I have been home, laid up with a severe case of gout, and so I have had the time to work on this more than in the recent past. I have been gratified, really gratified, by the responses. Thank you.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

What first attracted me to Maria was the way she had no reservations about saying she didn’t like Walt Whitman’s poetry, even though our freshman-year literature professor had made Walt Whitman’s work central to the course. When I told her one day as we were walking out of class that I admired her honesty, she smiled, said something about how most literature professors had more hot air in them than substance and walked off to wherever she had to go next. A few days later, when I saw her sitting in front of the library, the hello I stopped to say grew into an hour-long chat, and after that, for the next two months or so, we met a couple of times per week at a table in the back corner of the Rainy Night House Cafe, where we sat for hours drinking tea, eating bagels and talking. One afternoon, just as we were getting up to leave, Maria said she’d been given a bottle of good wine as a gift, and she asked if I’d like to come to her room that evening to help her drink it. I said I would.

She was already a couple of glasses ahead of me when I arrived, and while I played catch-up our talk turned to a subject I was surprised to realize we’d never before discussed, love and relationships. We circled the question of our own budding involvement warily, letting it drop in and out of the conversation, each of us waiting for the other to risk saying, or doing, something first. Then Maria asked me, “Richard, do you like your body?”

“Yes,” I answered, more because I couldn’t imagine saying no than because I’d ever really thought about it. “Why?”

She got down from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me. “No, I mean do you really like your body?”

“Yes,” I said again, but before I could ask her how she felt about hers, she leaned forward and asked her question even more emphatically, “You know, are you truly satisfied with every part of your body?”

A small edge of anger sharpened my voice, “What are you talking about?”

Maria smiled to herself, put her hand warmly on my knee and said, “Well, do you think you, you know, measure up?”

Finally, I understood, and I felt a little foolish for not having caught on sooner, but it had never occurred to me that a woman might actually ask this question. I had, as I imagine most young men do at one time or another, taken a ruler to my penis to see how big it was; and I would be lying if I said I did not think about how I might compare to other men or wonder if what I had heard about the relationship between penis size and sexual prowess and attractiveness to women were true; but so far the only girlfriend who’d ever seen me completely naked had been Jennifer, and while she had told me a story about a guy she’d been with whose penis had been so small that she laughed when she saw it, something she deeply regretted, she had never said anything to me about how big, or small, I was.

So Maria’s question, once I understood what it meant, not only took me by surprise; it also confused me. Looking back, I can smile thinking that perhaps the question was an honest one that she had asked at precisely the wrong moment. At the time, however, what I felt was a shift in the subtext of what was happening between us from the mutuality of friendship and what might come next to the adversarial stance of performer and critic. Anything I said–yes, no, maybe, let’s find out–felt like it would be a picking up of the gauntlet she’d thrown down, which I wasn’t interested in doing. On the other hand, to say nothing felt like it would be to lose my chance to be with her, and I really wanted to be with her, so I decided to buy time by turning the tables. “I don’t know. Do you measure up?”

Maria’s face changed immediately. The gently mocking expression with which she’d been waiting for my response vanished, and she searched my face with eyes that were suddenly sad and deeply suspicious. She kept her hand on my knee until she found, or didn’t find, what she was looking for, and then, so softly that I almost couldn’t hear her, she said, “Sometimes.”

Maria got up and went back to her chair. We talked a while longer, trying to recapture the easy banter from earlier in the evening, but we couldn’t. Maria was suddenly unable to look me in the eye, and when I finally stood up to leave, all she did was wave a silent good-bye from where she was sitting. We saw each other on campus a few times after that, but never said more than hello, and Maria had only once to turn and walk the other way as I approached for me to understand that she didn’t want to talk to me again.

When I went home at the end of the semester, I asked the only woman I could think to ask about what had happened between Maria and myself, my mother. This may seem strange to some people, but I’ve always been able to talk with my mother about sex, and I figured I could count on her to give me a straight answer. I was wrong.

“The size of a man’s ego,” my mother told me after I had finished my story, “can be measured by the size of his penis.” To illustrate her point, she related a story about a man who tried to pick her up in a bar she’d gone to with her friends. At first, she refused him politely, but as he grew more and more insistent, she grew more and more annoyed until, finally, having had enough, loudly, so that all the people around them could hear, she offered him the following challenge. If he had a “baseball bat” between his legs, she’d be his for the night. If he didn’t, he should just leave her alone. The man protested that he’d “never had any complaints,” but my mother slapped her palm on the bar and told him that if he had what it would take to have her, she wanted to see it right then and there. If he didn’t…enough said.

Needless to say, the man walked away.

“Only small men,” my mother’s one suggested that this was her final word on the subject, “say that size doesn’t matter.”

I don’t remember anything else about that conversation, except that I understood her story to have been a cautionary tale, her point being that I should not become like the man in the bar. How precisely that point related to my failed evening with Maria was unclear, nor, at least as far as I remember, did my mother do anything to try to make it clear. Now, of course, I can see both in my mother’s story itself, and in the fact that she thought it was an appropriate answer to my question about what had happened with Maria, her own anger at men, and I know enough about my mother’s life to know that this anger is justified, more than justified in fact. I did not know this back then, however; nor did I know it five or so year earlier, when I was sixteen, and she and I were sitting after dinner, either Passover or Thanksgiving, at the dining room table in my grandmother’s apartment and I am telling her about the one and only time I remember my father trying to talk to me about sex, which had happened earlier that day.

We were walking from the restaurant where he’d taken me for lunch to the subway where I would catch the train to my grandmother’s. He put his arm around my shoulder, leaned his head in towards mine and asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

I told him no, which was a lie.

“Well,” he responded, “you will soon, and once you start dating, you’re going to run into situations you won’t know how to handle.” He moved a few steps ahead, turned to face me, searched my eyes to make sure I knew what he was talking about. “I just want you to know you can call me.”

“I know,” I said, and the look of relief on his face as he quickly changed the subject to how I was doing in school made me want to laugh out loud. There was no way he could’ve known that I’d already lost my virginity, but knowing that he didn’t know–even though my first experience of intercourse had not been at all a positive one–and realizing how easy it had been to deceive him, made me feel superior, and it was this feeling of superiority that I brought to the table when I told my mother the story. I did not have a good relationship with my father at the time. In fact, I saw him as something of a buffoon, and laughing at his buffoonery–my mother shared this image of him–was one of the ways she and I bonded. This time, however, instead of engendering mutual laughter at my father’s ineptitude, my story opened up a divide between me and my mother that I had never felt before.

“Next time,” my mother was laughing–but the smile on her face was a thin line of contempt, and when she leans forward to tap the polished nail of her right index finger in rhythmic emphasis on the wooden surface of the dining room table, her eyes smolder–”Next time, tell your father you don’t have such problems. Tell him you wear a steel jockstrap. Besides, what does he think he’s going to teach you anyway. You probably know more than he does already.” She laughs again, and I laugh with her, though I am laughing more because I think she expects it than because I think what she’s just said is really funny. Something in her tone, something in the meaning of what she said, made me very uneasy, though I could not name what it was.

///

Fast forward about fifteen years or so. I am in my early thirties and sitting with my father in a very fancy steakhouse in New York’s financial district. It’s the first time we’ve seen each other since my brother’s funeral about ten year earlier, and we are seeing each other only because I have sought my father out. I want answers to questions I have had for a very long time about my parents, about myself, about why my father never tried to get in touch with me and more. We talk for a very long time, and I learn a lot that I did not know, but two pieces of what I learned are especially relevant here. First, I learned that my parents got married because my mother was pregnant with me. My father said that he approached her with the idea of getting an abortion, but she said no. I don’t know why she said no, but this was 1961, before Roe v. Wade, and so it may have been simply that she was afraid of the risks involved in getting an illegal abortion. Whatever her reasons, she and my father decided, once abortion had been ruled out, to get married. They didn’t really love each other, and so, especially knowing them as I do now, I did not find it at all surprising when my father told me that my mother decided she wanted a divorce just a couple of years after I was born.

The second thing I learned came in response to my asking why my father thought my mother was still so angry at him, even though they had been divorced for nearly thirty years. I once tried to ask my mother the same question. This is the conversation we had, as I recorded it in my journal later that day. In response to my asking why she was still so angry at my father, my mother said, “I’m not angry at him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I think I’m more angry at myself.”

“Why?”

“For talking myself into marrying him in the first place.”

“Why did you marry him?”

“I though I was in love.”

“You thought?”

“Well, I convinced myself…”

“And?”

“And that’s why I married him.”

“Why’d you get divorced?”

“He bothered me.”

“He bothered you?”

“He annoyed me.”

“In what way?”

“He couldn’t hold up his end of a conversation.”

“What do you mean?”

“He always talked in circles.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he would talk about the same thing over and over again, constantly repeating himself, circling back over the same idea like a vulture waiting to descend on a carcass. Then you’d point him in another direction, and he’d do the same thing with that topic. It was infuriating.”

“What kind of a father was he?” It was a question I’d never asked before.

“I don’t think he was much of a father at all, either before or after the divorce.”

“Okay, but what kind of a father was he?”

My mother paused to think, “Well, he did change your diapers; I have to give him that. And he played with you guys—”

I reminded her that I’d seen the pictures of him feeding me and suggest that, at least as a father, it didn’t sound like he was too bad.

“But I was always the disciplinarian,” she told me, pausing again and sighing, “I guess I just didn’t have much respect for him.”

When I ask my father the same question, he tells me about how, not long after he’d moved out of our apartment–which is ironically just a couple of blocks from where I live now–but before their divorce was final, he called my mother to ask if he could come over and talk, to see if they could work things out. She said okay, but once he got there, everything went wrong. He would not go into the details of what happened, though. All he would say was, “Something happened that shouldn’t have happened.” Even when I pressed him to tell me what he meant, all he would do was repeat those words. “Something happened that shouldn’t have happened.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “And, you know, Richard, your mother was the kind of woman who could goad a guy into it.”

Clearly, in other words, whether it was rape or some other form of assault, my father did some sort of violence to my mother. When he told me that, a lot of things began to fall into place, not only her comment about the steel jockstrap, with its allusion to the idea of a chastity belt, but other things my mother used to say to me as well.

If you look quickly at a picture of my father when he was younger, and if you didn’t already know you were looking at him, you might think you were looking at me. We look that much alike, and the resemblance made my mother very uncomfortable. “Grow your beard,” she started telling me almost as soon as hair appeared on my face, “You remind me too much of your father.” Even when I was well into my late twenties and early thirties, my mother sometimes has difficulty with my clean-shaven appearance. Once she even threatened—her tone was joking of course—to exclude me from a family portrait she was planning unless I grew my beard back. I didn’t; the portrait never materialized.

Now, I of course don’t know if the portrait really never materialized because I didn’t grow my beard back, but it is in my memory a telling coincidence that represents the stance my mother, as a parent and as a woman, took towards me, as a child and as a man (or a boy becoming a man), throughout most of the early years of my life: She did not want me to grow up to be like my father, not only in terms of the character traits she found so objectionable in him, but in terms of my body as well. Once I hit puberty, I was, I was becoming, I would eventually be, physically, sexually, a man, a man who looked very much like his father. She did not want to face me across the gender gap my growing up would inevitably open up between us. A man was what I had no choice but to become, and yet a man was precisely what my mother did not want me to be.

Matthew Yglesias:

Bipartisan competition will tend to be rarer when the parties are ideologically coherent. And that’s what we have right now — almost every Democrat in congress is more liberal than almost every Republican. That makes bipartisan cooperation difficult. The roots of this polarization, however, are structural and not really lamentable. The old era of bipartisan cooperation was grounded in the parties having substantial ideological overlap and that, in turn, was a consequence of Jim Crow and the existence of a weird one-party state in the apartheid South where the one party was the Democrats even though the region was generally more conservative in ideological terms. That era’s not going to come back and we shouldn’t want it to come back, even if we deem certain aspects of its passing to be lamentable.

Here. Thanks, Bean!

(Bean also pointed out the most awful — in a couple of senses of the word — headline ever, from — of course — the New York Post.)

Oh, and as long as I’m posting stuff Bean sent me, check out this TV commercial for AOL, which is either hilarious if you get the references, or completely bewildering.

Feel free to post whatever you’d like (including links to your own stuff) in this thread.

Since I posted this at The Gimp Parade last June, Boys on Wheels has been a fairly major contributer to my site’s daily visitor hit count — easily 30+ hits per day. Obviously people are fascinated enough to Google. So, what do you think?

Funny or not so much?

Direct YouTube link here.

(I can’t seem to make the video embed correctly here at Alas without it messing with the formatting of the whole page. Anyone know how to correct this?)

The lead singer of Boys on Wheels is Jesper Odelberg and he is a guy with cerebral palsy, as well as part of a Norwegian comedy show. The four-minute video linked above is a montage of rock songs with lyrics slightly altered. Subtitles are provided in the language each song is sung in. For example, the first song is in Norwegian, the second is a spoof on the ’80s hit by Norwegian band A-Ha: “Take On Me,” instead called “I’m Not Gay.” Bryan Adams’ ’80s power ballad “Heaven” has been altered so the lyrics begin:

Baby, you’re all that I want, but you’re living on the fifth floor.
I’m finding it hard to get there, in my wheelchair.

Bon Jovi’s “Living On A Prayer” is spoofed as “Living In A Wheelchair.” Three men in power wheelchairs sit on a stage with dynamic colorful lighting. Sometimes the two backup guys do some dancing with their wheelchairs. Odelberg’s costume changes to match the song, with ’80s-era Bon Jovi hair and clothes for the last song.

Also at YouTube, Boys on Wheels singing “My Balls are OK” and “Making Love in a Handicap Toilet”

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

The latest Disability Blog Carnival is up at Andrea’s Buzzing About, where the theme is “A Few of Our Favorite Things.” Check it out, or look through past carnivals.

Connie Kuusisto hosts the next one at [with]tv on Thursday, January 10, with submission deadline the Monday before.

Image description: Blue text lies over a line drawing of a old-fashioned back brace that look like an elaborate, longer corset. The text reads “the Disability Blog Carnival — a bracing event.”

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

The students in a remedial composition class I’m teaching during my second semester as a college professor are reading aloud and commenting on fables they’ve written over the weekend. The prose is awkward and ungrammatical, but I’m impressed with the imaginative effort some have made. There’s a modernized version of Little Red Riding Hood set in an upper class neighborhood with the most sought-after senior boy in the local high school taking the part of the wolf. There’s also a gender-reversed Sleeping Beauty in which Princess Charming turns out to be the homeless woman who sleeps in the park. I’m about to move on to the next part of the lesson when Walter, who’d announced when we began that he wasn’t going to read, asks if we’d like to hear his story. Yes, I say, of course.

At the center of Walter’s narrative, which takes place far in the future, is a very powerful drug lord whose organization has been infiltrated by a top female narcotics agent posing as a prostitute. When the dealer’s lover, who is also a prostitute in his stable, learns that the operation has been compromised, she tells him immediately. The dealer conceives a plan that uses his lover to expose the spy, who is then tortured slowly to death. To express his gratitude, the dealer takes his lover to be, giving her, in Walter’s words, “the literal fuck of her life, pounding away until she was no longer breathing.” The story ends with a description of the lavish funeral the dealer gives her.

When Walter finishes reading, he looks around the circle with a sarcastic and self-satisfied grin. The rest of the class is silent; no one except me is willing to meet his eyes, but I am hoping that one of his classmates will speak first, condemning what he’s written not in the voice of authority–which my voice inevitably will be–but in the voice of his peers. A minute passes in silence before it becomes clear that his fellow students don’t intend to respond, and so I call on a few students by name, male and female, to see if I can draw them out. The men all say the story is “sick,” while the women tell me they it’s not worth responding to. To me, though, a response feels absolutely necessary. Walter, like all the other students in the class, is just out of high school. I do not want to let pass what seems to me to be real teachable moment, and so I ask Walter if he really believes that fucking a woman to death could be an expression of gratitude.

“Absolutely,” he says, without a hint of irony in his voice. “For the woman it’s the ultimate fulfillment, and for the man it’s the ultimate proof.”

“Of what?” I ask him.

“Of manhood.” His tone indicates that he’s surprised I even have to ask. “Women would buy tickets and stand in line to be with a man powerful enough to fuck them like that.” He says these words with a conviction I at first can’t think how to counter, but then I wonder aloud if he would include his girlfriend or his future wife in that line of women.

“I’m not talking,” he says, “about doing this to someone I love. I’m talking about the pieces of trash you can pick up in the local bar, the sluts who give it away, the hookers who do it for money. Women who are asking for it.”

“Why do they deserve to be murdered?” I ask.

“They’re whores,” he responds. “No one cares about them.”

I take a different tack, asking him if he’s ever killed anything other than an insect. When he says no, I ask him if he realizes that he’s talking about using his own body, his penis specifically, as a murder weapon.

“Yes, I do,” he says.

So I ask if he makes a distinction between the sex he would have for pleasure–presumably with a woman he loves–and the power he says he would like to experience using sex to kill. Walter looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Power,” he says, “is pleasure.”

Class ends. As I’m putting my papers in my briefcase, Walter steps up to my desk. “Now that everyone else is gone,” he says, his voice full of conspiratorial camaraderie, “come on, be honest. Wouldn’t it be great to take some slut to a hotel and then meet your buddies later and tell them you killed her with your dick?”

“No,” is all I can think to say.

“Sure, okay, maybe now that you’re older and you can’t get it up like you used to, but when you were younger, when you were an undergraduate, wasn’t fucking something you did so you could share it with your buddies and impress them, and wouldn’t they have worshipped you if you told them you’d fucked someone to death?”

Since it’s even more clear now than it was during class that Walter is less interested in really engaging the ideas he is espousing than in “outing” me as “one of the boys,” I decide that monosyllabic answers are the best way to deal with him. “No,” I say again.

Walter waits a few seconds for me to say more. When I don’t, he mutters something under his breath of which I think I hear the words pathetic and excuse, and he walks out, and that’s the lest I see or hear of him until I get my final roster with a W for withdrawal next to his name.

///

The encounter I have just described took place more than fifteen years ago. In the several years immediately following my discussion with Walter, I often shared what he’d said with my friends and colleagues, male and female, and I always found it interesting that their responses fell, for the most part, along the same lines as my students’ responses did. On the one hand were those who dismissed Walter as “crazy,” whatever they meant by that term (and some suggested that he really ought to be institutionalized), and, on the other hand, there were those who saw him as not worth the energy it would to respond to him in the first place. The ease with which these responses were almost always given, however, always left me a little uncomfortable, because it seemed–and still seems–to me that each of those answers too easily dismisses the question of how Walter came to feel the way he did in favor of a very glib understanding of who he must be based on what he said. Yet it is precisely the question of how that haunted me most, and that I think continues to be something men don’t talk about enough, not because I think answering it lets Walter off the hook, but because the interior experience Walter claimed to have /desire of his own genitals, of my genitals too, as a weapon feels as inaccessible to me as the interior experience of biological femaleness.

///

One of the letters from Penthouse magazine–I think it was from the “Happy Hooker” column–that has stayed with me since I first read it when I was a teenager was written by a woman who claimed to be describing how she and a friend took revenge on a man who’d tried to rape the friend. The writer of the letter arranged to meet the man at a disco, invited him to her apartment, and seduced him into being tied spread-eagled to her bed. Then the woman’s friend, who’d been waiting in another room, came in, and the two women teased the man sexually until he was begging them for release. In response, the women took out a razor and shaving cream, telling him that if he ejaculated while they rubbed his penis, the would shave all the hair from his body. The letter went on to describe in great detail first the man’s pleading with them not to do it and then his efforts to keep himself from coming while the women took turns masturbating him. Finally, of course, he came, and the women shaved him, threatening to slice off his testicles if he didn’t lay still.

The woman’s letter describes a rape. She didn’t present it as anything else–except to make clear that it was motivated by revenge–and she never implied that the man enjoyed what she and her friend did to him. Nonetheless, my sexual imagination was drawn to the story. For months, for years afterward, I fantasized about women tying me to a bed and creating in my flesh an arousal so all-encompassing that I too would be willing to beg for release. Yet no matter how hard I tried to imagine a conclusion other than the one in the letter, I always ended up the victim of some version of the revenge the writer and her friend took. What I most identified with in this story, I think, what led me always away from the scenario I began with of trust in my imagined lovers and the pleasure they wanted to give me, was the man’s experience of having the pleasures of his body turned against him, for I knew I could be shamed in that way as well, that my body was always the potential source of my own defeat.

///

A similar theme is played out in an episode of the long-and-deservedly-defunct TV series She-Wolf of London. A very old man is brought into the hospital dying of unknown causes. The doctor on duty believes the old man is either senile or insane because he keeps insisting he is actually twenty-seven years old and that he was turned into an old man by a woman. As the doctor leaves, he orders a nurse to give the old man a sedative. Once the nurse and the old man are alone, however, she unzips her uniform to reveal black-lace lingerie, and the old man recognizes her as the woman who has aged him–one of what the viewers will later learn is a group of succubae who have opened an escort service in England’s capital city. As the old man looks on in helpless terror, the succubus begins to climb into his hospital bed, and, as she does so, she reminds him in the voice of a predator enjoying the powerlessness of its prey that all he has to do is not want her and he will be able to live. All he has to do is not have an erection and she will not be able to fuck him to death.

///

The story Walter wrote can be understood as a kind of pre-emptive strike against the fear of women expressed in this scene, as well as in my response to the Penthouse letter I described above. This understanding is not the same thing, however, as knowing how Walter and I–or at least I, since I cannot speak for Walter–came to feel this fear in the first place, and I’m focusing here on the question of how rather than why because it seems to me that why has already been answered, authoritatively and at length, by the women’s movement: Men fear the power of women’s freed, sexual and otherwise, because the power of women’s freedom, sexual and otherwise, represents the undoing of male dominant power and privilege, with the corresponding collapse of the myth of male invulnerability and the manhood men are expected to achieve in order to perpetuate that illusion.

Acknowledging this fear, obviously, is not the same thing as validating the culture of male dominance that produces it. At the same time, however, not to acknowledge the emotional validity to men of that culture’s existence is to miss what I think is a central question that has to be asked, that men have to ask of ourselves, if we want not to learn not to be afraid: When you consider that pain, humiliation and/or subjugation are almost always the consequences for a man who has failed in his manhood, is it any wonder that so many of us strive to use our bodies so that they can never be used against us?

///

A colleague with whom I used to have lunch on a regular basis would occasionally bring her three-year-old son along. Usually, John was a very animated little boy, asking questions, making a mess, and doing in general what three year old boys do to maintain themselves as the focus of attention. On this particular afternoon, however, John sat next to his mother in absolute silence. Both of his hands were bandaged because of a fall he’d taken earlier in the day, and he was still in pain, which made it difficult for him to hold the small pieces his mother cut for him from the pizza we’d just ordered for lunch. From time to time, when the look of frustration on her son’s face became especially acute, my friend would stop our conversation, pick up a small square of food and hold it to his mouth, not continuing with what she’d been saying until he’d chewed and swallowed the whole thing. When we were done, and John stood up so his mother could put his coat on, he held his engauzed palms out to her, silently asking for comfort. My friend squatted in front of her son and asked in a voice filled with empathy, “What’s the matter John? Does it hurt?” When John nodded his head, she stroked his cheek with her fingers and said, “I know sweetie, but you’re a man, right? You can take it.” John set his mouth in a firm, thin line, and he again moved his head up and down. Then his mother helped him slip his arms into the sleeves of his jacket, zipped him up and motioned to me that we were ready to leave.

As we walked out, I thought of all the countless times, and all the different painful and humiliating ways in which I was, in which John would be, in which boys routinely are, asked or told, implicitly or explicitly, by both men and women, boys and girls, “to take it.” I’m not being melodramatic here. I have no doubt that my friend said what she said without even thinking about it, and I don’t want to blow out of proportion this one clearly minor appeal to her son’s incipient manliness. The fact is, however, that she could’ve helped her son understand that we cannot always expect people to comfort us when we are in pain without putting his manhood at stake. Or, more to the point, she could have given him a hug without making any comment at all. (At the time this happened, I did not have a child; now that I do, well can I imagine that she might have been tired of a day’s worth of comforting him, and all she wanted was a little break.) That she did not, that even in a situation as insignificant as this one, John’s manhood became an issue, however small, indicates how deeply and unselfconsciously, perhaps even unwillingly, my friend valued the line separating the men from the boys.

Another example: A good friend told me that when her son was eleven she responded to his failing grades by explaining that when he got older he would have to support a family, just like his father, so he’d better start learning responsibility now. “All his boyish innocence,” she said, ” seemed to drain right out of him. Everything was homework, homework, homework. He doesn’t even play with his toys anymore. I wanted to improve his grades, not turn him into a little man.”

No doubt, and hopefully, as he realized just how far off the adulthood his mother had threatened him with really was, this boy eventually went back to being a kid just like any other kid. Indeed, my point here is not that these two interactions in and of themselves represent some permanent harm done to this boys, but rather that the interactions themselves represent only one small part of the manhood training boys receive and that each boy’s response, even in such relatively minor situations, corresponded perfectly to the manhood ideal: he sucked it up and showed that he could “take it.”

In Love, Sex, Death and the Making of the Male, Rosalind Miles points out that the old saying “boys will be boys” can be read not only as it usually is, a statement of resignation in the face of inevitability, but also as an imperative: Boys will be boys. The degree to which this second reading is the more accurate one becomes fully evident when you look at the consequences of not “being a boy.” Ask any man, and if he’s honest enough to tell you, he will have at least one story, and probably more than one, of how he was hurt when he was a child for not being aggressive enough, athletic enough, stoic enough, sexually objectifying of girls enough, sexually powerful enough, competitive enough, loyal enough to his buddies and so on. The hurt the man tells you about may have been physical, emotional or both; the particular story he tells you may involve something relatively minor, as in the cases of the two boys I just told you about, or something deeply serious and even life threatening, like my friend who was sexually assaulted and raped by boys he’d through were his friends just because he was the weakest and least masculine among them.

Yet despite the radical distance we usually assumes separates a victim/survivor from her or his victimizers, there is one aspect of his rape that my friend and those raped him have in common, that all boys and men in our culture have in common: their ideas of themselves as men–and my friend’s friend’s behavior was nothing if it was not about their ideas of themselves as men–are a direct a result of their confrontation with the violence and aggression considered to be the normal, natural and necessary context in which manhood is formed. None of us can escape this. We may choose to embrace the violence or reject it; we may find some way of accommodating ourselves to it, or we may devote our lives to eliminating it, but there is now way we can avoid confronting it. This confrontation takes place so pervasively throughout our lives–how do I respond to the posturing of the male student who is challenging me about nor accepting his late paper, or to the neighbor whose threatening body language belies the polite tone of his voice as he argues with me about who saw the parking spot first, or to my son’s insistence that he wants a “boy’s only’ birthday party–that the question of how or why boys come to value manhood so highly is dwarfed by the question Miles asks, “[H]ow do they avoid it?” (58)

Something odd just happened to me.

I have anxiety around the phone. From talking to other people I know, it seems like this isn’t rare. Mine’s gotten worse recently, like a lot of my other anxieties. I *can* make phone calls, and there are kids of phone calls that are easier for me to make than others. For instance, anything spontaneous is easier than anything that I know in advance I have to do. I can call person A to be social for ten minutes, but it’ll take me hours to work up to checking in with person B to confirm that they’re coming to an event, and even when my anxiety problems weren’t bad, it would take me days to work up to calling someone I didn’t know to interview them cold for an article. Once I’m on the phone, I feel fine. I’m charming, I’m funny, I’m articulate. I *like* talking to people, even people I don’t know. The anxiety is around the act of calling itself. I don’t know why. It parallels the anxiety I’ve had in the past year or so around leaving the house. I like being around people and crowds once I’m out, but the act of leaving — and the act of calling — are a barrier for me. Sometimes it’s a barrier like a membrane that I can push through with just a little bit of teeth-gritting and concentration, and sometimes is a big solid wall. There are people I have no or little anxiety around calling, but also places and people I have increased anxiety around calling - for instance, the doctor.

After my medical problems this summer, I’ve had a lot of problems with anxiety and the doctor’s office. My blood pressure goes up to really scary levels when I go in. I have anxiety attacks. My heart rate accelerates so that when I’m resting it’s as high as it should be when I’m doing arobic exercise. All my terror over possibly having multiple sclerosis, I’ve mapped onto the medical facilities themselves.

This anxiety has gotten better in some ways — if I go in to see a familiar doctor, for instance, my blood pressure won’t skyrocket — but it’s still present.

Anyway, one of the byproducts of this is that I don’t call the medical office. My [male] spouse does. If we leave it to me to call, then I will find ways to avoid it or to forget, or I will have insomnia before I have to call (and my mood problems tend to be complicated by lack of sleep), or I just won’t call. And then I miss appointments. No one wants me to miss appointments.

This is one of the things we do in the distribution of labor in our marriage. If I were talking from a feminist standpoint, which I generally do, I would say that my spouse compensates for me in certain ways and I compensate for him in others. If I have anxiety around the doctor’s office, then he calls. If I suck at maintenance tasks because my head is always on global stuff, then he focuses on maintenance tasks like grocery shopping and getting us to appointments. If he can’t do time management for big projects or know how to do the emotional work of maintaining the network of our family and friends, then I do that. And so on.

If I were to talk about this from a disability rights perspective, which I generally don’t, I would say that my social anxiety causes me certain problems which I anticipate and compensate for by asking my spouse to be my caretaker in certain capacities. (I don’t know if I’m using the right terminology here… when I say a disability rights perspective, I mean placing my status as someone with anxiety problems in the foreground.)

Unfortunately, due to a cock up a couple weeks ago, despite the fact that I had my spouse calling, I *did* miss an appointment. We fucked up our records — mea culpa, except for both of us. I really don’t want to miss a second appointment despite the fact that I hate going in.

OK, now we get into fiddly stuff. Because I missed an appt, I’ve had my spouse call in to get a full list of all the times I’m booked to go in. In addition to all the real appointments, they gave us one time when I am actually, in fact, *not* booked to go in. Why? I don’t know. I assume someone just misread or misspoke. Anyway, we noted it down as a time when I had to go in — and that time was tihs morning. I was surprised that I had this appointment time because I didn’t know what it was for, but we assumed it was real.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of contracting strep throat, so we had to make an emergency appointment. We went in, I stopped at the desk to register for the appt, and asked her to confirm that I was coming in today as well. “I don’t see anything,” she said. “We have nothing in the books until January.” I said thanks –and because it had been odd that I’d had the appointment in the first place when I didn’t know what it was for, I started assuming that it had just been an error that anyone had told me about it in the first place.

Still, I wanted confirmation that I didn’t have an appointment and that the woman at the desk hadn’t been misreading my chart, so I asked my spouse to call this morning and make sure that I didn’t have an appointment. He learned that in fact there’s nothing for today, and that was that.

Only it wasn’t. After that, the scheduling people called back and asked to speak to me. A woman let me know on the phone that they usually released information to spouses about appointments, but they were no longer willing to release information to *my* spouse because of the kinds of questions he’d been asking, and I’d have to call myself. I explained why he’d been asking that question, the whole story about the phantom appointment — and she repeated her request that I only call about my appointments myself. “Okay?” she said. I, still strep-throated and half-asleep, said, “Um…” and tried to figure out how to say “No, that’s not okay.” Before I could figure out what to say, she said, “Thank you,” and hung up.

I was very upset. Foremost — stupidly — was embarrassment. Embarrassment that we’d missed the appointment a couple weeks ago, embarrassment that we had this phantom appointment which I knew would look strange and irresponsible to the scheduling people, embarrassment that I was bothering them, embarrassment at being called. Secondly, I knew that their request would cause us problems around my anxiety, and that the likely result was that I would end up missing appointments and missing care.

I don’t want to miss appointments or care. I don’t want my relatively uncomplicated problems to become major ones. I don’t want my phobia of the medical system to negatively affect my health.

I called back and spoke to the woman’s coworker, and explained my problems with anxiety. I explained why I needed my spouse to be able to call. I explained that it was okay with me that he did. I asked her to note in my file that he could call for me. She was friendly, and helpful, and she placed the note in my file, and she talked to me as if I was a reasonable, intelligent, responsible person, which I appreciate.

I know why the schedulers were upset and concerned. They were worried I had a stalker. As a feminist, I approve. I approve of the fact they were paying enough attention to be worried. I approve of the fact that they decided to act on that concern rather than remaining passive. I approve of the fact that they tried to find a way to solve the problem. I greatly appreciate that both were well-intentioned and friendly and helpful and good people.

However, I don’t think the way that they tried to act on their fear was the best way that they could have done so. There are several issues for me here:

1) Once they’d spoken to me about the problem, they knew that the person who had been calling was — as claimed — my spouse. They knew I knew what was going on, and approved. The issue then became not one of protecting me from a stalker, since there clearly wasn’t one and everything that was happening was going on with my understanding and approval. When they found tihs out — which did not seem to surprise them — they did not adjust their plan accordingly. The idea of a possible stalker became more important than the actuality of no stalker.

2) When speaking to someone who is clearly uncomfortable, saying “thank you” and hanging up is a great conflict-avoidance strategy. I heartily approve of this strategy for many occasions. However, in this case, it was a problem because of what I was unable to articulate to them off the cuff. If I had not called back, I would not have been able to tell them why it was a problem. If my anxiety were worse, I would have been unable to call back (this situation got covered under my nonphobia of spontaneous phone calls).

3) They didn’t consider disability when they called. It was off their radar.

There could have been other strategies for dealing with this situation. For instance, the only way that the schedulers ever know that someone is who they claim is that the person provides their student ID number. If I didn’t have an identifiably female name, and my spouse an identifiably male voice, then they would never know he wasn’t me. If they were concerned about protecting my privacy, we could have set up a password for my spouse to confirm his identity, or set up another layer of privacy to make sure that he was someone authorized. They have the ability to mark in my file — they could mark a couple alternate questions that would assuage their fears.

And of course talking to me itself was something that they could have used to assuage their fears. If they had approached the situation with open questions, I might have been able to explain what was going on — and possibly propose alternatives. Now, these women work in a college health center, an environment whch is very aware of sexual violence, and one in which many of the patients — by virtue of being young — aren’t totally able to act as mature adults. Further, this is a situation in which the schedulers are experts and I am not. They have to deal with medical appointments every day. I understand why they approached me with a decision and a plan, and if circumstances had been slightly different, it would have been a good idea. Unfortunately, they didn’t really consider that I was an expert on my own life — instead, they operated based on their assumptions about my life (that I was able to call, for instance). Again, I understand why this happened and know it was well-intentioned, but it misfired in this case.

I am grateful to have read some writing on disability rights in the past couple years. Knowing something about how the medical system creates problems for people who need caretakers to act on their behalf allowed me to contextualize what was going on. It allowed me to see what was happening as a systemic problem instead of an individual one. Having read about the social creation of disability allowed me to think about my problem not as just a failing in myself, but to consider all the ways in which the system is set up to accomodate “normal” abilities and lacks, and to punish deviance from that norm, even when compensating for that deviance is relatively easy.

If I hadn’t had a sense of these critiques, I would have focused on my personal shame at being unable to handle these situations without my spouse’s help. I would have castigated myself for being weak, and tried to force myself to act as if I didn’t have the anxiety. I know what the result would have been — I did not go to a single medical appointment last year. I never even got as far as booking one, despite how severe my depression became. Having access to the consciousness raising of systemic critique of ablism allowed me to look at a system instead of my personal problems.

My problems are mild, but they do interfere with my life. They’d interfere more if I was unable to use the solutions that I’ve set up for myself to cirumvent my problems. I don’t really consider myself part of the disabled community — I don’t think I have a right to, when there are people like Kay with much more severe problems. I feel about it sort of like I feel about cliaming an LGBT identity — I’m bisexual because I am sexually attracted to women, but my few relationships (only three) have all been with men. I don’t want to be disrespectful to people who have to deal with real problems of oppression. At the same time, disowning a disabled identity is clearly an ego-defensive manuever; I don’t want to think of my problems as being real problems. I don’t want to admit that I am not “normal,” or abled, or able to do everything that I expect of myself.

When I got off the phone with the woman, I started crying. I’m still feverish from strep, and was tired, and I’m sure part of my upset was just being weakened. But I was still astonished at the force of my reaction. I didn’t know why I was so upset. Now I’m starting to realize — it was the shame of having problems, and the fear of having been for a moment helpess and vulnerable before someone else.

Commenters, I’m vulnerable here. I ask you to respect that.

From the National Women’s Law Center blog:

Ending a protracted legal battle, the University of Colorado today settled with plaintiffs in a Title IX suit that accused the university of deliberate indifference to sexual harassment and assault by football players and recruits. [...]

Under the terms of the settlement, the university will pay Lisa Simpson $2.5 million, hire a new counselor for the Office of Victim’s Assistance, and appoint an independent, outside Title IX advisor. The advisor will be available to all individuals reporting sexual harassment or assault, will address any concerns with the University’s response to complaints, will review issues relating to sexual harassment and Title IX compliance, and will make recommendations to the university regarding reforms to university programs to prevent future sexual harassment. [...]

Ms. Simpson in 2002 filed a complaint against the University of Colorado alleging that she was raped at a football recruiting party in December 2001.

Good on Lisa Simpson!¹

One of the odd things about MRAs² is that we forget how much variance there is within the MRM³. From the perspective of most “Alas” readers, someone like Glenn Sacks seems pretty far “out there” — and justifiably so. Nonetheless, within the spectrum of MRAs, Glenn is actually very far left, since he objects to misogyny on occasion, and also takes positions such as favoring same-sex marriage — for which Glenn was attacked on Men’s News Daily because same-sex marriage “is the final embodiment of N.O.W’s plan for feminist supremacy.”

So it gets a lot nuttier than Glenn Sacks.⁴ That said, many of Glenn’s views are waaaaay out there. Which brings me to Glenn’s post about the University of Colorado case, which reeks of the MRA’s default assumption that when a man is accused of rape, the woman is probably a liar:

I have no idea whether the two women are telling the truth when they claimed they were raped at the party in 2001. However, it seems strange that with two different alleged victims, prosecutors were unable to get any kind of sexual assault or rape or even plain assault indictments against any of the alleged perpetrators.

It is axiomatic in criminal law that “you can indict a ham sandwich,” yet they could not even get a single meaningful indictment. [...]

Perhaps the two women really were victims of a terrible crime. However, the Associated Press article above gives the impression that the real victims here may have been the school officials who lost their jobs and the taxpayers who picked up the tab for the lawsuit.

So although he admits to not knowing for certain, Glenn thinks the women probably weren’t “real victims,” because otherwise there would have been an indictment.

Huh?

DAs can almost always get an indictment, but they often won’t bother if they don’t think there’s enough evidence to win a trial. To suggest that not referring a case to a grand jury means the accusation was false — a position Glenn clearly implies, although he doesn’t quite say it — is lunacy.

The good news here is the court finding allowing Simpson’s lawsuit to go forward. Let’s hope colleges that tolerate rape and harassment have been put on notice by this case. Also good news that Lisa Simpson settled not only money, but for CU taking real steps to improve their campus atmosphere.

UPDATE: It appears that Glenn was relying on a badly-written AP story, which conflated two separate events to give the impression that a grand jury had examined the rape allegations and declined to press charges. See the comments for more.

UPDATE 2: Just reading through the comments on Glenn’s blog, and boy are some of his readers woman-hating sick fucks. A couple of examples:

You know, it should be obvious to anyone what happened here. I can’t believe anyone would want to give any credence to these disgusting perjurers.

I don’t know which is more revolting, the scum who would make false allegations for profit, or those who enable the practice.

You know, it should be obvious that someone who thinks “it should be obvious” that rape accusations against football players can’t be true, is more revolting.

My point in saying this is that if a girl/woman goes out picks up a guy, wines and dines with this guy all night long then agrees to go back to his place or takes him to hers, agrees to the idea of having sex, gets in bed with this guy of HER own free will, removes her clothing or allows her clothing to be removed then when the act is about to happen says NO!!!! how in the world can we say that the guy raped her?

How can we say that? Because she said “NO!!!”

It’s really not that fucking complex. But one of Glenn’s readers — this one — is such a woman-hating, rape-enabling empty-headed git that if a woman “allows her clothing to be removed” he thinks she’s no longer allowed to decline sex.

Two posters responded to the above garbage — one to say “If she says no, you have to stop” (a moment of sanity!) and one to say that “No jury in their right mind would call that rape, because the consent is so obvious.” (To this person, when a woman says “NO!!!,” that’s obvious consent.)

Another one of Glenn’s readers suggested that even if the alleged rapes took place, it’s the rape victims who should be blamed:

If anything was wrong all who were drinking should be arrested for under age drinking and the renters the girls in this case that alleged rape should be held more accountable because it was their house or apartment. They did not have to allow any of this to happen. They did not have to have a drinking party. Furthermore, I do not understand how only the girls were taken advantage of because of being lubricated by booze. It would stand to reason that these seventeen year old boys (pre-freshman/high school seniors, potential recruits [and since boys {according to society mature slower than girls} should make them less responsible for their actions than the more mature and older girls] were also lubricated by booze and impaired and made bad decisions because of this.

I don’t judge Glenn by his readers; he seems to pretty much not moderate at all, and for all I know he doesn’t read all the comments. But I think it says a lot about the pathetic state of the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM) that even on the blog of an unusually reasonable and moderate MRA, the comments are full of woman-hating, rape-denialist venom.

1. Simpson was actually one of two plaintiffs in the case, but the other chose not to disclose her identity. (back)
2. MRA = “Men’s Right Activists” (back)
3. MRM = “Men’s Right Movement” (back)
4. IMO, Glenn Sacks and Robin Steele are the two most sane self-identified MRAs. (back)

This “Bobby Make Believe” cartoon — from 1915 or thereabouts — totally cracked me up. I love how (in the boy’s fantasy) all the townsfolk are so calm and unruffled by a mysterious sniper shooting bullets at them. This was written and drawn by Frank King, who later became famous for “Gasoline Alley.” The drawing in this cartoon is great, but not as great as some of his later work.

Click on the sample panel to read the whole thing.

Hat tip: The Balloonist. For more “Bobby Make Believe” strips, see the “Bobby Make Believe” archive on Barnacle Press.

But don’t go there without being forewarned: There is racist imagery in some of these strips. And sexism, of course. I love classic cartooning — the best cartoons from a century ago are in some ways better than what’s being done today, and of course the best newspaper strips back then were much better drawn than newspaper strips today (due to having so much more space to work with). But racist and sexist approaches were very commonplace in cartoons back then.

It’s easier for me to wince at the racism and sexism, but nonetheless enjoy old cartoons, because I’m white and male. Most current cartoonists whose drawing style is rooted in classic cartooning techniques (For example: Robert Crumb, Seth, Kevin Huizenga, Chris Ware, Tom Neeley, Jeff Smith)¹ are white men. I’m not sure how meaningful that is — American comics as a whole are white-male-dominated, although getting less so every year — but it’s at least suggestive.

On the other hand, it’s not like today’s pop culture isn’t full of racism and sexism, too, although the racism today tends to be subtler. This is really just the problem that anyone anti-racist or anti-sexist (but especially us folks in fandom) constantly faces; you find ways to enjoy offensive pop culture, since the alternative is giving up pop culture altogether.

1. Of course, it’s a bit weird to lump all those folks together; Crumb, Huizenga, Neely and to a lesser extent Ware take visual inspiration from classic newspaper cartoonists from the first half of the 20th century (as well as Disney comic books, in Neely’s case), while Seth’s visual inspiration appears to come from classic New Yorker cartoonists of the 30s through 60s, and Smith’s visual inspirations seem to be Pogo and classic Disney animations (back)

We have your son.We are destroying his ability for social
interaction and driving him into a life of complete isolation. It’s up to
you now…Asperger’s Syndrome

The NYU Child Study Center has a new public education campaign designed to create awareness of psychiatric disorders. Ads appearing in magazines and on NYC billboards and kiosks are mock ransom notes signed by specific psychiatric disorders: ADHD, Asperger’s Syndrome, autism, bulimia, depression and OCD. Here’s the ad for bulimia (Description: Cut and paste words from magazine text form a ransom note: “We have your daughter. We are forcing her to throw up after every meal she eats. It’s only going to get worse. –Bulimia” Below the note the ad says, “Don’t let a psychiatric disorder take your child” and gives info for the NYU Child Study Center.):

Text for the other ads reads:

We have your son. We will make sure he will no longer be able to care for himself or interact socially as long as he lives. This is only the beginning…Autism.

We are in possession of your son. We are making him squirm and fidget until he is a detriment to himself and those around him. Ignore this and your kid will pay…ADHD

We have taken your son. We have imprisoned him in a maze of darkness with no hope of ever getting out. Do nothing and see what happens…Depression

We have your daughter. We are making her wash her hands until they are raw, everyday. This is only the beginning…OCD

The NYU Child Study Center, celebrating its tenth year and the relaunch of its public information website AboutOurKids.org, says:

The idea behind the “Ransom Notes” is that, all too often, untreated psychiatric disorders are holding our children hostage. These disorders rob children of the ability to learn, make and keep friends and enjoy life.

“Ransom Notes” may be shocking to some, but so are the statistics: suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people ages 15 to 24, and serious emotional problems affect one out of 10 young people, most of whom do not get help. The strong response to this campaign is evidence that our approach is working. We understand the challenges faced by individuals with these disorders and their families. We hope to both generate a national dialogue that will end the stigma surrounding childhood psychiatric disorders and advance the science, giving children the help they need and deserve. We want this campaign to be a wake up call. Please join the dialogue.

And people are joining the dialogue. The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN) has gathered 14 other disability rights organizations and issued a joint letter (.pdf file) calling for withdrawal of the ad campaign. (There’s also a petition for anyone to sign in support of the ASAN joint letter and appeal.) In part, the letter reads:

While the “Ransom Notes” campaign was no doubt a well-intentioned effort to increase awareness and thus support for the disabilities it describes, the means through which it attempts this have the opposite effect. When a child with ADHD is described as “a detriment to himself and those around him,” it hurts the efforts of individuals, parents and families to ensure inclusion and equal access throughout society for people with disabilities. When individuals with diagnoses of autism and Asperger’s Syndrome are told that their capacities for social interaction and independent living are completely destroyed, it hurts their efforts for respect, inclusion, and necessary supports by spreading misleading and inaccurate information about these neurologies. While it is true that there are many difficulties associated with the disabilities you describe, individuals with those diagnostic categories do succeed – not necessarily by becoming indistinguishable from their non-disabled peers – but by finding ways to maximize their unique abilities and potential on their own terms.

Individuals with disabilities are not replacements for normal children that are stolen away by the disability in question. They are whole people, deserving of the same rights, respect, and dignity afforded their peers. Too often, the idea that children with disabilities are less than human lies at the heart of horrific crimes committed against them.

The letter also notes that the ad campaign supports the idea that people with these psychiatric disorders — note that autism and Asperger’s Syndrome are labeled psychiatric disorders here — may be dangerous to others around them.

Does anyone else’s mind jump to Columbine-type scenarios when they see “children” and “hostage” linked? Mine did.

h/t to Stephen Drake at Not Dead Yet

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

Pratchett remains optomistic and asks that the community respond with cheer.

I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s, which lay behind this year’s phantom “stroke”.

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet.

As PZ says, Pratchett “Aintn’t dead yet.”

–

UPDATE: It occurs to me that you all may not know who Terry Pratchett is. He’s a comic fantasy writer who has penned many, many novels in a universe called Discworld. Discworld started out as a fairly simple parody of fantasy epics starring a wizard named Rincewind, but quickly got much more sophisticated. It’s a rich and historically deep series that takes on a number of topics. One of my favorite books is a satire of philosophers and religion. The most recent takes on the historical development of paper money. Very little makes me as simply joyful as reading a new Terry Pratchett book — or even an old one that I like.

Reagan started us on the path to capitulating to Muslims! We forget what guts it took Bush to stay in the Iraq War! Bush beaten up by scientists! MASS PRODUCED EMBRYOS!

I laughed. And then I laughed some more.

Near the end, OSC positions himself as a centrist. He wants us to know that the insane Right is just as bad as the insane Left. Well, honey, you’d know. Nice try at claiming to be a moderate, though.

Piggybacking on Amp’s report of recent NYT statistics on prisons and prisoners in the U.S. is the news that prisoner suicides in Massachusetts state prisons are nearly triple the rate in other states. From the first part of a three-part series in The Boston Globe:

Last year alone, seven inmates killed themselves, and another’s attempt left him brain dead; four have taken their lives so far this year.

Department of Correction officials say the suicides are random and unrelated. But a Globe Spotlight Team investigation of the deaths and detailed reconstruction of how they occurred found that they were far from random.

Most of the suicides came after careless errors and dangerous decisions by correction officials and the staff at UMass Correctional Health. And the trail of violence is far wider than the number of dead would indicate, as hundreds more inmates each year have wounded themselves or attempted suicide.

In fact, such incidents are soaring.

So common has it been to find a man with a makeshift noose around his neck that some correction officers have taken to carrying their own pocket tools to cut them down. The tally of suicide attempts and self-inflicted injuries - 513 last year and more than 3,200 over the past decade - tells a story of deepening mental illness and misery behind the walls of the state’s prisons, despite repeated calls for better training of officers and safer cells for mentally troubled inmates.

The entire series is here.

h/t to Liz at The Trouble with Spikol

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

Some statistics swiped from the NY Times, which in turn based its article on a Department of Justice report released last week:

* At the end of last year, 1 of every 31 adults in the United States was in prison, in jail or on supervised release.

* An estimated 2.38 million people were incarcerated in state and federal facilities, an increase of 2.8 percent over 2005.

* Of that 2.38 million, 38% are Black.

* Of that 2.38 million, a bit under 5% are women. “The female jail and prison population has grown at double the rate for men since 1980; in 2006 it increased 4.5 percent, its fastest clip in five years.”

* About 15,000 people were held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, an increase of 43 percent over last year.

* “In several states, incarceration rates for blacks were more than 10 times the rate of whites. In Iowa, for example, blacks were imprisoned at 13.6 times the rate of whites, according to an analysis of the data by the Sentencing Project.”

* “Still, many prison systems are accommodating record numbers of inmates by using facilities that were never meant to provide bed space. Arizona has for years held inmates in tent encampments on prison grounds. Hundreds of California prisoners sleep in three-tier bunk beds in gymnasiums or day rooms. Prisons throughout the nation have made meeting rooms for educational and treatment programs into cell space.”

Although the article doesn’t mention this, an increase in shared dormitories is more-or-less guaranteed to mean an increase in prisoner-on-prisoner rape; getting rid of dormitory-style housing — in which prisoners never have any place they can go to be safe from other prisoners — is one way scholars suggest for designing less rape-prone prisons. (This is more of an issue for male prisoners than female prisoners, since male prisoners are typically raped by other prisoners, whereas female prisoners are typically raped by male prison staffers.)