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rape as social control

While Everyone Sings "Being a Harlot Is All Fun and Games / Till Somebody Loses..."

Sun, 2010-02-28 11:19 — figleaf

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon calls out a hidden heavy lifter in the no-sex class arsenal:

There’s a bit of polite fiction about premarital sex—-not that it doesn’t happen, but we don’t discuss it in detail around relatives—-but all in all, women dating, flirting, and sleeping with men is considered a normal, healthy way to meet people, fall in love, and yes, even find someone to marry, if you’re into that sort of thing.  We know that the most common thing that happens is that you date someone, sleep with them, and it doesn’t work out.  But sometimes it does, so we keep plugging.  But sometimes someone rapes someone else, and then all of a sudden people start acting like going out with men and allowing yourself to be alone with them—-and god forbid, floating the possibility of having sex with them!—-is outrageous behavior and anyone who engages in it should expect nothing short of being raped and possibly beaten severely. 

She said it here.

In other words though most people won’t say anything at all before the fact, when it goes bad they’ll say “I told you so.”

Call it the “being a pirate is all fun and games / till somebody loses an eye” principle corollary of the bogus Rule #2

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You can see the same sort of thing with unplanned, unwanted pregnancy, by the way. The usual way “shotgun wedding” is used implies only the male party is the only one who isn’t ready to marry or, more precisely, settle down when the couple gets “caught.” That impulse to force women, even more than men, to settle down is, I believe, an absolutely huge driver of nominally “pro-life” activism.

The No-Sex Class: A Chilling Confirmation From Slavery Apologists Before the American Civil War

Sun, 2010-02-07 22:52 — figleaf

Well here’s an interesting tidbit on maintenance of the two-sphere model of gender that I stumbled across on a coffee-shop “library.” The book is called Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. In a coffee-shop setting I’ve only been able to read the introduction but the rest of the book looks interesting as well.

Here’s an eye-opening couple of paragraphs from the introduction though.

To link female honor to purity would have proven sexually inconvenient for southern white men, however, had they not bifurcated the sexuality of white and black women. The creation of Jezebel provided the rationale for allowing sexual relations between white men and black women. Southern proslavery ideologue William Harper made no apology for the sexual degrading of black women by white men. He simply extended his theory that “slavery anticipates the benefits of of civilization and retards the evils of civilization” into the realm of sexual relations.

By regarding black women as a “class of women who set little value on chastity,” he argued that slavery protected black women by saving them from the alternative of being cast out of society in the manner “justly and necessarily applied to promiscuous free women.”

Harper further argued that the sexual access to enslaved women discouraged white men from debauching “pure” white women and provided them with “easy gratification” for their “hot passions” without violating the code of southern honor. Finally, he reasoned, such sexual access made white men “less liable to those extraordinary fascinations, with which worthless [white] women sometimes entangle their victims.”

Source: Introduction, pg #9

What’s really boggling is that Harper, like Aquinas, Augustine, and countless others who’ve endorsed this view of heterosexuality imagined they could endorse this outlook and still go to Heaven when they died.

This would sound more shocking if virtually the same sentiments didn’t turn up in the Middle Ages and even earlier: a relatively small number of “jezebels:” prostitutes, slaves, and occasionally even boys are sacrificed at the alter of, well, unalterable male lust in order to… what? To preserve the nigh-unto-asexually disinterested sexual “purity” of “true womanhood.

One can only imagine how actual true women felt about it… all of them obviously — both the “bad,” “debauched,” or “fallen” ones were overborn sexually, and the “pure,” “true,” and “virtuous” who were allowed no sexual expression at all.

Anyway, it’s a totally horrifying but also very tidy encapsulation of the dominant paradigm of women as the obligatory no-sex class and men as the compulsive sex class.

Anyway, knowing nothing else about the book (though I’ll see if I can get back to the coffee shop to read more of it) the very quick skim I was able to give it looks like a seriously interesting look at a usually seriously overlooked population and the dynamics women of all social and economic classes were subject to before, during, and after the Civil War.

On the very off-hand chance anyone else has read more of it feel free to let me know what you think in comments.

Polanski Defenders, Hollywood, and the Use of Unwanted Sex as Currency

Thu, 2009-10-15 16:37 — figleaf

Jill (formerly Twisty) of I Blame The Patriarchy takes on the peculiar cast of characters defending convicted rapist Roman Polanski has an aura of childlike naivete. She says the answer is that basically all the nominal progressives who called for him to be left alone are all just really bad people and we’ve just been too dumb to notice. Taking aim at Whoopie Goldberg

Wait! No! Not Whoopi, the affable Center Square who’s black enough to be hep, but not so black that she scares the honkys?

...

Possibly Whoopi views Polanski’s violent crime in this seriously fucked-up way because in Hollywood — patriarchy’s primary misogyny propaganda unit — rape is nothing but a plot device

She said it here.

I think that’s going both a little too hard but also way too easy on them.

Instead I think it’s because in Hollywood people use, um, “leveraged” sex as even more of a medium of currency than most other places do. It’s not just about the “casting couch” thing but an outright demonstration of a combination of power, fealty, and “committment” to a person or project. Where it’s sort of a given that giving a producer a blowjob when it’s known you like giving them or even just don’t mind isn’t nearly as valuable as giving one when it’s the last thing on earth you want to do.

And so by that way of thinking, which I’m guessing Goldberg just sees as the cost of doing business, what Polanski did to a 13-year-old was just “over the line” and not “rape-rape.”

And I’m just thinking that unusual suspects are standing up for him not so much because they like the system or look forward to being on the receiving end themselves but because to acknowledge it in Polanski’s case would mean having to confront what they themselves have submitted to, or at least steeled themselves for in case they had to, as their own “cost of doing business” in Hollywood.

And by the way, that’s not to excuse the “rape as a plot device” business they grunt out on a daily basis. Quite the opposite. You see a lot of the same sordid plot devices in regular print and comic publishing, but you don’t see that “if you want it you’ve got to show me how badly you want it” sort of thing that goes on in Hollywood.

Bottom line: it’s not so much “rape-rape” culture as a culture of sexual harassment on an industrial scale. For an insider to stand up to it requires acknowledging that he or she has participated in, and possibly “benefited” career-wise from it, as aggressor or victim or both.

%@!#%W

For the record I think sex is just great. And while I’m not a fan I’m not opposed to fee-for-service sex. I seriously have it in for sex as leverage or obligation of any kind, though.

Setting Expectations and Locating Responsibility No Matter How Culture Defines "Victim"

Mon, 2009-07-27 07:36 — figleaf

In comments to my previous post about the universality of victim blaming, Christina B, who’s studied rape in the context of warfare made clear the piece I realize I was missing

I studied (not extensively) the effect of rape on the social fabric and the reason why it is being used as a tool of war in the context of Darfur, which is a shame based culture.

I don´t want to generalize to all ¨shame based cultures¨, but in the context of Darfur it is the responsibility of the woman´s guardian (father, brother or husband) to keep her safe and pure. It is part of his masculinity, his identity as a man. Hence, when a woman is raped or has consentual sexual relations outside of marriage, culturally, her ¨guardian¨ is seen to have failed in his charge of protecting/controlling her. He has failed as a man, which is why it brings shame on the family. This is the basis of rejecting women/girls who have been raped. It isn´t really about ¨blaming¨ the victim. It is about the man´s inability to ¨be a man¨.

Of course, this particular view of masculinity is based in the idea that women are inferior and that men can´t control themselves sexually. However, the specifics are different than in ¨guilt based cultures¨, and I think it is important to keep that in mind.

She said it here.

In some patriarchal cultures (ahem, America would be one of them even though Christina was speaking specifically about Darfur) rape is used not only to injure and humiliate the actual victim but to humiliate and degrade the men who’s identities are tied up in protecting “their” women. In other words in many cases in the eyes of the rapists the intended victims include the real victim’s custodial men.

And in that context (and against our particular core values) killing, assaulting, or shunning the woman is perceived as a way for the male victims to mitigate their humiliation.

But rather than absolving those male “victims,” (who incidentally may indeed feel victimized) their actions double the horror.

1) Because not only are they totally, um, missing the point, they’re acting in a context where it’s still the victim who’s blamed rather than the perpetrator.

2) However culturally determined, murdering, assaulting, shunning the real victim (or, in America, just declaring she must have “asked for it”) in no way changes the universal dynamic that however broadly the culture defines “victim” it’s the victim that’s being held responsible and being blamed. When, instead, responsibility lies with the perpetrator(s)!

Getting that through our collective thick skulls is gonna take some work, and might take different forms in different cultures, but since its a universal fallacy we can legitimately criticize and oppose it no matter how it manifests.

And the reason I keep beating on this is that getting away from the idea that “she was asking for it” or, I guess in some cases that the custodial patriarch or family was asking for it is necessary in order to move towards the general case of setting expectations for men and holding them responsible for our sexual and sex-linked behavior.

Blame Where Blame is Due: Cross-Cultural Edition

Sun, 2009-07-26 09:03 — figleaf

Following up on my previous post and cultural sensitivity an even shorter way to say it might be that while different cultures often have different values, and even value systems, and while (as a minor fan of Ruth Benedict) I’m aware that it’s difficult for someone with one cultural value system to make moral declarations of another, I think its safe to say blaming victims of sexual assault is pretty universal.

And so to the extent blaming the victim is a universal cultural value (as common to Louisiana as Liberia, as common to feminists as anti-feminists) there’s no need to tiptoe while confronting victim blaming.

Yes, we should strive to be sensitive in our approaches to changing the narratives from blaming victims to blaming perpetrators. And so it might be necessary to recognize that in more overtly patriarchal “shame-based” or “honor-based” societies it’s not just the victim herself but her father and family who are blamed. And that the patriarchal connection to victim-blaming is only more subtly veiled, but no less solid, in nominally “1st-World,” and/or “guilt-based” cultures like, oh, say, Maryland.

But at the end of the day the responsible parties are the parties that commit the fucking crimes and not the victims of those crimes. Thus regardless of culture it’s long past time to hold the perpetrators rather than victims (however broadly or narrowly one chooses to define “victim”) responsible.

A Single Month Seems Scarcely Enough

Tue, 2009-04-14 11:59 — figleaf

In her “Abbreviated Pundit Roundup,” BarbinMD of Daily Kos quotes columnist Bob Herbert on what’s actually a narrow point in a much broader context.

Murderous gunfire claims many more victims than those who are actually felled by the bullets. But all the expressions of horror at the violence and pity for the dead and those who loved them ring hollow in a society that is neither mature nor civilized enough to do anything about it.

Read the quote, and follow the links here.

Ironic that I should think that a narrow point for something that claims victims so far even from the echos of the sounds of gunshots. I think I’ve mentioned how mere fear of “city” violence led family of a friend to move to ex-urban “paradise.” And how consequently their daughter who year after year was left to her own devices for hours after school thanks to her parents long, long commutes. And how, imagining herself perishing of boredom she wound up perishing instead of massive injuries under the wheels of a logging truck in a car full of intoxicated, unsupervised teenagers like herself. So yeah, in a sense murderous gunfire truthfully claims far more victims than those who are actually felled by the bullets.

For all that, Herbert’s point remains narrow. Murder is not the only useless, self-perpetuating, desperately unnecessary tragedy to empty life of meaning for victims, their loved ones, and even those who will never know them.

There are enough such tragedies to fill 10,000 Russian novels. On April 8th, President Obama took formal steps to acknowledge and officially recognize one kind of these… Sexual Assault Awareness month. Good for him.

Why I'm Not Buying the Wasilla Rape-Kit/Emergency-Contraception Refusal Conspiracy Theory

Fri, 2008-09-19 09:27 — figleaf

So! A lot of folks have been picking up on the possibility that the city of Wasilla, Alaska might have charging rape victims for “rape kits.”

I say that’s not just wrong it’s wrong in a way that inadvertently help former Wasilla mayors and police chiefs save a little face. The rest of this post explains what’s actually in a “rape kit,” where the actual expense comes in, why emergency contraception isn’t part of the process, and why ‘wingnuts would prefer that story to what’s probably the real reason, and, finally, what the real reason probably is.

What are rape kits? Rape kits, a.k.a. SAE kits (sexual assault evidence kits), RA kits (for rape-assault kits), or Vitullo Kits,” named after the Chicago forensic investigator Louis R. Vitullo who developed the standard kit for gathering, processing, and storing evidence of rape and sexual assault…in the 1970s.

Like many other evidence-gathering “kits,” rape kits aren’t commercial products. Instead they’re a collection of (as Wikipedia’s entry puts it) “commonly available examination tools” such as swabs, glass slides, wooden sticks for fingernail scrapings, bags for clothes, forms for documentation, and detailed instructions for correctly collecting the evidence.

They don’t contain emergency contraception.

So! If it’s just swabs, slides, vials, and bags, how can one cost $600-$1200? And why wouldn’t they contain emergency contraception?

Well, guess what? “Rape kits” are nearly always processed in hospitals. (ka-ching!) By doctors or other medical personnel (ka-ching!) or (at least on CSI where I haven’t gotten most of my information) by trained forensic specialists. The evidence is processed in labs (ka-ching), either in glamorously lit and gorgeously designed CSI labs in larger cities with television programs, or, for smaller municipalities, in the same sort of medical pathology labs that process throat cultures, blood draws, and other medical samples. (Ka-ching!)

Which part do you think takes up most of the $1200.00, the q-tips and evidence envelopes or the gathering and processing fees?

Right in one!

So why does it make sense that the kit itself wouldn’t contain EC? Well, because none of the standardized lists of kits suggest they do (direct evidence) and because they’re used in hospitals. (Note: this would be consistent with ‘winger protests that really they only wanted the hospitals to bill the victim’s insurance for the kits, not the victims themselves. But s’yeah, see below.)

Anyway, we could drill down through evidence and counter-evidence but the bottom line is still going to be that the nominally “principled” (by ‘winger standards anyway) that “virtuous” (again by ‘winger standards only) municipal authorities won’t pay for rape kits because they contain emergency contraception is bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Bullshit! No, stop, don’t start, bullshit. That’s not why. It has nothing to do with why.

In fact, to perpetuate the story that that’s why is doing them a favor! So don’!

How’s it doing them a favo? Because, again, if it was on “pro-life” principles they’d have some kind of a moral, non-knuckle-dragging-women-hating leg to stand on. Which is why they may end up begging you to say it’s about EC.

Because if it’s not about EC then it’s about the much more plausible, fundamental belief on their part that all rape accusations (where the victim survives, anyway, and is therefore a slut) are false accusations. So, principled wingnut stand? No, unprincipled wingnut stand.

They want to charge for rape kits because they think it’ll discourage women from “changing their minds and crying rape.”

If it really was about emergency contraception (which, remember, it isn’t anyway) then you’d expect them not to stock the kits at all. But instead of refusing to use the kits — as might be expected of a really principled “pro-life” person if the kits really did contain EC — they merely required that the victim to pay for it herself. And when I say “pay for it” I don’t mean the actual material kit (low cost, remember) but paying to have the evidence processed.

So once again, their refusal to pay for rape kits was never about red herrings like emergency contraception. Instead it was about an entrenched, traditional, philosophical sympathy and/or admiration for the accused in rape cases, and an equally abiding suspicion that if the victim wasn’t just lying outright she was almost certainly asking for it.

*Who* Exactly Is "Asking For It"

Thu, 2008-06-26 22:50 — figleaf

[Note: I’m on vacation in what may be very limited internet service so this is a pre-recorded and (I very much hope!) a self-publishing post. I may not have much opportunity to reply to comments but you’re comments are still very welcome. I’ll reply as soon as I can. You’re some of the best commenters in the blogsphere so you’re always welcome to respond spiritedly but respectfully to each other’s comments while I’m away. —fl]

I spend most of my time talking about the descriptive elements of the dominant “no-sex” class paradigm: men’s irrational but persistent conviction that women are “fair game” for leverage for sex because they have no authentic sexual agency and thus no interest in sex independent of those who seek to “get” sex from them. But there’s another side, a prescriptive side where various personal, social, and legal punishments are designated for women who fail to meet the class expectations created for them.

Case in point? Laura Woodhouse of The F-Word Blog

Yup, once again the onus is being placed on women to prevent rape, with men entirely absent from the equation, this time in the Malaysian city of Kota Bharu:

Authorities in Kota Bharu have distributed pamphlets recommending that Muslim women do not wear heavy makeup and loud shoes when they go out to work in restaurants or other public places. [...] The goal of the modesty drive was to prevent rape and safeguard the women’s dignity, said a spokesman.

Policing women’s appearance and pre-emptively blaming them for rape in one fell swoop? Ten patriarchy points for you, sir.

Read the quote in context here.

I think looking at these declarations as warnings against rape is missing the point. I think instead they serve the functional purpose of authorizing rape as a tool of punishment for transgressors.

So I’m afraid that while Feministe is possessed perhaps of more generous expectations when she says of the same municipal circular

If the Kota Bura Municipal Council is actually interested in preventing rape, perhaps they should focus on the rapists.

Read this quote in context here.

I’m afraid the Council really isn’t interested in preventing rape, they’re interested in using and encouraging it as a form of social control of women.

And I think, by the way, that this is a very big deal. When wretched jerks say of an assault victim “well, she was asking for it” I suspect what they mean is “we were asking for it.” Time to start calling them on it.

%#)!*&$

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