demure.  You can’t have sex unless you’re gender-conforming.  You can’t have sex unless you wear a thong or drive a porsche or do something ridiculously specific and of course TOTALLY natural that will make people that you are interested in fall in love or lust with you forever.  Are shaved legs in any intrinsic way more attractive than non-shaven ones?  I mean, really?  What purpose does it serve to tell women (especially straight women), that a pre-condition of having men interested in them is to remove a natural-growing part of their bodies?  It takes a lot of time and hassle to do it, and it can be expensive.

Oh, right - it’s because Gillette can make a lot of money by selling sexual insecurity to women, which again, is fundamental insecurity.  If women are spending money buying razors, and time to shave themselves, then they don’t have as much money or time to push back against a system that tells them their natural bodies aren’t attractive and that they need to be constantly altered and changed in order to be acceptable.  If they aren’t attractive, then they aren’t women.  For someone who identifies as a woman, getting this social message is pretty much being told “you are bad at being yourself.

These messages about what we have to do to have sex are manufactured for the purpose of pushing either products, or maintaining a certain type of status quo in the world.  These messages become true over time, too, as Holly recognized above.  I wish I could tell all my female friends that they shouldn’t pluck or wax or shave, because they are awesome and men and women would want to have sex with them no matter what, but I’d probably be wrong - not making those displays of body modification would probably hurt their chances at finding (especially) male partners.  I wish I could shake my own conditioning that makes me both look for those displays of social conformity in my partners.

So, what have we learned?  First, that sexuality is a pretty fundamental part of human identity.  Second, that sex is coded in our culture as controllable: this is something that can be manipulated, because it is so fundamental.  It can be packaged and sold to us in a very specific box, and most of us will scurry around trying to squeeze our sexuality into that box.  Third, it can be manipulated in ridiculous ways that are arbitrary to the benefit of corporations or individuals.

Back to “rape is not sex:” It’s not.  Rape is a crime of control and dominance.  Manipulating our individual identities for profit or the social status quo is also control and dominance.  I’m not trying to say that a woman shaving her legs because she feels like she has to in order to experience being a sexual human is being victimized like a survivor of rape or sexual assault, but I am thinking that they exist on the same continuum.  One is about social control and dominance, and the other is about individual control and dominance.  Rape is all about sex, because society has done such a good job showing us that sex can be used for control and oppression, and because none of us (even the asexual population) is without a gender and orientation.  Rape seems to be the most extreme example of what society is already doing to us in regards to sex and sexuality: limiting our options and controlling our bodies and forcing us to do things we don’t want to do.  Sex (and race) is the venue where society forces on most of us an image of who we are, what we’re supposed to be FOR, and how we don’t live up.

And this is why articles like Jaclyn’s are so powerful, and so important.  Social control over sex is not completely overwhelming, at least not all the time.  Individual people find ways to push back against a system that tells them how to look, how to act, how to behave, and how to live in order to experience a very basic aspect of being human, and every time someone who’s done that finds a way to talk about it, it puts a little dent in the steel picture of what we’re all supposed to look like.  Every time someone calls bullshit on beauty standards, gender expectations, and the gender binary, sex as a pre-packaged concept that we’re all sold loses some value to dominate us.  The less controllable sex is, the less it can be used as a tool to constrain people, the less rapists will be able to apply it to control survivors. 

* I’m blogging here, and have a fantastic auction going on here that you should check out. I’ll be posting spontaneous flash fiction and poetry inspired by the auction items; many of the stories and poems will draw on my novel in progress, Cicatrix, which deals with sexual violence and recovery.

* Fellow CAPS volunteer Jennifer is blogging here! She’ll be posting spontaneous flash fanfic - list of fandoms will be posted on her blog.

* Adrianne Brennan is blogging here. Her posts will include her thoughts on writing, never-before posted excerpts of her works, and answers to any questions you pose to her beforehand.

We are not just doing Blogathon because it’s fun - we’re doing it for BARCC. We are doing this goofy but incredibly arduous thing because we believe strongly in BARCC’s mission.

So sponsor us! Click to donate; you can put “blogathon” or “blogathon” + a blogger’s name or whatever you like in the comments field. Then please e-mail your receipt to the blogger you’re sponsoring so we can keep a running total. There will be a prize drawing! There will be silly incentives for every thousand dollars we raise for BARCC! It will be ridiculously awesome. Read along, comment, and sponsor!

Blogathon kicks off at 9am tomorrow. Party time!

This will be my eighth Blogathon, and the fourth year I’d raising money for BARCC. Blogathon is completely exhausting, yet totally worth it, as you’ll see below. Yes, I’m taking the lazy way out and just reposting the announcement from my personal blog; I’m saving my writerly energy for Saturday!

I’ll be posting short fiction and poetry, composed spontaneously, every half hour for 24 hours. That’s 49 pieces of story, automatic for the people. I’m also running an auction of wonderful stuff donated by wonderful people; each post will have a link to an auction item, and the story therein will be inspired by said auction item. (Auction will run July 26-August 2.) Yeah. Other people just post “I am so tired” for hours. I do Blogathon backwards and in heels. Because it wasn’t hard enough?

Once again, my chosen charity is BARCC. BARCC is the second oldest rape crisis center in the country, and one of the biggest, with a staff of 20 and a volunteer corps of 120+ who put in hours equivalent to 19 additional staff members. We have a 24-hour hotline and medical advocacy program (medical advocates go to the hospital with survivors for evidence collection), a community awareness/public education/outreach program (which is really unique and ever-expanding), legal advocacy, legislative advocacy (we helped change the law on restraining orders recently so you can get one if you’re not in an intimate relationship with your stalker, go us!), case management, and counseling (up to twelve sessions).

BARCC provides all of this and more completely free of charge.

And we are able to do so partly because of you.

This will be my fourth year doing Blogathon for BARCC. Over the past three Blogathons, we raised over $11,000 for BARCC.

You have paid for 880 hotline calls, or 147 emergency room accompaniments, or 165 counseling sessions, or the complete training of 11 volunteers.

You did that.

Let’s do it again.

My goal this year is $5,000. That’s 400 hotline calls, 67 ER accompaniments, 75 counseling sessions. That’s hundreds of people you can help.

Click here to sponsor me; e-mail me your receipt so I can keep a running total. Go bid on nifty stuff. And spread the word.

But there’s a whole other category of obstacles that survivors face to reporting assaults to the criminal justice system: attitude and philosophy.  If survivors are viewed as hysterical women with an agenda, police are less likely to actively pursue their case.  If there’s a shortage of SANE nurses and rape kits don’t get processed, prosecutors are less likely to pursue a case.  If police just don’t want to deal with rape survivors, because those cases are tough and take a lot of time and are stressful, they are less likely to pursue a case.

This type of issue is not endemic to rape as a crime the same way that physical evidence might be in certain types of rape situations.  There is nothing intrinsic to rape that requires the justice system to judge survivors, re-traumatize them, and drop cases.  There are ways to remove those obstacles, like training special sexual assault police units (which Boston has, thankfully), fully funding SANE programs, and keeping survivors regularly updated on the progress of their cases.

I’m happy today, because I’ve gotten some good news recently about progress in exactly this area.  Amnesty International just sent me a press release about the passage of the Tribal Law and Order Act as an amendment to H.R. 725.  This is good news!  Native American women and Native Alaskan women face a disproportionate number of rapes and sexual assaults, and until this act (which Obama still has to sign into law), survivors faced a ridiculous number of bureaucratic obstacles to reporting their assaults or getting necessary services like rape kits.  The hope is this new law will reduce a great number of those obstacles that are based on jurisdictional problems, and allow survivors in those communities much quicker access to the justice system. 

Likewise, in DC, the police department is undertaking a review of its rape and sexual assault policies.  Go read the article - it’s an impressive case of the police union actively working to protect survivors and inform the public more openly about sexual assaults.  This is the type of institutional review I’d like to see happen more often, and represents a strong push towards eliminating those obstacles for survivors that we can easily remove.

As I wrote about last week, the more survivors that can come forward and speak about their assaults, whether personally or through the medium of a police report, the harder and harder it becomes for the rest of society to view rape as a side-issue, one for women and maybe gay men to deal with in their spare time.  If every survivor filed a report, every police office in this country would be completely overwhelmed and we might see this for what it is: a public health crisis spiraled wildly out of control.  Maybe then we’d put the type of resources behind ending rape and sexual assault that it needs and deserved.

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Since this is a positive news day, though, enjoy some fun music!  The Stills, “I’m With You” (h/t to Master Rhinehart for this).

It’s taken me about a week to get around to writing this. Because, frankly, everything about this makes me want to punch people in the face. Not you - I’m sure you’re a lovely person. But Polanski and his supporters. Also… it’s a big story. There’s a lot to cover here - more than one can reasonably cover in a mere blog post. Someone ought to write a book. So it’s also a matter of picking a point small enough to discuss.

As you can imagine, I’ve been reading up on this case rather a lot. It was on author Andrew Vachss’s website that I noticed something of particular interest - Vachss has compiled early media coverage of the case.

In the earliest article on record, it’s referred to as rape.

I was struck by this, because in all of the modern articles, the media infuriatingly refers to this as a “sex case”. Indeed, as early as one year after the rape, the media had already shifted to saying things like “sexual intercourse”. But that first article, from the Washington Post, says flat-out “Polish film director Roman Polanski, widower of murdered actress Sharon Tate, was free on bond today on charges of luring a 13-year-old girl to the home of Jack Nicholson under the pretext of photographing her, then drugging and raping her....In addition to the rape charges, Polanski also was booked on suspicion of sodomy, child molestation and furnishing dangerous drugs to a minor.”

This shouldn’t have made me stop in my tracks. This shouldn’t be rare, this actual telling of the facts of the case. And if you doubt that those are the facts of the case, you should read the testimony (trigger warning on that, of course).

No matter what Whoopi Goldberg says, this is rape.

Call it what it is.

Harriet J has a great idea here for a little culture jamming:

Here is one way you can fight rape culture. If you have just watched a movie with a rape scene:

1. Go to the Wikipedia page
2. Note the scene’s description
3. Note that it likely does not use the word “rape,” but probably instead says “have sex,” “seduces,” or “love scene.”
4. Revise the description of the scene and use the word “rape”
5. Go back in 6 months and return it to “rape,” as a rape apologist or rapist has by now has revised it back to “love scene”
6. Repeat

You can do this with news articles, too, and I hope you will. When you see articles about Polanski, comment on them. If they’re calling it “sex” tell them they have the wrong word - the word they’re looking for is rape. If they actually say rape, thank them. Make this visible. Make them call it what it is.

This is on my mind because of a tabling event I did this weekend with BARCC.  We were providing information at an ethnic fair and as is normal for my experience at tabling events, virtually no one wanted to talk to us.  My fellow volunteers and I talked about a couple of the obstacles that might be keeping people away from the table - we didn’t look like members of the community in which the fair was taking place, we had limited language skills for the population we were serving (although I don’t know how anyone would know that by looking at us), and we don’t really have any fun things to give away (compared to the Boston Public Health Commission, anyway, which has TONS of cool stuff).  We talked a little bit about the particular obstacles that exist in minority communities to talking about or reporting rape - Dr. Katherine Morrison at Curry College has done some awesome research about those obstacles, specifically for African-American women - but one of my fellows made a great point.  He said something along the lines of, “it doesn’t matter what culture or community we’re talking about.  No one talks about rape.”

He’s right.  While public health specialists have written many books and articles about appropriate ways to discuss rape and sexual assault in minority communities, it’s not like mainstream, white American culture is particularly open about it.  It’s not like there’s any magical community where rape is discussed regularly with the type of urgency and honesty that its prevalence demands, except maybe the insides of a rape crisis center.  So I’ve decided to ask why we don’t talk about rape.  I’d like you all to chime in on the conversation.  Here are my theories:

1. Rape is tightly wound up in sex, obviously.  Our culture isn’t too open about sex in general, and talking about rape often requires talking about sex and how the two are different.  Considering that we live in a country where a good chunk of the population doesn’t get any comprehensive sexual education and doesn’t really know how conception works, it’s not super-surprising that people aren’t OK talking about about violence that seems to share so many things in common with sex.
2. Rape is scary to talk about.  Even in our best rape prevention literature and workshops, talking about rape can make ME feel paranoid.  It’s not helpful, most of the time, to tell young women and men that every man they meet is a potential predator and could assault them at any minute, but...with the social camouflage that perpetrators have to operate, and with the casual misogyny that exists in mainstream culture, it’s true that most people have a difficult time telling who the predators are.
3. For straight men (or at least for me), there was a slightly different aspect of this paranoia: the realization that I, as a man, was a symbol of potential abuse, trauma, and misery to roughly half of the human population.  No, not all or even most women assume that I’m a rapist, but as a social symbol, as a man, I’ve had to learn that one of the things my body and form and gender identity represents to the rest of the world is violence.  That was chilling to realize, when it finally hit home.
4. Entrenched interests actively work to prevent us from talking about it.  Thomas, I think, coined the phrase ”the pro-rape lobby,” and I think that’s a pretty apt description of the forces I see at work here.  This “lobby” is a group of people who have vested interest in gender relations remaining the way they are: imbalanced and unjust.  There is a tremendous amount of power and money in keeping the system the way it is now; talking about rape would shake those foundations a lot.  Using that article that Thomas wrote above as an example: how much money do the Steelers stand to lose if Roethlisberger doesn’t play for them?  How much do they stand to lose if they don’t make it to the Super Bowl?  How many people care about the welfare of a survivor when weighed against all that power and cash?

This is where I think a lot of the stigma of talking about rape comes from - the entrenched power enforcing it.  I don’t believe that there’s any inherent shame in being assault by another person.  Why should there be?  But survivors regularly tell BARCC that they feel ashamed of being assaulted, they feel stupid, they feel like “they should have known better” or similar things.  People don’t come to those conclusions from nothing; they come to those conclusions because a large segment of the population regularly tells us that it is our fault for being assaulted, that we are stupid for “letting” someone attack us.  Shame and fear and silence are not inherent to rape as a social phenomenon; they exist because we as a culture have made them part of experiencing rape.  Survivors in the past who have tried to speak up, and speak up powerfully and publicly, met with powerful social forces that were designed to prevent them quiet.

This is a place where I think allies have a tremendous responsibility, but also a tremendous opportunity, to change our cultural dialogue.  Survivors face about a million and one obstacles to speaking out about their experience, and many of those obstacles are dangerous to a survivor’s livelihood or personal safety.  It is both unreasonable and unfair to expect survivors to want to speak out about their rapes, but allies can help to shield those that do from the consequences they might face (whether it’s the hazards of the criminal justice system, loss of job or hostility from family members and other friends who knew the perpetrator). 

Allies can also try to open up the cultural dialogue about rape overall, and to target that pro-rape lobby directly where possible.  One of my pastimes is reading about other social movements to see where they come from and how they achieved their objectives.  One that comes to mind specifically in regards to silencing is the LGBT movement’s fight to get the rest of the world to recognize the dangers of HIV/AIDS.  The history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) I found to be fascinating and instructive, and with quite a few parallels to the work BARCC is doing.  ACT UP needed to push the rest of the country to understand that AIDS was a real thing, a massive problem; that the mainstream media sources were spreading lazy or incorrect information about it; and that politicians and decision-makers were waiting far too long to take action to stop its spread.  Activists who went on to be active with ACT UP also created the now iconic slogan “silence = death.”

This is what I think we need to see to push back against the pro-rape lobby.  We need to both provide survivors with the space to speak and the support and tools necessary to shield them from the social forces that want to keep them quiet, and continue to press the dialogue outside of just survivor experiences.  The more we talk about rape, the less power shame and fear have, and the less reasonable it becomes to keep the entrenched gender system in line the way it is. 

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So.

Mr. Gibson is again in the news for letting his inner asshole off the leash. He has again revealed himself as a tiny, terrified man who has to lash out at people around him in order to feel powerful and secure. And what’s more, he’s revealed that he has less than sane ideas about the social habits of men of other races than himself, as well as some pretty loathsome ideas about what kind of infraction is worthy of a sentence of gang rape.

His train to creeptown is pretty well documented at this point, and I don’t feel like I need to link to sources for it—Google’s got everything you need on that score.

What I do want to talk about, though, is the pushback I’m starting to see from people who seem to want to blame his victim for ‘exposing a private conversation’. And who are trying to say ‘she edited the tapes to put a bad light on it.’

Let’s pause here, while we consider under what possible light could ‘If you get raped by a pack of f***ing n*****s it’ll be your own f***ing fault’ be construed as anything BUT loathsome, abusive, and evil. Even if he’d said “If you get raped by a pack of fluffy bunnies it’ll be your own fluffy fault”, it would STILL be inexcusable. But given that he was insinuating that black men have nothing better to do with their time than to roam the streets in packs looking for women to rape, I don’t think we can say that statement was in any way innocent, or in any way not-racist. So why does it suddenly become excusable solely because he didn’t think he would be overheard while he was saying it?

Of COURSE he wouldn’t say something like that in front of obvious witnesses—the man was already made to apologize for his drunken racism when he was pulled over in California on a DUI, and he knows that image is everything. But all abusers know the same thing. They know that their power base rests on isolating their victim, undermining her support system, and above all, appearing utterly blameless to anyone who might be close enough to perceive what’s going on, or to interfere with it. Abusers KNOW this shit, people. They know how to make their victim seem crazy, hysterical, unbalanced, even to her own mind, to her own children, to her own family, and they know how to gaslight the press, the authorities, and the world outside their own little lair into thinking the abuser himself is the one getting the raw end of the deal.

Also, I feel it’s relevant to point out that “Der schlechte Affe hasst seinen eigenen Geruch.” The bad monkey hates his own smell. Or to put it in the words of H.L. Mencken, “It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.” Mr. Gibson seems quite comfortable with the idea of a woman deserving rape on the grounds of having irritated him personally, doesn’t it seem? One wonders (but not very hard, really,) if in a shadowy corner of his imagination he himself isn’t roaming the streets in packs looking for women who need raping. Who have it coming. For whom a brutal abuse by many angry men—or maybe by him many times over,—would be no better than she deserved.

At one point on the tape, Oksana asks Gibson what kind of a man punches his lover in the face while she’s holding their child. Now take a moment to think of this in a more familiar context than two celebrities in a custody battle—put this into context of your own family for a moment. Imagine your father saying that to your mother. Think about what she could possibly have done to have your own father punch her in the head, twice, while she was carrying an infant in her arms. Maybe your sibling, maybe yourself. Think about what excuse you could possibly accept for his behavior. What she could possibly have done that would make punching her in the head, twice, while she couldn’t even put her hands up to protect herself, excusable.

Then consider Gibson’s reply to the accusation; “You f***ing deserved it!”

In what light is that acceptable, people? In what light does his not realizing he’d be HEARD excuse the fact that he did it, he isn’t sorry for doing it, and if he could get away with it, would clearly do it again.

I’m sure the FBI conviction files are full of criminals who definitely and absolutely would NEVER have said certain things if they’d known someone was recording them. And the jails are full of violent criminals who would never have done what they’d been convicted of if they’d realized someone was there to see and testify. All it means is that, as an abuser, he had a failure in judgment, and lost control of his victim.

And in answer to the people who express suspicion over her having taped what was ostensibly a private conversation, consider this: Why would she have taped it if this were the first abusive call she’d received? Why would she bother to tape it if she didn’t know that the likelihood of his verbally abusing her wasn’t very high indeed? She knew what to expect from him when she set the recording device up, and he delivered the unfiltered goods because he wanted to abuse her. He wanted to make her hurt, and she was out of arm’s reach, and so the phone was good enough for the moment.

Abused women often have to overcome the social camouflage of their abusers in shocking, and uncomfortable ways. They often have no choice but to wave the bloodied laundry of their ‘private’ situation on the street for all to see, or at least so that they can’t easily pretend not to see it. They often have to resort to documentation of just this sort of ‘private correspondence’ in order to prove to anybody else that they are actually in danger, are actually being hurt, are actually being killed in little pieces every day. Did she ask for money to hold the tapes back? I honestly don’t know.

But I do know that if I was being attacked like that by someone as rich and influential as Mel Gibson, I would feel very deeply that the protection of money and possibly even extortion was a necessary thing. Shame is apparently the only stumbling block to his abusive tendencies, and so if I had stood in her shoes, you damn betcha I’d have tried to use it to get the bastard off my back. Because compared to punching me in the face, putting my daughter in danger, and asserting that I deserved gang rape for my defiance of his expectations, I can’t say I’d feel extortion was much of a crime at all.

In short, I put it to you that this was not a case of editing, this was a case of abuse. This was not a domestic dispute and a nasty custody case, this was a victim trying to establish incontrovertible proof of what was happening to her. If Gibson hadn’t been a celebrity, none of us would have heard about this tape except for the local sheriff and/or family services in Oksana’s town. Just like the internet at large never hears the hundreds of other abuse tapes that victims have to create in order to finally get someone to believe that what is happening to them is real. Just like the internet at large never gets to hear but a fraction of the stories about the victims who never do get anyone to believe their story until it’s too late.

This happens every day. And there is nothing out of pattern in what Gibson was taped while screaming. There is nothing out of character in the threats, the abuse, and the insinuations—he might have been reading from a well-researched script, the dance steps are so exact. I have heard this story before—it usually ends in either blood or tears. I hope that this time it ends in safety for the victim, and a well-deserved shaming for the abuser.