Brett Favre, who I infer is a football player of some accomplishment, cried when announcing his retirement. And anti-feminist radio host Laura Ingraham commented:

“All these years, and I didn’t know there was a woman quarterback in the NFL,” said Ingraham to start her Friday show that aired on replay on Monday at 2:00 a.m. on Newsradio 620 WTMJ.

“Brett Favre…we’re watching this in the studio, obviously retiring from the NFL, great quarterback, handsome 38-year-old man, he gets up there and he does this press conference that was frankly one of the most embarrassing things I have ever seen.

“That’s a great message for young boys. ‘Get up there and act like a girl and start blubbering like a baby.”

When I first heard about this, I thought it was a disgusting example of anti-male sexism. But on reading her actual words, what’s striking about it is how perfectly Ingraham merges anti-male and anti-female sexism; note how she uses the terms “woman” and “girl” as insults.

As Jill says, what an asshole.

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 cartoon is perfect. Go read the whole thing.

I received an email from a reader about a round table on the Tavis Smiley Show. Apparently, Tavis will have a panel discussing Thomas’s book and his appearance on 60 Minutes. Panelists are Marc Morial, President and CEO of The National Urban League, Princeton Professor Cornel West, and Columbia University President, Farah Jasmine Griffin. If you are in New York, the Tavis Smiley Show airs at 12 midnight on PBS.  If you are in another market, I’m not sure of the time, but you can check you local PBS station.
Did anyone else see the 60 Minutes interview with Thomas?   I thought he came off as really bitter.  He kept using the anchor’s name in a pejorative way.  It was very uncomfortable from my vantage point.  For those interested in abortion and sexual harassment issues, Thomas made the claim that the controversy surrounding his appointment was really about abortion.  The panel on the Tavis Smiley Show will discuss this issue in some depth.

Update: Some students at CCSU have started their own blog–Take Back the Recorder– in opposition to the paper’s editorial staff. Go show them your support.

Last February we heard the story of a college newspaper in Connecticut that printed an article saying “rape is a magical experience” and “rape only hurts if you fight back.” The author claims he was trying to satirize rape, which he clearly did not achieve. ¹ Well it looks like this bunch is at it again and more emboldened than ever since they managed to survive their last go round. This time, among other offensive diatribes, the Central Connecticut State University newspaper has published a cartoon about urinating on a 14 year old Latina, who is locked in a closet.²

I found out about this debacle from a comment left in the thread on the West Virginia rape and torture case over at Feministing. A commenter named prof/activist provided a link to the PDF copy of the paper. The offending cartoon can be found in its original context if you scroll to page 16, the final page of the PDF file. The cartoon consists of two figures one triangular and the other square. The triangle says that his urine smells like honey after he eats certain cereals, and the square asks if it tastes like urine. Then the triangle says, he doesn’t know he’ll have to ask the Latina girl tied up in the closet. Then, it jumps to the final frame where the square says, “Tell Juanita I said Hola.” The cartoon also has a sentence printed under it that says, “The Recorder Does Not Support the Kidnapping of (and Subsequent Urinating on) Children of Any Age.” I was going to repost the cartoon here, but it’s not worth the bandwidth. You can open the PDF file above to read it.

Students and faculty members, disgusted by the paper’s racist and sexist reputation, protested the cartoon on Friday. The story was covered in the local paper and it received national attention. Here’s a quote from the AP article in the New York Times:

The university’s president vowed on Friday to cut off advertising in the paper, and its critics have planned a protest on Monday on campus to push for reforms, including the ouster of the paper’s editor, Mark Rowan.

“We believe the climate here at Central is one that fosters this kind of behavior,” said Francisco Donis, a psychology professor and president of the university’s Latin American Association, “so we want more systematic changes to create a welcoming environment for everyone to feel safe and secure.”

About 5 percent of the 9,600 undergraduates are Hispanic, according to university figures. The campus is in New Britain, a racially diverse city of 71,000 about 12 miles southwest of Hartford.

Mr. Rowan, 21, was the editor in February, when the newspaper was criticized for publishing a satirical opinion piece titled “Rape Only Hurts if You Fight It.” The satire called sexual assault a “magical experience” that benefits “ugly women.”

The author of the article lost his position at the paper and apologized, but Mr. Rowan was allowed to retain his post.

The university created a task force that recommended providing more training for its student journalists, buying libel insurance and creating a student-run alternative paper or Web site.

Mr. Rowan, who is set to graduate in December, said lingering anger over that controversy was adding to outrage over the cartoon. He said he did not know if he would be asked to resign.

Rowan and his cronies have caused enough trouble for the University, ushering the school into the national spotlight on two separate occasions. It seems clear that Rowan lacks the ability to judge the quality and appropriateness of the paper’s content. Both pieces in question were not only offensive, but they also were of poor quality. Petroski’s rape article didn’t succeed at being satire, and this cartoon didn’t succeed at being funny. In fact, only a person like Ted Bundy would find either of these articles amusing, which makes me wonder if there are some sociopaths running this paper.

Mr. Rowan has shown poor judgment, and has allowed the student newspaper become a bottom feeder with little journalistic integrity. Right now Mr. Rowan holds two journalism related positions. He’s an editor of the CCSU student paper, and he has an internship with the Hartford Advocate, but at the rate he’s going he may never have another position in journalism. How is he going to explain these gaffes to potential employers? Who would want to hire someone, who routinely brings negative attention to their publication? He hasn’t learned his lesson, and that’s going to come back to haunt him in the future. A good editor thinks about getting the story, and getting quality material, not just pushing his political agenda and publishing anything that comes across the desk.

I know the retorts that the student editors will have–We have free speech. We didn’t mean to offend. Lighten up, it’s just a cartoon. You’re being too sensitive. I hear these arguments every time someone engages in offensive behavior like this. Rather than taking responsibility, they try to deflect the criticism by condemning the condemners. At this point, it’s pretty clear, that the University needs to step in and revamp the paper. If the student editors are unwilling to do this themselves, it is incumbent upon the University administration and the majority of students to oust the paper’s editors. This surely doesn’t represent the school, its administrators, and the vast majority of its students.

1. If you want to see real rape satire, go here to Marcella’s site. (back)
2. The writers and editors clearly haven’t learned their lesson. While scrolling through the electronic copy of the paper I found an article written by Justin Kloczko. The primary purpose of the article is to taunt a local reporter who is leaving the New Britain Herald to write for the Hartford Business Journal. The taunts and insults are directed at this reporter because he was one of the people who brought the February rape article to light. The article appears next to a picture that says “Crotch Shots, Nipple Slips, Cellulite Legs! The Recorder is not looking for the above, but is looking for dedicated photographers to cover local and campus events. Contact us at ccsurecorder@gmail.com and make us forget that Britney picture.” (back)

I’m going to organize this as bullet points for each episode. 

Gods Jewish Warriors

• I thought this was the best one of the series. 
• It was balanced in showing both the extremist settlers, and the more mainstream Jews who were opposed to the extremists.
• They gave ultra-orthodox Jews a free pass on the sexism issue, which was unfair.  They noted the treatment of women by Muslim and Christian fundamentalists, but mentioned nothing that I recollect.
• I was also impressed with how they discussed the international dimensions of the settler movement, and the fundamentalist Christians and right wing Jews who provided money and support to the settler movement.
• They also discussed the changes throughout history and covering the various peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors.  One of the most disturbing parts of the special was the discussion of the killing of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.  If you don’t know the story, you can click on the link.

God’s Muslim Warriors

• I felt like this one was a little more predictable because we are quite accustomed to critiques of Muslim fundamentalists–people promoting violence, Jihad, etc.  I do wish they would have highlighted more of the moderate leaders, and more people opposed to Islamic fundamentalism.  They did interview a few people who left extremist groups, which was interesting, but I wish they would have talked with people who were fighting these extremists all along.
• I thought the scenes of the Iranian women protesting were the most moving.  Heart has several postings on the women’s movement in Iran; you can find them here.  Many of the Muslim countries in the Middle East have draconian anti-women policies, and these policies are often justified in the name of religion.  By far one of the most consistent trends with Muslim, Christian, and Jewish extremists is their disdain for the rights of women.
• They did very good at focusing on the international dimensions of the movement; in particular the growing movement in Europe.  What I also found interesting was how both the Christian and Muslim fundamentalists were obsessed with the “cultural decay” in the West, focusing mostly on the decline in traditional definitions of family, materialism, and hedonistic popular culture. 

God’s Christian Warriors

• This was by far the worst of the three.  First, they didn’t show any of the Christian fundamentalists who advocate murder and violence.  There was a brief mention of bombing abortion clinics, but I wish they would have had an in-depth interview with someone like American terrorist Eric Rudolph or any of these people who have engaged in violence at abortion clinics. What about the Christian Identity movement?  What about Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and his family?  They did talk with Christian fundamentalists, but they didn’t talk to the ones who engage in or promote violence like they did in the first two parts of the series.
• I was happy to see them discuss gender, and the treatment of women, especially when Christiane Amanpour told the one minister that the Taliban said the same thing as him. That was classic.  But they didnt get into the depth that they could have– discussing churches who barred women from being ministers.
• There were not enough interviews with people opposing Christian fundamentalism.  They had two ministers who stepped away from some parts of the movement.  I liked the Minnesota minister, who couldn’t figure out why these groups were so obsessed with homosexuality as a sin, but not materialism, greed, or gluttony.
• There was no coverage of the international nature of Christian fundamentalism.  You would think it is only in the US, but there are places like.  Several of the countries in the pink on this map prohibit abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, and Christian fundamentalists are responsible for promoting this in many countrries.  This list also includes some of the various Christian based terrorist groups around the world.

What do you think?

In another ignorant white people moment, we have this comment from Elizabeth Edwards.

As her husband trails Clinton and Obama in national polls, Elizabeth Edwards has been an outspoken critic of his opponents. Last month, she said her husband would be a better champion for women as president than Clinton and more recently said, “We can’t make John black, we can’t make him a woman. Those things get you a lot of press, worth a certain amount of fundraising dollars.”

Some of her other points in the full AP article are legitimate, but this quote is just nonsense.  Being white and male doesn’t get a candidate press?  Being white and male makes it hard to raise funds?  If this is the case, then why is it that out of the field of nearly 20 major candidates only 2 are not white and male.

The quote seems to suggest that Clinton’s gender and Obama’s race are why they get media attention and financial supporters.  I’m not saying that the gender and race angles haven’t been covered, but to insinuate that that is the reason for their early success in fundraising and polls is unfair.  Perhaps they are both getting attention because people like what they have to say.  Maybe Clinton is getting attention because of her tremendous name recognition.  Maybe Obama has hired a creative and talented campaign staff. 

If white women, women of color, and men of color have been so successful at running for President then why have white men been the only ones to win? 

This certainly isn’t going to help Edwards move up in the polls with white women and people of color (he’s already doing poorly with African American voters).  I was thinking about voting for Edwards, but if the campaign is sending Elizabeth Edwards out to make these types of comments, John Edwards is moving down on my list of preferred candidates.

I wasn’t going to comment any more on Clint Heine, but his comment threads get worse. SimonD said:

I want to offer a job for Maia in K’Rd. My massage parlor needs 2 women to dance nude on stage.

Does anyone know Maia’s full name? I want to forward the job offer to WINZ, so they can get registered unemployed people like Maia to apply. I know WINZ doesn’t like unemployed people who are registered with them to decline a job offer (any jobs really). So, there is a chance that Maia will take my offer.

For those who don’t know the NZ benefit system, if you turn down a job you can go on a benefit stand-down for up to 13 weeks. So people on benefits can’t turn down work.

SimonD wants to coerce me into sex-work by cutting off my other forms of income.*

Clint Heine’s objection to this isn’t based on my right to my own body:

If her blog is accurate I do believe she is already well known to the WINZ staff in her area. I somewhat doubt you’d want somebody like her in with your lovely girls. :)

I’m proud to say that he’s right. If I was to work on K’Rd I’d educate, agitate and organise, and SimonD wouldn’t know what hit him.

But the point here is that coercing a woman to work in the sex industry by cutting off her other forms of income is rape. These clearly men view women as objects to be used by them, and my desire is irrelevant. This is the second time a man on Clint Heine’s blog has expressed a desire to punish me with sex, and Clint Heine has no problem with that at all.

* In reality WINZ do not require women to accept jobs in the sex industry.

Some paparazzi took pictures of actress Maggie Gyllenhaal breastfeeding her child in public. Somehow I missed this, when the “scandalous” photos were taken a couple weeks ago. They are posted all over the place at entertainment blogs. I thought I would pick out a few choice comments from sexist pigs for your reading (dis)pleasure.

Here are some comments from A Socialite’s Life

Here’s one from Conrad:

I am sure plenty of women find this beautiful, but thats a beauty that needs to be shared between mother and child in a quiet, discreet location. She had to know 1 million plus ASL readers would be viewing this spectacle. I never had much of an opinion of her, but now I know she’s an animal. It reminds of that childhood question - “what’s grosser than gross…”

Another from What Betheny said:

Gross. I like her, but this picture is gross. There are more private ways to breastfeed your baby in this country. We’re not living in Africa. I can’t stand the self-righteous breastfeeding moms who just show absolutely everything without thinking for one minute that just maybe not everyone is comfortable with seeing their body parts and their child sucking off of them. It’s a personal bond between you and your baby, so make if personal.

Now here is the good news: most people on the thread were supportive (at least the last time I read the comments a week ago).

Then, you have this site, where they put up a not safe for work warning and blurred out her breast (But apparently the pictures in this post are A-OK). Here are a few of the comments (out of 490+).

From eva:

hmmm… imo if you want to breastfeed in public, pump your tits at home, bottle it, and feed them that way.

From combustion8:

shes so ugly… look at that puppy sag.

From Frenchie:

Ewww…not good. She could have covered up a bit with a blanket. I know it’s a natural act but that is pretty tacky. Her tit hanging all over the place is not natural. She should be more conscientious of not offending the general public by being more subtle.

From Rebecca:

Discusting! I’ve seen women do that before but at least they had the decency to cover their breasts. What a freakin peasant! Yes breastfeeding is natural but so is urinating and defecating, does this mean we’ll catch people doing that in public too? This is what I call no self-respect. (Gee where has Rachel heard this one before.)

I couldn’t bare to read through all of the comments. This thread had many breastfeeding defenders even though it wasn’t quite as pro-breastfeeding as the other thread.

The fact that this was covered as a controversy reflects anti-breastfeeding attitudes. A few sites treated it as such, and I found a few that put disclaimers admonishing people to behave. A Hollywood actress is feeding her child in a public place should be a non-issue, and I even hesitated to post this. However, people do need to be reminded that many anti-breastfeeding attitudes are puritanical, sexist, and unhealthy. I think the number of commenters who feel the need to personally attack Gyllenhaal commenting on her appearance, her sexuality, and her morality (or supposed lack there of) is indicative of why breastfeeding is such an important feminist issue.

Shout Out to Jennifer at Black Breastfeeding Blog!

Kellymac at “A Woman Against Feminism,” in a post entitled “Ladies, Wonder Why You Can’t Get Men To Talk To You?,” says “This is what we throw away when we embrace feminism and trample on our men.” She’s referring to an essay by “Voodoojack.” Here’s some of what Voodoojack has to say:

I don’t speak to you because I’ve tried before. I’ve tried to develop interests in the things that interest you. No matter how insipid, trivial, or dull I find the stories of your friends I’ve never met, of people I do not know, of things on TV that have no interest in watching, I try to make the effort to learn about these things. […]

I don’t speak to you anymore because you’re no different than anyone else. You’re not unique anymore. There’s nothing special about you. The colors may vary, but you dress the same as everyone else. The names and faces of the other bit-actors and actresses in the central drama that is your life may be different, but the plots the same. You’re no different than a low-budget porno movie.

Gosh, why would a great catch like Voodoojack have any problem attracting scads and scads of women? It can’t be anything about his personality making women run for the hills, because as the above-quoted sample shows, the man is simply
overflowing with charm.

This is a devastating blow to women everywhere. Admit it, ladies: you made a mistake when you traded in the chance to date great guys like Voodoojack in exchange for feminism. If only you had known! What has feminism ever given you, compared to the unmitigated joy dating a swell charmer like Voodoojack would bring?

Since I don’t have time to write a post today — or, rather, I don’t have time to write a post NOW, because I’ve just spent a bunch of time leaving comments on a thread at “Feminist Critics” — I thought I’d just reproduce a comment I left over there. (By the way, Renegade Evolution is now posting at “Feminist Critics,” which improves the blog substantially, in my opinion.)

The context is a discussion of a scene in the most recent episode of Dr. Who, “Blink,” so consider this a spoiler alert.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Rachel’s thread about ‘tween girls and shopping, Mandolin and Joe had this exchange:

Mandolin: We’re talking about a society-wide pattern of representation, wherein shopping and materialism have, yes, been condensed as part of a larger narrative wherein women are portrayed as frivolous (interested in unimportant things) and unable to handle money. Check out a few episodes of I Love Lucy.¹

Joe: I think the simpsons/everbody loves raymond/king of queens/life according to jim/whatever have done a decent job of spreading that stereotype across gender lines. Fat dumb lazy guy married to thin pushy competent woman has become a staple.

It’s conventional for both feminists and (more frequently) MRAs² to construct playing the frivolous, lazy and incompetent character in sitcoms as a sign of oppression; that is, feminists say the incompetence of the Lucy character (are her need to always be rescued by level-headed Ricky) is a sign of how women are denigrated in society, while MRAs point to the incompetence of Homer Simpson or Raymond (and their need to always be rescued by level-headed wives) as a sign of how men are denigrated in society.

Although in this instance a feminist, Mandolin, brought it up first, in my experience MRAs bring this argument up more often than feminists, presumably because the male-idiot-spouse is much more common on TV nowadays than the female-idiot-spouse. As “Mens’ Rights Online puts it, “Turn on your TV and you will see the sitcoms and advertisements that portray dads as speechless dolts in the face of the superior wisdom of their wives and 11-year-old children.”

Read the rest of this entry »

1. I disagree with Mandolin here; I think that I Love Lucy, which portrayed women as constantly constrained by an enforced housewife role, was actually quite subversive and feminist for its time. I far prefer Lucy, who was constantly fighting against the constraints of her life, to the “happy to be secondary” housewife character found in many older family sitcoms. (back)
2. MRA = Men’s Rights Advocate. I’m not assuming that Joe is an MRA, or that he’d necessarily disagree with anything I say in this post; his exchange with Mandolin just brought this stuff to my mind. (back)

Jean Kilborne, I hope you’re reading (I know she probably isn’t, but I figured I would give her a shout out anyways.). I’ve got some pictures you can add to your award winning films on misogynistic media.

First, we have last night’s episode of America’s Next Top Model, where the photo shoot consisted of simulations of murdered models. Jill mentioned it over at Feministe, and Jennifer at WIMN’s Voices has a much longer post, including this link to the actual pictures. The pictures also include the comments of the judging panel, which adds another touch of misogyny to the photo shoot. I saw the episode last night and dropped my jaw in amazement.

A few weeks ago the NYT magazine featured another blatantly misogynistic fashion spread. This spread included women in nooses and bondage. I was able to find the blogger Musings of a Working Mom who posted a few of the pictures on her site (You can see all of the photos here.). The photo from above is one example from the NYT Magazine.

I say we start a letter writing campaign. If you want to email the New York Times Magazine about their photo shoot. Here is the email: magazine@nytimes.com

America’s Next Top Model is sponsored by a few companies. One such company is Sprint. I found the name and email of some folks at Sprint. I’m not really sure exactly who one is supposed to contact, but you could CC an email to each of these folks:

Sprint Nextel Executive Services
866-398-4606
executive.offices@sprint.com

Director of Consumer and Business Communications Laura Lisec
Laura.m.Lisec@sprint.com

I had a hell of a time finding contacts for Cover Girl, but they also sponsor ANTM if you can find a contact. In fact, if anyone knows the right people to contact, feel free to tell me in the comments section.

And, you can be suspended from school for it.  Here is the story from the New York Times.

The three girls had been warned by teachers not to utter the word. But they chose to say it anyway — vagina — in unison at a high school forum, and were swiftly punished by their school.

Now the case of the three, all juniors at John Jay High School in this affluent hamlet 50 miles north of Manhattan, has become a cause célèbre among those who say that the school has gone too far, touching off a larger debate about censorship and about what constitutes vulgar language.

Is vagina, or the “v-word,” as some around here have referred to it, such a bad word?

“We want to make it clear that we didn’t do this to be defiant of the school administration,” said Megan Reback, one of the three girls, who all received one-day suspensions for using the word during a reading of “The Vagina Monologues” at the forum last Friday. “We did it because we believe in the word vagina, and because we believe it’s not a bad word. It shouldn’t be a word that is ever censored, and the way in which we used it was respectable.”

We actually had a discussion about this in my sexuality class in the first couple weeks of the semester.  The students seemed to agree that many (other) people thought vagina is a dirty word, but none of them expressed opposition to the word themselves. However, most of them agreed that vagina was considered a “dirtier word” than penis.  It was a good opportunity to talk about sexism and feminism. Now I’ve got to email them this article. 

(Photo found on the webpage of the Reproductive Rights Action League of Yale College.)

This is just the definition I use; I’m not claiming that I can dictate my definition to anyone else. What I try to do with a definition is to exclude as many clear non-feminists and feminist-bashers as possible, while still maintaining a “big umbrella” definition that can include feminists with wildly disparate views.

A feminist:

1. Advocates for the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.
2. Believes that there is current, significant, society-wide inequality and sexism.
3. Doesn’t believe that men are the primary victims of inequality and sexism.

Point one is pretty much derived from the standard dictionary definition of feminism.

Point two is intended to exclude folks who don’t see any present need for feminism, because they believe equality has already been achieved. Feminism is an activist, political movement; you can’t be a feminist if you’re not advocating for change, in my opinion.

Point three is intended to exclude men’s rights activists and their fellow travelers. My previous definition excluded the MRAs in a slightly different way, by saying that feminists believe that sexism and inequality “on balance disadvantages women.”

But I now think that excluded too much; although many (perhaps most) feminists think that sexism and inequality primarily oppress women, I know sincere feminists who think that both sexes are significantly oppressed by the gender binary system, and that making a “whose worse off” comparison is not a useful approach. My modified definition no longer excludes those folks, but still excludes MRAs.

In another great example of college students being totally insensitive, a student at Central Connecticut State University decided that it would be funny to satirize rape. He titled his editorial “Rape Only Hurts If You Fight It.” He claims to be making the point that only sensational stories get headlines, so he decided to make his own sensation.

Well the students and staff didn’t find the editorial to be funny, and the writer John Petroski was called to the carpet in a town hall forum at the school:

Petroski took the podium before a hushed, tense audience — his first public appearance since the publication of a controversial article he wrote last week in the student newspaper describing rape as a “magical experience.”

The article, meant to be a satire of media sensationalism, had missed its mark, incurring the wrath of hundreds of students over its depiction of rape as a boon to civilization and to “ugly women” who otherwise would not be able to get men to have sex with them.

Many in the audience felt Petroski had a lot to answer for, especially those who were familiar with some of the articles and comic strips he had previously written for the paper poking fun at sensitive topics such as abortion and affirmative action.

He had been up since 3 a.m. writing the speech. He hoped it would heal the wounds he had reopened and convince the audience that he was truly sorry — although later he would assert that the overwhelming response to his story proved his initial point.

Apparently, the condemnation of students did have some impact because the student was forced to resign, and it sounds like the paper’s editor was even getting a little reflective by the end of the forum. Here’s an excerpt that starts with Petroski and ends with the editor of the paper.

“I apologize sincerely,” he said to the group of women who, in the days since the article was published, had publicly identified themselves as rape victims in a show of protest against the article and the paper.

One student, Nicki LaPorte, had won a rousing ovation from the audience after tearfully condemning the article earlier during the forum.

“I am not a victim of rape, I am a survivor of rape,” LaPorte said.

Several other students were also critical of the article, saying it crossed the boundaries of journalistic responsibility. Besides demanding Petroski’s resignation, several students also called for the resignation of the paper’s editor, Mark Rowan, as well as the paper’s faculty advisors.

Students said that over the last year, the paper had become increasingly hostile to women and gays and other minority groups.

“Where are the advisors in all of this?” asked one student.

The controversy over the article prompted The Recorder’s editorial board to vote to remove Petroski as the opinion editor over the weekend. Yet Petroski will be allowed to continue writing on a limited basis, according to Rowan, who also said he has no plans to step down.

Petroski and Rowan said they were both deeply moved by the dozens of letters they had received concerning the article over the last few days, especially those written by rape victims who described their attacks in harrowing detail.

“It’s definitely going to make me more sensitive to this issue,” said Rowan, a 21-year-old senior who hopes to pursue a career in journalism after he graduates. “Up until now, I had always seen the world from the narrow vantage point of a 21-year-old white male, but now I see that it needs to be broadened.”

Rowan said the paper intends to appoint a woman to replace Petroski as opinion editor soon. The paper would then have an editorial board consisting of seven men and five women, he said.

Nevertheless, this case seems to be alarmingly similar to the blackface cases we have been seeing. Students claim that they didn’t know their behavior was offensive or inappropriate.

This also case strikes me as a real male privilege moment because rape is no joke to women especially for college women who have a very high rate of rape victimization. I think many men don’t realize how the threat of rape affects all women. We do things like get our keys ready well before we get into our cars. We check the backseat before we get into our car. We rarely go to parties alone. We stay in our homes late at night, and this applies to almost all women whether we have been sexually assaulted or not. The fear of rape is pervasive and unfortunately so normalized that many women (myself included) take it for granted. I suggest that men who want to learn about how rape affects women’s lives read this essay by Tim Beneke. It is an excerpt from his book Men on Rape: What They Have to Say About Sexual Violence. The article demonstrates how pervasive and powerful the fear of rape is.

I wish John Petroski and Mark Rowan would have read the Beneke article. Maybe then they would realize why this essay wasn’t the least bit funny. Satire implies that you “get it.” (Didn’t I say this a couple days ago!) Mr. Petroski and Mr. Rowan simply don’t get it. By his own admission, Mr. Rowan says he’s being viewing the world only through his young white male vantage point, and I suppose that’s what college is for getting students to see not only their vantage points but the vantage points of others. If Petroski and Rowan could see the world through my eyes (and the eyes of billions of other women), would know that rape is no laughing matter; they would understand the paralysis and fear that rape causes for women, and they would have never written such an editorial.

Thanks to Carmen for the heads up on this!

I am going to repeat myself about this a little further down, but let me say up front that this post is in response to the comments in this open thread for male survivors of sexual abuse/violence started by Abyss2Hope. First, though, since this is my first post on Alas, and since my comments in various posts here will not necessarily provide adequate context to what I want to write about and why I take the approach to it that I do, let me offer a brief introduction: I am a poet and writer and a professor in the English Department at a large community college in New York City, where I have been teaching composition, creative writing and literature for the last seventeen years. I tend to structure the content of my classes such that, even if the topics themselves are not explicitly feminist—such as the course in Middle Eastern literature I am teaching this semester—I can make feminist analysis a part of how I teach them. Indeed, feminism has been central to the way I understand the world since my late teens-early twenties, when reading Adrienne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence was the only thing that convinced me I wasn’t crazy (a few years later it was Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse). I will have more to say about that further on in this post. For now, let me just say that I have been writing and publishing about issues of manhood and masculinity from a feminist perspective since 1988, when the first of two essays I wrote on women’s reproductive rights was published in Changing Men Magazine. Since then, I have published pieces in more than a few other journals, including this one in Salon.com that might have turn out to have some relevance to this discussion. If you are interested in seeing more of my work, you can find excerpts on my website. You can also visit my own blog, where this will be cross-posted.

My point in providing these links is not primarily to hawk my own writing—though I will, of course, be very happy to have more readers ;)—but rather to give you the opportunity, should you be interested, (and I guess this is also the academic in me) to see what I write here in the context of a body of work and a perspective I have been developing for more than half my life. My experience here on Alas, especially in threads where the intent of the original post is to expose male privilege as fully as possible, particularly as that privilege is expressed through rape and other forms of violence against women, is that the substance of the ideas originally put forth too often gets lost, as commenters shoot from the hip in ways that either intentionally derail conversations or do so because people are more concerned with their own personal agendas than with actually reading what others have to say. (Anecdotally, and this is also a point I will return to later on, it seems to me that while men more than women are guilty of these derailments, it is not only MRA’s and other anti-feminists/critics of feminism who do this. I had my head quite rightly handed to me in a thread about women and rape that I completely derailed because I got defensive about something I shouldn’t have gotten defensive about.)

While I have no illusion that this post will be any different—though I certainly hope that it is—the issues that arise when male survivors of sexual violence confront feminism, either as an ideology put forth in books or in the bodies of feminist women and men, still need to be talked about. These issues are complex—which is why I have called this post “A Beginning”—and, indicative of this complexity, perhaps, is the fact that while I have already declared my bias in favor of a feminist analysis of things, I do not belive that feminist discourse is a place where male survivors ought to expect either to speak or to be heard in a way that places our experience at the center of whatever is being discussed. Indeed, the post you are reading has its origins in a comment I made to Daran in Abyss2Hope’s Anatomy Of A False Rape Accusation - Part 2. Daran, in a comment that he has since acknowledged was rooted in a misreading of a comment by Q Grrl, made the following statement:

The complaint isn’t just that feminists talk solely of male on female rape, but also that male rape survivors are excluded from services.

Later on, he restated this concern in this way:

I still find [Qgrrl’s] characterisation of those who advocate for the admission of male rape victims to the discourse as “wankers” who “whine” to be offensive. “Respect” is not a one-way street.

I am not interested here in resurrecting either Daran’s misreading of Qgrrl or the discussion that followed it. I have quoted these statements by Daran because I think they say quite succinctly what he and other men see a shortcoming of feminist discourse about sexual violence, i.e., that it does not, by defintion and even by design, make room within itself for a space that can adequately account for the experience of male survivors. I think this concern has validity, though I disagree with the ways in which Daran pursues it—at least as far as I have been able to tell in the short time I have been reading him—and so my response to him read, in part:

You know, Daran, as a man who was sexually abused when I was a child, I have quite a lot of sympathy for a position that is critical of the way in which men are often left out of the sexual-assault discourse, feminist or otherwise. When I was in my late teens and early 20s and just beginning to come to awareness of what had been done to me, no one, and I mean no one, was talking about the fact that boys were sexually abuse; people were just beginning to acknowledge publicly the degree to which it happened to girls […] I would love, therefore, the opportunity to be part of a conversation among men about what it means to be a male survivor of rape and other forms of sexual assault that takes as its starting point not the fact that feminism does not include men in its discourse, which is where you inevitably start these discussions, but rather our experience of men of being sexually violated (and, yes, also of having our experiences dismissed, etc. and so on).

In response to this comment, A2H started an Open Thread For Male Survivors of Sexual Violence, naming me as moderator and asserting that while the problem of “male survivors of sexual abuse/assault being left out of the sexual-assault discourse” is

a real problem that merits attention[, it] too often […] gets mentioned as a way to attack efforts to fight sexual violence directed at girls and women or as an excuse to attack feminism or feminists. That exploits male victims and they deserve better.

Toy Soldier found this a less than inviting introduction, asserting in another comment that A2H’s words were “antagonistic, accusatory and inaccurate.” Ultimately, despite the fact that I posted two or three comments trying to start a discussion of ideas around male survivors and feminism, and at least one or two others, including Jake Squid, tried to move the conversation away from what Amp rightly called “a lot of mutual suspicion and dislike here, on both sides,” the thread devolved onto the topic of what it would take for male survivors who have had negative experiences with feminists on Alas and elsewhere to feel safe posting here. Ultimately, it became clear that the roots of the open thread for male survivros in A2H’s thread on false rape accusations, coupled with the fact that Alas is an explicitly feminist blog, was a problem for at least some of the people who might otherwise want to join this discussion. Hence, this post, which will, I hope, give the discussion a fresh start.

I do not want to deny or trivialize what it feels like for male survivors who have had their experiences of abuse dismissed, denied or trivialized by women or men speaking in the name of feminism. I have had that experience as well, and, as anyone who has survived an assault of any kind must know, to have that experience denied is to be forced to relive the shame and isolation of the original assault. However, someone who speaks in the name of feminism does not represent all of feminism, even if what they are saying can legitimately be called feminist, and it is with feminism that I want to start, not feminists, because if this discussion were to start with a focus on what feminists have said and done or not said and not done when it comes to male survivors of sexual abuse, we would end up right where we ended up in the thread started by Abyss2Hope, with a whole lot of suspicion and mistrust, and we will have gone essentially nowhere.

I was around 19 when I first started to name as sexual abuse what I had experienced at the hands of two different men at two different times of my childhood, and one of the things that enabled me to name that experience was reading the essay “Caryatid: Two Columns,” in On Lies, Secrets and Silence. I remember distinctly being at summer camp, sitting on my bed during my day off and reading and rereading the following passage:

[T]aught to view our bodies as our totality, our genitals as our chief source of fascination and value, many women have become dissociated from their own bodies…viewing themselves as objects to be possessed by men rather than as the subjects of an existence.

I don’t know why, but those words pushed a button somewhere in me, and I began to ask—in fact, I actually heard a voice in my head asking—”But what about me? What about what happened to me?”

Yet even as successive readings of that essay, along with the other pieces in Rich’s book, offered me a way to begin to name my own experience, it also identified me as a man with the same power and privilege that the men who abused me had used to abuse me:

Rape is the ultimate outward physical act of coercion and depersonalization practiced on women by men. Most male readers…would perhaps deny having gone so far: the honest would admit to fantasies, urges of lust and hatred, or lust and fear, or to a “harmless” fascination with pornography and sadistic art.

I was fascinated by pornography; I had fantasies that combined lust and fear; and it was impossible to miss the cynical accusation in Rich’s use of the word “perhaps.” The message was clear. Whatever else might have been true about who I was, I was also, by definition, the enemy, and I did not know how to speak at one and the same time as both a survivor of male sexual violence and someone who participated in it. I don’t know why this paradox did not lead me to reject feminism outright, except to say that reading feminist writers like Rich convinced me that feminism, more than any other ideology I had encountered, pointed to a way of living my life that was antithetical to the way the men who abused me were obviously living theirs.

Nonetheless, the paradox was silencing, so silencing, in fact, that a few years later—and this was after I’d started telling people I’d been abused—in a training session at a different when day camp, when the male session leader told us he was going to use “she” as the generic pronoun referring to kids who might choose to tell us they’d been sexually abused, I found myself unable to confront him about the way that choice rendered me and my experience, not to mention the experiences of the other men and, perhaps more importantly, the boys at the camp who’d had the same experience, invisible. Yes, part of why I didn’t speak up had to do both with the very public nature of the forum I’d be speaking in and the adversarial nature of what I’d be saying, but I also couldn’t speak up because I didn’t have the words, the conceptual vocabulary not only to say “This isn’t fair,” but also to point out that boys’ experience of abuse, my experience of abuse, needed to be understood on its own terms and not as a perhaps anomolous subset of the experience of girls; and one reason I did not have that vocabulary was that it was not to be found in the feminism I’d been reading. (To be fair, no one else had that vocabulary either. At that time, and I am talking here about more than 20 years ago, barely anyone but feminists was willing to acknowledge that sexual abuse happened to girls; no one had even really considered—at least as far as I know—that it was happening to boys as well.)

It was not until a couple of years later, when I was in graduate school, that my perception of the lack of such a vocabulary became the need to develop one. It started when a female friend of mine persuaded me that I should think of what happened when I lost my virginity as an instance of date rape. I have written about that experience here, on my blog, and so I am not going to retell the whole story. What is most relevant here is that, as I came to understand that my friend was wrong, that the girl with whom I had sex for the first time had not raped me (and if you want to know more about that, you need to go read the post on my blog), I also began to articulate distinctions between the ways in which feminism was helpful to me as a survival of child sexual abuse and the ways in which it could not be and, more importantly, was unreasonable for me to expect it to be. Some of these, in no particular order, include:

1. Women, not men, are the subjects of feminist discourse; and men, when men are part of that discourse, are the objects of its analysis. This is not merely the logical result of the fact that most feminists are women; it is a deliberate political stance intended to subvert and ultimately eliminate patriarchy/male dominance. As such, whether you accept a feminist analysis or not, it is pointless to ask feminist discourse to admit men’s subjectivity on an equal footing with women’s—and equal footing is what would be required if one were to try to turn feminism into a forum for dealing with the experience of male survivors of sexual abuse/violence. Stephen Heath’s essay “Male Feminism,” in Men In Feminism, does a great job of articulating the problem of male subjectivity within feminism, but without a specific reference to sexual abuse. (I should also be clear that when I talk about people who do not accept a feminist analysis, I am not talking about people who believe that feminism is itself an oppressive ideology the purpose of which is to subjugate men, or any of the myriad variations on that theme that run through the various strands of conservative discourse out there. I am thinking of people who believe there are other forms of political analysis that adequately account for the kinds of gender imbalances that feminism addresses and that seek the change of those imbalances in the direction of greater equality.)

2. At the same time, however, feminism names the structures—political, socioeconomic, cultural and even psychological—that normalize the kind of power hierarchy that leads to the sexual abuse and exploitation of both boys/men and women/girls. Broadly speaking, feminism gathers these structures under the label patriarchy or male dominance. Curiousgyrl gets at this point in a comment where she points out that “men systematically rape male children and other men [because of the] way that male dominance works; there [are] not only benefits for exercising male dominance but consequences for refusing or being unable to do so.” I realize that her formulation very neatly elides the fact that there are also female abusers. What I will say about female abusers for now is this: the boys/men they abuse are also suffering the consequences “of refusing or being unable” to exercise male dominance. In other words, even if female abusers do not neatly fit the feminist paradigm of the dominant and abusive male, boys and men who have been abused by women still suffer their abuse within a male dominant context, and it is feminism that first named that context for what it is. Still, the phenomenon that curiousgyrl points out is a structural one; it does not get at male survivors’ interior experience, and it is that experience I am hoping this post will motivate people to discuss.

3. Feminism, more than any other socio-cultural/political form of analysis, articulates the different positions boys/men and girls/women occupy vis-a-vis sexual violence. When a girl or woman is raped, the rape enacts, confirms, affirms her status in a male dominant society as a sexual object; it makes explicit that part of the social script for what it means to be a woman that says a woman exists to be used sexually by men. On the other hand, when a boy or man is raped, the rape interrupts his status as a sexual subject; it turns him into something he is not supposed to be in a male dominant culture. Part of talking about men’s experience of sexual abuse on its own terms, it seems to me, has to include the taking apart of this aspect of the experience; and I do not see how we can talk about this without coming to the conclusion that male sexual subjectivity in a male dominant culture is built on the denial of precisely the vulnerability that abusers exploit. This conclusion, carried to its logical political and socio-cultural ends, is a quintessentially feminist insight.

Some things about the discussion and moderation:

1. This thread is open to anyone who has something substantive and constructive to add to a discussion of feminism and male survivors of sexual abuse/violence. My title includes the world “child” in parentheses because child sexual abuse is what I experienced, and so, for me, a central motivation in taking the time to write this post is something I said in this comment:

[G]iven the number of boys who are sexually abused–statistics I have seen range from 1 in 5 to 1 in 7–the problem of the sexual abuse of boys cannot be framed, simply, as the individual problems of those boys who have been assaulted. The problem needs to be politicized [….]

2. Daran argues that the result of the exclusion of male survivor experiences from feminist discourse has material consequences in that male survivors are sometimes refused services because they are men and that organizations which would serve men are either refused or have a hard time getting funding. This is a serious issue, but I do not think this thread is the place to have it What I want to talk about here are the ways in which we talk about male survivors’ experiences, the ways in which we conceptualize it, because those things will form the foundation of how we argue for services and funding.

Okay, I guess that’s it for now. Let’s see where this discussion takes us.

As in this comment thread over at Alas, some people keep insisting that women lie about being raped while insisting that men don’t lie about rape.

[Update (12/17): Per Daran’s request I am clarifying that my use of “insisting that men don’t lie about rape” incorrectly labels his words on the linked thread. If I understand his correction what he continues to assert is that it hasn’t been proven that men lie about rape.

I see that as playing word games. He disagrees.

Here is his own explanation of his position:

Feminist cannot object to the statement “Women do (sometimes) lie about rape-and men don’t”. Because:
1. Construing “lie about rape” to mean “falsely report to the police that they were raped”, the statement is true, or at least, feminists cannot show that it is false.
2. Feminists cannot object to that construction, because they were the ones who used that construction in the first place when they circulated the 2% false accusation myth.
Edited to add:
3. While it is debatable to what extent individual feminists can be held responsible for the actions of other feminists, feminists who make generalised group-based complaints about the actions of non-feminists, cannot object when they are hoist on that petard.

end update]

If challenged, they will explain that by denying that men lie about rape, they are referring only to a very specific scenario where the man is the alleged victim who filed a police report.

It’s a very useful redefinition for alleged rapists and those who want to dismiss the pervasiveness of sexual violence against girls and women.

I’ve been thinking about how this dual “statement of facts” creates an unfair bias against female alleged rape victims.

What “women lie about rape, men don’t” does is plant the idea that when a rape case comes up where a woman is the alleged victim she must be treated with open skepticism. Can’t take her word for what happened because she’s female and girls and women lie about being raped. If there is anything about her that people won’t like or won’t trust then it can seem like she must be lying about being raped.

However, if a rape case comes up where the man is the alleged victim he must be treated as a real victim. Heck, there’s no need for the word alleged. He’s simply a victim. No criminal trial needed to know who is innocent and who is guilty. All he has to do is self-identify as a sexual assault/abuse victim and everyone must believe him even if he makes that claim during a crank and obscene call to a rape crisis line.

“Women lie about rape, men don’t” also plants the idea that when it comes to a particular sex crime case where a key part of the evidence is testimony, men are always honest while women will resort to lies for a whole list of reasons.

This implication of male honesty vs. female dishonesty is nonsense, but because it is supposedly based on solid research many people never question it and let it color their perception of what they hear.

This is an attempt to misuse probability theory both in the determination of probability statistics and the use of those