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GOP Overreacts to Teenage Sexuality

5.4.11 | No Comments »

teens

Conservatives and anti-choice activists have been trying — and lately, succeeding — to whittle down abortion rights in this country for some time. But a recent effort is also underway to whittle down our definition of rape so that fewer and fewer victims are included.

The original language in HR3, an anti-choice Republican bill proposed in Congress, redefined rape for the purposes of determining which victims can have an abortion covered by Medicaid. Conservative lawmakers narrowed the standing broad definition to only “forcible rape,” begging the question as to how many bruises you have to incur in order to qualify as a rape victim. It created such an uproar that Republicans promised to get rid of it from the bill. But as Nick Baumann of Mother Jones reports, they’re not done trying.

As HR3 comes up for a vote today, the committee report for the bill says that it will “not allow the Federal Government to subsidize abortions in cases of statutory rape.” Congressional committees write these documents in order to outline their intent for the legislation in case there is ever a court fight. If such a fight comes up around this bill, the effect will be that victims of statutory rape will be denied Medicaid funds for an abortion.

Telling victims of sexual assault that their experiences don’t “count” is the lowest of the low. It also only serves to create an environment of more acceptance around these crimes. A 30 year old coercing a 13 year old into sex? Sorry, federal law doesn’t count that as rape. And if the government doesn’t think it’s rape, why should a perpetrator? Why would a victim realize that she should report a crime that is now not considered a crime? According to these lawmakers, she should be forced to bear any child that results if she can’t afford an abortion with her own money.

The reasons offered for this restriction echo fear of rampant teenage sexuality. Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, said the original redefinition was in response to a “brazen effort” by abortion rights groups to “federally fund the abortion of tens of thousands of healthy babies of healthy moms, based solely on the age of their mothers.” Richard Doerflinger of the US Council of Catholic Bishops said it was “an effort on the part of the sponsors to prevent the opening of a very broad loophole for federally funded abortions for any teenager.” But teens only account for fewer than two out of 10 of all abortions, and of those most are 18-19; women in their twenties are the largest group, at 58%. There’s a difference between all teenagers and those who are victims of statutory rape. But in the minds of Republicans, no difference exists. All sexually active teenage girls deserve to be punished by bringing to term an unwanted baby, rape or no. The language is an overreaction to the imaginary problem of young girls wantonly sleeping around and then trying to abort their babies under false rape accusations.

Republicans at the same time try to claim they aren’t changing anything. But the bill’s language is absurd, as the Hyde Amendment has stood as law since 1976 and forbids federal funds from paying for abortions — except in the cases of rape and incest. In the words of a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokeswoman, “Hyde does not make a distinction between statutory rape and any other kind of rape and states are not free to make such distinctions.” This is merely an attempt to narrow a law that already shuts too many poor women out of access to abortion care.

Not to mention that a group claiming to be working against the stealth efforts of abortion rights groups is using some pretty stealth efforts of its own. If they’re really not changing anything, why jump through such complicated legislative hoops to pull it off? The answer is in how much they want to control young girls’ sexuality.

The Republican attempt to control women’s sexuality

4.11.11 | 1 Comment »

Good news! Our government was able to get itself together just in time to avoid closing its doors. Literally at the 11th hour, minutes away from the first government shutdown in 15 years, what could have possibly been the sticking point keeping lawmakers from reaching a deal? Was it funding our 2.5 wars? Investments in education or infrastructure? What to do about our unemployment crisis?

Nope. It was whether or not to allow a rider (a.k.a. an attachment to the bill) that got rid of Title X funding for Planned Parenthood. But in a fight over the budget and trying to save the government from spending too much money, getting rid of this funding will do exactly the opposite. Planned Parenthood’s services help prevent unwanted pregnancies that are a cost to taxpayers, not to mention providing preventative care to millions of women and men, helping them root out cancer early and stay healthy. And Planned Parenthood is able to offer these services in a cost effective way; if the government has to provide them on its own, rather than contract with Planned Parenthood, it will simply have to spend more money.

And while the GOP and the media talked about this as a fight over abortion, it wasn’t about that at all. After all, the Hyde Amendment prohibits Planned Parenthood from using any federal money it receives to pay for its abortion services. Not to mention that such services makes up for a mere 3% of what it does. What’s the rest of it, you ask? Four million STD tests, one million pap smears, 830,000 breast exams, and providing 83% of all clients with things that prevent unwanted pregnancy in the first place. The rider also stripped funding from UNFPA, which isn’t allowed to use federal funds for abortion either. Rather, its mission is to avert maternal and infant mortality in developing countries.

So this wasn’t about money and it wasn’t about abortion. Why exactly has the GOP targeted Planned Parenthood so heavily? Author Ellen Chesler points out that part of it is political: get rid of Planned Parenthood and you eliminate an organization that effectively mobilizes women who vote against Republicans. Amanda Marcotte explains that it’s also about Republicans deciding that poor women who have sex don’t deserve government money.

It’s also about controlling women’s sexuality. Any woman can get it on without severe consequences because she’s empowered with contraception and sex education and, good heavens, the choice to terminate and unwanted pregnancy. By denying women the tools to have safe sex when and with whom they choose, the GOP is looking to put up limits. The idea that a woman could have sex for pleasure, do it out of wedlock, and not suffer the wrath of God in the form of an STD or an unwanted pregnancy clearly irks them.

The GOP’s bait and switch on abortion was also evident in HR3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” which was from the start redundant, as the Hyde Amendment already takes care of this. But beyond that, Republicans managed to include a provision that changed the definition of rape to only that which is “forcible.” This has nothing to do with abortion, but everything to do with attacking women and their sexuality. It put the blame on the woman who “asks for it” or is “too drunk” or “too flirtatious” rather than on the rapist where it belongs. It’s one more way of punishing women who don’t wear iron clad chastity belts. They may claim that this is about saving the lives of fetuses, but when it’s clearly not about abortion and rather about sex and rape, it’s hard to take them at their word.

And even though the facts are clear these fights aren’t really about abortion, the GOP drums up the perception that they are. Anti-abortion fever is also about controlling women who have sex. As Ann Pellegrini puts it: “Abortion conjures raced and classed images of an out of control female sexuality. An unwanted or unplanned pregnancy, which can happen for so many reasons—including failed contraception or a failure to educate young people about contraception at all (hello, abstinence-only sex education)—is instead recast as a woman’s failure in self-discipline and sexual morality.”

When girls and women are denied the tools to make healthy choices about sex, no one wins. But the point for Republicans is to attempt to put walls around women and their sexuality, denying them the ability make their own choices and casting them as immoral.

Reducing Sexual Abuse in Prison: A Moral and Fiscal Crisis

3.21.11 | 1 Comment »

prison

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker may have used a state budget shortfall as an excuse to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights, but 44 states and DC are also facing a budget crisis. While they try to pinch every penny, prison reform is showing up on the table among Republicans and Democrats alike. Right alongside the issue should be the problem of prison rape, an epidemic in our system. With so much taxpayer money spent, addressing our astronomical rates of sexual abuse and the paltry options available for victims should be part of what we pay for. Until it is, sexual assault will continue to be seen as something that “just happens” to some people.

The United States prison population stands at over 2 million people, with the highest incarceration rate in the world – 743 per 100,000 of the national population. The costs of this system are dramatic. In 2006, governments at the federal, state and local level spent an estimated $68 billion on corrections. What happens to many of the people living behind bars is perhaps even more dramatic. In the New York Review of Books, David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow expose the current state of abuse in the incarceration system (it’s definitely worth reading the whole article). Recent numbers published by the Justice Department found that more than 216,600 people were abused in 2008 – that’s almost 25 people an hour. These numbers are still likely lower than the real rates, the authors point out, because it’s hard to eliminate barriers to reporting – the shame some victims feel or the fear of relation from their attackers. Meanwhile, the numbers only count people who were abused, not the instances of abuse, which is far higher. The article notes, “Between half and two thirds of those who claim sexual abuse in adult facilities say it happened more than once; previous BJS [Bureau of Justice Statistics] studies suggest that victims endure an average of three to five attacks each per year.”

And while Law & Order: SVU may make it sound like most of this abuse is at the hands of fellow inmates (and disgustingly as if jailed people “deserve” such treatment), the reality is that most victims are abused by staff. As the authors point out, these are “agents of our government, paid with our taxes, whose job it is to keep inmates safe.” There is something extremely wrong with a system that uses so many tax dollars to pay such a great number of people who sexually assault those under their supervision.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Preventing abuse is a moral issue, but it also makes monetary sense. The Justice Department has come up with a very conservative value for preventing it, assigning only $375 to preventing an adult from experiencing “abusive sexual contact” and $500 for a juvenile. But in fact, Kaiser and Stannow point out that this is only one-fifth of the generally accepted benefit of preventing rape by force. It also leaves out the costs of spending on public assistance, like welfare, disability benefits, housing vouchers, and food stamps, to sexual assault victims who are unable to reenter society and maintain employment because of their long-term trauma – something the department acknowledges happens without quantifying what this means. It also neglects to factor in the savings incurred from reducing the recidivism rate, which it in fact notes “could potentially save society and government tens of millions of dollars per year by avoiding the economic and human costs of crime, the cost of investigating a prosecuting crimes, and the considerable cost of incarceration itself.” Reducing the rate of abuse in prison is likely to reduce the recidivism rate at the same time.

While a draft of standards to reduce abuse to be reviewed and implemented by Attorney General Eric Holder aims to reduce it by 3%, Kaiser and Stannow point out that this is a meager goal and one that could easily be ratcheted up. They suggest targeting the average rate of abuse in the top half of facilities that have already begun attempts at addressing rape – this would “give us an estimate of possible gains that was both realistic and conservative, based on what has already been accomplished across the country,” and far more could be done with explicitly stated standards. Meanwhile, achieving better rates doesn’t have to break the bank. They note:

The department could do much more than it is now proposing while remaining fiscally responsible. Many of its proposals can be improved at minimal cost. Other necessary measures will carry a significant price, but we do not believe they will be nearly as expensive as the department has estimated.

As we look to address our overcrowded prison system, it’s clear that much can be done to improve costs, sentencing, and other practices. With this must come a consideration of how we can keep a population literally trapped in its situation from being tormented by exposure to abuse. Letting our government – and the general population – turn a blind eye to the crisis of sexual assault on prisoners only serves to normalize rape in our society and enhance the idea that anyone could “deserve it.” Prisoners don’t deserve to be raped and anything that can be done to stop it from happening must be put into action. And it doesn’t just make moral sense; it also makes fiscal sense. The time for action is now.

Badass-Activist Friday presents: HEATHER CORINNA, of Scarleteen, and all-around Goddess

3.18.11 | 1 Comment »

It’s Friday, and we all know what that means! Interviews with your favorite badass feminists and activists. Whether social media queens and kings, creative artists, sex educators, or just kick-ass personalities, these people harness righteous anger, instigate movements and inspire culture change. We’re here to honor them and their work, but more importantly, to highlight how we can all get up, plug in, and Just Start Doing.

So without further ado…

Here’s Heather Corinna, all around Goddess and Founder and Executive Director of Scarleteen.

hcorinna

Heather Corinna is my personal heroine! She is a queer, feminist activist, writer, photographer, artist, educator and Internet publisher and community organizer. She has been considered a pioneer of both women’s and young adult sexuality online, having brought inclusive, informative, feminist, original, creative and radical sexuality content to the web since 1997. She is the author of S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College. Currently, she directs CONNECT, a local sex-ed outreach program around Seattle that primarily serves homeless and transient youth. She is also also currently a board member for NARAL Pro-Choice Washington, on the editorial board of the American Journal of Sexuality Education and is a contributing writer and editor for the forthcoming edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.


Scarleteen is one of the most informative and accessible resources about sex and sexuality and covers a broad range of topics without being condescending – can you tell us a bit about how it got started?

Thanks! The short version of the long story is that it got started when I was running a different website about adult women’s sexuality, and young people started emailing me their questions. I looked for somewhere to refer them to online, but there really wasn’t anything (this was in 1998), so given that I had a background in youth education anyway (I was a classroom teacher at the time), and wanted them to be able to get their questions answered, I just went ahead and started answering them, first building a very small version of the site with some of those questions and answers.

…which brought more questions, and more answers, so it kept just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Big enough that within a few years, I needed to make it my full-time job and let other projects go. While it’s not something I ever actively sought out to do full-time, I’m glad it worked out that way. It’s been a great way for all my skills and talents and the things I care most about to work together in a way that works well for me and also benefits millions of people every year, which is seriously awesome. When I left classroom teaching to work in sexuality, I thought I had to choose between them, and as it turns out, I wound up getting to do both.

How has technology helped with your activism? Are there any downsides?

“Above all else, it’s provided me a very effective, efficient and affordable venue to do what I do internationally and much more accessibly than other media, like print publishing. With sexuality work in particular, online technology affords people an anonymity that is exceptionally helpful: concerns about privacy are one of the biggest barriers for people when it comes to seeking help with sexuality and talking about sexual concerns and issues.”

There are some downsides. For instance, online and related tech is certainly very accessible, but that doesn’t mean that it’s accessible to everyone. For instance, I do some work with street youth here in Seattle and unless they’re in a shelter which allows them online access, those youth don’t have access to the net. Often the people who have no access to the net or the least access are those who also have the least agency and resources when it comes to their sex lives and sexual health, so the folks who probably need the most help of anyone are the people that, working this way, I often cannot provide help for. As well, while many people feel more comfortable talking about sexuality without being face-to-face, there are times when it’s clear someone really could use in-person support, or even just to have their hand held, get a hug, or have someone there to bring them a tissue when they’re upset.

You’re very open about your personal experiences and how they’ve affected your life and feminism – how does this play into your work at Scarleteen/ your activism?

“In a lot of ways, though often not the ways people expect. I didn’t have a terrible sex life in my teens and twenties. I didn’t have horrible outcomes in being sexually active, in being queer, even in being somewhat off the bell curve sexually when it came to where most of my peers were at, but mostly very positive outcomes. On the whole I had really wonderful experiences with my sexuality and with sexual partnership and exploration that helped me get through some of what, for me, was far more challenging and difficult in my life. I stayed very healthy and usually very happy. I had a good time, which sometimes meant a silly-party good time, but other times meant a good time that was very rich and deep. I usually felt great about my sexual self, and in a whole lot of ways, sexuality was a big place of liberation and healing for me.

It’s certainly not the only way to feel liberated or the only place to find healing like that. But sex and sexuality have that capacity, and having it be something that is about liberation and feeling whole rather than something painful, scary, limiting or fragmenting, something that makes you sick or totally derails your life isn’t rocket science. When you have some basics of healthy sexuality down, when you have access to good care and information, and when you’re given venues of support and encouragement in taking care of yourself and others well, and in aiming to be who you uniquely are in sexuality, as in anything else, it’s just not that hard for it to be something wonderful, whether someone chooses to be sexual with others or chooses not to. Of course, so many people — so many people — don’t have those things, aren’t afforded them or are purposefully kept from them.

The biggest influence from my own personal life in this work isn’t about trying to make things different for young people than they were for me, which is what I more often hear colleagues working with young people express, but to try and give them what will usually make it more likely for them to have positive experiences like I did.

At the same time, not everyone around me in my life was so lucky, and some areas of my own life around sexuality, my body and relationships — most certainly having been assaulted and abused — were not positive, and I didn’t get what I needed at all. I didn’t even have, nor was I given, language for what happened to me when I was first assaulted. I didn’t have anyone to talk to or any help in taking care of myself. Some of the time, my own instincts did a good job, while other times, they really really didn’t. So, there are certainly some ways in which my aim is to try and provide what I didn’t have and needed.

Were there times when you felt useless/ unable to help and how did you deal with that frustration?

There still are those times. Sometimes I have them a couple times a week, sometimes I have them a few times in a day. But what I try and do is remind myself that my desire and intention to help, all by itself, makes me anything but useless. The fact that I want to help, all by itself, also always makes me able to help, even at times when I can’t help as much as I’d like or the ways that I think would be more ideal.

So often, when people want help what they want most of all in that is support. We can’t always help someone get out of an abusive relationship, get an abortion when they want one, or even make choices we’re very sure would be better for them, even if we walk them through step-by-step and talk to them every day for years. But what we can always do is to simply be there for them to listen, to share supportive, kind words and do whatever it is that we can, to the best of our ability. And I have to believe that doing whatever my very best is is always enough, because it’s all I’ve ever got and it’d be impossible for me to keep doing what I do every day, every year, if I didn’t believe that.

What do you think is the most difficult thing nowadays in terms of moving ahead with the fight for consent and realistic sexual education?

How incredibly institutionalized nonconsent and sexual ignorance are. Because even when we can change the messaging in one area, there are always more other people and places folks are going to get unhealthy, inaccurate or just plain limited messaging. It’s very hard sometimes to have to recognize that if and when you’re the one voice that’s making things clear like that real consent and real sexual empowerment is possible, you have to know that very often, you’re the minority voice and it’s always challenging and even tiring to try and make what you’re saying weigh more than what someone is hearing at school, from their government, from their church, from their friends, from partners, from parents, on television, in magazines.

At the same time, our minority voice in this has become less of a minority even in just the 13 years I’ve been working in sexuality now, which is a very small period of time. Positive messaging is certainly way more pervasive than it was 30 years ago. The conversation has clearly changed and grown. This kind of change, with such big stuff, is always going to be slow, is always going to be difficult, but it’s also clearly been something that has been improving over time. Sure, there have been some backsteps and backlash, some times we seemed to move forward then move a little back again, but on the whole I think it’s accurate to say that there has been, and there remains, some constant forward momentum and ever-increasing positive change.

Why do you think American media is so obssessed with “hook-up culture”. Do you think this exists currently, or do you think this existed before and has changed over the years?

I know this existed before: I’ve watched it happen now, I watched it ten years ago, I watched it 25 years ago when I was a teenager myself and my parents dealt with it, too. “Hookup culture” is the current term and manifestation of a fixation on sex outside of certain culturally or religiously sanctioned contexts that’s nothing close to exclusive to the current time.

Why? It’s complex and not everyone focused on it always has the same reasons. For some people, it’s about not thinking sex outside marriage is okay. For others, it’s about thinking sex that doesn’t have a clear exchange value — as in, sex is earned or paid for with marriage, with some other kind of commitment, what have you — isn’t okay. For others still, they clearly feel threatened by people feeling freer in sex than they do or have, or than they think anyone should feel. others still are concerned about the way they see or perceive people going about casual sex in terms of health or emotional outcomes. Since “hooking up” — whether you call it that or call it any of the other things it’s been called over the years — is not exclusive to young people, but often more visible and prevalent with young people, some of the reaction to it is a reaction with young sexuality, period. Let’s also be frank, when we’re talking about media, rather than individuals, it’s a very easy way to get people to read or view something, because it’s salacious and provocative. It’s an easy cheat: even if someone is saying something very trite, redundant or totally unoriginal about it, people will tend to look anyway.

Those are just some of the many why’s: there are more, and sometimes it’s a combination of more than one reason. But one of the biggest common denominators is one we see as pervasive in address and attitudes about sexuality, period, which is that sexuality is this big, scary thing, bigger than us, and something that needs to be controlled — not just personally, but externally and institutionally — lest it control us. That’s obviously an issue that as people, we’ve all been trying to work out for thousands of years and are still trying to work out.

How do you think we, as young activists and students can best make a difference?

Value your own voices and experiences where they are right now and get them out there, ideally to a larger audience that just the people who you’re working with. I often hear young people who feel that there’s no point in them speaking up and out because older people won’t care or some peers won’t care. However, even for those who won’t care — and whose adultism is their problem and bias — plenty do care, and more to the point, your peers do care and they need to see and hear you to help them feel and be more empowered.

Everyone also needs all of you to speak to where you have been and where you are, rather than trying to speak from a place that isn’t yours, or is a place you’re not at yet, but think you need to be at to have authority or earn respect. Not only do you not need to be anywhere but where you are, giving your own experiences and the you-of-right-now the weight they deserve, and YOU giving them authority is incredibly powerful. Not just for you, but for other people who, by virtue of age, gender, of having been victimized, who are of color, who are in any way oppressed and silenced by someone else. Doing that models that authenticity is more powerful than conformity and that oppression is something we have the capacity to change, even when we’re the ones oppressed, and we do that not by making ourselves people we aren’t and more like those who are oppressing us, but by refusing to be anything other than ourselves.

South Africa Government Hears Out LGBT Activists On Corrective Rape

3.16.11 | No Comments »

There is perhaps no phenomena so inexplicable as “corrective rape.”

A common practice in South Africa, corrective rape is an act of violence where lesbians are raped in order to “fix” them, because, you know, if we haven’t met the right dude yet, maybe it’s jut because the right one hasn’t raped us! (Same-sex marriage in South Africa has been legal since 2006, proving once again that marriage equality is unfortunately not synonymous with equal rights.) The practice was called out by human rights groups in 2009:

A report by the international NGO ActionAid, backed by the South African Human Rights Commission, said the horrific crimes against lesbians were going unrecognised by the state and unpunished by the legal system.

The report called for South Africa’s criminal justice system to recognise the rapes as hate crimes in an attempt to force police to take action over the rising tide of violence.

The ferocity of the attack became clear in April last year when Eudy Simelane, former star of South Africa’s national female football squad, became one of the victims. Miss Simelane, and equality rights campaigner and one of the first women to live openly as a lesbian, was gang-raped and brutally beaten before being stabbed 25 times in the face, chest and legs.

But scores more women have been deliberately targeted for rape, the Guardian reports.

Now, as charming as that sounds, it is clearly time to wave goodbye to that trend. Gay and lesbian activists have been lobbying in South Africa for corrective rape to be labeled a hate crime agree. They have been tireless in their efforts to not only spark conversation on the tragic practice of corrective rape, but to hear their government speak out against it with them.

In Cape Town, government officials have finally met with a group of those activists. This marks the first time the government has acknowledged the discussions surrounding corrective rape in the region.

The activists gathered outside of Parliament to spotlight the practice, and call out the perpetrators for targeting lesbian women based on their sexual orientation. Members of the group met with the Justice and Constitutional Development Minister (sounds fancy, right?) Jeff Radebe today – and they were ready. The activists’ demands were clear: for Radebe’s department to research, develop, and implement an action plan for the nation to tackle hate crimes and even other acts of homophobic violence.

Activists had circulated a petition calling him to take action; it was signed by over 170,000 people from 163 countries within 100 days. (The petition was one of the most popular / successful on change.org of all time.)

There’s no word yet on the outcome of the meeting; it may be too much to hope that all activists’ demands were met. But it’s not too much to hope that with the government finally meeting with LGBT activists, the road may be paved for further efforts to stop corrective rape and diminish its commonality.

This article was initially posted on Autostraddle and republished with the permission of the author.

When Every Word Counts

3.2.11 | No Comments »

rape
Combating rape culture usually involves going after big, widespread problems. But some of the most pernicious battles currently being waged focus on just one word at a time.

Perhaps the recent word most loudly decried was “forcible”. That one was inserted into HR3, the Republican House bill full of all sorts of anti-choice, anti-women policies, including the expansion of “conscience clauses” to cover ER doctors who refuse to perform them even in life threatening cases, imposing a new tax on people who buy health insurance plans that cover abortion, and denying women in the military the right to pay privately for abortions in military hospitals abroad. But what caught many people’s attention was the attempt to redefine rape. Under the bill, abortions would only be funded by Medicaid in instances of “forcible” rape, a qualifier never used before. This led to the (unanswerable) question: what exactly is non-forcible rape? Kristen Schaal on The Daily Show explained that it is “what is merely rape-ish.” The use of this word could have meant that women seeking abortions after being raped would have had to show their bruises to prove that enough force was used to qualify (because the process of reporting a rape and pressing charges isn’t traumatizing enough). The GOP has now promised to drop that language after a veritable firestorm erupted, including another valiant Twitter campaign by Sady Doyle, #DearJohn. (Although the language may actually still be in the bill.)

A lesser-noticed bill in Georgia also focuses on one word: “accuser.” Republican Representative Bobby Franklin has introduced a bill into the state legislature to call women who report their rapes “accusers” instead of “victims.” Franklin claims that it’s unfair to call someone a victim until there’s a conviction – even though, as Carolyn Fiddler of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee points out, “Burglary victims are still victims. Assault victims are still victims. Fraud victims are still victims.” All before the crime is proven by a jury of the victim’s peers. This takes our attention away from the fact that the woman in question is a victim of a horrendous crime and diverts it to the possibility that she is merely accusing an innocent man. Using such language diminishes the seriousness of a rape accusation and the vulnerable position of someone who has experienced sexual assault.

And then there’s the word “rape” itself, which Stephanie Gilmore noticed was glaringly absent from Super Bowl coverage of accused rapist and Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. It was said that he “had sex with” his victim, that the incident in question was just a “drunken night,” it was just a “poor and classless decision.” As Gilmore puts it, “When we avoid the words ‘rape,’ ‘statutory rape,’ and ‘sexual assault,’ we dehumanize and silence victims.” Rape charges get demoted to “sexual misconduct” or simply being “involved” with an unwilling woman and are considered something other than rape. “Having sex with” implies consent that is absent when the act is forced. You can see the effects of this kind of thinking in the Canadian case where a judge withheld jail time from a rapist because the victim was drunk and wearing a tube top with no bra. The case wasn’t about rape, in his words; it was about “misunderstood signals and inconsiderate behaviour.” By refusing to call the act rape he completely changed the sentencing – and avoided laying blame where it was due, at the feet of a man who forced sex on his unwilling victim.

Refusing to use the word rape can have serious effects for victims as well. As Chloe Heintz recounts in a video explaining how Planned Parenthood saved her life, it wasn’t until someone described what happened when her boyfriend forced sex on her as rape that she understood it as such. Only then did she really come to grips with what it meant and process how it related to her identity. Gilmore connects our horrendously low reporting rates to the lack of conversation around what rape is – if you don’t know what constitutes it, you may not know you should report it. Would Chloe perhaps have pressed charges against her boyfriend if she had recognized his crime as rape at the time? It’s more likely. And as Jaclyn Friedman points out, it creates an environment in which even Whoopie Goldberg feels there is a difference between “rape-rape” and real rape.

Each misused word only serves to diminish the seriousness of rape and sex crimes, making victims more vulnerable and empowering attackers. And they all seek to roll back the clock to a time when it wasn’t taken seriously. “Forcible rape” hearkens back to when women had to somehow prove that they resisted an assault for the crime to qualify as such. “Accuser” puts women and the crimes that happen to them in a category apart from others. And calling rape a euphemism that obscures the facts smacks of calling domestic violence “putting a woman in her place.” The battle to protect the rights of rape victims, to prevent rape from happening, and to get our society to face rape culture head on is a challenging one, but it starts with language. Friedman calls for someone to sit down with editorial boards “to challenge their resistance to saying that what is alleged is rape.” Someone clearly also needs to sit down with legislators and judges. The words that frame this debate and become encoded in law sets the stage for the rest of the fight.

Badass-Activist Friday presents: SADY DOYLE of Tiger Beatdown

2.4.11 | 2 Comments »

Dear Readers, Happy Friday!

The WIYL blog is kicking off an all-new series of interviews with your favorite badass feminists and activists. Whether social media queens and kings, creative artists, sex educators, or just kick-ass personalities, these people harness righteous anger, instigate movements and inspire culture change. We’re here to honor them and their work, but more importantly, to highlight how we can all get up, plug in, and Just Start Doing.

Without further ado…

One of the most relentless and passionate voices on the Internet, blogger extraordinaire and twitter activist Sady Dole of Tiger Beatdown!

You’re one of our favorite, most unapologetic and opinionated bloggers. Can you talk a little about what made you start Tiger Beatdown, voice your opinions with such conviction, and what challenges that might have posed you in the course of your work?

Aww, thanks! Tiger Beatdown started the way most blogs start: I had a lot of things to say every day, and didn’t think the people in my life would be interested. It was pretty common for people to make fun of me, even just affectionately, for being “too feminist.” But I needed a place to be as feminist as I wanted. As more people started to read the blog, I felt more empowered to take my opinions seriously and value them and voice them loudly. Now, people still make fun of me for being too feminist, and there are still moments when I feel insecure about being accepted socially or professionally because of that, but the people who make the jokes are also aware that they can’t freaking stop me. There’s a different tone to the jokes now, because I’m not the one who’s feeling threatened.

In the past two months, you have launched two Twitter campaigns — #DearJohn and #Mooreandme — defending the rights of rape victims, illuminating how bogus and dangerous a redefinition of rape will be, demanding justice, accountability and making some serious noise. What happened as a result? Were/are they successful? Why twitter?

I think in terms of #MooreandMe, our impact on the narrative looks pretty small, but it was profound. There are no longer stories about how these women have to be lying, stories which openly seek to discredit them without a trial; Naomi Wolf is no longer saying that an unconscious person can give consent. People are still minimizing the charges, and there’s still a false dichotomy being put forth, that you can either support WikiLeaks or believe Assange might be guilty, but not both; anyone who doesn’t say Assange is innocent is still accused of saying he’s guilty. And the charges are still being downplayed by the press. But we stopped the very worst manifestations.

The thing is, with #DearJohn, we’re challenging the exact same misconceptions that informed the Assange case: The idea that rape has to be “forcible” in order to be rape. People who couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that coercion or unconsciousness equaled non-consent in the Assange case are now shouting from the rooftops that unconsciousness and coercion equal non-consent, in order to oppose the GOP. It’s a little irritating, but I’ll take it.

Twitter was an instinctive choice for #MooreandMe, because it made the target of the protest accessible and ensured that he could hear us. But I liked it as a medium for #DearJohn too, because it was really equalizing, it wasn’t hierarchical, it ensured that voices and perspectives could influence the conversation regardless of how well-connected or well-known they were, and it was a very visible, trackable way to register dissent.

And that has to do with the other major accomplishment of these campaigns, in my opinion: We’ve mobilized sexual assault survivors, and made them a powerful base. I’ve gotten so many letters from survivors about how these protests made them feel like they could finally speak up, and gave them hope that their concerns actually mattered. Instead of being silent or divided, survivors are speaking up and exercising political and cultural power, as a group. Which is really impressive. I like the idea of the people in power being intimidated by rape survivors, and having to take them into account when they make decisions. That really brings me great joy, just to contemplate it.

Do you speak to a specific/target audience, or do you speak mostly for yourself, with the responses you receive as a side effect?

I try to be as inclusive of as many people as possible, while also not speaking for anyone else. I try to listen as closely as I can to legitimate criticism, because I’m not useful or interesting when I speak only to my own concerns, but I also can’t say what it’s like to be a woman of color in this society, or a lesbian, or a trans woman, so everything I write comes specifically from me and my base of knowledge. I do like getting responses. I even like getting critical responses, if they’re smart. And as I’ve grown, I’ve become more focused on who I’m serving, and not just on my own need for self-expression. Sometimes I don’t want to talk about rape at all, but I still think people need to hear it. So it’s my job to drag my ass to the computer and repeat the basics about why rape is bad, again.

What do you think is the most harmful gender stereotype out there and what’s the best way to combat this? Humour plays a large part in your writing – are these things related?

I mean, there are so many. If you speak about sexism, you’re a bitch. Or you’re a whiner. Or you’re making things up, you’re delusional. You’re too serious; your issues aren’t serious enough. You’re too intimidating; you’re too weak. Everyone’s a winner. I definitely make jokes, sometimes just to keep the posts interesting and because it’s how I talk, but also because it’s hard to call someone an over-serious bitch or a weak, hypersensitive whiner when she’s got a big shit-eating grin on her face. If you’re clearly laughing, it doesn’t even matter if anyone else thinks you’re funny; you’re not coming from a defensive position any more.


You’re also one of the most committed online feminist activists out there – what keeps you committed and motivated to keep catalysing change? What movements inspire you?

I just have this really serious problem with not being listened to. I don’t accept it. If I know I’m right, then I just get louder and more persistent as more and more people disagree with me. Sometimes it’s not even because I think I’ll win; I just do it to annoy people. I don’t think it’s a gift. I think it’s just my innate obnoxiousness. Did you not hear me talking? I’ll yell. Did you not hear me yelling? I’ll get a megaphone. Did you not hear me with the megaphone? I’ll stand over your bed at night and aim my megaphone directly into your ear. DO YOU WANT ME TO SHUT UP? HOW ABOUT NOW?

I’m always keeping my eyes open, and trying to stay tapped into all the vital stuff that young feminists are doing, especially online. I read a ton of blogs every day, just to get a sense of what people are thinking and talking about; it helps me, not just as a writer, but as someone who is hopefully serving a community when I organize. Even if I see something that irritates me, or something I disagree with, it informs what I WON’T do, next time I’m planning a similar action. What energizes me is not so much any particular movement, but the fact of so many movements and individuals in dialogue with each other, particularly online.

Is there anything you’d like to say that we haven’t asked — ?

I would just like to remind readers that they’re powerful enough to do this sort of organizing themselves. The key is to reach out to each other and work together. #MooreandMe involved a whole lot of people, but I wasn’t taking steps to delegate anything to anybody, so I actually felt really isolated and drained and martyred. I felt alone, when actually I was surrounded by people who wanted to help, and some (like my co-blogger, Garland Grey) who were taking key roles in the protest.

With #DearJohn, I actually took the time to talk to everybody I knew, and to draw in people I didn’t even know that well, so that they could to serve vital functions within the protest. The result is that I feel empowered, I feel like part of the community, I’m doing better work, and I have a ton of people to talk to and learn from as we form strategy and talking points and such. One of the strengths of the political Internet, which a movement like #MooreandMe or #DearJohn makes clear, is that there are so many great voices and so many ways for people to connect and influence each other. So if you see something that you think you have to oppose, use your voice to speak up against it, and try to get any friends or sympathetic people in your online space involved as well. The way you go from a blogger to a person building a movement is simple: You say, “hey, I want to build a movement, who’s interested?” And when they’re interested, you start talking to them, and then you start to move.

For more, visit Deanna Zandt’s Guide to the #DearJohn campaign and Sady’s Resources for the Digital Activist. For background on the #DearJohn movement, read Amanda Marcotte and Sady.

Remember, getting pissed off is good. Channel it, get inspired and we’ll move with you. You can start by signing the Petition to stop HR3 here.

Giving Girls Choices Around the World

1.19.11 | No Comments »

You’ve probably heard of the Girl Effect. It’s the name of a project that the Nike Foundation started in 2008. There’s been quite a lot of press coverage. Big names like Larry Summers, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Farmer have endorsed the concept. The buzz is about data that shows when a developing country invests in young girls, the economic benefits multiply. Give her an education and she’ll start a business, then invest her money in her village and improve their lives while proving that girls are valuable (and making room for more girls to be like her). Data also shows that giving women money has greater benefits than giving it to men – “when women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for a man,” according to The Girl Effect’s fact sheet. The amount of attention focused on the need to invest in women’s education and well-being is almost astonishing and incredibly important. These have been ignored for too long.

But as an Aid Watch blogger pointed out, there are some flaws amid the hype. The project relies on the notion that women are good investments because they are inherently more nurturing and inclined to take care of others. But why are we not addressing “the structural factors that underlie men’s apparent disinterest in the health and education of their children?” Aid Watch asks. Why reinforce the stereotypes of women as caretakers and men as negligent without examining why these roles are so rigid? And by focusing on economic growth as the end goal, as opposed to gender equality in and of itself, it ignores some important issues. Aid Watch points out, “The greatest subordination felt by women is within their own home, yet the girl effect has nothing to say about domestic violence, rape, the wage gap, or the many other systemic problems.”

Perhaps, then, one of the best ways we can empower young girls is to focus on giving them viable choices about sex, not just on how well they take care of others. Give them contraception so that they can choose when and how often to get pregnant. As noted in Half the Sky, a recent book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, “122 million women around the world want contraception and can’t get it… up to 40 percent of all pregnancies globally are unplanned or unwanted.” Rather than rely on her to spread her money among many children, give her contraception and she has a better chance of controlling the size of her family and spacing out her pregnancies. Then she can make her money go further and have more agency over her own life. According to the Guttmacher Institute, reducing unplanned pregnancies gives girls more educational and employment opportunities while reducing public sector spending. (Not to mention that condoms save lives. Talk about economic benefits – it costs only $3.50 a year to save a life through distributing condoms and preventing HIV, versus $1,033 to save her life through a treatment program once she has AIDS, according to Half the Sky.) Westerners can help this cause while making the choice to have safe sex themselves by buying Sir Richards Condoms, which will donate a condom to a non-profit in the developing world for every condom they sell. Now that’s a real girl effect!

We also have to address the issues of rape, child marriage and other ways in which women are not in control of their sexual choices. Many women (in developed and developing countries alike) live in an environment that doesn’t value their choices about when and how they want to have sex. Just as it is important to focus at home on combating rape, global aid can help fight the forces that lead to it elsewhere. For example, The Girl Effect rightly focuses on giving girls an education, many of whom aren’t allowed or are unable to attend school. But it’s also important to educate boys about their responsibilities to respect women and their bodies and to educate all about safe and consensual sex.

Meanwhile, these projects depend on the stereotype that women in developing countries need to be saved. As Aid Watch points out, the video invites First World citizens to “fix” the lives of Third World women. “This message gives more agency to Westerners than to the girls it claims to be empowering,” the blog says. Why do we assume we know what they “need” more than they do? Western activists and aid workers have to acknowledge that those who are best able to address their problems are the women themselves. This is why it may be most helpful to focus on giving women as many choices as possible – give her the opportunity to control her reproduction so she can dictate her own life path. There’s clearly a demand for it.

Addressing these concerns means putting a woman’s well-being and equality first. It’s fantastic that empowering women has extra benefits. But it can’t be the only reason we work toward women’s rights around the world. Making sure that women have agency over their lives – particularly over their sexuality – is job number one.

Pop-cultural change: from within!

1.12.11 | 1 Comment »

me senior ball

Hi everyone, I’m Caroline! I like pop culture, popsicles, blogging, biting wit and/or commentary, television and talking…pretty much equally.

My senior year at Smith College was dominated by papers with titles like, “Internalized Sexism and Wedding Crashers” and “Phenomena and Hysteria: The Beatles and Twilight” no matter what the subject…which was when I realized that my passion wasn’t so much in translating Chaucer a la my English major. Instead, I love to dissect popular culture such as celebrity gossip, television and social media, and I want to change it from within.

I heard about The Line through my job blogging and doing social media at Women’s Media Center and for SPARK Summit. I immediately loved it. Though the concept of drawing the line in a sexual situation seems like a no-brainer, we live in a culture that constantly has sexual assault, aggression and rape as punchlines to jokes that are never funny, and should never be made.

Is it funny when your friends’ boyfriends feel entitled to sex anytime anywhere? Is it funny when you wake up to some guy on top of you and you have to wonder what would have happened if you were more tired? Is it funny when it’s late and you want to leave but the person you’re with is stronger and insistent? Never. But I can’t count the amount of times I’ve heard about these situations…or seen them play out in movies or television with a sexy soundtrack or laugh track not far behind.

Hopefully, you’ll see my name on the credits of a hilarious and progressive TV show in the future, but for now I’m so excited to be blogging for The Line! You can also follow me on my Twitter, or join the feminist chat I run for @womensmediacntr, #sheparty (Wednesdays, 3-6 pm EST). Let’s get this dialogue going!

Julian Assange: a victim of “revolutionary feminism?”

12.28.10 | 4 Comments »
Julian Assange faces rape charges in Sweden.

Julian Assange faces rape charges in Sweden.

An update on Assange thanks to Feministing.com, who put it right:

Maybe Assange is confused because he doesn’t seem to grasp the basics of consent. He says one of the women “arrived at a lunch in a revealing pink cashmere sweater, flirted with him, and took him home.” And the other woman took a “’trophy photo’ of him lying naked in her bed.” Well, ok, that’s nice. And also totally irrelevant to the accusations against him, since both women have said that the sexual encounters began consensually but at some point stopped being consensual. That pink cashmere might have screamed “unprotected sex against my will” to Assange, but I’m guessing that wasn’t the woman’s intention.

Assange, who, as highlighted in this earlier post here, and this one, is currently wanted for interrogation on rape allegations being made abroad in Sweden, with two female accusers coming forward. Once he moved past his defense that he was a victim of “politics,” he opened his mouth- and revealed he also sees himself as a victim of “feminism.” This seems laughable, since the encounters he is facing interrogation for are those of having sex with a woman while she was asleep- always charming- and continuing to have sex with women after they asked him to stop – also charming. He has also been accused of using force to coerce these women into nonconsensual sex. Assange seems a little caught up in how this affects him, and not the impact he has had on these lives or the safety of these women and their health.

It is important to note that consent can be withdrawn. It is important to note that consent for one sexual activity is not consent for another, or for any others, or for sex at another time. Consent is borne of freedom of choice and open communication- which Assange resisted through physical force and the act of ignoring his sexual partner’s voices.

And it is important to note that sex without consent is rape, not a political act to be used to create sympathy for him. Perhaps next time Assange opens his mouth, he should talk a little more about himself, and what his actions really mean for these allegations.

Editor’s note: This post was edited on Dec 29. Assange has not been charged at this point; these are allegations. Sorry for the mistake.

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