Monthly Archives: October 2011
Dear Facebook: Rape Is No Joke
by Angi Becker Stevens @ The Ms Magazine Blog
According to Facebook’s terms of service, users are not permitted to post content that is hateful, threatening or incites violence. But it appears that, in the minds of the Facebook powers-that-be, pages that encourage rape don’t violate that rule.
For two months now, Facebook users have been campaigning for the site to take down several “rape joke” pages. The titles of these pages include such gems as “Riding your girlfriend softly, cause you don’t want to wake her up” and “You know she’s playing hard to get when you’re chasing her down an alleyway.” Hundreds of Facebook users have reported the pages as Terms of Service violations, and a petition at Change.org (see below) demanding their removal has received over 130,000 signatures. But Facebook has yet to take action. Dozens of pages advocating rape or violence against women remain on the site, many with tens of thousands of fans.
The defenders of these pages say that we need to lighten up. Learn to take a joke. Feminists are, once again, being humorless. We are making mountains out of molehills when we become outraged by such trivial things as pro-rape Facebook pages.
According to statistics, 17.4 percent of women in the U.S. have survived a completed or attempted rape, and that figure would likely be higher if victims were not so often silent about their experiences. Yet we are not supposed to question what it means for us, as women, to live in a culture that dehumanizes us with acts of sexual assault (the vast majority of which are committed by men we know personally) and then dehumanizes us further by pointing and laughing at our victimization, belittling trauma with crude humor. This is the definition of rape culture: a society that upholds the conditions for sexual violence against women and treats this violence as an unchangeable norm.
Anyone who claims that a rape joke is just a joke does not understand how rape culture works. Just as racist jokes can only be found funny within a culture of racism, rape jokes could not exist outside of a culture of rape. When our society allows men to believe that having sex with a sleeping woman is not rape; that having sex with a girlfriend or previous sexual partner is never rape; that having sex with someone who is too intoxicated to consent or object is not rape; men are taught to feel entitled to these acts (and women are taught to accept them in silence). When our culture is casually permissive of sexual assault, it inevitably perpetuates more sexual assault.
It would be absurd, of course, to suggest that anyone goes out and commits assault as a direct reaction to a Facebook page. But in reducing sexual violence to nothing more than a joke, they reflect and perpetuate the idea that women are objects to be used for the sexual satisfaction of men. Countless seemingly small things work together to uphold that kind of pervasive misogyny.
It would be naïve to imagine that the removal of these pages will in and of itself end rape culture. But that doesn’t mean the appropriate response is to simply accept them. Daunting as the task may be, the only way to end rape culture is to confront it.
Facebook is certainly not responsible for the prevalence of sexual assault in our society. But those in a position of power at Facebook are responsible for the choice they make to either condone or condemn the use of sexual assault as humor. Silence, as the saying goes, is acceptance. And Facebook’s refusal to take sexual violence seriously is exactly the kind of complicit silence that rape culture thrives on.
To sign change.org’s petition, click here.
This piece originally appeared on the Ms. Magazine Blog
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If Gays Can Marry Can I Marry My Dog?
When will people understand that tradition is just a stumbling block in the pursuit of progressive thinking? My dog and I are very much in love. She has been my friend, protector and lover for eight years. I firmly believe that we are both deserving of a legal domestic partnership, too. If the gay/lesbian community can be granted such a thing, then why can’t we? Heck, I’d be willing to bet that there would be less uproar over me kissing my dog on the front page.
This was an actual letter written by Joe Freeman and published in the San Jose Mercury News on May 21, 2008, on the cusp of gay marriage becoming legal in California, and amidst visions of husbands kissing husbands and wives kissing wives.
While some feared immanent bestiality, others worried that if gays could marry, next thing you know, adults would be marrying kids. It’s all the same, right?
At the very least, what about consent?
An adult man can give consent to marry another man. An adult woman can give consent to marry another woman. But children are too young to fully understand what they would be getting into by agreeing to marriage — if they were asked their opinion at all. Children cannot give consent. Neither can dogs or cats or birds or lizards or cows… Bestiality and child marriage are nothing like gay marriage. Funny that ol’ Joe couldn’t make the distinction.
Joe is also worried about going beyond tradition, or traditional morality that is based in religion. But after all the atrocities committed in the name of religion, whether the Crusades or 9/11 or cutting women’s genitals from their bodies (female genital mutilation), I don’t find religion to be the best guide to ethics.
So religious morality can seem hardly moral at all, and too often the opposite.
Better to base morality on whether someone is being harmed.
I can see how homophobia hurts people. Gay bashing harms victims. Homophobia inflicts emotional suffering, sometimes so severe that gays and lesbians take their lives. At the least self-worth can greatly suffer. But those who bash also lose their humanity.
When parents can’t get married, children cannot visit a sick parent in the hospital, they can lose out on social security or inheritance if a parent dies, they aren’t guaranteed child support if parents separate. These kids miss out on the support and stability that other kids take for granted.
On the other hand, I don’t see how homosexuality harms anyone.
We would all be better off extending love instead of hate and contempt.
October is LGBT History Month.
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Women, Objects of Desire (Even for Women?)
As women have become increasingly sexually objectified, even straight women were more aroused by a nude woman than by a nude man in one study, when measuring blood flow to the vagina, researchers found.
Is this true? A student of mine wondered. And do the rules of religion collide with sexuality? My student, named Laurelle, garnered a peek at both matters with a simple focus on threesomes.
Laurelle surveyed her friends, family, and coworkers, and had a friend post questions on his forum. Twenty-five women and twenty-five men of varying ages, races, and religious perspectives responded to these questions:
Would you like to do a threesome with two women? With two men? What religion do you belong to? What’s your sexual orientation?
It’s not a scientific study, but I found the results interesting, and with permission I’m sharing her findings.
Eight percent of the men and sixteen percent of the women were bisexual. The rest were straight. No gays or lesbians, which surprised her. (When I survey my students I sometimes receive far more “bi” responses than gay or lesbian, as well. Also surprises me.)
Now, on to the first survey question. Let’s start with men. Not because they are numero uno, but because the women’s answers are perhaps more surprising.
Does belonging to an anti-gay religion make men less inclined toward threesomes? No. While 72% of the men said they’d enjoy a ménage à trois with two women, the number rose to 78% of men belonging to a religion that disapproves of homosexuality. Are they ignoring their religious tenants? Or do they think lesbians don’t count? None of the men – even those who were bi – were interested in sex with two men. Interesting.
Laurelle found it refreshing that twenty eight percent of the guys just wanted one partner. (Better than the 90-plus percent she’d expected would crave threesomes.)
How about women? Those who belonged to an anti-gay religion were less likely than men to want threesomes. But then, women were less likely to want them, overall. Forty percent of the women were interested in trying a threesome involving two women, while only sixteen percent were interested in two men. Yet forty-eight percent of those belonging to a religion that disapproves homosexuality were up for such trysts.
Laurelle’s sample showed a higher interest in threesomes than a survey that I have yet to
post. Her sample comes from family, friends and coworkers, while mine comes from women’s psych and women’s studies students. Maybe she runs with a more experimental crowd.
Still, interesting that these straight women were more interested in sex with two women than two men. And that bi men felt the same way.
The results lend support to the notion that women are seen more sexually than men even among straight women and bi men (at least when they’re in the role of a sex-object casual hookup). Biology? More likely culture.
From the time girls are small they are bombarded with sexualized images of women, but encounter relatively few such images of men. Any wonder, then, that even hetero women can end up seeing women as sexier than men? Some call if female sexual alienation. When we live in a world that is more controlled by men than by women, on some level we all end up seeing the world through male eyes.
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