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Rape Culture Meets Rape Jokes: The Responsibility Trap

6.17.13 | No Comments »

A lively, somewhat confusing, conversation about bad and violent rape jokes has taken center stage for some in the comedy community again. The state of this conversation tells me something: a dangerous vacuum of social responsibility exists on a cultural level around sexual assault. Socialized victim blaming along with a lack of understanding of rape culture may help explain how these rape jokes continue to be defended by some comedians and fans alike.

The current paradigm of the so-called “feminist vs. comedian” rape joke conversation goes something like this:

Comedian: I tell jokes. Censorship is un-American. Obviously I tell jokes about rape and I am not actually encouraging rape. You don’t get it.

Feminist: I get it. I’m not asking for censorship of your jokes but some of thse jokes are akin to outright hate speech. If you understood rape culture you likely wouldn’t tell bad rape jokes and you’d have some humility about the damage caused when you do.

Comedian: Obviously reasonable people in the world know rape isn’t funny and get I’m just joking. Bad rape jokes have no real negative impact on women and survivors of sexual assault.

Feminist: Consider this: “Reasonable” people rape. A naïve use of rape jokes furthers misogynistic behavior all around you by supporting it and laughing with it, not at it.

Furthermore, using violent rape jokes is unwise when about one in three of the female fans (and possibly some of the males too)  in your audience are likely triggered by this type of language due to their own sexual assault or the sexual assault of their close friend or relative.

Trivializing rape by joking about it when women already don’t feel safe reporting rape and often experience an internalized guilt for their sexual assault is NOT helping your audience take this epidemic seriously. Do you take rape seriously?

Enter the trolls stage left, right and center.

This conversation has been going strong for a year in the wake of a rape joke made by comedian Daniel Tosh. A resurgence of the conversation was sparked when feminist writer Sady Doyle e-mailed comedian Sam Morril about his use of rape jokes. In the email Doyle made an attempt at a good-faith conversation about the use of rape jokes as comedy. Doyle, as well as those who came to her defense, were met with violent hate speech including rape threats. Jezebel’s Lindy West read some of those rape threats aloud and filmed the situation. This, ladies and gentlemen, is rape culture.

For those still in the dark, Hello Giggles offers an excellent summation of the term rape culture:

The term “rape culture” refers to a culture in which attitudes about rape are tolerant enough to be an enabling factor in anything ranging from sexual harassment to actual rape. When a girl complains about being catcalled on the street because it made her uncomfortable, and you tell her to just take a compliment, you’re perpetuating rape culture. When a girl has one too many drinks at a party and is taken advantage of, and your reaction is that it’s her fault for not being more careful, you’re perpetuating rape culture. When you say that someone was “asking for it” because their skirt was too short, you’re perpetuating rape culture. When you assume that men are never victims of sexual harassment or assault, yes, you’re still perpetuating rape culture (not only because desexualizing one gender sexualizes the other by proxy, but because classifying one form of harassment or assault as valid over another is contributing to the problem).

When asked about rape jokes last year comedian Sarah Silverman argued making fun of this heinous crime seems like a “comics dream” and incredibly edgy but really it’s just the safest joke. Silverman jokes, “Who is gonna complain about rape jokes? Rape victims? They don’t even report rape!” And I will add, by the same token, why worry about making homophobic jokes either when many gays still aren’t even willing to come out of the closet?

Recently a BBC reporter was forced to apologize after making a comment about his ability to to “cure” a lesbian. You know the joke: if only this one lesbian had sex with this one straight guy she would know she is actually straight. Keep in mind, there are parts of the world where rape of lesbians is used by some men in a homophobic culture with the intention to cure women of their homosexuality (“corrective rape”) for example South Africa. But maybe as a lesbian I’m being too sensitive? Or maybe I have some internalized homophobia to work through before I feel comfortable speaking out against this form of violence? This is rape culture too.

Ultimately the responsibility of not making bad rape jokes rests with the comedian. Tosh, Morril, and plenty of comedians making crude sets of jokes I can’t sit through in the NYC’s West Village every week carelessly toy with misogynistic language because at the end of the day so much of it is still culturally acceptable.

In the aftermath of her e-mail Doyle tweeted she didn’t believe there was a need for censorship of rape jokes and instead pointed to the role of shifting social mores. The flip side of victim blaming is instead a belief in the social responsibility for everyone to take seriously their part in confronting rape culture regardless of whether you are a rape survivor, a sister of a rape survivor or a guy who knows a girl he thinks shouldn’t become a statistic.

When stopping violence against women is taken seriously on a cultural level, bad rape jokes may finally lose their punch and comedians relying on them, their audience.

This Isn’t About Tourism: On Travel, Rape, and India

6.7.13 | No Comments »

An American woman was gang-raped in the northern Indian town of Manali. The 30-year old joins a long list of women and girls who have fallen victim to sexual violence in the country in recent months. This apparent epidemic is concerning, certainly. But is the most pertinent message we can take from it really, as others are suggesting, that India is an unsafe destination for tourists?

Undeniably, India has a problem with rape. As Bhagyashri Dengle, executive director of Plan India, testifies, the country has “deep rooted” gender issues, lying within “the status of women [and] … the male mindset.” It remains legal for men to rape their wives. More than this, though, a survey supported by UN Women found that 95% of women in New Delhi feel unsafe in public places. At the same time, three out of four men agreed with the statement that “women provoke men by the way they dress”, two out of five men agreed with the statement that “women moving around at night deserve to be sexually harassed”, and 51% of men considered themselves to have sexually harassed or committed violence against women in public spaces. Yeah – that’s a problem.

But it is by nature a problem that affects the women of India far more than it affects tourists, American or otherwise. We absolutely should be worried about the rate at which rapes are occurring there, and the way that sexism and misogyny appears to be ingrained into Indian society – but out of fear for the lives and well-being of the women that are there, not just our own when we choose to visit. That’s bordering on narcissism, and for what? India isn’t going to get safer if tourists never go there; if anything, it’ll get less international attention, leaving chaos unchecked. If the root of the problem is India’s heavily patriarchal society, then addressing that is the only key to stopping sexual violence.

Besides, telling female tourists not to travel, or giving them a laundry list of things that they mustn’t do if they decide to go anyway, is veering dangerously into victim blaming territory. All those things she should do will be hanging over her head, stopping her from having a good time… and then, if she is attacked, they’ll quickly become what she should have done. Considering that attacks on tourists are said to be rare, who is that helping, exactly?

Perhaps most significantly, though, this discourse completely ignores the greatest threat facing American woman – and it ain’t traveling abroad. Someone is raped or sexually assaulted every 2 minutes in the US; far more frequently than in India, where statistics suggest it is one every 20 minutes. And those are just the reported attacks. We can focus on India’s problem with rape all we want – it won’t make our own glaringly obvious issues disappear. Have we forgotten Steubenville and the countless other school and college rape cases? What about the exorbitant rates of sexual assault in the military? Or Ariel Castro?

The gang-rape of a tourist in India should teach us something, but it is not that American women should stay at home. When is that ever the solution to rape, here or abroad? No, we need to observe the problem in India with the intention to end rape for all women, not just Americans – and then we should open our eyes and realize that we’ve got a pretty huge problem with rape of our own.

More on Ms. Magazine’s Ten Totally Typical Examples of Rape-Splaining and Victim Blaming, and Why They Need to Stop

6.5.13 | No Comments »

TRIGGER WARNING: discussions of rape, abuse and offensive language and ideas.

December 15, 2012 CHICAGO– a 12 year old girl is held by gunpoint and gang-raped by three 16 year old boys in the basement of one of the rapist’s homes. August 12, 2012 STEUBENVILLE– an unconscious 16 year old girl is raped at a party by two 16 and 17 year old football players The thing these two heinous crimes have in common? Both victims were blamed for what happened to them.

Rape-splaining and victim blaming are two of the biggest proponents of the pervasive rape culture that we all live in. Rape-splaining is the explaining away of a sexual assault or rape; this includes coming up with excuses for the rapists and subtly placing the blame on the victim. Victim blaming is more overt in its shifting of the blame from rapist to victim, but both of these tactics give the victim responsibility for what happened to them. Since people are constantly bombarded with this cultural mindset, both rape-splaining and victim blaming can easily be found in verbal and cyber conversations. Ms. Magazine pointed out the 10 most common examples of victim blaming in an article last week.

Let’s take a deeper look at them now:

1. The victim was asking for it. This is the line that I hear most commonly in regards to sexual assault and rape. If a girl is drunk, acting like she “wants the D”, or is dressed provocatively, she obviously is asking for rape, right? The more thought you put into this argument, the more absurd it sounds. Women have every right to drink, be flirty, and wear what they want without being in physical danger. Scotland got it right when they filmed an anti-victim blaming advertisement; the victim is never asking for it!

2. Men get these biological urges to rape; they just can’t help themselves. According to the UK’s Rape Crisis Center, “studies show that most rapes are premeditated i.e. they are either wholly or partially planned in advance. All rapes committed by more than one assailant are always planned.” Men are human beings, right? Don’t human beings have free will to make their own choices? Why are men any different when it comes to sexual urges? Men aren’t animals, and if I were a man, I would honestly resent the implication that I couldn’t control myself. Rape is a choice that men make with their brains, not with their penises.

3. The victim might have made it up. This one makes me, and countless other feminists/women/rational humans, quite upset. Why are people more ready to believe that the woman is lying than that she has been victimized? If someone was robbed, this question would never even be fathomed by onlookers. Look below at the lovely infographic made by the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey. It speaks for itself.

rapist_visualization_01

 

4. The victim is ruining the life of the rapist; the rapist had so many prospects. When a man chooses to rape a woman, he is making a choice. Albeit a stupid and awful choice, but it is a decision that is consciously made. He weighed the pros and cons of the situation, and although he might claim that he was caught up in the moment, he infringed on another individual’s liberty and personhood. For this, he must face the consequences. It is not the victim’s fault that a man chose to rape her, even if he was a star athlete/genius/musical prodigy/etc. He may be such a “promising boy”, but he is also a rapist and that can’t be forgotten.

5.  The victim should not have been in that situation/known that person/lived in that neighborhood/walked down that street/gone to that  bar, etc., etc. Again, the point must be made that MEN NEED TO CONTROL THEMSELVES!! It’s a disgusting double standard that our society perpetuates. Name any situation where a woman would feel unsafe, some examples being: walking down a dark alley, going to her car at night in an empty parking lot, going to a bar, going over to a guy’s house. Now imagine a man being in the same situation. People wouldn’t consider it unsafe for him to be there, but if a woman does the same exact thing, she is asking for whatever happens to her. The point here is that society shouldn’t be restricting a woman’s freedom in this way; instead, society needs to be telling men to not rape women.

6. People of certain races/ages/classes/backgrounds are just more prone to violent behavior. False false false. There isn’t a cookie-cuttter, typical rapist. Yes, rapists are a product of their environment, but not of economic/ethnic/racial/age/social groups. Rapists are a product of the Rape Culture, of a culture where violence against women is tolerated, of a culture where women are sexualized to such an extent that it is incredibly easy to view them more as objects and less as human beings.

7. The victim didn’t say no. Just because she didn’t say no, doesn’t mean she’s saying yes. What is consent, ladies and gentlemen? The legal definition of consent is when “a person who possesses and exercises sufficient mental capacity to make an intelligent decision demonstrates consent by performing an act recommended by another.”  There are many important aspects to this definition, such as the person must be mentally able to make this decision and they perform the act recommended. Consent is a resounding yes, not the absence of a no.

8. In cases of underage perpetrators: The rapist is only a child him/herself. The rapist made the conscious decision to violate another human being. He made the choice and should therefore be tried as an adult. Rape isn’t a juvenile offense such as shoplifting; it is the exertion of power and dominance over another resistant human being. Shoplifting, vandalism, and other lesser offenses won’t ruin lives. Rape, on the other hand, can end lives. 13% of rape victims will commit suicide. If an adolescent can cause another human so much trauma that they take their own life, then why shouldn’t they take the full punishment for their actions?

9. The victim should have known what he/she was getting him/herself into. Rape isn’t the victim’s mistake, it’s the rapist’s. Why should women have to live in fear because of men’s choices? Obviously the victim didn’t know they were going to be raped, or else they wouldn’t have gone. Saying that the victim should have anticipated a sexual assault is absurd. This is just another excuse to try to let the rapist get off free.

10. The victim’s parents should have taught him/her warning signs. I think Andrea Gibson said it better than I ever could. Society has told women and girls so many different ways to try and prevent rape, but those haven’t seemed to work. The question shouldn’t be “What should you tell your daughter?” The question should be “What are you going to teach your son?”

Rape-splaining and victim blaming perpetuate a rape culture. These are the 10 most common examples of victim blaming, but there are many more that are tossed around in conversation every day. These excuses make a hostile environment for victims, and even more unsettling, they make a safe environment for rapists.

They need to stop.

Facebook Takes an Important Step Toward Ending Sexual Violence and #FBRape Wins An Important Battle in the Fight for Safe Spaces Online

6.2.13 | No Comments »

When Women, Action & The Media (WAM!) launched The Everyday Sexism Project, and writer Soraya Chemaly called on Facebook to recognize violence against women on their site as hate speech and train moderators to protect women from harassment and hate speech, we  - the activist and, more specifically, feminist Internet-dwellers, saw this action as a great step toward moving toward solidifying the web as a haven of safe spaces.

The internet has incredible potential to create safe spaces for girls and women: today, unlike ever before, we can use the internet to organize from around the world and take part in social movements. Where Is Your Line? uses Facebook and email to organize and plan what we are going to write about, and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to share our work with the world and engage others in conversation. For groups like WIYL and countless others know that social media and the internet—and the safe spaces that they allow us to create—are vitally important to our success.

We asked for pages and content that glorifies violence against women and hate speech to be removed from the website, in the same way that hate speech targeting other oppressed groups was already being removed by Facebook. On Tuesday, after around 5,000 emails were sent to Facebook and a Twitter campaign that reached around 60,000 tweets, Facebook agreed to take the actions requested by the campaign.

We won!

Facebook has pledged to review their guidelines regarding violations, update training in regards to reviewing hate speech, increase the accountability of users so that a person posting cruel material can be held accountable, and work with feminist and anti-violence against women groups like Everyday Sexism.

This is exciting news for everyone, but especially organizations that rely on social media for creating social movements and social change; groups who are exploiting the organizing and sharing powers that platforms like Facebook offer to achieve larger goals of social equality.

Women deserve safe spaces on the internet, and these safe spaces should be free of bullying and hate from misogynists and individuals who commit violence against women. Individuals attempting to organize in a way meant to glorify violence against women and perpetuate said violence do not deserve the same right to safe spaces. We’re happy to see that Facebook finally agrees.

Congratulations to Facebook for taking these important steps toward making the internet a safer place for women, which will undoubtedly have important consequences in the real world as well. And congratulations to everyone who was involved in making this goal a reality—your hard work and internet activism paid off!

WAM’s #FBrape Campaign and Systemic Misogyny in Tech Culture

5.29.13 | No Comments »

Last week, Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!), a national feminist media organization, along with the UK-based Everyday Sexism Project and the feminist writer Soraya Chemaly, who regularly reports on the intersection of technology and feminism, spearheaded its campaign to hold Facebook accountable for its widely-reported selectively gendered policies in removing offensive content. Feminist coverage of this topic has consistently shown that Facebook refuses to take down content that perpetuates rape culture and normalizes domestic abuse. Such groups, which proliferate on Facebook, are instead filed under “controversial humor.” By contrast, pages where women control the presentation of their bodies, including breastfeeding, or anatomical diagrams of the female reproductive system, were summarily taken down from the site. According to the WAM FAQ, Facebook’s current moderation policies hinder feminists’ abilities to use the social network as a site for activism and spurring feminist consciousness.

Unlike previous attempts to bring awareness to these policies, WAM’s campaign calls upon advertisers to hold Facebook accountable by pulling their ads until Facebook responds. Mobilizing young feminists using social media to appeal directly to advertisers is a technique successfully used by feminists in a 2012 campaign against Rush Limbaugh shortly after he called Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student, a slut for advocating for the passage of the contraceptive mandate. As of this writing, over 43,000 tweets and 4,000 e-mails have been sent out about the campaign since its announcement, and several companies have pulled their ads from Facebook until this issue is addressed, including WestHost and Nissan UK.  Feministing reported that six companies, including Dove and Audible.com, refused to pull their ads from the site. While these companies claim reporting sexist pages is a sufficient action to prompt change, the WAM! Twitter account has posted powerful tweets demonstrating how the reporting processes leaves women out in the cold. Responses like Dove’s are insufficient because they ignore the systemic ways gendered hate speech are endorsed by Facebook staff and tech culture.

Feminist activists and organizations involved in the campaign acknowledge that appealing to Facebook directly, due to its lack of anonymity, is dangerous because of the risk of harassment by trolls and Facebook moderators’ general apathy to this abuse, which mimics its indifference to women’s safety writ-large in online spaces. Indeed, Facebook’s ubiquity and clout as a social network likely plays a large role in their refusal to honor the experiences of feminists and rape survivors. Facebook’s behavior grimly confirms that we live in a world where women are always subject to sexual violence. The larger cultural message we receive from a patriarchal society, and from the brogramming culture that spawned Facebook in the first place, is that this is okay, this is the way things should be.

Indeed, these biases permeate tech culture. In a 2011 article for Forbes, “Siri is Sexist,” Amanda Marcotte, a Brooklyn-based feminist writer, notes Siri, the personal assistant introduced on the iPhone 4S, has an uncanny ability to quickly locate escort services. However, Siri’s abilities don’t similarly extend to quickly or reliably locating emergency contraception or abortion services. Marcotte observes,

The problem isn’t that anyone involved with this hates women. The problem is that they just don’t think about women very much. Siri’s programmers clearly imagined a straight male user as their ideal and neglected to remember the nearly half of iPhone users who are female. That the tech company that’s the standard-bearer for progressive, innovative, user-friendly technology can’t bother to care about the concerns of half the human race speaks to a sexism that’s so interwoven into the fabric of our society that it’s nearly invisible.

It should be inexcusable for programmers, developers, and moderators continue to ignore the ways social media is both leveraged by and uniquely informs women’s daily experiences of being in the world. We live in a culture that is actively hostile to our existence, one in which men upload rapes to Facebook without facing repercussions. In addition to being half the population, women are the overwhelming majority of social media users, granting the sites social legitimacy and capital despite the dictates and overrepresentation of men in tech culture. Sixty-four percent of Facebook users are women; if anything, our perspectives and daily experiences of sexualized violence should be given priority instead of being dusted aside as irrelevant and humorless. The fact that Facebook’s moderators choose to hide behind the blinders of their own privilege, where the presumptive “average Facebook user” is a white male who never has to worry, daily, about the specter of forced sexual aggression, is no longer acceptable. Their apathy is simply enabling injustice and abuse.

Rape Is Like What? Endless GOP Babbling on the Pro-Life Side

5.28.13 | No Comments »

The GOP war against women rages on. A battle is occurring in Michigan, and a pro-lifer had this to say.

No, rape is nothing like a home flooding or a car accident. In fact, rape is nothing like any other happening. Rape is the ultimate violation of a person’s mind, body, and soul, and there is so much stigma, shame, and loss of self that accompanies this crime. Floods, while tragic, are a loss of property. Vehicular accidents range from minor to catastrophic, but they do not have the attached stigma, shame, and loss of self. Additionally, a run-of-the-mill accident is not a crime, only property is damaged, and recovery time is short, not life long, as in rape.

Abortion is healthcare. Rape survivors who become impregnated should have the choice to terminate the zygote/fetus. All women should have that choice.

I have been in numerous vehicle accidents, and I have been raped. The worst injury from an accident I have to live with resulted in a TMJ disorder. The worst I have to live with in the aftermath of rape is ongoing nightmares, anxiety with panic attacks, personal space issues, flashbacks, body memories, fear, intimacy problems, and a struggle with my self-esteem. These are nearly daily.

It also seems (to me) that most people do not understand why fighting this bullying of rape survivors is terrible until they have either survived rape or survive the rape of a loved one, or why we fight so hard to end the rape culture that promotes violence.

To the woman who made the asinine assertion that rape is like any other insurance claim, I say you are wrong. You are insensitive. You are ignorant. Rape is a violent crime that leaves devastating effects that a survivor must deal with forever. There should be no further stigma or shame added to her for aborting a product of rape.

 

This Week in Rape Culture: Campus Roundup

5.24.13 | No Comments »

It’s been a busy news cycle when it comes to discussion of rape and rape culture on US college and university campuses.  Read on for the good, the bad, the infuriating, and the (cautiously) optimistic.

The Oxy Diaries. Things continue to heat up at Occidental College, where 37 students have filed two lawsuits and two federal complaints over the college’s mishandling of sexual assault cases on campus. On the heels of the lawsuits and accompanying press conference, as well as visible campus activism by survivors and supporters, more than 100 Oxy faculty signed an open letter of support demanding policy change. On May 6, the faculty voted overwhelmingly to express No Confidence in both the college’s campus attorney and Dean of Students.

On May 8, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights formally opened an investigation into Occidental’s handling (or mishandling) of assault allegations.  (This is the second such investigation by the DOE this year: In March, it opened a similar investigation into the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill’s sexual assault reporting and adjudication process.)

While the investigation should not be taken as a determination of guilt, survivors and their supporters at Oxy are seeing it as a positive step forward. Said Caroline Heldman, chair of the department of politics at Occidental and one of  many faculty who have worked with the Occidental Sexual Assault Coalition to bring attention to the issue of sexual violence on campus,

“In a sense, it’s a vindication of the survivors’ stories that their claims are real and legitimate,” Heldman said. “I’m just really happy that all of our work has led to this, this day, the start of a real investigation and not one run by the administration.”

Where Is Your Line? will continue to watch and report on developments at Oxy. Sociology professor Lisa Wade, who has also been active in bringing the issue of assault at Oxy to the fore, regular updates at her blog Sociological Images as well, for those who want an inside perspective.

A “decline in civility” at Dartmouth? On Wednesday, April 24, Dartmouth College took the unusual step of cancelling classes to deal with what it termed a “decline in civility” on campus.  The previous Friday, several members of Real Talk Dartmouth had disrupted an assembly of prospective incoming students to bring attention to Dartmouth administration’s perceived inaction in cases of sexual assault. Declaring “Dartmouth has a problem!” members of the group shouted alarming statistics about sexual violence on campus, including the troubling fact that in the past 10 years only three rapists had been expelled from the institution and the steady rise in sexual assaults on campus (from 10 to 22) between the academic years 2008-2009 and 2009-2010. (Members of  Real Talk Dartmouth, which is not affiliated with the college, also report that 95% of assaults at Dartmouth go unreported.)

In response to the protest, members of  Real Talk Dartmouth received threats of rape and murder on social media.

The college responded by canceling classes on Wednesday and issuing an email assuring the campus community that both the protesters and the people who threatened them would be subject to disciplinary action through approved college channels.

Hold up a second. Yes, that’s right. The email from the college officially equated the actions of protesters, who were trying to draw attention to violence on campus, with the actions of those who threatened them with sexual assault, bodily harm, and death for daring to speak out. Dartmouth administration characterized the escalating situation as a “decline of civility on campus.” (Just a thought: Maybe the real “incivility” on campus comes from a) having an administration that deals ineffective with sexual violence, and b) the attitude that threatening people with rape is an effective way to silence them.)

The full email from the chair of Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees reads:

April 26, 2013
To the Dartmouth community:

As some of you know, a small group of students disrupted the Dimensions Welcome Show for prospective students on Friday, April 19, using it as a platform to protest what they say are incidents of racism, sexual assault, and homophobia on campus. Following the protest, threats of bodily harm and discriminatory comments targeting the protesters and their defenders ran anonymously on various sites on the Internet.

With tensions high across the Dartmouth community, Interim President Carol Folt, the Dean of the Faculty, and other senior leaders across campus agreed that the best course of action was to suspend classes on Wednesday, April 24, for a day of reflection and alternative educational programming. This decision was made to address not only the initial protest, but a precipitous decline in civility on campus over the last few months, at odds with Dartmouth’s Principles of Community.

This unusual and serious action to suspend classes for a day was prompted by concern that the dialogue on campus had reached a point that threatened to compromise the level of shared respect necessary for an academic community to thrive. The faculty and administration together determined that a pause to examine how the climate on campus can be improved was necessary. This was an important exercise that the Board supports. It is also important to note that there will be an opportunity for faculty to hold the classes that were missed as a result of Wednesday’s events.

Neither the disregard for the Dimensions Welcome Show nor the online threats that followed represent what we stand for as a community. As Interim President Folt indicated Wednesday in her remarks in front of Dartmouth Hall, the administration is following established policies and procedures with regard to any possible disciplinary action in both cases. As in every case regarding a disciplinary investigation, this process is confidential and respects the privacy of our students.

Dartmouth is not unique in the challenges it faces concerning campus climate and student life. We aspire to lead in responding to these challenges.

The Trustees and I are committed to addressing and supporting efforts necessary to resolve these issues, improving the campus climate and strengthening the institution. The Board’s Committee on Student Affairs is working with senior leaders and consulting with outside professionals to make progress on this front.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and questions with me at Stephen.F.Mandel.Jr.78@Dartmouth.edu

Best regards,

Steve Mandel ’78, P’09, P’11
Chair, Board of Trustees

(Emphasis added.)

In case you missed it, the administration is on record as saying that staging a protest against sexual assault on campus is the same as threatening another student with rape or other violence.

And that, right there — that’s what rape culture looks like.

SMU Task Force Reports Back: After months of meetings and discussions, the task force appointed last fall by Southern Methodist University president R. Gerald Turner has reported back with its recommendations. SMU has been accused of a secretive culture around the handling of sexual assault on campus, including an “opaque system of on-campus hearings known as ‘student conduct panels.’” When a (male) student was sexually assaulted by another (male) student in one of the University’s parking garages in the fall of 2012, SMU suddenly seemed to become aware of the culture of sexual assault on campus, prompting Turner to appoint the task force. (The charges against the student who was accused of the assault have since been dropped.)

As an SMU alum, I was frankly surprised that the campus administration suddenly cared. As I have reported, there was an undeniable rape culture on the campus while I was both a graduate student and an instructor there.

Turner’s task force returned 41recommendations for changing the campus attitude and approach to sexual violence. Among them are instituting anonymous reporting of sexual assaults on campus, providing all staff with a wallet card listing resources for students who have been sexually assaulted, funding of an after-hours sexual assault counselor on campus, and clarifying of policies and procedures surrounding investigation of sexual assaults. (You can read the full report here.) While these may all be positive steps towards better adjudication of sexual assaults that do occur, it remains to be seen whether these steps — many of which are focused on after-the-fact dealing with assault or prevention efforts that appear to be the same “how not to be a victim” tactics that characterize rape culture in the first place — will change the campus culture.

Anonymous, Steubenville, and Administering Great Justice Online

5.20.13 | No Comments »

In a Mother Jones article published earlier this week, Josh Harkinson discusses Anonymous’ crucial role in making the horrifying cases of gang rape in both Steubenville, Ohio and Halifax, Canada crest on the national radar. The publicity Anonymous brought to the Steubenville case eventually led to the prosecution of two of the perpetrators in Steubenville. However, the women responsible for directing Anonymous to these brutal cases played an instrumental role in directing the online group’s resources to publicizing the cases and putting the perpetrators on blast, a refreshing change to tired narratives of victim-blaming and shaming.

Michelle McKee, an activist from Washington, and Alexandria Goddard, an Ohio-based reporter, were both frustrated that the now-infamous events in Steubenville, Ohio, weren’t receiving national coverage despite several attempts on McKee’s part to tip off reporters to the story. Goddard, a friend of McKee’s, used Twitter and her expertise studying teen’s social media usage to cobble together the sordid commentary by members of the football team of what occurred that evening, and eventually published her findings on her blog, Prinniefied. The collection of screenshots Goddard gathered from Twitter from students who were in attendance proved vital not only in implicating the rapists but also in displaying an overwhelming endorsement of rape culture.

Meanwhile, McKee reached out to Anonymous, aware of their previous campaigns against cyberbulling. Along with KnightSec, a subgroup of Anonymous, McKee was instrumental in starting the #RollRedRoll hashtag and subsequent campaign in order to bring attention to the case and Steubenville’s silence, which clearly prioritized the football players’ prestige and careers over the psychological damage the victim, who goes by the alias Jane Doe, suffered. Using a compilation of tweets from the perpetrators and those complicit in the group rape, and information from the high school web page, Anonymous created a video officially putting Steubenville on notice.

That so many of the perpetrators’ ribald tweets were linked to their real names, without any regard to future consequences, is telling about our cultural priorities. Rapists are free to tweet and share photos detailing their acts of aggression, with the calm assurance that they won’t be penalized in any way for their actions, no matter how disgusting; all the blame will be shifted to the victim. As Elizabeth Plank, a writer for the blog PolicyMic, points out in her article on the trend of viral rape, the documentation of rape on social media is a way to once again proudly violate the victim. She writes:

The fact that rapists want others to know that they have raped suggests that violating women is a rite passage, a legitimate method to climb the social ladder of masculinity — or at least the bastardized toxic masculinity that they covet). Forcefully penetrating an unconscious girl is not a source of shame, but a badge of honor in the march of toxic masculinity, passed on through cultural narrative and weak “boys will be boys” punishments. Instead of guilt, the rapists feel pride. They get to rape their victims all over again, with ever share and every nasty comment, with every “LOL” and every “what a slut.”

The most prominent mainstream media narratives for rape and sexual assault only serve to reify the dictates of viral rape, demanding to know what the woman was wearing or drinking in an attempt to re-shame her. In CNN’s coverage of the Steubenville verdict, anchors Candy Crowley and Poppy Harlow were far too preoccupied with how the guilty ruling would ruin the rapists’ lives to be concerned for Jane Doe’s well-being. As of this writing, CNN still has not made any sort of apology regarding their rape apologism for the perpetrators.

As Harkinson correctly notes in his article, Anonymous is a surprising ally to the movement to combat rape culture and rape survivors, considering its genesis from 4chan. However, Anonymous’s work has resulted in legal repercussions for the rapists in Steubenville, and national attention to Rehtaeh Parsons’ suicide following her group rape and subsequent relentless bullying. Their decentralized nature, broad reach, and unfettered access to resources civilians might not be able to utilize makes Anonymous a force to be reckoned with. (Their ability to quickly compile all the relevant evidence regarding Parsons’ viral rape is nothing short of remarkable.)

Aided by the work and dedication of survivors and feminists, Anonymous is taking an important step towards declaring that women will not stand for the continued proliferation of rape culture in both its online and offline manifestations.  Using new technologies not only to break stories about the effects of the cycle of rape and unrelenting harassment by peers on survivors, but also to control the narratives created about these stories is an important tool that feminists online must continue to wield to send a clear message: rapists and rape culture will no longer be tolerated.

Ray J’s “I Hit It First” Completely and Totally Sucks

5.17.13 | No Comments »

Singer Ray J recently released a single charmingly (read: offensively and horrifically) entitled “I Hit It First.” The song is very obviously about Ray-J’s ex and, now, Kanye West”s pregnant partner: Kim Kardashian. (You may recognize Ray J from films like the sex tape that made Kim famous in 2007.)

In the lyrics and the music video, Ray J makes a number of blatant references to Kim – including featuring a Kim look-alike as the female lead in the video. The cover art on the single is even a blurry version of what is most likely a picture of Kim on the beach.

cover art

The single's not-so-subtle cover art

I am absolutely disgusted by the song, the music video, and of course, Ray J himself. Watch at your own risk:

First and foremost, his actions are blatantly disrespectful – I’m not Kim Kardashian’s biggest fan, but under no circumstances is it appropriate to publicly call out personal details about your sex life with an ex. It’s a violation of her privacy and an offense to her current relationship with Kanye West. It’s also just pathetic, because he is clearly using Kim’s fame (which is far greater than his) to garner media attention and promote his music and career. It’s sad watching him get attention, even if it’s negative. That’s what he wants, and at too high a price.

“I Hit It First” is degrading and incredibly mysogynistic. After reading the title (an abridged version of the song’s imaginative chorus, which goes: “I hit it, I hit it, I hit it, I hit, I hit it, I hit it first”), you might innocently wonder what the “it” in question is. A wall, perhaps? A baseball? Maybe a tree that he ran into with his car? But then you realize, oh no, wait – he’s talking about an ACTUAL HUMAN BEING. He is literally referring to this woman that he slept with as “it.” IT. As in, the same pronoun that you use when describing your toaster oven or the copy machine at work. She is not a person, not a partner – she is “it.”

Look up “objectification” in the dictionary and you could find a downloadable MP3 file of this song. Ray J’s language is dehumanizing; he dismisses this woman’s personhood, reducing her to the status of an object for fucking. Her sole value derives from her body and its sexual functionality – except for it’s not really her body, but his; his to look at, to touch, to fuck, to sing tacky songs about, and to use as he pleases. Because, as this song makes brutally, unavoidably clear, we live in a society that consistently tells women that they have no rights to or control over their bodies. Our culture overwhelmingly refuses to acknowledge women’s sexual agency, the fact that women are individuals who possess both desires and the capability to decide for themselves how to act on those desires. “I Hit It First” is a particularly shameless example of that mentality – by using the words “I hit it,” Ray J establishes himself as the dominant figure in this encounter - in all encounters - implying that the woman, his partner, played no active role in the “really bomb” sex that was had, and that he benefited socially from the encounter and the fact that everyone knows about it:

I had her head going north and her ass going south
But now baby chose to go West
We deep in the building she know that I kill ‘em
I know that I hit it the best
Candles lit with that wine, money still on my mind
And I gave her that really bomb sex
No matter where she goes or who she knows
She still belongs in my bed
Going hard in the streets, mobbin with my homies
Sippin’ on good, blowin’ on OG
Me and ghost sittin’ clean with the matching rollie
I did that first so everybody know me

Why Ray J feels that allegedly being the first person to sleep with Kim Kardashian (or any woman) gives him some kind of bragging rights is honestly beyond me. Kim is not a prize – she is a person who (regrettably, it seems) decided to sleep with Ray J, and that’s about all there is to it. Being the first person to have sex with a woman does not give you any kind of claim to her. I don’t care if you were the first, the last, the only, or one of 55 – the ONLY person with ownership over a woman’s body is the woman herself. Not her husband, her wife, her father, her brother, her boyfriend, or any other person she’s ever looked at, spoken to, or slept with. Only her. And the fact that we still seem to struggle with this concept is a key reason that rape and all other forms of sexual violence are still so prevalent in our society.

The media coverage surrounding this song has focused almost exclusively on Ray J’s subtle-as-a-gun references to Kim Kardashian and their relationship. Which, while mildly entertaining, is extremely problematic. Really, it doesn’t matter who “I Hit It First” is about – the real outrage should be focused on why Ray J, and countless other artists (Kanye West included), feel that it’s acceptable to speak about women in such despicably disrespectful terms. Why, WHY, do we let this slide? Why does equating a woman to a disposable item make a man a badass? Why are we teaching boys that it’s cool to disrespect their partners and girls that they’re only worth something if men want to have sex with them? These are messages that stay with us even in adulthood, degrading our most intimate experiences and fostering a sexual dynamic that is toxic for men and women alike.

So, what can we do about that? For starters, do yourself a favor and never, ever listen to “I Hit It First” again. Seriously. We all had to hear it once to be part of this conversation, but honestly, the music video alone sets the entire feminist movement back about 50 years. Check out this great article from Feministing to read another perspective on why the song is so harmful to women. And beyond just that, start paying attention to the media you consume. Take a moment to think about what you internalize when you hear the Ying Yang Twins tell you to “shake that shit, bitch,” or when Nate Dogg says “I’m looking for a girl who will do whatever the fuck I say, every day she be giving it up.” Lyrics like that do something to you; they influence the way you think about yourself even if you’re not actively aware of it. So be aware of it. We can’t stop this barrage of grossly misogynistic media overnight, but we can take steps towards shielding ourselves against its negativity.

Child Rape and Abortion: An Archbishop’s Asinine Assertion

5.16.13 | No Comments »

Archbishop Fabio Martinez Castilla made a startling assertion last week. In a nutshell, abortion is worse than the rape of children by priests. Let me repeat that:  abortion is worse than molesting kids.

At one time abortion was legal. The first anti-abortion laws in the 1800′s purported to protect women from dangerous, unskilled abortionists. Then a lot of garbage happened, and a Texas woman’s abortion case went to the Supreme Court and granted the legality of safe abortions, commonly referred to as Roe v. Wade.

Catholic dogma claims that all abortion is murder and has been since the Church’s inception. This is not true; in the 4th century CE, St. Augustine declares a return to the Aristotelian belief of “delayed ensoulment“, and that abortion is not murder until “fetus animatus“, or the fetus is more fully developed. The Catholic Church wavered on and off (mostly off) about abortion as murder until the 17th Century. Then Pope Leo XIII declared in 1886 that all abortion is murder.

Child abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests has been attracting media attention since 1985. Finding reputable statistics on child abuse by Catholic clergy is tasking, since Catholic sources cite a much lower figure than non-Catholic sources.

Castilla says child rape perpetrated by priests and abortions are harmful and deserve punishment because in the former crime, “their future is ruined” and the latter medical procedure is “murder”.

One benefit of living in the USA is a constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state. Unlike other countries where Catholicism heavily influences government, Roe v. Wade stands, even if the war on women has been trying to thwart a Supreme Court ruling. Abortion is not going away. The matter of its legality is a precedent to keep women safe from back alley coat hanger style abortions. The systematic rape of children is not guaranteed by any institution. Furthermore, adult survivors of sexual abuse often have a lifetime of depression, trust issues, self-blame, and other issues.

As a rape survivor who is convinced I would have had an abortion if impregnated by my rapist, I find Castilla’s statement appalling. A medical procedure is not a criminal act and should not be shamed. It’s a choice. Rape is a crime with repercussions for the victim. If Castilla is against abortion, then he should not have one.

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