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She Asked For It?
Why are victims so often blamed for rape?
What’s “her” motive in the situation? What drives the rapist? And who has control?
I’ve been thinking about this as two men are sentenced for joining eighteen others to brutally rape a 16-year-old Richmond, California girl.
—
She wore a lavender dress to the homecoming dance. But she left early and began dialing her dad to pick her up. And then a schoolmate invited her to join some friends who were drinking on school property, and who encouraged her to drink too much. She said they were polite — at first.
She doesn’t remember anything after one kicked her in the stomach and she fell over.
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Sexy Weiner?
Congressman Anthony Weiner has admitted sexting a picture of his package to young women — yet again — in the tradition of Brett Favre, Kanye West and assorted flashers everywhere.
What are these men thinking?
Tracy Clark-Flory over at Salon put out a call on Twitter to get women’s reactions to this sort of sexting. Plenty of women wanted to see a man’s chest. But with few exceptions the response to THIS was complete repulsion. When asked whether crotch shots “do it” for them, one tweeter replied, “If by ‘do it’ you mean ‘send me to the toilet retching,’ then yes, they do.”
Flashers seem similarly clueless. Flasher message boards suggest that these men expect women to get turned on. At least one man finally “got it,” saying, “I simply can’t do it anymore… I found that I was basically just offending woman after woman.”
Men love looking at lady parts, so they think women must love the sight of man parts, too. Surprisingly, “penis” is a common web search among men, straight or gay, and they are as likely to “google” penis as vagina. No wonder they think women want to look at theirs, too. Of course, porn depicts women going wild at the sight of the male member. But porn is a wildly inaccurate instructor on women’s sexuality.
Some believe the flaunting is tied to evolutionary psychology. After all, “Male monkeys and apes routinely display their penis (usually erect) to females to indicate sexual interest,” says cognitive neuroscientist Ogi Ogas. The move may make female monkeys and apes swoon. But among women, retching seems an unlikely process by which to pass on ones genes.
But I think women’s reactions also run counter to Freud’s contention that women experience “penis envy” (this being the supposed cause of our feelings of inferiority: “His is so big!”). I know my first reaction to seeing a penis was a huge relief that I, myself, was streamlined. Looks like others might feel the same.
Women may appreciate a man’s package in the context of “wanting” and/or loving a particular man. But this sort of sexting? Not so much.
It seems men are a bit more obsessed with the sight of their penises than women are.
In “honor” of Anthony Weiner’s ongoing determination to run for Mayor of New York City, this is a repost of a piece originally published June 10, 2011.
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How the Male Gaze can Suffocate Women
Women encounter the male gaze in sundry ways. One appreciates an approving nod. Another feels slighted when she misses said nod. Others seek escape from this gaze.
Melissa Nelson got fired.
The thirty-thee-year-old was dismissed from her job as a dental assistant in Iowa because her dentist boss – and his wife – felt she was too attractive, and too tempting.
Her sex discrimination suit failed at both a lower court and the Iowa Supreme Court, which ruled she was fired “not because of her gender but because she was a threat to the marriage of Dr. Knight.”
Michael Kimmel, an expert on men and masculinity, wrote a thoughtful New York Times piece citing the male gaze as culprit here.
Dr. Kimmel says “lookism” – discrimination inflicted on the “too attractive” and “too unattractive,” alike — stems from the power of that gaze and “the fact that men’s estimation of beauty is the defining feature.”
Sure, “lookism” is gender-neutral, but the workplace isn’t, he says. Bosses are more likely to be men.
Next, he asks:
Where have we heard that before — that men’s vulnerability to women’s sexuality and attractiveness is so great that women must be prevented from showing any part of their bodies to them? … Mullah Omar would approve.
Members of the American Taliban have commented on my blog, spewing hate at pretty women who make men feel lesser-than-her and weak in the knees. A “good” woman would cover up, lest she be raped, or at the least, hated.
Or fired?
Come on!
Of course men will notice pretty women. But the only reason some may fear “her” power or “his” inferiority is in his head. Neither is really out there.
There is no need to punish us because we are pretty or because we are not.
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Fifty Shades of Pro-Orgasm
Some worry that the deluge of male dominance/female submission imagery in our culture helps to make sexism seem sexy, encourages women to crave their own submission and abuse, and spurs some men to abuse women.
Others are less concerned. Specifically regarding the Fifty Shades series one of my students — a fan — says,
To those feminists who are bashing the book and those of us who read it: Give us more credit! Women are not that easily influenced by a piece of poorly written fiction. At least not the women I know.
Or this from Feministing:
I’m not perplexed by (the appeal of Fifty Shades of Grey). And I am in no way appalled. I am fully in support of anyone doing whatever (safe, consensual) thing that they want to do to get themselves off. Feminists for Orgasms.
Feminists for Orgasms. Pro-choice feminists. Feminists who think women have more sense than to be so easily swayed by a pornified culture that sexualizes male dominance.
And anyway, since male domination is rather of off-limits for feminists, that makes it that much more forbidden and O-inducing, right? Katie Roiphe, whose Newsweek piece on “Shades” was widely panned, has a point when she says,
What is interesting is that this material still, in our jaded porn-saturated age, manages to be titillating or controversial or newsworthy. We still seem to want to debate or interrogate or voyeuristically absorb scenes of extreme sexual submission. Even though we are, at this point, familiar with sadomasochism, it still seems to strike the culture as new, as shocking, as overturning certain values, because something in it still feels, to a surprisingly large segment of our tolerant post-sexual-revolution world, wrong or shameful.
I have mixed feelings. On the one hand sure, women should choose what they want. On the other hand, how much choice do you have when you’ve unconsciously internalized society’s way of seeing? Or, as one of my readers put it,
I find this post (on women learning to like torture) extremely frustrating because it points out an issue that bothers me so much. I have always struggled with the fact that morally (and in general) I am completely disgusted by degrading and torturing women, but when it comes to sexual fantasies, I feel completely differently. I think that this is a serious problem and needs to be addressed by my and the coming generations. I think it is perfectly fine to enjoy D/s if that’s what you’re into, however I do not think it should be subconsciously shoved into the minds of every girl growing up in our society.
And while many believe that we aren’t affected by our culture and the messages around us, we do seem to be. Sales go up for products that are advertised. Why else would companies spend mega-millions on a 30-second Super Bowl ad?
Or, a post from Feministing reads:
I am in no way surprised that many women, who have been socialized in a culture in which male sexuality is linked to domination and in which women are taught their sexual power comes from being wanted, have fantasies of submission.
And actually, “dominating men” is one of the few ways that men in our culture are eroticized at all.
Meanwhile, nearly 80% of young women have poor body image and can get distracted from sex by worries over what their bodies look like. The whole dominance/submission thing could help young women to get away from that focus and get into the sexy happenings they are engaged in.
Still, I don’t care to see abuse eroticized, whether based on gender or ethnicity. Or whether the target is children or animals. And I will continue to work against it.
But eroticized abuse is what we’ve got. And many women, including many feminists, find it arousing.
So I’ve given this a lot of thought.
While people do unconsciously internalize the messages of their society, we can also become conscious of them, which makes choice more possible. We may then choose to overcome the messages or, alternatively, compartmentalize them.
So, a woman could live an egalitarian and empowered life while keeping submission fantasies confined to the bedroom in order to neutralize the potential harm that comes from feeling — and becoming — “lesser than.” She could also do the BDSM-thing in ways that are not physically harmful.
Many who engage in D/s only do so with partners who respect them as equals and who see these “cut off from reality” moments as play.
Others keep the fantasies in their heads and don’t act them out. As one dominatrix put it,
In many cases people’s eyes are bigger than their stomachs and they prefer the fantasy to reality.
If anyone chooses to act out their fantasies I suggest avoiding anything that is actually harmful. Pain exists to warn against whatever is causing it. Those who lack pain receptors die young.
Others protest that some people deal with emotional problems by harming themselves. Like cutting. Again, cutting is not healthy. If you need that sort of release, seeing a therapist to deal with the underlying issue is healthier.
Finally, so that women don’t consistently act in ways that bolster an ideology that encourages them to submit, how about turning it around sometimes? Maybe he’d like to be dominated now and again. Or, maybe you could spend an evening with him serving your every desire.
Now that would be nice.
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Women Write Resistance to Violence
It is easier to program a child than a VCR. Only three steps. Easy, time-tested, ancient, a sure thing.
First, hurt the child. Hurt her a little, hurt her a lot, threaten to do more, things she can’t imagine. Since she couldn’t have imagined what you’ve already done, her own fear will now control her. She will blindfold and gag herself.
Those are the opening lines of a poem by Elliott Battzedek entitled, “His Favorite Gun is Me.” The poem is part of a new anthology called, Women Write Resistance.
Poetry resisting violence. Gendered violence: Battering, rape, incest, trans-violence.
Poetry as resistance may sound strange.
Yet poetry emerges from the unconscious, beyond conventional notions provided by the powerful, creating competing narratives.
That’s crucial since gender violence holds a “double-bind: keep silent or speak and be ashamed,” says scholar Cheryl Glenn.
When he held her by her ankles
upside down on the roof
like she was
a bird he was plucking
…
I wish he doesn’t drop me
I wish this hadn’t
happened,
this being
the molesting, the threats, then
– to come –
the disbelief,
when the girl came forward and said
he made me
touch him,
and she, my mother said, me too,
they told her she was
a naughty girl who just wanted attention
— Lines from Shevaun Branigan’s, “Why My Mother is Afraid of Heights”
This poetry uses sass language: naming experience in personal terms, using language that is impolite, blunt, passionate or sarcastic. Sass uses natural speech and slang to resist the illusion of objectivity and refuses to take on a disembodied voice.
and long before you
forbade a ribbon for my hair
yelled when my contact slipped out in the pool
or kicked our toddler’s stuffed snow leopard across the room,
it was moonlight,
and you were handsome,
and we were in love,
and I was 19
and had sworn, after the trailer park of childhood,
never to let a man hit me.
I felt so proud of that rule I’d made up myself.
— Lines from, “Before You” by Joy Castro
Making it personal moves us beyond customary news coverage that is abstract, sometimes titillating, and that ignores the consequences of gender violence.
By creating and communicating new ways of seeing, this poetry provides the possibility of both personal and social transformation, as Audre Lorde would put it.
Part of that transformation is reflected in the anthology’s title. Lauren Madeline Wiseman, the editor, points out that we once had only the concept of victim. Now we see one-time victims transformed into survivors. But another dimension must be added: resister.
Here are a few of the poets busy writing resistance: Ellen Bass, Alicia Ostriker, Judy Grahn, Wendy Barker, Lisa Lewis, Maureen Seaton, Judith Vollmer, Lyn Fifhin, Alison Luterman, Frannie Lindsey, Linda McCarriston, Leslie Adrienne Miller, Jehanne Dubrow, Rebecca Foust, Allison Hedge Coke, and Hilda Raz, along with many others.
The resistance emerges in broken silences, disrupted narratives, being sassy, witnessing, harnessing anger and raising consciousness to connect the dots between the personal, the political and the societal: the place where resistance lives.
Poetry that urges us all to empowered resistance.
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Tampons Confiscated as Women Protest in Texas
You know what happens when women protest restrictions on their rights?
In Egypt they’re harassed and raped.
In Texas their tampons are confiscated.
If you can’t bully women by forcing something into their vaginas, just keep women from putting anything in there, themselves.
That’s right. You can take a gun into the Texas State Capital. But tampons, pads, and condemns are forbidden. Or even diabetic supplies that could save your life. Because pro-lifers just don’t like that sort of thing.
After all, women’s lives and autonomy are far more dangerous than guns.
Any sort of control women have over their bodies and reproductive lives must be stopped by Texas law enforcement! Abortion, contraception, sex ed… and now tampons.
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Trayvon Martin’s Right to ‘Stand His Ground’
We’re told over and over that if Zimmerman was afraid of Martin, according to Florida law, he had the right to put a bullet in the chamber of his concealed handgun, get out of his car after being told not to by the 911 dispatcher and follow and confront Martin and shoot him to death.
That’s from CNN opinion writer, Miller Francis. He continues:
At the same time, we are told that Martin, who had far greater reason to fear Zimmerman, practically and for reasons of American history, did not have the right to confront his stalker, stand his ground and defend himself, including by using his fists. We are told that this was entirely unjustified and by doing so, Martin justified his own execution.
Talk about victim-blaming!
The contradiction-in-rights likely arises because we tend to see through the eyes of the powerful and not through the eyes of the powerless. After all, the powerless have little control over media or the political or religious pulpits. With that in mind, I’m reposting the following as the Martin v. Zimmerman jury deliberates:
The Crimes of Hoodies, Short Skirts and Fannie Mae
“More guns, fewer hoodies” and we’d all be safer, Gail Collins advised in a New York Times piece after Trayvon Martin was gunned down for “eating skittles while black” – and while wearing said hoodie – in a gated community. A clear threat that had to be stopped.
That’s right. Guns don’t kill people, hoodies do: Trayvon Martin’s “hoodie killed him as surely as George Zimmerman did,” claimed Geraldo Rivera (who later apologized).
Sounds familiar. When women are raped short skirts become the culprit.
Yet few rape victims are wearing short skirts. And even nicely dressed black men can create fear. Journalist Brent Staples noticed that people got out of his way when he nonchalantly walked about. Amazed at his ability to alter public space, he tried humming Mozart to project his innocence. Seemed to help.
But why aren’t pricey cars, fancy suits and expensive watches blamed when rich, white men get robbed? What thief could resist?
Why? Because making more powerless members of society the culprit is meant to distract from the sins of the powerful. It’s women’s fault if men rape them, and it’s black men’s fault if lighter men kill them.
In another example, some blamed liberals for foolishly using Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to help Blacks and Hispanics “buy homes they couldn’t afford,” leading to the banking crises that nearly drove the U.S. economy off a cliff.
What really happened is that rich bankers gave rich campaign contributions to government officials, who in gratitude disposed of pesky regulations. That helped bankers get mega-rich by devising complex financial packages that no one could comprehend.
Used to be that when someone bought a home bankers made sure they’d get paid back. But under deregulation it didn’t matter because the loan was sold to someone else. And that investor sold the loan again. And financial packages were created and sold, composed of fractions of many people’s mortgage loans. They were rated AAA since they were 1) diversified – and hence “safe” investments and 2) the housing market never goes down. (Yeah, right!)
Fannie and Freddie entered the process late, thinking they’d better join in or lose out.
When the housing market dropped and people couldn’t afford their homes, or sell them for a profit, the banks began collapsing. Lucky for them, the taxpayers bailed them out (or the whole economy likely would have collapsed).
Did deregulation get blamed for the fiasco? By some. But plenty of the “powers that be” — and especially “hate radio” — blamed Blacks and Latinos.
Because blaming more powerless members of society distracts from the sins of the powerful.
The crime does not lie with the man who pulls the trigger, nor with the man who rapes, and certainly not with the fat cat who pays to rig the game. No, the crime lies with those who wear hoodies, short skirts and who bank while black or brown.
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In-laws Rip Off Girl’s Fingernails, But Who Cares?
Sahar Gul
KABUL, Afghanistan — A court has reversed the convictions of three Afghans jailed for torturing a young relative who had refused to become a prostitute, alarming activists who had celebrated the guilty verdicts as a warning to all those who would seek to reverse the strides made by women here in the past 12 years… the defendants — Sahar Gul’s mother-in-law, sister-in-law and father-in-law — (will) be set free.
In objection to this reversal, I am rerunning my original post and unfortunately asking this same question: In-laws rip off girl’s fingernails, but who cares?
Fifteen-year-old Sahar Gul’s in-laws locked her away in a basement for six months. They beat her, tortured her with hot irons, broke her fingers, and ripped her fingernails off. Her uncle called authorities and by the time she arrived at a hospital her eyes were swollen nearly shut and scabs crusted her fingertips.
Afghanistan allows multiple wives, including child brides. This young bride had been taken in hopes of pimping her out in prostitution. The abuse was meant to persuade.
What struck me most in the AP report were the following lines:
The outcry over a case like Gul’s probably would not have happened just a few years ago because of deep cultural taboos against airing private family conflicts and acknowledging sexual abuse.
I am heartened that things are changing, with public outrage and an editorial in the Afghanistan Times reading, “Let’s break the dead silence on women’s plight.”
But to think that not long ago horrendous abuses like Sahar’s would have provoked no comment is outrageous. You have to wonder why women’s plight has been invisible for so long. And whether Afghanistan is alone in its blindness.
Women must be poorly valued for such abuses to go on without remark: mere property to be sold off, to make money off of, to beat when “disobedient,” to be stoned as spectator sport. And in some cases, to be tortured like lab rats.
When that is all you’ve known your whole life, when this world seems normal to all around you, who can fully see the horror?
Yet America isn’t always so different. Many still blame rape victims for their rape, and many victims still fear coming forward. Battering victims may be blamed for their abuse. Bullied spouses may feel shamed and cover up — and cover for their partners.
The world may be changing in Afghanistan.
The world needs changing right here in America, too.
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Choosing Beauty Over Sex, or Anything Else–Lessons From Tootsie
Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie
A lot of guys think women want to be beautiful so they can get sex. I’m sure many do. But some guys are surprised that — or don’t believe that — it’s often the reverse: many women have sex hoping to feel beautiful.
But then, men’s value often rests on how much sex they have, while women’s value often rests on their looks.
A woman may capture the Wimbledon title yet be slighted as not “a looker.” She may even become Prime Minister of Australia yet folks debate, “the size of her bottom… the cut of her hair.”
And as I’ve said before:
From the time they’re small, little girls are told they’re pretty – or notice when they’re not told that. They receive gifts of play makeup and vanity sets. They watch endless repeats of Disney princesses on DVD, buy beautiful princess dolls, and then graduate to Barbie or Bratz. All of whom have extensive wardrobes. It’s all about being pretty.
Meanwhile, girls and women are bombarded with media images of impossibly beautiful women who are photoshopped up the wazoo, modeling what they’re supposed to look like.
Who’s popular in middle school and high school? Pretty girls. By the time they’re in college young women are under relentless pressure to be hot, as if that’s the most important thing in the world.
When Dustin Hoffman took the role of Tootsie he got a shocking first-hand glimpse of all this.
In the film, Hoffman plays a difficult-to-work-with actor who no one will hire. So he poses as an actress to get a role. In an interview that’s gained a lot of attention, Hoffman says the experience helped him to see how men can unknowingly reinforce impossible beauty ideals.
His make-up artist had made him look like woman, he recalls, but:
I was shocked that I wasn’t more attractive… I said “Now you have me looking like a woman. Now make me beautiful.” I thought I should be beautiful. If I was going to be a woman, I would want to be as beautiful as possible. But they said, “This is as good as it gets.”
At that moment he had an epiphany that made him think twice about how he treated women. He told his wife,
I think I am an interesting woman when I look at myself on screen. And I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill physically the demands that we’re brought up to think women have to have in order to ask them out… There’s too many interesting women I have…not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.
Women are taught from the time they are small that their value lies in their beauty — unfortunate since our shell is shallow and looks are fleeting.
But is it any surprise that beauty so often seems more important than sex – or anything else?
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Shades of Making Sexism Sexy
Do Fifty Shades of Grey, along with the deluge of violent and humiliating images that flood our consciousness, support patriarchy by making male dominance seem sexy?
Some worry that it might.
John Stoltenberg, a feminist activist and scholar, wrote a piece called “Pornography and Freedom,” observing that plenty of porn seems to promote oppression, whether a woman is pictured bound and gagged with her genitals open to the camera or whether lines from a book read, “The man wanted only to abuse and ravish her until she was broken and subservient.”
These sorts of images in both mainstream media and porn are mostly about women submitting to men.
In the eroticization, male dominance can seem sexy, he says.
If it’s sexy, who would want to end it?
A student of mine once asked why we should care about women’s equality when a lot of women (like her?) find male dominance sexy.
Two of my friends told me that they wanted to marry dominant men. One did and eventually divorced him because she didn’t like the reality of it. The other stayed married but had a lot of emotional problems.
I’ve mentioned Alisa Valdes before. She was raised feminist, and was even named one of the top feminist writers by Ms. Magazine. But when she met “the Cowboy,” she “embraced her femininity” and learned to submit: No back-talking; no second-guessing; no sarcastic, smart-ass remarks. She stayed monogamous and ignored her jealousy while Cowboy catted about. Her book, “The Feminist and the Cowboy,” suggests women will live happily ever after in orgasmic bliss if they just submit to controlling, misogynist men. In a recent post I described how her submission turned increasingly violent.
Still, my students often wonder “What’s the big deal?”
But what if the imagery were about race instead of sex? What if blacks nearly always had white lovers in real life, and at the same time nearly all of the “D/s” imagery depicted white domination and sadistic acts inflicted upon blacks? And what if some blacks came to crave submission and their own abuse at the hands of whites?
Would that be healthy?
Of course, once patriarchy sexualizes submission you can turn it around with “the dominatrix” emerging. Yet we are not bombarded with imagery that makes matriarchy sexy. So guys don’t go around wanting to marry dominant females who will boss them around in real life.
But a lot of people don’t want to engage this discussion. Repression and all that.
Prof. Robert Jensen, of the University of Texas, studies porn and says,
When I critique pornography, I am often told to lighten up. Sex is just sex… (but) Pornography offers men a politics of sex and gender – and that politics is patriarchal and reactionary…
There should be nothing surprising about the fact that some pornography includes explicit images of women in pain. But my question is: Wouldn’t a healthy society want to deal with that? Why aren’t more people, men or women, concerned? …
We should be free to talk about our desire for an egalitarian intimacy and for sexuality that rejects pain and humiliation.
I feel it is important to discuss things that are rarely discussed, and that make distinctions between what is healthy and what is not.
Next time I will turn to the other side of this question, looking at “pro-orgasm” feminists.
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