Category Archives: violence against women
Don’t Reject Your Culture, Even When It Mutilates You
With recent new good news, I’m updating a past post and expressing my thanks, first, that only a very small part of the world lives under the Taliban, and second, that a young girl now has a new nose.
The August 9, 2010 cover of Time shocked the world as an 18 year old Afghani named Aisha gazed from behind her mutilated nose. Punishment for running away from home. Aisha had run away because she feared she would die from her in-laws’ abuse.
Eventually discovered, a Taliban-run court ordered her nose and ears be cut off, declaring she must be made an example. This was effectively a death sentence, since it was assumed she would bleed to death.
A death sentence? For running away? From people who might kill you?
Her husband took her to a mountain clearing where he slashed Aisha and left her to die.
Yet she lived. After passing out from pain, she eventually awoke, choking on her own blood. Then Aisha summoned her strength and crawled to her grandfather’s house. Fortunately, her father managed to get her to an American medical facility.
Alive but disfigured, sympathy arose around the world, and the non-profit Grossman Burn Center in California has now fitted her with a prosthetic nose. They are hoping to eventually do reconstructive surgery.
The Taliban tell their people that women’s rights are a Western concept that breaks away from Islamic teaching. But the Quran says nothing of cutting away ears and noses, and leaving girls and women to die. Early Islam actually had a feminist air.
I’ve often thought that if Asian women had gained the vote before their American sisters, the powers that be would warn us away from rejecting our religion and our culture.
Is it really a loss of culture or “religion” that is feared? Or do these men just worry that women might gain equal footing?
Meanwhile, beware: Don’t reject the culture that mutilates you body, mind and soul.
Georgia Platts
A version of this article was originally published August 3, 2010.
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Sources: Baker, Aryn, “Afghan Women And The Return of The Taliban.” Time Magazine. August 9, 2010; Bsimmons; Daily Mail
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What Do Top Model and Hard Core Porn Have in Common?
What do hard core porn and reality show, Top Model, have in common? Hard core pornography often gets the viewer off on women’s suffering. So does Top Model.
In the first episode the models underwent Brazilian bikini waxes on camera. As Jennifer Pozner described it, “Cameras flitted back and forth from their pained facial expressions to their nearly nude legs spread wide in the air, while the audio lingered at length on the models’ blood-curdling screams as hot wax was spread over their genitals and their pubic hair was ripped off.”
The only thing missing was the close-up.
Pozner went on to describe how contestants have been asked to drop from platforms onto surfaces with little cushioning, or to sit on ice sculptures in freezing temperatures. One model was asked to pose in a pool of icy water – shaking, shivering, and begging for a break – until her body began to shut down from hypothermia and she was rushed to a hospital.
If pain and suffering isn’t imminent, models are asked to act as though it is, coached to look “scared! Something’s chasing you! Something’s coming to get you!” Scared, “but pretty,” that is.
Host, Tyra Banks, has also asked models to act like they are in pain: chest pain, fingers slammed in a door, strangulation… A signature pose was suggested for one model, “Look like you’re getting punched.”
Beautiful, sexy women in fear and pain. All reminiscent of hard-core pornography. In the popular video, “Two in the Seat #3,” an actress is asked by an off-camera interviewer what will happen. She replies, “I’m here to get pounded.”
In other pornos women are hit or raped. Too-large objects are inserted as actresses scream out. Sometimes pain is registered in penetration. Even when suffering isn’t purposely placed in the script, directors don’t bother to edited it out, suggesting viewers’ taste. More and more, the new edge in porn involves cruelty.
I worry about a society that develops a taste for women’s torment. Or for anyone’s distress. As pain becomes eroticized, women can develop a desire for their own suffering. My women students sometimes talk of getting turned on by a little S&M in the bedroom. Depending on how far it goes, the sex play can lead to broken skin, bruising and infections.
We worry about women being battered. Should we worry when women come to crave their own abuse?
As they sexily submit to domination and acts of violence by their male partners, male domination, itself, becomes sexy.
We may have come a long way, ladies. But we’ve still got a long way to go.
Georgia Platts
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Sources: Robert Jensen, Ph.D. “The painful truth about today’s pornography – and what men can do about it.” Ms. Spring 2004; John Stoltenberg. “Pornography and Freedom” in Susan Shaw and Janet Lee’s Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions, 4th ed. 2009
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Rape Victims Shamed Into Suicide. In Pakistan. In America.
Assiya was sixteen when a “family friend” sold her to two Pakistani criminals who beat and raped her over the next year. Eventually the criminals traded her to the police in exchange for pinning one of their robberies on the girl.
Assiya had thought her troubles were over. But instead, the officers took their turn beating and raping her for several days before letting her go.
The police weren’t worried Assiya would tell. She was expected to commit suicide, as sexually assaulted girls had always done to rinse the dishonor of sexual assault from their families.
But instead, Assiya did the inconceivable. She accused her attackers.
This story is shocking. Why would anyone, or any culture, expect a raped girl to commit suicide? As though the shame were hers.
Yet sometimes America doesn’t seem so very different.
Cut to the U.S. where fourteen-year-old Samantha Kelly’s mother told police that her daughter had sex with eighteen-year-old Joseph Tarnopolski. He was arrested, though it’s unclear whether the charge was statutory or forcible rape.
After a local Fox News affiliate identified Kelly by name, she was bullied so much at school that she finally committed suicide. Yet another reminder of the stigma victims can face when they report this crime.
It’s sad to see that even today, in Pakistan and in America, rape victims can be shamed into killing themselves.
Georgia Platts
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Frats Invite Sluts, Bitches; Women Accept Degradation. Why?
“Dear Bitches, I mean witches.”
So began Duke’s Alpha Delta Phi’s e-mailed invitation to their Halloween party. It continues just as charmingly:
“The Brothers of Alpha Delta Phi know what true fear is. Fear is having someone say ‘I love you.’ … Fear is riding the C1 with Helen Keller at the helm (not because shes deaf and blind, but because she is a woman). Fear is waking up with no wallet, phone, keys, or front tooth next to a girl who you could generously deem a 3.”
Not to be outdone, Duke’s Sigma Nu frat offered their own enticement:
“Whether your dressing up as a slutty nurse, a slutty doctor, a slutty schoolgirl, or just a total slut, we invite you to find shelter in the confines of Partners D.”
Ummm, how appealing! (And I don’t just mean their grammar and spelling.)
Someone had the sense to print out the invites and scrawl handwritten messages: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” “Is this why you came to Duke?” and then wallpaper the campus.
Strangely, sorority sisters interviewed took it all in stride as “boys-will-be-boys.”
“Honestly, when I first received those e-mails I didn’t think anything of it,” said Emily Fausch, of Delta Delta Delta sorority. “This is the kind of thing I’ve come to expect from fraternities. In my heart, I know it’s a problem but I’ve really gotten used to it. I don’t take it too seriously. I think that college boys will be college boys.”
Now, not all fraternities are created equal. Some actually work to be respectful toward women. But at many frats, women are routinely degraded in attempts to create a sense of male superiority and “manhood” by putting women down, according to sociologist, Michael Kimmel.
But why do women so often support their own disgrace by continuing to fraternize with the frats? This woman’s comment that she’s simply gotten used to it is telling.
We live in a society that sees women as lesser-than, and which sexualizes male dominance. Both lay the groundwork for accepting ill treatment.
A few quick examples: Man, brother, and guy encompass women, but woman, sister, and gal don’t encompass men. So man becomes primary, and woman secondary. A woman marries and becomes Mrs. Leonard Smith. A man never becomes Mrs. Emily Struthers. Unless it’s an insult. Send a card from the family? Likely dad’s name goes first, then mom’s, then the children in order of appearance. Men tend to feel insulted taking the secondary spot. Women are just used to it.
We sexualize male dominance when Rhett takes Scarlett up the stairs for a night of marital rape and Scarlett cheerfully awakens the next morning. Or when Rihanna sings about enjoying mistreatment from her man, while Eminem celebrates abusing women. Watching women enjoy humiliation in porn or mainstream movies like The Secretary also eroticizes male dominance. The list goes on.
Continually treated as secondary, second-rate treatment becomes taken-for-granted, invisible. The women are used to it. It seems natural. Sometimes even sexy.
As too many frat brothers intensify the world of insult, women acclimate to the higher level shame.
All this teaches women to accept attitudes and behavior that regard them as second-class.
A college roommate of mine dated a frat boy who treated her like dirt. She defended him to all of us who cared about her. She had certainly learned to accept her own humiliation.
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Stephen Fry: Only Men Truly Like Sex
British actor, Stephen Fry, has created controversy with a claim that women don’t like sex as much as men, in a recent interview with Attitude Magazine. He feels sorry for straight men because women only have sex with them as the “price they are willing to pay for a relationship.” More proof of women’s sexual disinterest: they don’t go off having random sex in churchyards and restrooms, like he apparently does, to “get my f’ing rocks off.”
One woman questioned equating sexual enjoyment with random restroom meetings, “Most of us prefer intimacy with men who understand trust and respect, and give time to the art of seduction. And the men who want us are not dupes or dogs on heat. Trust me — more erotic pleasure and excitement is experienced with a true love on clean sheets than a quick one with some sad, unwashed, unnamed bloke on a gravestone.”
Meanwhile, British feminists like Germaine Greer have publicly denounced him.
At the same time, anyone who looks at social research will know that there is a kernel of truth to what Frye says. On average, women do report liking sex less.
Cross-cultural research and survey data suggest that while women have the capacity to be extremely sexual and sexually interested – probably more so than men with their capability for multiple orgasms – our culture does dampen women’s sexuality.
Frye feels sorry for men, but it’s a patriarchal culture that has created this situation.
Sex isn’t so appealing when society and religion send signals that women’s sexuality is sinful, or when women are slut-shamed and seen as devaluing themselves when they “give it up,” and blamed for not controlling men’s sexuality. On some college campuses men take the walk of fame Sunday morning, while women take the walk of shame.
And who gets screwed, f’d, banged, nailed (the list goes on)?
Meanwhile, a cock is proud. But “down there” is shameful.
Rape and incest also dampen women’s sexuality. As one of my students related, “I was molested by a family member for seven years of my life before I could tell anyone, and it repressed me to the core. I didn’t want to be touched by anyone, and I wanted to look ugly. I still fight some of these battles today.” Rape and incest are higher in patriarchal societies. In cultures where men value women, there is little violence against them.
Surveys show that women who don’t feel sexy can also have a harder time enjoying sex. With narrow notions of what sexy is, a lot of women find the bedroom something less than fun.
With all of these negative forces in play, it’s no wonder women are so often repressed.
For women to fully engage and enjoy their sexuality, we as a culture must start loving women.
Georgia Platts
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Rand Paul Supporter Wants Apology. Like Rapists, Batterers: It’s Her Fault
She made me do it!
How many times have we heard that?
We’ve probably all seen video of Rand Paul supporter, Tim Profitt, stomping on a woman’s head for expressing her right to free speech. (If you haven’t, see video here).
Now he says she should apologize for making him stomp on her head.
This is right in line with a man who insists the Yale Women’s Center brought the “no means yes” rape threats on themselves: “The sole purpose behind this building is to give hatemongering academic feminists a base to spread their propaganda and recruit new members… (the frat) most likely did it because feminazis always go out of their way to harm men… it might explain the motivation behind their actions.”
Oddly, these are not uncommon sentiments.
Rapists share a similar viewpoint: She dressed provocatively! She made me rape her.
The attitude echoes among wife batterers: She didn’t have dinner ready! She bought the wrong brand of beer! She made me beat her.
They all share the narcissistic quality of distorting themselves into an image of perfection, while projecting their own failings onto others. In their book, women constantly make men do terrible things to them.
In a world where men are given greater privilege, less-evolved men simply expect to have greater license. It’s natural, to be expected. Women must obey their husbands or be disciplined (beaten). Men have more right to women’s bodies than women do themselves. Uppity women who want change can expect torment for their efforts. And sometimes, when you’re bigger and stronger, and you can stomp on a woman’s head: might just makes right.
Georgia Platts
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Mind of a Rapist: Trying to Bridge a Gap between a Small Self and a Big Man
“I was in control for the first time of my life. I just felt like I had a little more power for once.”
“It could have been anyone. It could have been a guy. I was just mad.”
The first quote comes from Cary Stayner, who raped and murdered three young women in Yosemite. The second is from David Burpee, who raped a 17-year-old after having a fight with his girlfriend over getting fired.
Different rapists have different motives. These two are characteristic of the “Walter Mitty” type.
Walter Mitty is a fictional character. He’s an ordinary, ineffectual man who tries to bridge the gap between who he is and who he wants to be by imagining himself in situations of grandeur: a wartime pilot, an ER surgeon, a killer.
Walter Mitty rapists do something similar. They see themselves as less than the “big man” they yearn to be. And they have limited notions of what men are. To them, masculinity means power, dominance, aggression, violence, virility. They use rape to bridge the gap between their sorry selves and the dominant men they seek to be, whether it’s not-so-powerful Cary Stayner or David Burpee getting a tongue lashing from his girlfriend because he can’t hold down a job.
I was reminded of the Walter Mitty rapist after the Yale frat-boy chants of “No means yes, yes means anal,” near the women’s dorms and the Women’s Center.
What’s the connection between rape-threatening frat boys and the Walter Mitty rapist? The intent is the same: both are trying to create personal identities as superior and “manly.” The process of achieving that goal is the same: expressing sexual dominance. The degree of harm is the only difference.
But does rape really create superiority? The dehumanized act actually points in the opposite direction.
Georgia Platts
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Yale Fraternity Chants “No Means Yes.” Men? Or Scaredy Cats?
The boys (not men) of Yale’s Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) chanted, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” at the Women’s Center on campus last week. See video.
What was their motive?
When people do things like this – put others down – they’re trying to create an identity for themselves and for the people they are targeting.
“No means yes.” While rape has a sexual component, it’s mostly about power. In this chant, the guys were celebrating images of men overpowering women. “Yes means anal”? If she says yes, then do something she didn’t ask for (and presumably wouldn’t want) turning even “yes” into rape.
Chanting in front of the Women’s Center – a safe space for women who have been assaulted or abused – makes that message stronger.
Afterwards, the frat offered an apology that let them off the hook. And which actually helps them to feel powerful: We can do anything so long as we apologize.
How sorry are they? Frat boys shouted the same slogans in front of the Women’s Center in 2006. In 2008 a different fraternity bellowed their love of “Yale sluts” in the same location.
Here we have boys desperately trying to assert their manhood. Intimidating women to create a sense of male superiority that doesn’t exist in nature – otherwise they wouldn’t need to try so hard. It all screams “insecurity!” There must be a big gap between the men they want to be, and the boys they seemingly are, to make that much effort.
Guys in frats are often pressured to hurt women to prove their manhood. “Bros before ho’s.” Sociologist, Michael Kimmel, studies men. And he says that many of these pledges don’t want to do the hurtful things to women that they are pressured to do.
But aren’t men supposed to be strong, confident, courageous? Don’t men follow their conscience instead of following the crowd?
What we see here is not courage but bravado. Trying to appear more brave than they really are.
This is supposed to prove their manhood?
Are women that threatening? Really, these guys are just scaredy cats.
Georgia Platts
Related post: Ever Wanted To Be A Woman? What Men Say
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Cheerleader Ordered To Cheer Her Rapist, and Other Stories
In 2008 a high school cheerleader joined her friends for a post-football game party. But the fun turned into a nightmare when, she says, four young men sexually assaulted her. A grand jury initially declined to indict, but Rakheem Bolton was eventually charged and pled guilty to simple assault.
Bolton was also on the basketball team. But the 16-year-old refused to root for him. So school officials ordered her to cheer Bolton on, or go home. When she refused, she was cut from the squad.
After suing the district attorney, the school district and the principal, an appeals court ruled against her.
The school had no problem with her attacker playing on the team. Too important to win! Cheerleaders, however, won’t gain the school any glory.
The courts often see the world through the eyes of the powerful, too.
Who gets punished? Well, who’s powerful?
Case 2: Child Abuse Called “Art”
“Hypothetical question: How would you feel if, as a young teenager, your father asked you to strip down naked so he could film you talking about your confusing, puberty-warped body? Oh, you wouldn’t like it? Really? What if he called it ‘art’?” Asks NYU LOCAL reporter, Keyana Stevens.
New York University purchased the archives of artist, Larry Rivers. But one of his daughters wants to destroy the film entitled “Growing,” telling the New York Times that her father’s coercion in making those films led her to develop anorexia. “It wrecked a lot of my life, actually.”
But she had no control. And initially NYU refused her request.
Only public outrage turned things around, leading NYU to reject that part of the collection.
Case 3: DA Sends Abusive Texts to Abuse Victim
In the midst of prosecuting a man accused of domestic violence, District Attorney, Kenneth Kratz began texting the “hot, young” (as he put it) victim hoping to start a sexual relationship.
Experts called the messages disturbing and unethical, given the power differential between the prosecutor and the young victim. Not to mention heaping abuse on top of abuse.
At first Kratz seemed likely to avoid punishment. State legal regulators said his actions were not technically misconduct. The state crime victims’ rights board, which Kratz had chaired, wasn’t investigating. And Gov. Jim Doyle stayed silent.
Once again, publicity and shame came to the rescue: Kratz chose to resign.
When it comes to punishment, too often the powerful don’t have to worry as the powerless suffer. Except those rare cases when shock and publicity intervene.
What a sad state of affairs.
Georgia Platts
Source: “DA keeps jobs despite texting “hot, young nymph” violence victim.” San Jose Mercury News. September 17, 2010
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