This is something I think about a lot. It brings up issues of blame, communication styles, raunch culture, and of course, my favorite topic, slutty clothes.

It seems to be a favorite topic of people I meet when I tell them what I do. It goes likes this:
“the clothes girls wear these days….”
“at my school, the girls used to keep score of how drunk they got…”
“seriously, what message do they think they’re giving out when they dress like that?”

My reaction is usually along the lines of the speaker in the “My short skirt” monologue in The Vagina Monologues. As in, their short skirts have nothing to do with the men staring at them. Maybe they just like short skirts. (I do, and I am not lying when I say it’s because they’re easier to walk in and make me look taller.)

But then I read something like this. The quote that really got me was this person’s:

“I, perhaps unconsciously, observe women to try and determine how they want to be treated. When I see girls at a party who seemingly have no self-control, I’ll admit that it’s really tough to visualize them as ‘ladies.’ It’s as if they, solely through their own actions, have lowered my expectations, lowered my standards of behavior.”

I have a suggestion. Try using words. Remember Mae West? “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” How about “Is that skirt/tube top/translucent toga for me to remove or are you just feeling warm tonight?”

An ongoing discussion I have with people in the field of violence prevention is a debate over how much of campus sexual assault is due to perpetrators “who really didn’t know what they were doing was wrong, who made a mistake” and the perpetrators in the model of David Lisak’s Undetected Rapist. I’m from the Lisak school of thought on this one. You know why? Because this isn’t semaphore school. We don’t communicate just with flags people. College students may be young, as susceptible to culture as anyone else, as nervous and insecure, but we know they can put a sentence together; they have to for admissions essays. So I don’t think I’m holding anyone to too high a standard when I expect them to talk to each other and understand basic phrases like “I don’t want to.”

There is one caveat to this of course, and some people will object. I am in the above, primarily referring to the instigator of the sexual act in question. This is about power dynamics. If a person feels threatened, afraid, communication can be difficult. If you are bigger, stronger, or in some other way more powerful than your partner, for god’s sake take that into account and remember that there is one flag here that should be recognized. Silence. If you don’t hear a yes, folks, that’s a no.

Sexual assault is a pretty natural outgrowth of a culture where women’s bodies are seen as public property, and where some bodies are seen as unimportant.

Here we find yet another reminder of that deep and pervasive cultural value.

State Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, fears Louisiana may be headed toward an economic crisis if the percentage of people dependent on the government is not decreased.

His solution: pay impoverished women $1,000 to have their tubes tied so they will stop having babies they can’t afford.

The idea came to LaBruzzo after hurricanes Katrina and Gustav when the state was forced to evacuate, shelter and care for tens of thousands of people.

“I realized that all these people were in Louisiana’s care and what a massive financial responsibility that is to the state,” LaBruzzo said. “I said, ‘I wonder if it might be a good idea to pay some of these people to get sterilized.’”

This stuff is not, by any means, new. Backers of eugenics tried similar plots, and many poor women have been forcibly sterilized by doctors who felt it was up to them to make that decision. It’s a practice that zealots of various stripes have kept alive in many contexts, from Nazi Germany to New York City.

Hmmm. Acting on a woman’s body without her consent… Sound familiar?

Update: Womanist Musings (which you should be reading if you aren’t already) has a good analysis of this story, with more links.

The right has generally chosen to work under the radar when it comes to their attempts to control educational institutions… They quietly take over the school boards, lobby trustees, fund conservative student newspapers, etc. Ever wonder why there’s always a conservative editorial writer working for your college paper? Check to see if they’re being paid. When I was in college, our most conservative student journalist was paid $10,000 by some right-wing group to do his thing.

Ten thousand dollars!

If only I had worked for the other side. I could have eaten something other than mac and cheese in college.

Anyway… Stealth. As right-wing organizing genius Ralph Reed once said, “I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.”

I’d say that terrifying quote is a pretty good characterization of much of the conservative movement over the past 40 years. They’ve been making deep structural changes and building their own massive infrastructure, all the while making pretty sure the general public doesn’t know too much about what they’re doing.

Don’t believe me? Ask someone who doesn’t follow current events closely who Richard Mellon Scaife is. Ask them what Blackwater does. Ask them what the Council for National Policy is. Blank stares all around.

Arguably, conservatives have been even more successful in stealth work on college campuses than they have been in other areas.

There is a long list of conservative organizations working to create a right-wingy environment on campuses, and you probably haven’t heard of any of them.

In fact, that’s just the way they like it. They want to be able to change school policies and go on CNN without people immediately recognizing their agenda or organizing to stop them. They can make changes without anyone noticing, and maybe even sway some ill-informed moderates and liberals to their side of an issue. I have to say—it’s a brilliant strategy in a country where good journalists are few and far between.

But even with the relatively major (and relatively unknown to the general public) success they’ve had on a lot of college campuses, it seems right-wingers still aren’t happy with their results. According to the New York Times, they’re trying a new approach:

Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated, some conservatives have decided to try a new strategy.

They are finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas.

These initiatives, like the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas, Austin, or a project at the University of Colorado here in Colorado Springs, to publish a book of classic texts, are mostly financed by conservative organizations and donors, run by conservative professors. But they have a decidedly nonpartisan and nonideological face.

Their goal is to restore what conservative and other critics see as leading casualties of the campus culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s: the teaching of Western culture and a triumphal interpretation of American history.

I could spend weeks dissecting the racist, imperialist, and just plain nonsensical logic behind the concept of our supposedly threatened “Western culture,” but this post is already running long. Suffice it to say, terms like “Western values,” “political correctness,” and “free thought” are major conservative codewords.

Now for the truly scary:

According to a list drawn up by the National Association of Scholars, a group created in 1987 to preserve the “Western intellectual heritage,” 37 of these academic centers exist; 20 were created in the past three years.

Many of them have received donations from a handful of relatively new organizations, including Veritas, which was created in 2006, and the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. Mr. Miller, a Chicago entrepreneur, established the center as an independent nonprofit last fall after first collaborating with the 55-year-old Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which promotes conservative thought on campus.

Now, thanks in part to years of intensive lobbying by the National Association for Scholars, these projects may soon receive federal money as well. The new Higher Education Act, signed into law last month, provides grants for “academic programs or centers” devoted to “traditional American history, free institutions or Western civilization.”

Are we in the body bag yet?