Just popping in to recommend a fantastic article on campus rape in the Washington Post today. Along with the fact that the article itself is fabulous, it also points to the great new report on campus sexual assault by the Center for Public Integrity, and to recent, extremely important research on college rapists by David Lisak and Stephanie McWhorter.

When SAFER first made the transition from a student group to a national organization, I remember being very concerned about the ginormous, super-rich right-wing infrastructure that was standing ready to try to stop any effort to end sexual violence on college campuses. A very wise lady told me that the situation was very much like a chess game, in which the other side has extremely powerful pieces—queens and rooks and bishops and whatnot—but our side only has pawns. The trick, she said, is that our side has a lot more pieces.

Back then, one conservative organization opposing our efforts was able to create a carefully coordinated month-long media blitz opposing SAFER’s work in pretty much every major news outlet with little more than a few phone calls. Ironically enough, the coverage started with an op-ed in the Washington Post, so I feel a special satisfaction at seeing such great work there, specifically.

Anti-violence activists may not have the money and corporate connections of those who deny the reality of sexual assault on college campuses. We can’t make a call and send our talking points to a bought and paid for “journalist” who will parrot them. We don’t have corporate donors who will fund us to create propaganda trying to convince people that their own experiences are false. But what we do have on our side is the very simple truth: sexual violence is an epidemic on college campuses. More importantly, we also have a lot of people who are pretty tired of that situation. Articles like this make me think the pawns are on the move.

I have to wonder when Americans claim they didn’t know that rape was occurring at Abu Ghraib. We knew. From a 2004 transcript of a talk by journalist Seymour Hersh:

Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.

By the way, this information came out before the election of 2004.

If you didn’t know, you should have. This is absolutely a case of mass guilt. Over a million people have died. There was horrific torture of civilians, including children. In our names. We knew. If we didn’t know, our ignorance was willful, and it had everything to do with the race, nationality, and religion of the victims. We are responsible.

Now, as was inevitable (and perhaps intentional–after all, totalitarian regimes ultimately want people to know about the torture they inflict–that’s how they control dissent), photographs of some of the rapes that occurred at Abu Ghraib have surfaced, and there’s a debate about their release that I find bizarrely lacking. On one side, we have people who say the release of the photographs would lead to greater anti-American sentiment (you know what else leads to anti-American sentiment? Torturing children.) On the other, we have “progressives” calling for the release of the photos in the name of transparency. No one appears to be discussing what the rape victims might think about photographs of their rapes being distributed to the international news media. As is virtually always the case in our culture, when someone is raped we pay attention to the needs of everyone except the rape victim. The actual victims of rape are reduced to objects to be used for our own political ends. Their needs, their emotions, their desires, don’t count.

What the Obama Administration should do is contact these victims, and ask them what they would like us to do with the photos, and what restorative justice might look like. Incidentally, if reducing anti-American sentiment (rather than, for example, not raping people) is what we’ve decided we’re most concerned with, restorative justice would do a hell of a lot more to alleviate anti-American sentiment than refusing to release the photos, which, as far as I can see, does precisely nothing toward that end.

H/T Shakesville

Apparently the new movie Observe and Report includes a scene in which the protagonist rapes someone. This scene is played as a “joke.” See, it’s funny, because the female character is not nice . So it’s just a real hoot to put her in her place.

Just for funsies, here’s how a random dood blogger describes the scene, in which a semi-conscious, extremely intoxicated woman covered in vomit is raped by our hero:

If you’ve seen the red-band trailer for Observe and Report, you’ve seen the gist of the joke, which has Rogen pause mid-intercourse because he thinks Anna Faris’ character is unconscious. She’s apparently not, though, and scolds the guy for stopping. Yes, it’s black comedy, and yes, it makes sense as a joke in theory. But neither Faris’ seemingly conscious outburst nor the audiences’ laughter make it okay, according to some people who will not be going to see the movie this weekend or ever.

If you don’t think that’s funny in theory, lighten up!

I include this description of the movie by someone who I think represents a pretty average guy watching because I think it really brings home just how utterly fucked up the scene really is. Like dood blogger, most people don’t know much at all about the dynamics of sexual violence. Most people don’t have any analysis of rape culture. Most people will watch this movie and think that this joke makes sense in theory. They will think that if the audience’s laughter doesn’t make it okay, it at least makes it better in some way. They will not be tempted to curl into the fetal position for a few days at the mere thought that entire movie theaters full of people will be laughing at a rape scene. They might take rape just a little less seriously. And, FYI, most people don’t take rape very seriously to begin with.

I could say a lot more about this, but I don’t think I have much to add to Tiger Beatdown’s totally. fucking. awesome. beatdown on this particular subject. Beyond that, I think all I have to say is don’t see the movie. Tell your friends not to see the movie. That is all.

The group Smoke Jumpers has released an anti-Chris Brown song, in response to Brown’s recent assault on Rihanna:

A song criticizing Chris Brown is getting air play.

The song is called “My Flow So Tight” by a little-known dance group called Smoke Jumpers. It features the repeated line: “Chris Brown should get his ass kicked.”

A Web site for the group hyped the song as “the official Chris Brown dis record.” Radio stations in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and New York have recently begun playing it.

C.W. Griz, a member of the group who declined to give his real name since he expected Brown to be angered by the song, said Friday that he didn’t think enough people in the music industry had spoken out against the singer.

The 19-year-old Brown allegedly beat his girlfriend, singer Rihanna, on the night of the Grammy Awards in February. Brown is scheduled for arraignment on felony assault and criminal threat charges on Monday.

“I was really upset with the way a lot of celebrities and people were handling the situation,” said C. W. Griz. “Not enough people were speaking out against Chris Brown. What he did was a thousand percent wrong.”

He pledged the group would donate a portion of the proceeds from the song to organizations benefiting battered women, but declined to say how much or specify a charity.

I’m not a fan of violence in response to violence, or really violence at all, but I am a HUGE fan of making new pop culture icons if the existing ones won’t step up and say that what Chris Brown did was wrong… So I’m going to interpret the line about Brown getting his ass kicked as a symbolic way of expressing disapproval for his actions, rather than an actual call for physical retaliation… And I’m going to go buy myself a copy of that song!

But it was wrong.

I’ve written a lot about bystander behavior and sexual violence, and the fact that many sexual assaults happen because no one bothers to stop them, even though they have the opportunity.

This is one of the most egregious cases cases of bystander apathy I’ve ever seen.

A woman raped in a Queens subway station was devastated Tuesday when a judge threw out her suit against two transit workers who ignored her screams for help as she was being attacked.

In a nine-page ruling, Queens Supreme Court Justice Kevin Kerrigan concluded a token clerk and a subway conductor had no responsibility to intervene and were following work rules by not confronting the rapist.

I understand that the law can’t require us to take action when we see a violent act being committed. We all have the right to make decisions about what kind of risks we’re willing to take with our safety, and violent offenders are, by definition, dangerous. The subway workers decided they didn’t want to risk their safety. That is their choice.

Since I’ve spent a lot of time writing about/leading trainings on bystander behavior, I’ve thought a lot about what choice I would make in a situation like this.

My choice would be a different one.

We have a responsibility to each other. Especially those of us who want sexual violence to end. We have a responsibility to do what we can to stop each and every act of sexual violence that we can, be it verbal or physical. Every single one of those acts of violence matters, and the people experiencing that violence matter.

I am a million times grateful to those known and unknown mama bear people who have saved my ass in the inevitable dangerous situations we all face. If I could give a giant hug and a box of chocolates to the woman who pulled me away from a gropey guy at a college party where I was too drunk to say no even though I wanted to, to the woman who noticed someone sneaking into the back room of a business where I was working alone at closing time and promptly marched in to drag him out, and to the guy who noticed another man invading my personal space on a subway platform and pretended to be my long-lost friend to get between us, I would. Since I can’t get them chocolates, I pay them back for their kindness by being a mama bear too.

Recently, while on a walk in the park, I saw an adolescent girl being “befriended” by an older man. He had a dog she liked, and he charmed her into walking the dog with him. He kept moving the walk into secluded areas of the park.

Maybe he was a nice guy. Maybe not. But my friends and I followed those two for a good half hour, just to be sure he never got her alone. If he was a nice guy, I’m sure he didn’t even notice us. If not, I’m glad we were able to be a thorn in his side, just for a little while. That’s what mama bears are for.

My friends and I could have left the park. We had places to be, after all. And she wasn’t OUR daughter. But that girl matters. Making sure she was safe was simple human decency. We’re supposed to take care of each other.

The MTA workers may not have done anything illegal, but they did do something that violates our most basic contract with each other as human beings.

I’m sorry I wasn’t there on the subway platform that night, because come hell or high water, I would have stopped that assault. I hope you would have too.

As I continue to try to make some sense of my visit to Colombia and the implications of everything I saw there, I’ve been going through the notes I took… An excerpt:

I’m struck by the fact that, without prompting, almost everyone we talk to here tells us why they have hope. For Lilia, a peace activist who lives with constant death threats, it is “the people who keep hope when there is no good reason.” For a priest and activist we met today, it was our presence. He told us the simple fact that a group of Americans showed up to see him gave him hope that the world wants peace. It seems that everyone we speak to, from the activists we have been meeting to people on the street, has thought deeply about hope and how to preserve it. It is, quite simply, the urgent question for many of them. And the sense of hope that has been cultivated is central to the social justice efforts I’ve seen here. Without it, they would not exist.

Maybe when you’re faced with real despair, you don’t have the luxury of cynicism.

Cara at The Curvature has a really excellent post up discussing Jimmy Kimmel’s decision to bring up Lil’ Wayne’s experience of what I would define as rape (at 2:40) on national TV.

In the majority of sexual assault cases, where a woman is the victim of a man’s violence, rape apology is rooted primarily not in the denial that male violence exists, but in the denial that male violence means something and needs to be stopped. Conversely, in cases where a man is the victim of a woman’s violence, rape apologism is strongly rooted in the denial that women’s actions can count as violence at all — and especially that their actions can count as sexual violence against men, who are routinely construed as incapable of being victims.

There’s much more to the post. Go.

I’ve been seeing the trailer for the new movie I Love You Man a lot, and it has me thinking about what it says about our cultural ideas about masculinity… Now, I can’t be sure not having seen anything but the trailer, but I think I Love You Man is a backlash movie. By that I mean it’s a movie that (unconsciously, on the part of its creators) works to keep patriarchy and rape culture intact in the face of challenges to those systems. In this case, it’s a movie meant to keep men “in their place.”

As I’ve said before, anything that tries to force men into a strictly defined masculinity that is constructed as superior to femininity is a part of rape culture. And comedy, probably more than any other aspect of culture, is used as a tool to do just that. There’s nothing like the fear of ridicule to get someone to conform.

There have been some cultural shifts lately toward affirming emotionally close male relationships, as the rising popularity of the term “bromance” indicates. I think that this movie is a way of dealing with the anxiety such a cultural shift has caused, and trying to recreate the old order. It’s kind of like the backlash we’ve seen against “metrosexuals,” or emo, or pretty much any male figure that women respond to positively because he presents a nontraditional masculinity (boy bands, the movie Twilight, and Zac Efron are some good examples—ever notice how freaked out dude comedians get about that stuff?)… Something shows up that disturbs the usual order of patriarchy, and a few months later, voila!, there are commercials making fun of men who embrace that thing.

For example:

Of course, men are encouraged to develop bonds with other men in a patriarchy, but homophobia and strict gender roles mean that many of the ingredients of real friendship are taboo in male-male relationships, and that meaningful emotional relationships with women are seen as diminishing men’s masculinity. Some men are starting to challenge this by rejecting homophobia and traditional gender roles in favor of emotionally close relationships with others. Other, more traditional men who see that happening are simultaneously drawn in by their basic human desire for closeness, and repelled/made anxious by their patriarchal conditioning to avoid that closeness… They feel anxious and conflicted. They don’t know how to act, so movies show up to give them nice comforting answers—to tell them that it’s kind of weird to have female friends, and that they should have male friends, but only if they limit their interactions with those male friends to talking about bodily functions and yelling a lot… And by the way, homophobia is fun!

I wonder if we’ll ever get to the point where men in movies can relate to each other on an emotional level without being about to die in some war… Guess I can always dream.

Yet another college is being sued for allowing a person they knew to be a potential threat to other students to remain on campus.

A former student is suing West Liberty State College after she was sexually assaulted on campus in 2007.

23-year-old David Lane pleaded guilty to that assault in Ohio County last year.

Lane is currently serving time in a West Virginia prison. His victim is now claiming that West Liberty State College and its Board of Governors were negligent.

The complaint claims that the college represented itself as safe and secure, and that the Board of Governors allowed Lane to stay on campus even after he was found guilty by the college’s Judicial Board of a prior sexual assault on the campus in 2006.

It is bizarre to me that administrators don’t worry more about situations like this. The negative publicity and the potential money lost seem like they would convince them to take notice. In my experience, however, there is incredible and disproportionate concern about being sued by students expelled for sexual assault, while the possibility of lawsuits like this one is ignored. I’m starting to think that maybe more survivors just need to sue, so colleges will start taking that possibility seriously and create policies that are more balanced.

Real men never get paper cuts. Also, real men walk on the left side of the street, and they don’t fall asleep on airplanes.

Ah, the joys of arbitrary masculinity.

As this series of ads (directed by Errol Morris) at Sociological Images points out, advertising benefits quite a bit from a standard of masculinity that is never quite clear. As long as men are convinced that masculinity is superior to femininity, and that they will lose status by acting feminine, men can be endlessly manipulated by whoever has the authority to tell them what it means to act “masculine.” All advertisers have to do to sell their product is convince men that the most “masculine” thing to do is drink their brand of beer, or buy their car, or vote for the dude who is going to take us to war and kill a million people.

In the process of this advertising, the idea that “masculinity” is better than “femininity” is reinforced once again, creating a culture where the most effective advertising plays into this belief. And on and on it goes, until we get off our asses and change it.

To break it down, here are the messages men are getting from these ads:

“Gossip”: Being a real man is good. Being a woman is bad. Being a real man means being disrespectful of women’s thoughts and desires.

“Boat”: Being a real man means being totally dominant at everything, never needing help, and always knowing what to do. If a man does not have these qualities, other men will ridicule him.

And, as you all know, being a real man means having lots and lots of sex with lots and lots of women.

Simply stir for a lovely rape culture.

And to digress just a little, why am I expected to recognize Errol Morris, who directed this load of fail, as a great filmmaker? How is it that complete misogynist turdbombs are presented to me like this:

Roger Ebert has said, “After twenty years of reviewing films, I haven’t found another filmmaker who intrigues me more…Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini.”

While female directors can’t even get funded?

Why, why, why did I have to watch Roman Polanski and Woody Allen movies in my “Great American Film” class?

How is it possible that misogyny is so accepted that we actually revere artists who blatantly express hatred of women in their art and personal lives?

Given the fact that we live in a patriarchy, that women constitute only 19% of film writers and 4% of film directors, that men outnumber women onscreen about 2 to 1, and that no one can even seem to hire a woman to be the damn voiceover on a trailer, it seems to me that it’s an act of basic self preservation to avoid most movies… So why do people think I’m some sort of uncultured killjoy when I say I haven’t seen the latest installation of Rape Culture: The Movie?

Well, that’s rape culture too. And you know what? I think calling Errol “intriguing magician” Morris a misogynist turdbomb is just fine.