When Slut-Shaming Is Not Enough ...

... then it's time for a legal crackdown!

According to the Columbus Dispatch, an Ohio legislator has proposed a bill that would define "sexting" by teenagers as a first-degree misdemeanor:

Rep. Ronald Maag, R-Lebanon, said he will soon introduce a bill making the creation, exchange and possession of nude materials between minors – commonly known as “sexting,” – a first-degree misdemeanor.

“Local prosecutors have brought to my attention that under current Ohio law these teens could be charged with a felony and classified as sex offenders,” Maag said. “There is concern that this may not be appropriate for these minors.”

Now, in Maag's defense, it's an obviously good idea to ensure that teenagers don't get charged as felony sex offenders! But why criminalize this behavior at all? Adults can send legally naughty photos of themselves via cell or post them to the Internet. Obviously, nude photos of minors bump up against child porn laws, so there's good reason to restrict them on the Internet.

But as long as sexting remains an activity between two consenting teenagers, I see no reason for them to run afoul of the law. Why not use this chance to decriminalize it altogether?

Of course, teens shouldn't have sex until they're mature enough to handle it. Sexting is likely to magnify their vulnerability. I wouldn't want my kids involved in it when they're 13 or 16. There's too much scope for harming themselves and others. So this is an area that sex education ought to be addressing. I don't mean just sex education in the schools; I mean parents, the media, churches - anyone who cares about kids.

But it's a sign of moral bankruptcy, on the social level, if we think the criminal justice system should take over a role that properly belongs to education.

By contrast, it should definitely be illegal to disseminate a person's photos without permission, because it violates his or her consent. The sad story that spurred Maag's bill involved a girl in Cincinnati, Jessica Logan. She killed herself after her photos were circulated throughout her whole school. What drove her to despair wasn't her initial act of sending pictures to her boyfriend; it was the subsequent deception and breach of trust. While this isn't identical to rape, her consent was violated all the same, and in analogy to sexual assault laws, that violation deserves to be punished under the law.

"Corrective" Rape: Where Misogyny and Homophobia Collide

While listening to BBC radio this morning, I learned a new term: "corrective" rape. I was driving at the time, and I nearly had to pull over. (Consider this your obligatory trigger warning; I'm so upset about this topic that I almost can't write about it, and yet I feel like I have to.)

"Corrective" rape refers to raping lesbians with the ostensible purpose of "curing" them of same-sex attractions. In "Hate Crimes: The Rise of 'Corrective' Rape in South Africa," the NGO ActionAid documents a sharp rise in the incidence of this crime (pdf available here). The BBC report stated that about ten "corrective" rapes are occuring each week in Cape Town alone. (See also this article in the Guardian.)

It's ironic that these crimes are on the rise in South Africa, because as the BBC report stated, the South African constitution is one of the most progressive in the world, guaranteeing equal rights regardless of sexual orientation. In practice, however, homophobia and misogyny combine in everyday life and the justice system, making lesbians' lives very dangerous, especially if they're women of color. Young boys are growing up with the idea that raping lesbians is acceptable - that they are actually doing women a favor by teaching them to appreciate a real man.

ActionAid reports that the targeting of lesbians represents an intensification of the risks that all women face:

In South Africa, no woman is safe from violence. There are an estimated 500,000 rapes, hundreds of murders and countless beatings carried out every year. Shockingly, it is estimated that almost half of all South African women will be raped during their lifetime. And for every 25 men bought to trial for rape in South Africa, 24 walk free. ...

As part of this oppression, the country is now witnessing a backlash of crimes targeted specifically at lesbian women, who are perceived as representing a direct and specific threat to the status quo. This violence often takes the form of ‘corrective’ rape – a way of punishing and ‘curing’ women of their sexual orientation. (p. 3) ...

‘Corrective’ rape survivors interviewed by ActionAid say that verbal abuse before and during the rape focused on being “taught a lesson” and being “shown how to be real women and what a real man tasted like." (p. 12)

So the hallmark of this crime is the assailant telling the woman that his attack will make her a proper woman - and yet, according to ActionAid reports, judges have balked at punishing such rapes as hate crimes. (Of course, one might argue that every rape is a hate crime since it's an expression of misogyny.) It remains a mystery how women are supposed to learn their lesson in the numerous instances where "corrective" rape culminates in murder.

The BBC report was followed up by a discussion of whether Western media show a negative bias in their reporting on Africa. I'm not qualified to judge whether that's so, although I agree that Americans almost never hear good news about Africa in the media. But I definitely see a danger in othering this phenomenon of "corrective" rape. We know lesbians are at risk of violence in the U.S., too, and I'm sure this crime occurs here as well, even if with (much?) less frequency than in South Africa, where violence of all kinds is so prevalent. We just haven't had a name for it.

To the Highest Bidder

This evening my university is hosting an event that makes me deeply uncomfortable, yet there's been not a peep of protest. Probably because it's "for a good cause."

Over the past two weeks I've gotten two emails asking me to support this event - a formal dance - either by attending or by purchasing an ad in the program booklet. This already struck me as vaguely weird. Why would students solicit faculty to buy ads? What am I selling, my ideas? They may be priceless, but their value on the open market is mighty low. Plus, I don't know any faculty who are keen on attending undergraduate parties. The colleagues I hang with understand the importance of appropriate boundaries.

But what really got me is this: The sponsoring groups are going to hold a date auction. Proceeds will benefit the March of Dimes. I don't care how good the cause, or how pure the students' intentions. The idea of a date auction still creeps me out.

First, there's the obvious insensitivity of evoking slavery in any lighthearted manner. There was nothing funny about slavery. The ritual of auctioning a person even for temporary services - no matter how much in jest, no matter how good the cause - can't help but echo the history of real slave auctions.

To complicate matters, this particular date auction is being sponsored by a historically Black fraternity. As a white person, I don't want to impute "false consciousness" to the organizers, but I do have to wonder if anyone thought this through. Is it possible for Black people to subvert the history of slavery by parodying it? Maybe, if the parody is very evident. But I don't see that happening in this case. There was nothing ironic in the email I received, and black-tie affairs don't usually mix with mockery.

Then there's the exchange of cash for a person's potentially romantic company. Now, I'm pretty sure that at this dance, both women and men will be auctioned as dates. Yet it means something different when a woman is "for sale." We don't live in a society where women routinely purchase men's sexual favors. Even if there's gender parity on the auction block, only the "sale" of women resonates with the gender inequities built into prostitution. I'm not ignoring the existence of male prostitutes, just saying that realistically, this auction is much less likely to conjure up images of a gigolo.

My concerns aren't just theoretical. A 2005 article from The Daily Northwestern quotes dean of students Mary Desler as seeing problems with date auctions:

"I think they have the potential of putting students -- women and men -- in compromising and hurtful situations." ...

"What if no one bids money for a date with someone? Might that be hurtful? What if someone purchases a date with someone else and there is something about the purchaser that makes the student feel uncomfortable or, even unsafe? What if something happens on that date that is hurtful?" she said.

"I was involved in a situation a few years ago that was not at all positive for the student 'purchased.' I can't forget that situation," Desler continued.

The article doesn't specify exactly what happened, but in a culture awash in masculine sexual entitlement, I'd worry that women could be at somewhat higher risk of sexual assault when going on a bought-and-paid for date. Most men will be perfectly respectful, I'm sure. But when a guy has put out cold cash for the woman's companionship, aren't the odds increased that he'll expect her to put out, too? To be sure, this is a problem with dating in general - and a good reason to insist on going dutch whenever you don't want to get physical with your date. It seems to me, though, that at the very least, "buying" a woman's company at a date auction is reinforcing rape culture. That's the last thing I'd like to see colleges supporting.

I get why student organizations turn to date auctions. They can raise hundreds of dollars and - unlike raffles or auctions of products - it's all pure profit without any need to seek donations.

Maybe I'm just a killjoy. Still, I'd love to see schools and universities actively discourage date auctions. Citing concerns much like mine, the Office of Student Activities and Leadership at the University of Michigan has issued a statement opposing them. (It's not clear whether this statement came out before or after a student group at Michigan held a date auction two years ago to benefit a Peruvian women's shelter - oh, the irony!) Am I asking too much to want my own university to adopt similar guidelines?

Update 2-1-09, 9:30 p.m.: Duh! I meant to mention this in the original post: Though I wasn't there at the event, I'm pretty sure date auctions are mercilessly heterosexist, too. Can you imagine the fuss if one college-aged dude tried to buy another? Maybe it'd fly as a joke - humor is the main way that students deal with discomfort about homosexuality, 'cause they know that overt homophobia is uncool - but never, ever as a for-real date. Then again, if the girls started bidding on each other, that'd be hawt. Ugh.

Consent, Sexual Assault, and How We Buy Cars

At Abyss 2 Hope, Marcella has come down pretty hard on my recent post on seduction and consent. I think she distorts it pretty dramatically. Disagreement is fine; misrepresentation, not so much.

Marcella basically accuses me of promoting a rape culture. Here's the paragraph of mine that she seems to find most objectionable:

I'm not arguing that force or violence is present in every rape. Not at all. I'm just saying that to call an act rape, there has to be a clear absence of consent, whether because one person has said or signaled no, or because they're incapable of consenting due to drunkenness or unconsciousness.

Here's the core of Marcella's response:

This is a very dangerous position which I see most often from those claiming most of those who disclose having been raped are liars. This view sets up people (mostly boys and men) to commit rape which if it is rightfully reported will be claimed to have been a false report.

For sex to be consensual and legal there needs to be a clear presence of freely and legally given consent. This is a far different standard than Kittywampus has defined for "real" rape.

If you go to a car dealership and test drive a car, say wonderful things about that car, you have not consented to buy that car simply because you didn't say, "No, I'm not buying this car." It would be absurd to demand that all car shoppers' absence of consent must be clear.

Nobody who goes to a car dealership needs to be empowered to always say no in order to avoid unwanted car ownership or car ownership which comes at too high of a price.

I'm positive that Marcella and I agree that in a good society, not just consent but enthusiastic consent ought to be the precondition to any sexual contact. I'm pretty sure, too, that she'd agree with my statements in that post condemning coercion as unethical and arguing that far too much sex falls short of the gold standard of enthusiastic consent. Here's what I wrote:

I think it's absolutely true that there's a continuum of coercion when it comes to sex. In fact, a dismaying amount of sex takes place between the polar extremes of rape and enthusiastic consent.

I'm flummoxed at Marcella's decision to ignore that statement. I respect the work she's done, and my impression of her is that she's both bright and fair-minded. I'm not sure why she picked a couple of statements out of context and then proceeded as though I don't insist on the importance of consent (and not reluctant consent!), and as though I don't condemn sexual coercion as ethically wrong.

The tone of her post implies I'm a cheerleader for date rape and rape culture. I don't think either this particular post, or the rest of my work, supports that implication. (A while back, she linked to a post of mine in which I condemned the sexual harassment and assault that occurred in Ohio's ex-AG Marc Dann's office.) In my recent post, I also didn't distort the law on rape in my state, Ohio, which specifies that a woman need not physically resist, but clearly expects that she make her lack of consent known (unless she's impaired in any of the ways that make consent impossible). I don't think it's fair to attack me or my argument because my state's law does not call for affirmative expressions of consent.

Perhaps this all has something to do with Marcella thinking I attacked Maggie Hays personally (as she mentions in comments on her post). I was pretty outraged by Ms. Hays' initial statement that politeness = seduction = coercion = rape, enough so that I wrote a more polemical post than is my norm. It wasn't meant as a personal attack on Ms. Hays, and I apologize if she felt it was. I do stand by my position that when we erase important distinctions and paint all men as the enemy, we do feminism a grave disservice. I also didn't misrepresent her argument, though Ms. Hays herself has gone back and edited that original post to remove the equation that leads from politeness to rape. I commend her for rethinking it, though given the amount of argument her formulation inspired, it would've been better to revise the post without erasing that key passage. Otherwise, it looks as though Natalia and I were misrepresenting her argument.

Let me return to the paragraph Marcella found objectionable - the one where I say a woman has a responsibility to convey a clear no (verbally or otherwise) if she's on the receiving end of unwanted sexual overtures. Obviously, any situation where two people are strangers and one person touches the other sexually constitutes sexual assault. The same goes for any sexual contact between two people that's not preceded by a date or flirtation. Sexual touching out of the blue is also a form of sexual assault, even if two people know each other. And in any situation where a person's ability to consent is impaired, any sexual contact is a form of assault.

The paragraph in question, however, follows one in which I briefly sketched out dating scenarios of the sort where coercion might be in play. That's the particular case I'll deal with below - the situation where date rape can occur.

In an ideal world, when two people go on a date or begin flirting, both partners would continually check in with each other. Maybe you remember the Antioch Sexual Assault Policy, which attempted to ensure that partners did just that, explicitly, repeatedly, and verbally. It got roundly mocked at the time for being infeasible (and I still think it's unworkable, for reasons I'll explain in a moment), but its intent was good. Its most controversial provision was that the initiating partner had to verbally ask for consent at every escalation of intimacy, and the partner had to verbally provide it. It further specified:

Body movements and non-verbal responses such as moans are not consent.

Now, in world where people weren't so repressed about sex, we might be more capable of verbalizing our desires and responses. We might be better able to say, "mmm, I'd really like to ..." and our partner could respond with an equally happy yes. Even then - in a utopia absent repression - not everyone could state their desires out loud without breaking their mood. Some people just go nonverbal once they get really turned on.

Also, very few of us - women and men alike - would want sex to entail the kinds of bureaucratic checklist that the Antioch policy would mandate.

What most of us do, instead, is to use precisely those body movements and moans to check in continually with our partners. Here, too, people vary greatly; some individuals have much more sensitive communicative barometers than others. That's true for women as well, but a clueless woman is obviously less problematic, given the relative infrequency of woman-on-man rape.

How is this different from buying a car? Well, most people aren't afraid that a car salesman (or the car?!) will reject them. Our egos aren't invested in car buying. We don't buy cars in a cultural climate that makes meaningful discussion of them taboo; car ads don't distort our view on driving anywhere near as much as advertising in general warps our ideas about sex! Vulnerability and emotions aren't much in play when we buy a car (except perhaps for the sort of folks who buy Porsches?). Thus, the communicative situation is much more clear-cut.

Consider a first kiss. It's not a business transaction. It's a fragile moment where the initiator makes himself (or herself!) vulnerable. Now, if non-verbal communication is working reasonably well, a potential initiator will refrain from doing anything if the other person doesn't appear interested. He or she will stop, or ask if everything is okay, if they don't get an enthusiastic response.

Some people, however, are knuckleheads. The clods who don't get that there's a problem when you stop responding enthusiastically? They are going to need to hear a clear verbal no or an unambiguous non-verbal signal (such as a push). If they don't stop at that point, they've committed sexual assault.

But I'm not willing to criminalize failure to read relatively subtle signals (those moans and movements, again) in a situation where it's reasonable to assume sexual interest and where hormones are in flux. For instance, even a sensitive person might interpret a partner's sudden lack of moans not as withdrawal of consent but as a signal to try a different sort of touch.

To repeat: Outside a dating/flirting scenario, no sexual touching should take place. Period. Within it, possibilities for honest miscommunication abound. Both parties have a responsibility to make it clear if they don't want sexual contact to begin or escalate.

Going back to that first kiss: Say a guy kisses me while on a date. If I pull away immediately, that's a clear no. He hasn't gotten my verbal permission first (who does?) and he just misread the signals. That might make him an oaf, but calling it an assault strains credulity.

Taking this a step further, lets say I respond to his kiss, and things escalate. I respond enthusiastically until we're about to have intercourse. At that moment I decide I don't want to go quite that far. I pull away, which constitutes a clear signal that he'd better put on the brakes. (Remember, my definition didn't require a verbal no, but rather, when "one person has said or signaled no.") That's the point where - if he continues anyway - he becomes a rapist.

I'm trying to see where that differs substantially from Minnesota's legal definition of rape, which Marcella quotes in the comments on her post:

"Consent" means words or overt actions by a person indicating a freely given present agreement to perform a particular sexual act with the actor. Consent does not mean the existence of a prior or current social relationship between the actor and the complainant or that the complainant failed to resist a particular sexual act.

I am in no way contradicting that. I'm not requiring a woman to physically resist. As I mentioned before, in my state, Ohio, the law is more restrictive and does not require affirmative consent, as Minnesota does, so it's disingenous of Marcella to say that my original definition was at odds with the law.

I'm only saying that in situations such as the one I just described - where the initiator can reasonably think the other person might be attracted, where the intensity is escalating, and where there's room for misunderstanding - both parties have a responsibility to clarify their boundaries. The law requires that, as does good sense. And I stand by my point that it's not infantilizing to expect women to communicate their boundaries to partners and potential partners.

If you accept a date with someone, that doesn't entitle them to kiss you, but it does give them reason to think you might be interested. If they try it and you don't want it, they've initially committed a blunder, not a criminal transgression. If they persist after you make your lack of interest clear - verbally or nonverbally - then that's sexual imposition, a form of sexual assault. The law in Ohio is very clear on the definition of sexual imposition: unless the perpetrator is a mental health practitioner or the recipient of the touch is a minor, the potential perp has to be aware that the touch was unwanted, or that its recipient could not meaningfully consent (see the text of the law for details).

In other words, the law does not expect the initiator of the conduct to be a mind reader.

Unless we want to criminalize all clumsiness within a sexual encounter, the same has to hold true as sexual contact escalates. As soon as one party says no, it has to be respected, and lack of respect for that no has to be subject to criminal penalty. But unless we want to write the Antioch code into criminal law, we have to account for the fact that where one party can reasonably understand the other party's conduct as consent, the second party needs to make it clear (verbally or not) if they withdraw their consent.

Instead, Marcella writes:

This view is what allows rapists to justify raping a girl after she agrees to kiss him or agrees to sexual touching. She didn't say no (because she wasn't asked since that would give her a chance to say no) so her lack of consent wasn't clear. Therefore, he can't be a "real" rapist.

Women have to wait to be asked before saying no? I know a lot of people who've been raped, mostly students of mine, all by acquaintances, friends, or dates. I've hugged them and cried with them and listened to their stories. None of them were asked if they wanted to proceed. In all but one case, they did convey a clear no. The guy went ahead anyway. (The one exception? The woman was drugged. That too is clearly rape, and I would never say otherwise.)

The examples I gave in my previous post were situations where coercion might be present in a dating/flirting scenario - where, for instance, a man might pressure a woman for sex because he paid for her meal. If she feels obligated to sleep with him because he treated, and goes along with his advances without ever making her lack of interest clear - kissing him politely, touching him back, but doing it all out of a sense of obligation - that's seriously messed up. It reveals all kinds of ugliness in gender socialization for both men and women. And it shows a real problem with consent. She didn't give it freely and enthusiastically, but how could the man have known that?

I don't think we can criminalize this sort of flawed consent. Instead, we need to continue educating women and men about the importance of enthusiastic consent; without it, too much bad sex will occur on that continuum where emotional manipulation damages people's ability to consent freely. Women need to be in touch with their desires. They need to realize they can express them - and say no, or yes - and that their desires must be respected. Men need to realize that a "no" isn't a signal to apply more leverage.

On that, I don't think Marcella and I are really all that far apart after all - except on the question of whether I've got a career ahead of me as the next Katie Roiphe.

On Seduction, Agency, and Entitlement

In my last post, I didn't really tackle the question of what seduction is, anyway, and how it differs from rape. I thought Natalia had addressed that very ably. In comments, though, and then in a post of his own, figleaf challenged me to think about how male socialization might blur that line for some men:

I think it's more complicated than that. Inside my theory of the "no-sex" class paradigm, where men are indoctrinated believe normal, compromised women never just *naturally* want sex and, therefore, that sex must be obtained through some sort of leverage, the difference between from rape to exploitation of economic disadvantage to aphrodisiacs to dinner with roses are only a matter of degree and legitimacy**. That's the way Hays appears to look at it: from inside that dominant paradigm.

(More from figleaf here.)

I think it's absolutely true that there's a continuum of coercion when it comes to sex. In fact, a dismaying amount of sex takes place between the polar extremes of rape and enthusiastic consent. I would have generally agreed with Maggie Hays' post that set off this discussion, had she simply categorized as "exploitative" or "coercive" many of the phenomena that she's decrying: For instance, "duty sex" and "sexual payments" (i.e., some men's expectation that if they pay for a date, the woman owes them sex) both involve an element of coercion.

She didn't do that. Coercion is ethically wrong. But I react allergically against such coercive situations being classified as rape, which is a crime, after all, and not just a breach of ethics. If a guy buys me dinner and I choose to end the evening with a handshake or less, he might call me a pricktease. That's not rape, that's mere assholery. If I drink so much that I can no longer say no, then it's rape, all right. Ditto for any situation where we start to make out and he then ignores a clear no.

I'm not arguing that force or violence is present in every rape. Not at all. I'm just saying that to call an act rape, there has to be a clear absence of consent, whether because one person has said or signaled no, or because they're incapable of consenting due to drunkenness or unconsciousness.

I'm troubled by this inflationary expansion of "rape" because Maggie Hays is not the only person who's trying to broaden the definition. I once heard something similar from a sexual assault educator. For instance, this educator said that if a woman has had anything to drink at all, she's presumptively incapable of consent. Moreover, she claimed something similar for women over age 55! Now, I haven't been able to confirm that anyone else is using this same criterion. I did press her on this point, and she clarified that she wasn't claiming that all sex with women over 55 is rape or abuse; rather, she was saying that mental competency has to be demonstrated rather than presumed.

Besides trivializing actual rape, the inflationary labeling of all coercion as "rape" drains women of agency. We remain free to say no - even when we're afraid of being called a prude or a tease, even when our partner is a manipulative bastard, even when a guy has footed the bill for haute cuisine and roses. As Natalia said, we are not children.

The losses are incalculable if we start presuming that women are incapable of saying no. In fact, that presumption plays right into male sexual entitlement. The notion that women lack agency is a precondition for masculine sexual entitlement. Those pickup artists and just regular Nice Guys(TM) that figleaf rightly criticizes for thinking they need to apply leverage? They're driven by entitlement. They're motivated by the notion that a woman's no only means that their leverage needs to be stronger, subtler, cleverer, more expensive - or just possibly, more forceful. Most such men won't actually rape a woman. But this mindset does make date rape more likely to occur.

What might masculine sexual entitlement look like in a less virulent - but still troubling - form? In a follow-up post, Maggie Hays describes her experiences with an ex-boyfriend that spurred her to regard seduction as a form of sexual exploitation (and/or rape - it's no longer quite so clear, in this post, whether she's continuing to conflate the two terms). I'm not going to quote from her description of that relationship because I don't want to oversimplify or take anything out of context; better to read it yourself. At one point, though, she adds some nuance to her original statement that seduction equals rape:

To elaborate, I meant seduction as: 'When a man persuades a woman to have sex with him, often subtly, through being kind, polite, chivalrous, while playing on her feelings, possible vulnerability, or sometimes getting her consent by deceiving her, distracting her, and sometimes intoxicating her (with alcohol or drugs) so that he can use her for his own sexual gratification and purpose.'

This is, of course, much more coercive than simply being kind or polite, as she suggested in her initial post. On top of that, it sounds like her ex was a liar. I do empathize; most of us who've lived for a while have experiences with exes where we felt lied-to and manipulated. I'm sorry she was treated like crap.

Based on how she describes her ex, my guess is she sums him up fairly when she calls him an "asshole." In fact, it's sort of libelous to the actual anatomical part to apply its name to truly vile human beings. This guy comes across as a major-league manipulator. But a rapist he's not.

Plenty of embittered men tell tales of lying, scheming, manipulative women, too. I've never heard a man complain that an ex lied to get him into bed. While I'm sure it happens, there aren't many men who'd admit it, since it goes against the assumption that men are horny little everready rabbits. Men do complain about women manipulating them for love and money, just for instance. Neither gender holds a monopoly on rotten manipulative behavior.

I absolutely do think it's fair to say that the kind of seduction Maggie Hays describes with her ex is unethical. That doesn't mean it ought to be illegal, but it ought to be socially sanctioned, not celebrated as studly.

Historically, Hays' definition of seduction was the most prevalent one. Seduction was often assumed to an expression of class privilege. In my research, I've come across innumerable tales of a servant girl seduced by older, richer men - often her employer or his son - then abandoned once they fell pregnant. Even back then, circa 1910, the German feminists I've studied were split on how to respond to these stories. Some publicized them in sensationalized form in order to gain public sympathy for the plight of unmarried mothers; portraying them as victims was one way to counter slut-shaming (which was pretty nasty back then, too). Other feminists objected to the distortion of truth and to the idea that women had no agency (though they would've used different terminology).

The raw data I've seen indicate pretty clearly that the rich man and poor servant girl narrative wasn't fictionalized; such cases occurred regularly in early twentieth-century Germany. The far more common scenario, though, for one servant to pair up with another. If pregnancy did occur, the two servants would often marry (this was less true in the countryside). Cross-class liaisons rarely resulted in marriage, and so they were more visible in both statistics and public perceptions.

No, sexual coercion hasn't disappeared from women's lives, but most American women are no longer as constrained as a poor servant girl a hundred years ago. It's time, as figleaf says, to redefine seduction:

[W]hereas for most anti-feminists, "Pick-up Artists" in the "seduction community," possibly Scott Adams, and a subset of feminists that include Hays' school of thought, seduction is a unilateral act undertaken by men to extract sex from women who would otherwise "know better," for people who *aren't* into that mindset seduction can be something entirely different. Like the persuasive interaction between individuals who are sexually interested but haven't finalized a decision... or who *have* decided and are mutually enjoying a form of extended arousal.

That second definition is what I've always considered seduction to be. Of course, that delicious sort of seduction relies on the knowledge that one can say no at any point - that both parties have agency, and that neither is entitled. It rests on the mutual recognition that enthusiastic consent is essential not just to law and ethics but to good sex.

I've always felt free to say no, even in situations where the guy acted entitled. Maybe that's because I called myself a feminist before I even hit puberty. Or maybe because I always balked at trading sex for prime rib - but then again, I only consider one of those things delicious. (Hint: I did try moose meat a couple years back, but I've been a near-vegetarian for decades.)

Dispatches from the Universe Where All Men Are Rapists

Oh dear. With friends like this, feminism doesn't need enemies. Thanks to this sharp takedown by Natalia Antonova, I checked out Maggie Hays' thoughts on rape, and I left with the feeling that Ms. Hays is living in a parallel universe to mine - one where men are the enemy and any woman who loves men is a traitor to the cause.

Did you know rape is the same as seduction? Here's what Ms. Hays originally wrote under the headline "Rape can take different forms":

- seduction: when a man persuades a woman to have sex with him, often subtly, through being kind, polite, chivalrous, etc.

- rape of our souls: when we, women, are not allowed to be ourselves because of having to conform to patriarchal feminine gender 'norms'. Whether we do it to "be liked" or not to be criticized, most of the time, we conform.

In response to comments - and after she'd apparently had a chance to think it over again, which is maybe scariest of all - Ms. Hays added:

Seduction is a form of male sexual exploitation of women. And I certainly do not condone when men screw women over, whether in an individual case or culturally. I will need to get back to this somehow, sometime: seduction does not feel like rape at all when a woman has fully accepted to submit to the patriarchy; that does not change the fact that patriarchal masochism is a destroyer of inner female energy. I think I should have called seduction 'a form of male sexual exploitation that intends to destroy female energy', but I will surely go back to that in a future post. ...

Seduction may not be exactly called rape, but it still generally does involve a man fucking a woman over and deceiving her. Damn! I've seen this happen to me and women friends so many times, I'm not crazy: I have heard them complaining about what assholes often men can be... Any form of sexual exploitation (even a subtler one) you don't really want to happen to you or that you feel shitty or depressed about the fact it has happened to you is a form of rape or male sexual exploitation of women somehow.

That's only adding nuance if you distinguish "rape" from "male sexual exploitation," which both the original post and her update gleefully fail to do. By the way, she does not use "seduction" as shorthand for "getting a woman shitty drunk so she can no longer consent to sex or say no." She includes kindness and politeness under its banner, for fuck's sake.

Now, if like me you think conflating all these things trivializes rape almost beyond recognition, you should go read Maggie Hays' original post (so you can see I'm not taking things out of context) and then check out Natalia's wonderful dissection of it. Here are a few of Natalia's juiciest bits:

The thing about seduction is - of course it can end up with you making choices that you may later regret. This goes for men and women. How many of us haven’t been charmed by a person who turned out to be a scumbag or asshole in one way or another? But the key word here is “choice.” I’m sorry, but the very definition of rape implies the absence of choice, one way or another.

Seduction is not coercion. A man who makes you feel like wringing out your panties is not a rapist by definition. Why the hell do I even need to point this out to anyone? ...

It’s true that women are supposed to regret their bad choices much more than men. What Maggie Hays is doing is essentially perpetuating this idiotic double standard, and turning around and calling it feminist.

The other ridiculous assumption being made here is that a woman couldn’t possibly go out of her way to seduce a man.

That’s right. The many times that you and I have done this, girls, we were:

a) Blinded by the Patriarchy’s shiny penis and unable to understand what it was we were doing, b) We were, in fact, raping ourselves, or c) Unknowingly replicating the evil behaviour of evil, dirty males, forever compromising our precious purity. Well, I’m glad all of that has been cleared up!

This is disgusting, because it’s a huge trivialization of rape. It’s like those people you sometimes meet, the people who can’t handle anyone disagreeing with them ever, so they say things like: “Stop talking to me! Stop assaulting me with your disagreeable rhetoric! You’re no better than a rapist!”

(But really, go read the whole thing here.)

I especially appreciate that last point because it reminds me of Elaine Scarry's argument (in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World) that using the word "torture" figuratively minimizes the horror of actual torture. Since I read that book, I've been pretty scrupulous about reserving "torture" for the kind of shit that's gone down in Guantanamo Bay.

If you don't want to follow me on that tangent, though, consider this item from today's Columbus Dispatch, which is just logically impossible in Maggie Hays' parallel universe:

The Scioto County sheriff's office is investigating two separate cases of young boys being sexually assaulted by older boys.

Three juveniles have been charged with rape in the first case, in which a 7-year-old boy was sexually assaulted in a West Portsmouth neighborhood. Detective Jodi Conkel said the assault occurred on Dec. 15 in a vacant building that is being renovated into a church.

Conkel said the boy often hung around with the juveniles, and detectives think the boy could have been assaulted more than once. Two of the suspects are 12 years old and the third is 14.

In a second case reported Wednesday, a 16-year-old Wheelersburg resident is accused of raping three young boys, ages 3, 5 and 10, while they were visiting his home.

The teen has a juvenile record and is being held in a detention center pending a court appearance, Conkel said.

Conkel and Scioto County Prosecutor Mark Kuhn refused to release the names of the juvenile defendants in each case.

This is just horrifying. I have two young sons. One is five, the other nine. At the risk of sounding like someone who's watched too much Faux News: the law would have to protect the perp from me if anyone harmed my boys.

Maggie Hays would have me believe that only women are victims of The Patriarchy. The victimization of boys is simply impossible and incoherent in the framework she presents: All men are assholes, assholes = rapists, and all women are victims. She has no way to even recognize the existence of boys as victims. In comments, she makes clear that she'd been a victim of rape (and I am deeply, sincerely sorry to hear that). Her experience does not, however, give her the right to nullify the equally valid experiences of others.

I'm hoping someone will plug the wormhole between Maggie Hays' universe and mine. Of course, if hers is a female universe, she might call that rape, too. (And yes, I realize that's a juvenile remark, but I'm gonna make it anyway.)

Hearts of Stone

This is just so wrong and terrible in so many different ways:

A 13-year-old girl who said she had been raped was stoned to death in Somalia after being accused of adultery by Islamic militants, a human rights group said.

Dozens of men stoned Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow to death Oct. 27 in a stadium packed with 1,000 spectators in the southern port city of Kismayo, Amnesty International and Somali media reported, citing witnesses. The Islamic militia in charge of Kismayo had accused her of adultery after she reported that three men had raped her, the rights group said.

(Source: Huffington Post)

Let's take apart this atrocity one piece at a time:

• The girl was thirteen.
• She was apparently already married, otherwise the charge would not have been adultery but fornication or similar.
• She was raped. At age thirteen.
• Her story was not believed. This accords with Shariah law, which automatically considers a man's word more credible than a woman's.
  
• She was sentenced to death.
• Authorities allowed the sentence to be carried out.
• The execution was performed in a particularly brutal way.
• Her death was cheered on by a crowd of 1000 spectators.

Of course, Somalia is a mess. There's no rule of law. Various factions are fighting each other.

Even so. If anyone is wondering why feminism hasn't withered away, here's one compelling reason.

And lest we're tempted to "Other" this atrocity and ascribe it to the "backwardness" of other nations and religions: Thirteen-year-olds are raped in the United States every day. Women's basic credibility was challenged in American rape trials until very recently. By this, I don't mean that the accused was (rightly) presumed innocent, but that the accuser was presumed to be a crazy vindictive lying slut until proven otherwise. Even today, victims of sexual assault too often find themselves having to defend their sexual histories in court.

Oh, and don't forget: Even though my country is not ruled by extremist militias, we've still allowed the rule of law to be hollowed out over the past seven years. We have plenty of our own, home-grown (Christian) fundamentalists who believe women deserve punishment for expressing their sexuality (preferably, in the form of a baby, though disease will do the trick, too). And among the rich and privileged countries, we stand alone in employing the death penalty.

Not Just an Evergreen Problem

The Carnival against Sexual Violence 57 is up at abyss2hope. My post on the deployment of rape myths in the Marc Dann sexual harassment scandal was included - thanks to whoever picked it up!

Among the interesting posts in the carnival was a report on a student who was allegedly raped at The Evergreen State College. The incident occurred on a Saturday night; she didn't get a medical exam until the following Tuesday. Her reason for waiting? The student health center was closed over the weekend.

At Change Happens: The SAFER Blog, Ashley comments:

So this school A) had no one available to help this woman when evidence collection was most imperative and B) once contacted, allowed her to wait even longer to obtain the proper care and have evidence collected. Further, by pushing her visit to the emergency room back yet another day, they may have made it impossible for her to take emergency contraception to prevent pregnancy. At the very least, they’ve made it less likely that EC will work.

This is just one of the many reasons that every college should have crisis counselors and sexual assault nurse examiners on call and ready to handle cases like this 24/7. As this case shows, students are often reluctant to call local agencies, and will tend to turn to familiar, college-based programs, especially in a time of crisis.

Now, it's unusual for student health centers to be open from 9 to 5 on the weekend. My undergrad alma mater is open on both weekend days, but they have a massive endowment. My graduate institution offers some Saturday hours; the university where I currently teach is open for a few hours on Sunday afternoons.

Obviously, restrictive weekend hours are unhelpful - not least, because assaults usually aren't conveniently scheduled during normal business hours. But even if an assault occurred at high noon on a weekday, student health centers don't typically deal with the first-line response at all. My university would refer the victim directly to the emergency room of our local hospital, where a SANE nurse (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) would perform the necessary exams, treat any injuries, and offer emergency contraception. This procedure is the same, 24/7: the student health center would never be involved, only the ER.

In other words, Evergreen's approach seems to be pretty typical. Like many other colleges, too, Evergreen has an office charged with preventing sexual assault, which also offers services to survivors. Its web page provides a link to a community sexual violence prevention agency with a 24-hour hotline. This goes one step further than my university, whose website gives 24-hour phone numbers only for the hospital and the police department.

Universities can and should support programs to prevent assault and help survivors cope. But I don't think we can expect student health centers to carry the burden of 24/7 services. Realistically, a university will not pay for its own on-call nurse. This will become even less likely as already tight budgets shrink during the harsh economic times ahead. Even our local hospital has only three SANE nurses serving a five-county area.

What colleges can and must do, however, is make sure that every student knows the importance of getting an exam and EC within the first hours after an assault, that they have easy access to the relevant emergency numbers, and that RAs and other student affairs staff know how to direct victims to help. This is a matter of education. It should be a core aspect of any university's sexual assault prevention program.

Universities can also partner with community agencies. Stanford, for instance, maintains an on-campus office for the YWCA Sexual Assault Center, located in its student health center. It's associated with the off-campus YWCA Rape Crisis Center of Silicon Valley and offers a 24-hour hotline. Without knowing all the details of how that partnership works - and most crucially, who pays for what - I think this might be a promising model to pursue. It allows communities and colleges to pool resources, which ought to create mutually beneficial synergies, and it gives students a bridge from their familiar environment to resources beyond the university.

Binging on Prohibition

Photo by Flickr user kspoddar, used under a Creative Commons license.

A legal drinking age of 21 prevents high-risk drinking among college students, right?

Umm ... not so fast. Over 100 college presidents have signed onto the Amethyst Initiative, a petition calling for a national conversation on rethinking the drinking age.

Already there's a predictable counterreaction, as the Columbus Dispatch reports:

... Mothers Against Drunk Driving says that lowering the drinking age would lead to more fatal car crashes and urges parents to think carefully about the safety of colleges whose presidents have signed on.

"It's very clear the 21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced at those campuses," said Laura Dean-Mooney, MADD's national president.

Joining with MADD is Nationwide, which released a survey last week indicating 72 percent of adults think lowering the drinking age would make alcohol more accessible to minors, and nearly half think it would increase binge drinking among teens.

But here's the thing: Unlike the general public, college presidents have a close-up view of underage drinking. A lot of them apparently realize that neo-prohibition has failed miserably on their campuses. Students engage in binge drinking partly because they have to do it on the sly. So they front-load their evenings, drinking heavily behind closed doors, before they mosey out to the bars or parties where they might not be served.

I have an even closer view of the issue because my students have talked to me frankly about it. A year ago, I took an informal in-class poll of who had gotten in trouble for alcohol violations. At least a third of my students in two different sections of 40 raised their hands. That makes roughly 25 students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, whose college careers were threatened with derailment. Those who raised their hands are only the ones who got caught and were willing to admit to it in public; the true number is probably somewhat higher. Even those who'd never been caught - including most of the teetotalers - saw the system as capricious and unfair.

The result? Diligent, responsible students are threatened with suspension if they get caught twice with alcohol in their dorm rooms. They don't need to be drinking themselves, they merely need to be in the same room as friends who are imbibing. I've written letters imploring student judiciaries to go easy on students who've been swept up in this trap. Alcohol infractions clog the judiciary system, crowding out plagiarism cases and diverting attention from much more serious violations of policy.

Not least, as long as drinking is criminalized, students are much less likely to report sexual assault. Alcohol is almost always in the mix when college students experience unwanted sexual contact. The Kyle Payne case is only an especially infamous and egregious instance of this. Every sexual assault case that I know about first-hand involved alcohol. But the current approach - "just don't drink and you'll be safe" - is a failure.

I'm not naive enough to think that irresponsible drinking will disappear if alcohol becomes legal on campus. I was an RA for two years in college. I was also a student, fer goodness sake. I did enough stupid things to have a permanent aversion to tequila.

But because I was an RA in the dark ages (1984-86), I also know that things can be different. We RAs bought the alcohol for dorm parties. (Okay, I know that won't fly anymore! You'd get your butt sued.) With social life centered in the residences, we could easily keep tabs on our charges. Sure, people still regularly overindulged. But we knew who was overdoing it, and we made sure they were cared for.

As far as I know, no one was ever sexually assaulted on my watch. It might have happened without my knowing; that's in the nature of acquaintance rape. Certainly in the mid-1980s, "date rape" - as it was then called - was such a new concept, few women would have applied it to nonconsensual sex.

Still, we had a safety net, composed not just of RAs but of friends and dorm-mates and resident faculty. I'm positive that this averted lots of potentially ugly situations. Often, I was part of that net. On more than one occasion, I was the person it protected.

I'd love to bring back that net. Although Gordon Gee of Ohio State has signed the Amethyst petition, the president of my university has not, and I'm sure he won't. My university has a reputation as a party school. Signing the petition could create a short-term PR problem. But in the long run, bringing alcohol use out of the shadows is the first step toward fostering a more responsible drinking culture.

Kyle Payne Redux, and More Fun with Blogrolling

Remember the case of Kyle Payne, the self-appointed advocate for survivors of sexual violence who exposed and photographed the breasts of a passed-out woman whom he was supposed to be helping? Well, he's written a long and kiss-assy letter on his blog, which I won't link to directly, but you can find the link at The Curvature, where Cara dissects Payne's letter beautifully. Jeff at Bookworm (jfpbookworm) dismantles his non-apology apology almost line by line, and does it so well I have nothing to add. So go read their posts already.

Well, I guess I have just one question - not really a thought - and that is, can someone ever regain trust after violating it so flagrantly? I don't think Mr. Payne ever can. Even in his long letter - which I honestly think is aimed more at the judge than at feminists or his victim - he acts as though events simply happened to him. Clearly, aliens swooped down and inhabited his body for a few minutes.

But the question is still one I wonder about, partly as a student of history where it's not just individual but collective guilt, responsibility, and accountability at stake. What crimes - and what circumstances - render someone irredeemable? I'm not sure this can be answered in the abstract, since circumstances do matter. And yet we make such judgments regularly, whether in our personal relationships or through the criminal justice system or even on the level of international sanctions.

Anyway, inspired by Cara and Jeff's excellent take-downs , I decided it was time to update my blogroll:

• Cara's The Curvature
• Jeff's Bookworm
• Lindabeth's Don't Ya Wish Your Girlfriend Was Smart Like Me
• The Feminist Underground (Habladora and more - okay, I actually added them a few days ago - but let me toot the horn for their newly launched series on feminist parenting)

Happy reading!

Justice, Ohio Style

The Political Cat calls our attention to an absurd miscarriage of justice:

Police in Ohio apparently went to the home of a legally blind diabetic cancer patient in her fifties, looking for her son, a felon. The woman, Denise Harris, was suspicious, for legitimate reasons WHIO TV says they will air tonight in an interview with her.

Police are claiming they knocked on her door and she "became combative" and didn't want to talk to them. So they tased her.

Excuse me? They fucking WHAT? Is somebody putting mind-altering drugs in the water in Ohio?

Um, close to my neck of the woods Dupont has been spiking the water with large doses of C8 (aka perfluorooctanoic acid), which is a suspected but unproven carcinogen. But nobody's yet suggested that either C8 or any of the other abundant pollutants in the state is warping our minds. By golly - that might explain a lot. Like why we in Ohio are acting like a bunch of spineless sheep as the rule of law dissolves before our eyes.

Come to think of it, whatever chemical is inducing docility in Ohio seems to be affecting most of the country. Let's hope we find the antidote before November.

Protecting Girls in Egypt

Sometimes I think I should stop reading medical journals and start studying, oh, maybe the history of gardening. (Hmm - that might not be any cheerier. Think pestilence. Think famine.)

Last week, this sad, disturbing, depressing item appeared in the British Medical Journal:

Egypt has announced that it is imposing a complete ban on female genital mutilation. The ban was imposed last week by the Ministry of Health after a public outcry over the death of a 12 year old girl, Budour Ahmad Shaker, who died from an overdose of anaesthetic while being circumcised.

After the much publicised death of the girl, the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights appealed to the government for a law that would criminalise the practice and that would "punish doctors who commit this crime, and close clinics and hospital that continue to practise it." The doctor who had carried out the circumcision on the girl has been arrested, and the clinic where it took place has been closed down.

In Egypt 75% of female genital mutilation is carried out by doctors and nurses, and 25% are carried out by birth attendants, or "dayas," most of whom are poorly qualified. Subsequent death from various causes, including bleeding and infections, is common.

On the one hand, there appears to be a kernel of good news in this. Egypt appears to be cracking down on a brutal practice, right? And more importantly, at least one feminist group strongly backs the new law?

But not so fast. Since I don't know much about feminism in Egypt, I thought I'd better dig a little deeper. The practice is still widespread in Egypt. And so it stands to reason: if the hospitals are totally boxed, won't the dayas' business explode?

Umm, yeah. A Reuters article that includes the voice of actual girls hints at why the new law may indeed backfire, putting girls at greater risk than before:

The death of the 11-year-old schoolgirl at a private clinic in the Egyptian village Mughagha in June prompted the government to outlaw the custom of female genital mutilation, which is so widespread in Egypt that 95 percent of the country's women are estimated to have undergone the procedure.

But the ban may be hard to enforce and activists fear the practise may go underground as the vast majority of Egyptian families still view circumcision as necessary to protect girls' chastity. Most girls are cut by the time they reach puberty.

Even in Mughagha, a village of low rise houses hemming the Nile, many women and girls say they want the procedure to be allowed but under more stringent medical supervision.

"If a girl is not purified, she will just go hook up with men. This protects women's honour. Otherwise it will become just like America here and girls will go with guys," said Asma Said, a 16-year-old secondary school student.

"Those who say it doesn't happen are lying 100 percent. There is not one person here not circumcised, and it will continue."

She like many of the schoolgirls in Maghagha who spoke to Reuters said they supported the practice, even if they were frightened of having it done.

The only girl who spoke against the practice was shouted down by her classmates until she conceded that genital cutting was a necessity.

"No one can get married without it," said the girl.

So it comes down to patriarchy. I don't often say that. But what real choice do these girls have? How else should we understand this, when even the girls themselves see cutting as a form of male control over female sexuality? Of course they know they'll be social outcasts if they remain intact. And so, as long as a girl's access to marriage, children, security, and social adulthood hinges on it, she's unlikely to protest.

I'm reluctant to prescribe a better solution because as an outsider, I just don't know enough. I only know that we have to be cautious about assuming that any crackdown on genital cutting will automatically improve women's lives. And that new laws often don't matter worth a darn if they're not matched by new attitudes.

Men, Feminism, and the Curious Case of Kyle Payne

A young man named Kyle Payne - an über-douche of a blogger who calls himself a feminist - has just plead guilty to photographing and filming a young woman's breasts without her consent. Belledame, Renegade Evolution, and many others (see their blogs for a long list of links) have exposed all the sordid details of this. I won't rehash it here in detail.

The short version is that this guy was an RA at a college in the Midwest, and he was also a sexual assault survivors' advocate. He exploited his positions of trust to violate a young woman's privacy and right to bodily self-determination. The charges he copped to are lesser than an actual assault charge, but no one seems to be disputing the facts.

The astonishing thing is that this dude has kept blogging as though nothing happened. Really, you gotta follow the links above.

The little piece that I'd like to address here is what this means for men in feminism. And frankly, I think it matters not a hoot. Guest-blogging at Feministe, PhysioProf writes:

First, what the fuck is up with men calling themselves feminists?

I don’t call myself a feminist, because it’s not my call whether I am or not. It’s women’s call. I try not to be a fucking misogynist asshole and do what I can to reduce gender inequity in my professional and personal life, which includes trying to call out myself and other men on misogynist shit.

Making a big melodramatic display of tagging oneself with the “feminist” label seems like transparent male cookie-seeking at best, and cover for some seriously nefarious wackaloon shit at worst, as in the case of our male feminist sex criminal friend Payne. (Of course, maybe tagging myself with the “I don’t call myself a feminist” label is just more subtle cookie-seeking! HAHAHAH!)

Y'now, this is just not a relevant lens. Consider this: I knew a guy in college who seemed as painfully milque-toast as he was shy. Several years after graduation, while he was working as a grade-school teacher, he got busted for circulating child porn on the Internet. (He served several years in prison and actually showed up at a reunion I attended last fall - creepy.)

Does he represent all teachers? Does his story lead anyone to wonder whether all male teachers are potential child abusers? Of course not! (Well, actually it's not all that long ago, some 30 or 40 years, since that fear lurked among American parents. But I think we're past that by now.) Maybe my acquaintance chose his occupation to gain closer access to kids. But there's no reason to overgeneralize.

As for Mr. Kyle Payne, as soon as he violated that woman's trust, he burned his feminist credentials forever. He is not a feminist. Maybe he chose his causes out of conscious desire to fool women and gain their trust. Maybe it was more complex and he wasn't aware of the nasty soup of aggression and desire that drove his supposed politics.

Whatever the truth about Kyle Payne's motives, he never was a feminist. He was a total phony. And his case says nothing - nothing! - about men in feminism, or what men should call themselves - whether allies, pro-feminists, or just plain feminists - if they sympathize with feminist causes.

I think it's still difficult for sympathetic men to figure out how to place themselves with respect to feminism. I remember debates about this all through the 1980s (and clearly the issue goes back longer than my adult political memory, to the feminist-separatist scuffles of the 1970s and beyond). Even today, my best-intentioned students seem to struggle the most with how they fit into a women's studies classroom.

Calling yourself a feminist is risky enough for women, who fear being marginalized as ugly, lesbian, man-hating, humorless, etc. For men, it means putting their masculinity on the line. That's ironic, since risk-taking and courage are both hallmarks of conventional masculinity. But I really respect any man who's willing to claim the label for himself - as long as he's doing it in good faith.

Any man who treads into this territory is going to hits some speed bumps. Women are still rightly concerned about men co-opting the movement or the debate. I've written about how that can occasionally happen in women's studies classes when men reach near-parity in terms of sheer numbers. The same is true for any manifestation of feminism, not just its academic flavors. Some men still have a really hard time letting women take the lead. (Of course, some women don't play well with others, either - this is obviously not only gendered.)

Men also face a double bind when it comes to their motivations. Figleaf discusses how men who approach feminism with a rescue mentality can put women right back up on the good ol' pedestal. He argues that men may be wiser to ask what's in it for them - namely, better relationships with everyone they love and freedom from roles that constrain men as well as women. I think he's right, in general - and yet, anyone who suspects bad faith in his position can easily say, well, this is just making everything all about the menz again.

I start from the assumption that the vast majority of men who call themselves feminists are coming from a good place - that they, too, care about humanity and justice and kindness and fairness. Sometimes I may disagree with them, just as I disagree with quite a few women who are feminists. Sometimes their style may annoy me - ditto, too, for some of the women. But I tend to impute good faith until I see strong evidence to the contrary.

Clearly, photographing a passed-out drunken woman's breasts is evidence enough. But let's not turn Kyle Payne into a symbol of anything other than sexual violence.

Ohio's Hospitals Failing Rape Victims

NARAL Ohio wrote me an email today (yeah, me personally, because I'm special) announcing something that damn well ought to be a no-brainer - that actually ought to already exist:

On Wednesday, State Representative Dan Stewart will formally introduce a bill that would ensure that sexual assault victims have access to emergency contraception and preventative treatment for sexually transmitted infections (STI) in Ohio emergency rooms. This bill (Compassionate Assistance for Rape Emergencies) is critical for the treatment of sexual assault survivors in our state.
(No link on this, since it's not yet up on NARAL's state-by-state legislation tracker.)

And you'd think that such legislation wouldn't be necessary in the first place because the number of hospitals denying comprehensive care should approach zero, right? Wrong. Oh, so wrong.

NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio's survey of hospital emergency rooms last year showed that 17% of hospitals who participated in the survey do not guarantee access to emergency contraception (also known as the “morning-after” pill) to all sexual assault victims.

That's one in six hospitals refusing to provide legal care that meets the basic standards of modern medicine. Though NARAL doesn't specify, the odds are great that they're virtually all Catholic institutions. But by golly, if I were raped, the first thing out of my mouth wouldn't be "Please take me to a non-Catholic hospital." A victim of assault should be given everything she needs, not forced to advocate for herself while she's profoundly traumatized.

Yesterday I just read the full text of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 Papal Encyclical that reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church's intransigent rejection of abortion and contraception. I came away from it impressed with the otherworldly idealism of it. I still disagree as deeply as ever with its conclusions, but I do appreciate its warnings against using other humans as a mere means to an end.

And yet, nowhere does Humanae Vitae address the problem of rape and violence and coercion. If the Catholic hierarchy** wants to maintain that sexuality can only be expressed in marriage, in acts that do not run contrary to "nature" (and boy, is that a spongy category), then how does it account for acts of sexual violence? Why should contraception be anathema after an act that violates the spirit of Humanae Vitae on so many levels - the lack of meaningful consent, the clear use of one person as a mere means, the violation of the Church's notion of the natural?

And why - even according to Catholic theology - should a victim of violence be denied emergency contraception? Remember, we're talking about blocking conception, not performing an abortion. This is, in fact, the chance to prevent an abortion, considering that most rape victims will not carry a resulting pregnancy to term.

Yes, I know that Catholicism maintains that fetal life is innocent life, and that the fetus did not choose to be conceived through an act of violence. But nowhere does Humanae Vitae assert this point. Instead, it grounds opposition to "artificial" birth control in the sanctity of married sexuality as always simultaneously serving two ends, unity of the couple and the propagation of humanity. I'm no expert in theology, nor was I raised Catholic. I'm sure other Catholic teachings do address the Church's reasons for opposing EC even in cases of rape. I'm also aware that EC wasn't on the religious/political agenda in 1968 when Humanae Vitae was issued, although doctors were certainly aware of it.

But if the primary Catholic position statement on "life" doesn't provide a rationale for denying EC to rape victims, I see no reason why secular authorities can't impose their own requirements. I do know that the Church affirms the dignity of every human being, and if it takes government intervention to extend that to rape victims, so be it.

** I'm fully aware that most American Catholics will disagree with the Church on this, so I'm taking care to refer to the hierarchy and to official doctrine insofar as I understand it.

Rape as Rebellion?

Photo by Flickr user Captain Midnight, used under a Creative Commons license.

Why do (some) men rape?

It's not an academic question. If we knew why it happens, we might know how to stop it.

Figleaf is proposing that rape may be a form of rebellion against patriarchy. I nearly always agree with him, but I'm not at all convinced by this. He recognizes that it's a completely self-defeating form of rebellion, and he's not in any way excusing or condoning, just trying to understand it. But I think it's much more plausible that at least some rapists - not necessarily all - are motivated by resentment at feeling excluded from the perks of patriarchy. That's not at all the same as rebelling against patriarchy per se. (To stay within his frame of reference, I'll going to use the term patriarchy here, even though it's problematic, as I've already discussed, and I'd much rather substitute "male privilege" for it.)

One difficulty here is that it's folly to think there's a single motivation common to all rapists. Figleaf starts from Susan Brownmiller's assertion that rape is an act of violence. Brownmiller's work set the paradigm for virtually all feminist thought about rape since the mid-1970s, and it's been a highly productive lens. But I think her re-framing of rape as violence - crucial as that was in undermining the view of it as mere sexual deviance - can't capture the whole spectrum of possible motivations. Of course, rape always includes at least an implicitly violent component, even if it occurs while a woman is passed out and cannot possibly resist. But if we want to understand why rape happens, I think we need to think about the various meanings and motives that may lurk behind it. The urge to commit a violent act may not always be paramount.

To start what I consider the least important motivation, I'm willing to at least consider a possible role for biological factors, even though I'm skeptical of evolutionary psychology that claims men will try to spread their seed as widely as possible by any means necessary. After all, people created laws, religion, and ethics to contain our most destructive impulses, and men are just as capable as women of abiding by these basic principles of civilization. If biology alone is a suficient explanation, then why do the vast majority of men never commit rape? Still, since I'm trying to cast a wide net here, I'm willing to concede that there may be some biological predisposition. (I'm not willing to grant that testosterone accounts for this. The relationship between testosterone and aggression is by no means a simple linear one.)

Rape can be a form of male bonding, particularly in contexts like fraternities or bars. This is most obviously the case where gang rape occurs (and applies at least partly to the example figleaf cites). But male bonding can also be in play when a man commits an assault on his own but later brags about it to his buddies. There's nothing remotely rebellious about any of this. Participation in a fraternity gang rape, for instance, is a way to establish one's patriarchal bona fides, not to lash out against any system of privilege.

At least in a few instances, rape can be a way to get sex if a man perceives no other options. Prison rape is probably the most obvious example of this, but heterosexual men who feel that no woman would have them may also use this perception to justify rape. Again, I'm not saying this negates the element of violence, only that the desire for sexual release may be part of the mix. Rape as a means to sex is not rebellion against patriarchy - not in any form. Instead, it's rebellion against one's perceived exclusion from its privileges, and particularly from masculine sexual entitlement. This motivation is not about real needs, but about perceived entitlements.

Men may indeed be acting out resentments against individual women or against women as a class. Nearly two decades ago, I knew a man who'd recently been divorced. I had an experience with him that was not entirely consensual. Maybe I'll write about that in more detail some other day. But it was clear to me then, and it's still clear now, that he was acting out his anger against his ex-wife and his more generalized sense of sexual deprivation. The mix of motives here is similar to those guys who perceive no other sexual options, except here the man resents not getting as much sex as he thinks he's entitled to. Plain old misogyny plays into it, too, since resentments aren't necessarily limited to sexual ones.

Other systems of oppression may play a role. Insofar as men feel boxed out of the benefits of patriarchy, as figleaf suggests, we need to think about the intersection of different oppressions. A man who has experienced racism or classism or discrimination based on age or ability or any other "isms" won't likely to see himself as a beneficiary of patriarchy. He may harbor resentment that then gets turned against someone who's lower than him in the food chain. This can occur even when a man is not evidently oppressed; white, middle-class men may still feel cheated of the patriarchal privilege that they think ought to be their due. What counts is the perception. But again, this isn't rebellion against patriarchy per se, it's merely acting out against a feeling of not getting one's fair share of the patriarchal goodies.

But I think figleaf's on a much more productive track when he discusses entitlement:

The problem with the myth of (hetero) sexual scarcity isn't "stuff like this wouldn't happen if women just put out more." Because women *do* "put out" more than ever before without much affecting the myth, or it's consequences, one bit.

Instead the problem with the myth of sexual scarcity is that you wind up with a *climate* of wherein men feel not desperate for sex with women but *entitled* to whatever they can get. But it's a funny sort of "entitlement." Entitlement, no question about it, but an astonishingly alienated kind.
(The rest of his post is here.)

I think alienation enters into it because masculine sexual entitlement really is ultimately more about power than about pleasure; that's the common thread in all of the motivations that I just outlined. And that's why it's partly irrelevant if women say "yes" to sex now more than ever before - and partly just more infuriating to some men, who see their power slipping away.

The power to say yes encompasses the power to say no. And that poses a huge and fatal challenge to the very idea that men are owed sex. In the face of this challenge, men have a choice: either change their thinking and embrace enthusiastic consent as the prerequisite to sex - or simply take what's not freely offered.

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This is the sort of post that really needs footnotes because a whole lot of other people's ideas flow into it. Here are the main ones. Sorry to be so nerdy but they aren't things I can just link to. If you were to read just one of them, I'd suggest going straight to Michael Kimmel at the end of the list.

On rape as violence: Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (New York: Bantam, 1976).

On evolutionary psychology: Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000)

On male bonding and fraternities: Patricia Yancey Martin and Robert A. Hummer, "Fraternities and Rape on Campus," in Feminist Frontiers, ed. Laurel Richardson, Verta Taylor, and Nancy Whittier, 5th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 444–53; and A. Ayres Boswell and Joan Z. Spade, “Fraternities and Collegiate Rape Culture: Why Are Some Fraternities More Dangerous Places for Women?” in Men's Lives, ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner, 5th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001), 167–77.

On masculine sexual entitlement: Michael S. Kimmel, "Clarence, William, Iron Mike, Tailhook, Senator Packwood, Spur Posse, Magic … and Us," in Men's Lives, 540–51.