I was reading an article about Mexican brothel laws. Mexican brothels apparently use the “legal, but heavily regulated, including medical testing of prostitutes” approach to prostitution I’ve heard Americans advocate (and which is the approach used by Nevada).

I’ve also heard Americans advocate for the New Zealand approach (legal, and basically no more regulated than any other business), and for the Swedish approach (prostitution is legal, but being a John is illegal).

But so far, I’ve never heard an American advocate for the US system. The US system doesn’t eliminate prostitution — according to Patty Kelly, the author of the article on Mexican brothels, 30 percent of single American men over 30 admit to having paid for sex,¹ “and according to the National Task Force on Prostitution, 1 percent of women claim to have worked as erotic service providers at some point in their lives.” The system is brutal to sex workers, encourages corruption in cops, and wastes tax money on useless enforcement. No matter what you think the goal of prostitution policy ought to be, the US policy fails.

Yet it doesn’t seem seriously possible that US policy could change, either, except possibly in a couple of the more liberal or libertarian states. There’s no money behind changing the laws, and no political upside for congresspeople in advocating for change. (Plenty of downside, though — can you imagine the mailers? “Senator Smith wants to open a legal brothel in your neighborhood!” and so on.)

Kelly concludes her article:

Despite the Eliot Spitzers, the Heidi Fleisses, the Eddie Murphys, and, best of all, the pastor Ted Haggards, we deny, deny, deny that prostitution plays a role in our culture. Like Sonia lies to her family back in El Salvador about what she does for work, so too do we lie to ourselves as a culture, though on a far more massive scale. What I admire about Mexico is not the legalization of sex work in some states, but the widespread cultural honesty about the topic. What I admire even more is New Zealand’s effort to transform their own honest assessment of their situation into a public policy that benefits both sex workers and society. The final conclusion of the sex workers, the nun, the police officer, the criminologist, the public health specialists and others who formed the committee to evaluate New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act states that “traditions and attitudes [about prostitution] developed over many years and cannot be changed overnight.” This is true. But perhaps it is time we start trying.

1. I originally wrote “30 percent of American men over 30 admit to having paid for sexual services,” and then updated it to more accurate wording. (back)

Since we’re discussing porn, I thought I’d post this, which I thought was interesting. I’m not sure if it’s porn or not — it has no nudity or explicit images — but it’s probably NSFW. The video features interviews of people talking about porn, interspersed with video of them masturbating while viewing porn. Since the camera was apparently positioned on the monitor, the people seem to be staring directly at the viewer as they jack or jill off, which I think creates a more intense effect than porn images of masturbation.

The people interviewed are a little more diverse than you’d find in mainstream movies and TV — or in mainstream porn, for that matter — but much less diverse than I’d wish them to be.

“If I go to the debate on pornography, I’ll just fume about the fact that everyone’s got stupid analysis but me.” I said that a couple of months ago, and I was joking, but only a little bit.

Feminist discussions on sexually explicit material tend to be heated, and change no-one’s mind. The latest discussions on The Hand Mirror, another blog I write on, have followed this pattern. I want to explore why.

Media that has been created for the purpose of sexual arousal and produced to be bought and sold (which is a mouthful, but I think more precise than ‘pornography’) sits at an intersection: Desire, sex, the construction of men’s sexuality, the construction of women’s sexuality, bodies, work, the role of the state, objectification, the creation of rape culture and commodification (and much more, those are just what’s on top for me).

It only takes small differences in feminists’ analysis, weighting or experience of a couple of these before they’re coming at the issue that we call ‘pornography’ from completely different angles.

As well as making the issue complicated, these many facets also mean that those no such thing as a disinterested party. Everyone has a stake in what is being discussed, but what is most triggering about the discussion about sexually explicit material varies widely.

To simplify one example more than is really justified: discussions of sexually explicit material may trigger some women’s experiences of having their sexuality and desire denied, while the same discussion might trigger other women’s experience of having other people’s sexuality or desire forced on them. (I don’t mean this as a dichotomy, just an example of the sorts of talking past that can happen in these discussions).

I think it’s very difficult even to talk about, or articulate any of this, because the vocabulary we have around sexually explicit media is so limited. The distinctions I think need to be made about are numerous and complex:
Was it made by an individual expressing their personal desires?
Was it made to be bought and sold?
Did everyone involve in making it give genuine consent?
Does it normalise misogynist ideas about women, women’s sexuality, women’s bodies, or sex?
Do they normalise racist ideas about any group of women or men, their bodies or sexuality?
Does it normalise a limited view of human sex or sexuality?
How do the ideas it contains interact with rape culture?
Does it normalise a particular type of body?

Now the answer to most mass-produced mainstream pornography from Ralph to are yes (or no depending on the question). But my point is that these are different questions, and they’re different again from:

What do we do about it all? What do we expect other organisation, or the state to do about it all?

Those are just my questions, I’m sure other people have different ones (I’m sure I’d have different ones if I wrote them on a different day, after reading different material). Unless we are clear about what exactly we’re talking about, unless we actively try and overcome the difficulties I’ve outlined, we’ll never have anything useful to say.

I wrote this post - I decided to continue talking about pornography, despite my cynicism, because I think it’s important. I think untangling these threads, understanding the role of sexually explicit material in women’s oppression is vital. I think the first answer to the question: ‘what is to be done?’ Is that we have to figure out how to talk about this.

The comments on this post are open to feminists, and feminist allies only (I appear to have forgotten how to do the rule).

(MAJOR TRIGGER WARNINGS — Lots of stuff about how Fred Phelps abused his entire family. Please be cautious about reading on or following the links if you think it may be a trigger for you.) Read the rest of this entry »

Remember that awesome CD that’s out right now? The spoken word collection that features the work of BFP, Black Amazon, Little Light, and so many others? The one that combines personal history and movement making in truly inspiring ways? If you live in or around Long Beach, CA and haven’t heard it yet, now’s your chance! On Sunday, June 14th, Petit Poussin, Christine, and I will be hosting a listening party from 2-5. As we listen to the CD, you’ll be able to participate in discussion and respond by making your own media, whether it’s visual art, handwritten text, a zine, blogging or twittering, or whatever combination of the above you can come up with. Afterwards, we’ll sit down to a potluck dinner. CDs will be available for sale - remember that all proceeds go towards getting single mothers to the Allied Media Conference next month.

Address available upon RSVP. A quick warning for people with allergies: a friendly medium-haired cat will be present.

RSVP to modernmitzvot at yahoo com or ppoussin at gmail com!

Marine biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum is, along with Chris Mooney, a co-blogger at The Intersection, a blog on science and public policy whose RSS feed should be in your reader, and if it isn’t, you should go, right now, and rectify the situation.

Done? Good. Now let’s talk about the epidemic of rape facing young women around the world.

Sorry to shift gears without depressing the clutch, but I do so for a reason: to draw attention to an effort launched by Kirshenbaum to attack a problem that is horrifying in its scope:

Today begins a very important initiative called Silence Is The Enemy to help a generation of young women half a world away.Why?  Because they are our sisters and children–the victims of sexual abuse who don’t have the means to ask for help.  We have power in our words and influence. Along with our audience, we’re able to speak for them.  I’m asking all of you–bloggers, writers, teachers, and concerned citizens–to use whatever platform you have to call for an end to the rapeand abuse of women and girls in Liberia and around the world.

In regions where fighting has formally ended, rape continues to be used as a weapon. As Nicholas Kristofrecently wrote from West Africa, ‘it has been easier to get men to relinquish their guns than their sense of sexual entitlement.’ The war has shattered norms, training some men to think that ‘when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl.’ An International Rescue Committee survey suggests 12 percent of girls aged 17 and under acknowledged having been sexually abused in some way over the previous 18 months.  Further, of the 275 new sexual violence cases treated Jan-April by Doctors Without Borders, 28 percent involve children aged 4 or younger, and 33 percent involve children aged 5 through 12. That’s 61% age 12 or under.  We read about their plight and see the figures, but it’s so easy to feel helpless to act in isolation. But these are not statistics, they are girls.  Together we can do more.  Mass rape persists because of inertia so let’s create momentum.

[...]

Silence Is The Enemy was born–so named because we will not be. All through June, I’ll continue posting information, details, benchmarks, and let everyone know about progress made, new initiatives, and stories from the region. I encourage others to do so as possible.  The Intersection, On Becoming A Laboratory And Domestic Goddess, Aetiology, Bioephemera, Neurotopia, The Questionable Authority, DrugMonkey, andAdventure In Ethics And Science will be donating all revenue this month to Doctors Without Borders. The goal is two-fold:  Raising funds and–arguably more importantly–awareness. Since blogging revenue increases with traffic, we hope to get people to keep coming back for more information about what’s going on and thinking about how to make a difference. Do not feel obligated to donate, but it’s one idea. There are many ways to contribute:  Write and email Members of Congress (Congressional Directory here), speak at community meetings, encourage others to get involved, or donate to our chosen charity (Doctors Without Borders). Help us maximize our donations by visiting Isis, Jessica, Tara, Neurotopia, Mike, DrugMonkey, Janet and returning here often because every click will help raise money. Spread the word.  We want to make sure elected officials at multiple levels realize this is a global issue that matters to a large voting constituency!

I will be donating to Médecins Sans Frontières this month, and I encourage others to do the same. But whether you can donate money, or simply can donate your effort spreading the word that rape is not acceptable, and that you support efforts to end it, your efforts matter. It is incumbent on all of us to say that we will not be silent in the face of these attacks, and that the safety and well-being of the women and girls of Africa matters every bit as much as the safety of Americans.

I really have never understood the concept of the “hate fuck;” it’s way too close to rape in spirit, and…blech. I don’t judge what goes on in someone’s head, and as long as these thoughts stay in your head, fine, but still…yuck.

But going to the next level and actually writing an article naming conservative women you’d like to “hate fuck” is a whole ‘nother level of vile, and actually paying someone for that article is awful, even if you’re Playboy. I mean, I dislike Michele Bachmann as much as the next sentient being, but throwing out sexual fantasies about her while opining that she makes “chemical castration…look appealing” is odious beyond odious.

And it goes without saying that nobody’s written a hate-fuck list naming, say, Rick Santorum.

This is seven kinds of despicable, and it is a reminder that there are plenty of fauxgressives running around who somehow think one can be a good liberal and still hate women. One can’t. By all means, attack the politics of Malkin, Coulter, Ingraham and Bachmann. But do so by attacking their politics, not by asserting that their vaginas make them an inviting target for defiling.

Oh, and by the way, Hot Air, while I appreciate that you’ve discovered misogyny, you guys might want to also police yourselves. Arguing that liberal women aren’t hot is not the way to prove you’re sensitive to women.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., has always yearned for a better time, a simpler time, a time when men were men and women shut the hell up and listened to their superiors. But still, it’s always kind of surprising when he comes right out and says it:

The other thing we have to do is we have to stand up and say, look, America — Conservatives believe in the stewardship of patrimony. In other words, there are things in America that are really good, that work, have worked for 200 years. And we have a guy named Barack Obama who’s trying to fundamentally rewrite everything, change our economy, change our social structure, change our economy to something new.

Yes, “patrimony,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “anything derived from one’s father or ancestors” (But you knew that from the patr- root sitting right there at the start of the word).

That is, of course, exactly what Rick Santorum desires — a return to a patriarchal system, and while we’re at it, a system that pays its due deference to Christianity and caucasians, one that forces gays back in the closet and jams the door shut forever. A world where wisdom, property, and authority is handed from fathers to sons. A world that many women and men of good conscience have fought very hard to eliminate and transcend. A world like that which exists in Saudi Arabia, with only some issues of doctrine interfering in its perfection.

In short, Santorum is a pretty mainstream Republican.

PhysioProf, guest blogging at Isis the Scientist has a post up called the Handy-Dandy Guide for D00dly Commenters which struck both me and Ampersand as being similar to his How Not to Be Insane When Accused of Racism: A Guide for White People (Amp notes that he would use different wording were he writing the post today).

Here’s an excerpt:

(1) If you are leaving the first comment to a post, you are almost certainly fucking up.

(2) If you are using the words “men”, “boys”, “fathers”, or “sons”, you are almost certainly fucking up.

(3) If you are using the words “should” or “useful”, you are almost certainly fucking up.

(4) If you are telling people that talking about this, that, or the other issue is fine, but also asking them what they are doing about this issue, you are almost certainly fucking up.

(5) If you are complaining that by being “mean”, people that might be allies are being turned off, you are almost certainly fucking up.

Seems worth reading through.

I Blame the Patriarchy has a discussion of the piece (with worthwhile comment thread, I thought). Twisty wrote:

While it is always hi-larious to read what expert dudely readers of heartwarming nature crap blogs have to tell their less-enlightened brethren, it’s also maddening and, if you like, ironical, since such a post can only be written from the patronizing position of male privilege. It’s a kind of double-privilege, too: “Unlike you, Grasshoppah, the feminists have accepted me, for I have been to their savage death island and live to tell the tale.”

These guys are veteran ethnographers doing a field study, warning the new grad students: “The natives have curious, unpredictable ways. Approach them with caution or they will prong you sure as shit with curare-dipped spears. Oh, and we’re meeting for beers later at Chip’s tent.”

Hardy har, because implicit in these man-to-man, how-to-walk-on-eggshells-around-a-feminist tracts is an ingrained sense of the inconsequential status of women in the feminist heartwarming nature crappism blog community. It’s comical somehow, that feminist women — women who are widely considered to be the hairy minority, the kill-joy joke-butts of the internet whose blogs are often described by dudes as “lame” or “parodies” — are so aggressively protective of their trivial little sectarian colonies on the web that men need special training and travel visas to avoid blogular deportation.

As well as other things.

Twisty, as far as I can tell, respects PhysioProf as a feminist. She’s just calling him out on this particular dynamic.

This is one of those many areas where I don’t agree with Twisty exactly, but I think she’s saying something interesting. I think that PhysioProf’s post is interesting, and has some potential to be practically useful (although I disagree with some of his points; for instance, here at Alas, a male commenter probably isn’t fucking up by commenting first on any given thread. We’re also a little bit more comfortable with personal life sharing, I think, than the blogular culture at IBTP. But nevertheless, there are a lot of good points, and I think the way PhysioProf is analyzing his own privilege could be usefully generalized to other areas — for instance, white commenters who are trying to be genuine allies to poc, or cis commenters trying to be genuine allies to trans people, etc.).

However, Twisty is correct — in order to make a post like that, written in the language of the privileged, you have to be *exercising* your privilege.

It’s a good thing for privilege to be exercised in this way, I think. Certainly, I think on the whole, Barry’s post about how not to be insane when accused of racism (a guide for white people) has on the whole been useful, and it seems to be useful to POC activists as well. I note that ABW links to it periodically when she wants white commenters to be able to go read something that they’ll understand, and stop bugging her.

I think that one of the more important things allies can do is to help express things in terms of their privilege, specifically so that they can help preserve the valuable time of people like ABW who do not need to be dealing with that 101 shit when they’ve got better things to do. Allies who are privileged can do this without committing the same emotional reserves (it hurts — in my experience — to have to defend your basic rights against privileged people, and is not so personally painful when you’re defending others), and to some extent without committing the same amount of time, because the privileged language will click with the other privileged language in a way that the privilege-poisoned party can hear and acknowledge.

But it’s still kind of icky that these things are necessary. And the use of privilege, even for good purpose, still involves othering, as Twisty points out with her savage island metaphor. Thus even though the privilege is being used to ease one problem, it adds wrinkles to another by reinforcing the voice of privilege as the voice of authority, in contrast to the othered voice of the oppressed group.

Now that I think about othering: interesting that Twisty’s metaphor for feminism as understood by the privileged dialogue was a “savage island.” Interesting that we get back to colonialism and to race. I wonder what that speaks to. (I don’t think it’s just white privilege, although that’s probably part any metaphor like this; there’s a long history of using “savage island” imagery to refer to feminist-only groups, such as amazons, and even the ways in which female only groups are described in old SF and fantasy, both female-positive and female-negative. Is it easiest for us to imagine women’s liberation in terms of geographic separation? And do we culturally have a tendency to map the ‘primitive’ nature of white women with the ‘primitive’ nature of all people of color, as Victorian scientists did, when postulating the white male brain as the only civilized one?)

[And finally, as someone else who likes to mix high-falutin' language with teh crassness, I offer this tribute to PhysioProf: Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckity fuckpants.]

Via Rad Geek, the transcript of the first of a few 911 calls, made by a 17-year-old girl attempting to get an ambulance for her father, who had suffered a bad fall. McFarlan did eventually send help, but lied about the content of the calls. When the girl showed up at the police station, she was arrested on a trumped-up charge.

I suspect that if a man of McFarlan’s age had called and said “I need a fucking ambulance,” McFarlan would have kept his fucking asshat opinions to himself and just done his fucking job.

Adrianne Ledesma [while 911 is recording but handset is still ringing]: What the fuck?

Sergeant Robert McFarlan: 911.

Adrianne: I need an ambulance at [REDACTED]

Sergeant Robert McFarlan: Well, OK, first of all, you don’t need to swear over 911—

Adrianne: OK

Sergeant Robert McFarlan: —and slow down.

Adrianne: Send me a fucking ambulance!

[McFarlan hangs up on her]

And it just gets worse from there.

McFarlan was suspended without pay for two weeks. I can see an argument for not firing him — if this really was one single bad incident in an otherwise spotless record extending decades. I believe that everyone has more to them than their worst moment, and maybe McFarlan’s behavior here was his worse moment.

(It’s more likely, however, that McFarlan has always been an asshat, a bully, and a lousy cop, but has never messed up so publicly before. He was once sued for tasering a 14 year old boy (via), although the court dismissed the lawsuit.)

Two weeks without pay is a slap on the wrist, and suggests the police administration isn’t taking this seriously. Six months would have been better. In addition, McFarlan should be required, if Ms. Ledesma and her father are willing, to undergo a restorative justice process to try and make up to them for his assault on their safety and dignity.

Who does she own? Jeff Rosen, that’s who:

Emily, you are so right that Jeff Rosen’s unsupported whispers about Judge Sotomayor have become the conventional media wisdom in three short days. But more troubling still, he seems to have been arguing that female jurists are by definition “mediocre” for more than a decade! Here’s a piece he did for the New York Times in 1995, arguing that President Clinton’s “single-minded pursuit of diversity, combined with an eagerness to avoid controversy, has kept him from appointing the best available legal minds to the courts.” He then names the many, many white men passed over for federal judgeships and contends that liberal judges lack the intellectual firepower to challenge brilliant conservative jurists because “nearly 60 percent of the Clinton appointments have been minority members and women.” (Read: mediocre.) His single data point to illustrate that mediocrity: Instead of appointing a serious intellectual heavyweight to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (a/k/a “The scholars Court”), Clinton tapped “Diane P. Wood, a little-known professor of antitrust law at the University of Chicago, who is currently an assistant to Deputy Attorney General Anne Bingaman.”

That same mediocre Diane Wood is not only on every shortlist for the Supreme Court today. She’s also widely regarded as one of the finest judges on the bench, to whom other brilliant judges turn for reviews of draft opinions.

I’ve been busy this week, so I haven’t had time to put together my thoughts on Rosen’s asinine article which, near as I can tell, said that Sonia Sotomayor was occasionally brusque, which would be great if she was Antonin Scalia, but alas, she lacks a penis, so she’s instead a raging bitch. Oh, and she’s dumb, because she’s a woman, and obviously graduated summa cum laude from Princeton (winning the highest award given to Princeton students in the process) because of afirmative action, probably at the cost of a more-qualified marginal white guy. And then she graduated from Yale’s law school, where she served as an editor on law review — again, probably at the expense of a connected white guy. And then she served as an Assistant New York District Attorney, probably just because she’s Latina. And then she ended up a partner at Pavia and Harcourt, which probably just promoted her because of PC whining.

Then, of course, she was appointed to the bench by committed lefty George H.W. Bush in 1991, in a move surely designed to get women and Latinos off his back. Then Bill Clinton appointed her to the Court of Appeals in 1997, again, clearly as a sop to minorities. I mean, obviously, this woman rose from the daughter of working-class parents, whose father died when she was nine, whose mother raised her and her brother to become a jurist and a medical doctor, respectively, only because those damn minorities and women get all the breaks that white guys don’t.

Needless to say, Judge Sotomayor would make an exceptional nominee to the Supreme Court. She’s everything we say we want in an American — someone who pulled herself up by her bootstraps, who lived the American dream. But she’s a woman, and she’s a Latina. In Jeff Rosen’s world, that’s clear evidence that she’s a step below her betters. That her betters are all white guys need not even be mentioned.

(Via Balloon Juice)

Via You’re Reading Too Much Into It, The New York Times reports on a new trend: super-skinny male models.

Where the masculine ideal of as recently as 2000 was a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs, the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt. [...]

Wasn’t it just a short time ago that the industry was up in arms about skinny models? [...] The models in question were women, and it’s safe to say that they remain as waiflike as ever. But something occurred while no one was looking. Somebody shrunk the men.

“Skinny, skinny, skinny,” said Dave Fothergill, a director of the agency of the moment, Red Model Management. “Everybody’s shrinking themselves.”

The new male model is supposed to look younger, pubescent, rather than adult; and like with female models, that means casting them young and skinny.

It is disturbing that this is happening. I’d much rather see female models get more latitude; this is moving towards equality in the wrong direction.

The article makes a couple of “this was a big deal when women were thin, but no one cares that the men are now expected to be thin” comments. (”Far from inspiring a spate of industry breast-beating, as occurred after the international news media got hold of the deaths of two young female models who died from eating disorders, the trend favoring very skinny male models has been accepted as a matter or course.”)

The article should have pointed out that male models are still allowed to carry a lot more weight, proportionately, than female models. Which is probably why we haven’t yet had any young male models die of heart attacks (although if the thin trend continues, probably that will happen, alas).

According to the article, “Stas Svetlichnyy of Russia typified the new norm… about 145 pounds. He is 6 feet tall with a 28-inch waist.” Later, a booking agent says that a male model who is 6 foot one should weigh 155. Both of those work out to a BMI of 20, which is officially categorized as “normal” weight. But a BMI of 20 would probably make a female model unemployable:

Many suspect that some of the world’s top models, from Kate Moss to Jacquetta Wheeler, will be banned if a cut off BMI of 18 in enforced. [...] The average runway model is estimated to be 5 feet 9 inches tall and to weigh in at 110 lbs.– resulting in a BMI of just 16, according to the British newspaper the Evening Standard.

According to the standard BMI categorization, BMIs under 18.5 are “underweight.” That doesn’t make what’s being done to the male models acceptable. But for people who aren’t naturally superthin, trying to maintain a BMI of 20 probably isn’t as unhealthy as trying to maintain a BMI of 16.

Finally, the article’s language sometimes seemed to suggest that thin male models aren’t male. Not everyone will see it, but comments like “underfed runt” and “chicken-chested” feel loaded with sexism, implying that the models are not only thin but also inadequate as men.

Mark Halpern identifies the biggest concern about Souter’s replacement:

Aw, poor white guys! We only make up seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices. Why, one of them’s a woman! And there’s even a black guy! What more do you people want?

(Via Josh)

From an Associated Press story, reporting on the widespread objections among mom-bloggers to the “new Dora” doll planned for October:

Mattel and Nickelodeon both say there are two major misconceptions about the new Dora, which is not replacing the “Dora the Explorer” cartoon, but will be a new interactive doll aimed at the five-to eight-year-old, or tween market.

“People care so deeply about this brand and this character,” Leigh Anne Brodsky, president of Nickelodeon Viacom Consumer Products, says. “The Dora that we all know and love is not going away.”

“I think there was just a misconception in terms of where we were going with this,” Gina Sirard, vice president of marketing at Mattel, says. “Pretty much the moms who are petitioning aging Dora up certainly don’t understand. . . . I think they’re going to be pleasantly happy once this is available in October, and once they understand this certainly isn’t what they are conjuring up.”

Part of the confusion stemmed from the silhouette that was released, which made Dora look more like a Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan than a young girl. For the record, the doll does not wear a short dress, but a tunic and leggings. And while she looks older (she’s supposed to be about 10), with longer jewelry and longer hair, she doesn’t have makeup and seems pretty much like a 10-year-old girl.

Nickelodeon and Mattel say that as part of unrelated research, they found parents wanted a way to keep Dora in their children’s lives and have their daughters move on to a toy that was age appropriate.

“The idea is Dora for more girls,” Brodsky says. “The whole point was this was created because moms said help us.”

Oh, those silly, silly moms! When will they realize that Nickelodeon and Mattel only want to help?

But then again… compare and contrast:

(Also, it looks to me like maybe the image on the left is wearing a dress, which cuts off at knee-level, as opposed to the tunic on the right which cuts off much higher and is worn with leggings. Silhouette found here and here.)

Confusingly, there’s another silhouette illustration of the New Dora I’ve seen, which is just the non-silhouette illustration with the details blacked out. As far as I can tell, Mattel released two different teaser silhouette drawings, but I’m not sure of the timing.

Honestly, assuming the newer illustration reflects what the doll will look like, things could be much worse. The original Dora will still be on TV. Dora’s new outfit is funky and fashionable, without being overly sexualized as the Bratz outfits are. And I’m always happy to see a mainstream doll that’s not white. There’s still a ton wrong, but there are way worse dolls on the market.

But still — the original Dora was ever so much cooler.

More blogging about “New Dora”:

Womanist Musings: Dora The Explorer Matters To Boys
Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing
Viva La Feminista: Why Mattel and Nick Have It Wrong (Highly recommended. Check out her Dora tag as well, for more Dora-themed posts.)
The Hand Mirror: Dora’s new silhouette announced
Embrace Your Age: Keep Dora Exploring!
The Mommy Files: Dora The New Sexy Explorer
Feministing: The New Dora
Shakesville: Sooo

Finally, let me link to my own post from 2007, to make the point that this isn’t the first time Dora’s owners have thought “boy, if we could only sell a thinner, more girly Dora doll, we’d make a killing!”

Found this good report on Al Jazeera English.

Other blogs discussing the oral arguments in the case I blogged about yesterday.

• You’re Reading Too Much Into It, an interesting blog about politics and pop culture, starts by discussing Breyer’s infamous remarks and segways into critiquing the Daily Show’s sexist reporting from Sweden and a comedian who badgered her into performing on stage. What connects all of this is how our society treats women as objects to be looked at. (Plus there’s a clip from “Coupling” that I really enjoyed, less for the political relevance than for the clever use of 90’s phone technology as a prop for farce.) Hard to summarize, well worth reading.
• Amanda at Pandagon gets to the heart of the matter:
  

  What’s traumatic about strip searches and sexual assault isn’t that someone touched or saw something previously untouched or unseen. It’s the horror of having someone use your nudity and your sexuality as a weapon to degrade and humiliate you. And anyone who’s been subject to the routine degradation and humiliation dished out by sadistic school administrators has a pretty damn good idea of what was going on here.

• So was the goal really degradation and humiliation, or was it to find contraband? Jacob at Hit & Run points out something I didn’t know: school officials didn’t even search the student’s desk or locker before strip-searching her. The strip-search wasn’t a last resort, it was a first resort.
• Also from Jacob at Hit and Run:
  

  Wright, the school district’s lawyer, initially suggested it would unconstitutional for schools to enforce their zero-tolerance policies with body cavity searches, because there is no record of students’ hiding drugs in their vaginas or rectums. But later he backtracked, saying the real problem is that school officials are not properly trained to conduct such searches. When Souter asked him whether body cavity searches would be OK once administrators and teachers had undergone the requisite training, Wright said “that’s to be left up to the local governments.”

• Scott at Tapped has several good points that defy a one-sentence summary, so go read his post. And then go read Scott at Lawyers Guns and Money, where he breaks down how the Justices are likely to vote.
• The Agitator, responding to a comment by Justice Souter, writes:
  

  Can anyone think of a single incident in the last 30 years in which several children have died after ingesting drugs distributed by one of their classmates on school grounds? Before we let school principals go rummaging through the panties of underage girls, shouldn’t we be at least be able to cite a few examples?

• It’s pretty obvious to most “Alas” readers, I think, that part of this story is that eight of nine Supreme Court Justices are male. Historiann points out that this aspect has seemingly escaped the notice of most mainstream newsmedia. (Via Feminist Law Profs.)
• Rad Geek expresses a thought similar to what my all-too-infrequent co-blogger Myca said in comments.
• TechnologyWoman argues that what happened to Redding was an assault.
• SCOTUSblog has a useful summary of the background of this case.

Dahlia Lithwick reports on the oral arguments at the Supreme Court, involving a 13 year old girl stripped-searched because she had been falsely accused of giving ibuprofen to other students:

Adam Wolf, the ACLU lawyer who represents Redding, explains that “the Fourth Amendment does not countenance the rummaging on or around a 13-year-old girl’s naked body.” Wolf explains that he is arguing for a “two-step framework,” wherein schools can use a lower standard to search “backpacks, pencil cases, bookbags” but a higher standard when you “require a 13-year-old girl to take off her pants, her shirt, move around her bra so she reveals her breasts, and the same thing with her underpants to reveal her pelvic area.” This leads Justice Stephen Breyer to query whether this is all that different from asking Redding to “change into a swimming suit or your gym clothes,” because, “why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym?”

This leads Ginsburg to sputter—in what I have come to think of as her Lilly Ledbetter voice—”what was done in the case … it wasn’t just that they were stripped to their underwear! They were asked to shake their bra out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out!” Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts.

But Breyer just isn’t letting go. “In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.”

Shocked silence, followed by explosive laughter. In fact, I have never seen Justice Clarence Thomas laugh harder. Breyer tries to recover: “Or not my underwear. Whatever. Whatever. I was the one who did it? I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think it’s beyond human experience.” [...]

You see, we now have school districts all around the country finding naked photos of teens and immediately calling in the police for possession of kiddie porn. Yet schools see nothing wrong with stripping these same kids naked to search for drugs. Evidently teenage nakedness is only a problem when the children choose to be naked.

Scott at Lawyers Guns and Money breaks down how the vote is likely to go (Scalia is likely to vote for student’s privacy rights, incidentally, while this will probably be the second time Alito has favored the state strip-searching little girls).

Three points:

1) Yet anther example of how the drug war has eroded sanity.

2) Yet another example of why a Court with only one woman on it is a court that’s unable to fairly administrate justice.¹

3) Yet another example of why Democratic presidents appointing “centrist: judges while Republicans appoint far-right judges creates right-wing outcomes, not balance.

1. Yes, women aren’t always more connected to reality on these issues than men; I’m sure Camille Paglia, for example, would see nothing wrong with Breyer’s logic. But this isn’t a question of absolute difference; it’s a question of odds. A Court with 4 or 5 women on it would be substantially less likely to have Ginsburg be the only Justice appalled by Breyer’s rationalization. (back)

I was not planning to start posting again until I could begin in earnest the series I want to do on classical Iranian literature–and interruption after interruption after interruption has kept me from getting to the point where I am ready to do that–but something happened this week relating to a former students of mine that I need to write about. It is actually quite urgent, probably not to anyone who reads this blog, but certainly to the woman whose message is at the root of this post, and it makes a point that cannot be made strongly or frequently enough: We, especially but not only those of us who have survived sexual abuse of any kind and are strong enough to do so, need, need, need, need, need to speak up loudly and often about the realities of that abuse and how it has shaped our lives (because, whether we realize it or not, it shapes the lives even of those of us who have not been abused, either because we know someone who has or because it shapes the culture in which we live.) You may have seen this post in which I put up a YouTube video of an interview I gave to Jackson Heights Poetry Festival, an organization on whose advisory board I sit. In the interview, I talk about the relationship between my experience of child sexual abuse and the fact that I became a poet. The substance of what I said there is not important here. What is important is that watching this video moved a former student of mine to send me a message in which she told me–and the tone of the message suggests that I am the first person she has told–that she was sodomized a couple of years ago and had been trying to deal with it by pretending it didn’t happen. Even more importantly, though, and more urgently, she said that she suspects her three-year-old daughter is being sexually abused at the girl’s father’s house and that she [my former student] freaks out just thinking about the possibility. As I read the message, it sounded to me like she was saying this freaking out keeps her from acting on what she intuits, which is scary, because even if it turns out she is wrong–and there was no indication in the message that she has any vindictiveness towards the girl’s father that would lead her to make a false accusation (my point being that she might be wrong in good faith)–she needs to tell somebody, first to make sure that her daughter is safe and, second, to alleviate her own anxieties (and maybe understand, if she is wrong, what triggered her unfounded suspicions in the first place).

I responded in all the predictable ways–thanking her for her trust, acknowleding the courage it took for her to speak out, and encouraging her to get in touch with someone about her daughter’s sitation, though since I was running out the door, I couldn’t take the time to look up crisis hotlines or other phone numbers–and I am hoping to hear back from her, but what her message made me think about was, as I said above, just how important it is for us as a society to talk openly about the reality of sexual abuse. More, though, it made me think about how important it is to talk about that reality not just in contexts where sexual abuse is the topic–i.e., talk shows, conferences, seminars, etc. that are set aside for the specific purpose of addressing sexual abuse–but also, simply, merely, in the contexts of our daily lives, because abuse is always already part of our daily lives. Because you never know who is listening and how important your words might be to them.

I am remembering as I write this something that I have written about before, that I was not even thinking about when I started, but that is worth talking about here: An independent study I did five or seven years ago with two women who told me they wanted specifically to work on personal essays that dealt with the sexual abuse they had experienced when they were girls. They were both in a creative nonfiction class I was teaching and one had written an essay about her abuse that, while obviously cathartic for her, worked neither as a public document of personal testimony nor as art, and it was art she was trying to create. The problems in the essay were indicative of the difficulties abuse survivors have speaking out about their experience. Under normal classroom circumstances, I handle this by directing the student to some examples of writers who had dealt with similar topics; I might have a kind of “therapeutic” conversation (and I put that word in quotes because I do not mean that I would try to do therapy) to explore whether or not the student was really willing and able to delve into the topic at the depth and level of complexity it required. (I do, after all, have to assign a grade to the work my students hand me, and the last thing I would want is to give a low grade to an essay in which someone is struggling to come to terms with, or even just to name, the sexual abuse they’d survived because they were not yet able to write about the experience at the college level.) If the answer is no, then I offer the student the chance to write about something else; if the answer is yes, then I try to get them to articulate some of the difficulties they were having in writing the paper as a means of talking about how to deal with them in writerly terms; and I always encourage such students, if they are not in therapy, to seek counseling.

The woman in my creative nonfiction class, however, was not simply fulfilling an assignment I had given. She wanted to be a writer and she told me quite explicitly that she saw me as a role model, and so I was faced with the decision of whether to share with her my own experience of trying to write creatively, to make art, out of the fact that I had survived child sexual abuse. For reasons that are not so relevant here, I decided to do so. Then, when a second woman in the class also began to write about her experience of child sexual abuse, and she told me that she too wanted to be a writer, and she was a damned good writer, when the first woman approached me about doing an independent study, I suggested that the two of them might work together. The story of that independent study is really quite remarkable, but the part of it that is relevant here is this: At the end of the semester, all independent study students at my college are required to present their work at a colloquium; if they don’t, they don’t get credit. As the day of the colloquium drew near, my students grew increasingly nervous, for all of the predictable reasons, but one that stood out was their concern that the faculty and administrators present would think the subject of their work inappropriate for an academic context. So I told my students that I would introduce them by talking about my own experience of abuse and how meaningful it had been to me to be for them the kind of mentor/role model that just was not available to me in the 1980s when I started to talk about my own abuse. At that time, people were just starting to recognize the sexual abuse of girls. No one, as fas as I know, as talking in any substantive way–or at least was being given a forum to talk in any substantive way–about the fact that boys were being sexually abused as well.

And that’s what I did: I introduced those two women by naming myself as a survivor of sexual abuse and telling a little bit of my own story. It was a watershed moment in my life and in my career as a teacher. Not that I had any problem talking about my abuse, but I had always kept that part of my life separate from my professional life. It was “personal,” and so I had not really thought much about the degree to which it informed my practice as a teacher and a writer, my political stances in the world, etc. and so on. There is a great deal more to say about what it has meant to me to integrate these parts of myself, and I will, I hope write more about that. What I want to say here is simply that, if it were not for that independent study and the women who worked with me that semester, I would never have talked in that interview about the relationship between my abuse and my becoming a writer as easily as I did, and I would never have had the chance to encourage my former student to act on her feelings about her daughter’s situation, and my encouragement might turn out to be the thing that moves her to act, and we all know what kind of difference that could make in her daughter’s life (if she is being abused), and in my former student’s life as well.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

[Shorter Amp: Eugene Kanin famously found that 41%, or perhaps 50%, of rapes reported to police are false. Kanin's study is both badly designed and unverifiable; more reliable studies have found that between 2% and 8% of rapes reported to police are false reports.]

In a new (sort of) post on on Ifeminists, Wendy McElroy¹ suggests that false rape reports are common, relying heavily on Eugene Kanin’s famous study of false rape allegations. This study is commonly cited by MRAs and anti-feminists. McElroy writes:

How prevalent is the false reporting of sexual assault? Estimates vary widely.

According to much-cited feminist statistics, two percent of all reports are false. Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will (1975), for example, claims that false accusations in New York City dropped to that level after police departments began using policewomen to interview alleged victims. Elsewhere, the two percent figure appears without citation or with a vague attribution to “FBI” sources.

According to a study conducted by Eugene Kanin of Purdue University, the correct figure may rise to the 40 percent range. Kanin examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987. Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”

Studies and statistics often vary and for legitimate reasons. For example, they may examine different populations. But such a dramatic variance — two percent to 50 percent — raises the question of whether political interests are at work.

Tellingly, McElroy doesn’t go on to question whether Kanin — or the police whose records Kanin reported — might have “political interests” or biases. If McElroy applied her argument honestly, her “dramatic variance” logic would necessarily raise suspicions of both statistics. Instead, her skepticism (in this article, at least) is reserved solely for feminists.

I think the 2% statistic deserves skepticism and criticism; it’s popularity among feminists is an example of what I meant when I wrote “Within feminism, there’s sometimes too little skepticism regarding statistics and news stories which emphasize harms against women. We’ve created a culture which does a rotten job of self-correction.”

That said, the 2% statistic is not wildly out of line with some other reported statistics. Quoting an article in St. John’s Law Review:²

To illustrate, when the Portland, Oregon police department examined the 431 complaints of completed or attempted sexual assault in 1990, 1.6% were determined to be false. This was in comparison with a rate of 2.6% for false reports of stolen vehicles.

Similarly, Sgt. Joanne Archambault of the Sex Crimes Division of the San Diego Police Department routinely evaluated the rate of false reports over several years and found them to be around 4%.

More recently, the FBI reported an unfounded rate of 5.4% for forcible rapes (quoted in a newspaper article, via Abyss2Hope). However, because “unfounded” does not mean “false,” the actual “false” number would be lower than 5.4%. Quoting the Oregon sexual assault task force report (pdf link):

It is critical to bear in mind that a report determined to be unfounded is not synonymous with a false allegation or report. This distinction is important enough that it is worth repeating – a report that has been unfounded is not the same as a false report (or false allegation).

The FBI definition of unfounded specifically refers to cases that are found to be false or baseless. [...] Typically a baseless report is the result of a mistake of law – the reporter believed that they were the victim of a crime when based on the state criminal code they were not.

Even Eugene Kanin has written “unfounded rape can and does mean many things, with false allegation being only one of them, and sometimes the least of them.” (Pdf source.)

So how common are false rape reports? No one can say for certain. However, after conducting a review of the (extremely limited) available research, a recent report by The National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women concluded:³

When more methodologically rigorous research has been conducted, estimates for the percentage of false reports begin to converge around 2-8%.

So what about Kanin’s report, which found that over 40% of rapes reported to police are false? I wouldn’t suggest that Kanin has a political agenda — but I do think his methodology (which consists of tabulating police data from an unidentified small town) was overly credulous.

First of all, it’s important to realize that Kanin has kept secret what police force he was studying. This may have been necessary to gain access to police records, but it also means no other researcher has ever had the chance to verify Kanin’s findings and claims. There is no indication that Kanin attempted to interview any of the alleged false rape accusers to get their perspective, or in any way attempted to independently verify anything he was told by police. Kanin also implies that the recanters were told they’d be charged with filing false reports, but does not report the outcome of those charges.

In other words, Kanin’s study consists of Kanin uncritically reporting the claims of a single police force in a small, unidentified city, without those claims having been checked or verified in any way whatsoever.

Contrast that to this description of a genuinely rigorous study conducted by the British Government:³

The largest and most rigorous study that is currently available in this area is the third one commissioned by the British Home Office (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). The analysis was based on the 2,643 sexual assault cases (where the outcome was known) that were reported to British police over a 15-year period of time. Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators, based on the victim’s mental illness, inconsistent statements, drinking or drug use. These classifications were thus made in violation of the explicit policies of their own police agencies. The researchers therefore supplemented the information contained in the police files by collecting many different types of additional data, including: reports from forensic examiners, questionnaires completed by police investigators, interviews with victims and victim service providers, and content analyses of the statements made by victims and witnesses. They then proceeded to evaluate each case using the official criteria for establishing a false allegation, which was that there must be either “a clear and credible admission by the complainant”⁴ or “strong evidential grounds” (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). On the basis of this analysis, the percentage of false reports dropped to 2.5%.

Kanin (quoted by Marcella Chester) describes how the police relied on by his study determined that a case was false:

In fact, agency policy forbids police officers to use their discretion in deciding whether to officially acknowledge a rape complaint, regardless how suspect that complaint may be. Second, the declaration of a false allegation follows a highly institutionalized procedure. The investigation of all rape complaints always involves a serious offer to polygraph the complainants and the suspects. Additionally, for a declaration of false charge to be made, the complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. She is the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false. The police department will not declare a rape charge as false when the complainant, for whatever reason, fails to pursue the charge or cooperate on the case, regardless how much doubt the police may have regarding the validity of the charge. In short, these cases are declared false only because the complainant admitted they are false.

However, as the sexual assault task force for the State of Oregon (pdf link) wrote (emphasis theirs):

Victim Recantation is a retraction or withdrawal of a reported sexual assault. Recantations are routinely used by victims to disengage the criminal justice system and are therefore not, by themselves, indicative of a false report.

If over 40% of women reporting rape recant — even though multiple, more rigorous studies have found false rape reports are usually 2%-8% of all reports — that could indicate a police culture which gives rape victims an extremely strong reason to want to “disengage the criminal justice system,” even if they’re threatened with a fine or a short jail stay. And, as we will see, routinely pressuring all reported rape victims to take a lie detector test is a sign of a police department with a strong bias against taking rape reports seriously.

Jody Raphael, of the DePaul University College of Law, wrote:⁵

[Kanin's study] is frequently cited on web sites devoted to debunking the prevalence of rape. During this ten year period, the police department followed policy (now deemed unlawful by the U.S. Congress for police departments receiving federal funds) that required polygraphing complainants and suspects as a condition of investigating rape reports. Kanin’s department only declared a complaint false when the victim recanted and admitted it was.

In his published journal article, Kanin (1994) admitted that “A possible objection to these recantations concerns their validity….rather than proceed with the real charge of rape, the argument goes, these women withdrew their accusations to avoid the trauma of police investigation.”

And indeed, the Kanin study has been criticized for the department’s use of polygraph testing in every case, a process that has been rejected by many police departments because of its intimidating impact on victims. The International Association of Chiefs of Police disapproves of requiring polygraph tests during rape investigations because “victims often feel confused and ashamed, and experience a great deal of self-blame because of something they did or did not do in relation to the sexual assault. These feelings may compromise the reliability of the results of such interrogation techniques. The use of these interrogation techniques can also compound these feelings and prolong the trauma of a sexual assault” (Lisak, 2007, p.6).

Given the popularity of Kanin’s study, especially in light of the collapse of the Duke University lacrosse players prosecution, David Lisak (2007), an associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, cautions that this particular police department employed a common procedure in which officers’ inherent suspicion of rape victims results in a confrontational approach towards the victim that would likely result in an extraordinarily high number of victim recantations. Lisak also points out that Kanin’s is not a research study, because it only puts forth the opinions of the police officers without any further investigation on his part.

Kanin (1994) himself cautioned against the generalizability of his findings…

Sally Baird, in a letter to the editor, also cites Lisak’s article, writing:

Prof. Kanin’s study was examined in the article “False Allegations of Rape: A Critique of Kanin” by Dr. David Lisak in the September/October 2007 issue of the Sexual Assault Report. Dr. Lisak is an associate professor of psychology and director of the Men’s Sexual Trauma Research Project at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Dr. Lisak says that “Kanin’s 1994 article on false allegations is a provocative opinion piece, but it is not a scientific study of the issue of false reporting of rape. It certainly should never be used to assert a scientific foundation for the frequency of false allegations.”

He makes the point that Kanin “simply reiterates the opinions of the police officers who concluded that the cases in question were ‘false allegations.’” After citing an International Association of Chiefs of Police manual (Investigating Sexual Assaults, www.theiacp.org/documents/pdfs/RCD/Inves… p. 13), which states that polygraph tests for sexual assault victims are contradicted in the investigation process and that their use is “based on the misperception that a significant percentage of sexual assault reports are false,” Lisak then observes that “It is noteworthy that the police department from which Kanin derived his data used or threatened to use the polygraph in every case… The fact that it was the standard procedure of this department provides a window on the biases of the officers who conducted the rape investigations, biases that were then echoed in Kanin’s unchallenged reporting of their findings.”

For more reading, I’d highly recommend:

Abyss2Hope is far and away the best blog on this subject: Here, here, here, here and here, for starters. And see as well, Date Rape Is Real Rape.

Successfully Investigating Acquaintance Sexual Assault: A National Training Manual for Law Enforcement includes an excellent chapter on the question of false rape allegations (pdf link).

False Reports: Moving Beyond the Issue to Successfully Investigate and Prosecute Non-Stranger Sexual Assault (pdf Link).

1. If McElroy’s post feels a little stale, that’s probably because it’s a Kobe-related column she wrote six years ago, with paragraphs strategically deleted. (back)
2. Hecht-Schafran, L. (1993). Writing and reading about rape: A primer. St. John’s Law Review, 66, 979-1045. Due to the age of those studies, I haven’t read the primary sources, or even the secondary source, which was quoted to me in an email from Kimberly A. Lonsway, co-editor of Sexual Assault Report. (back)
3. Quoted from “False Reports: Moving Beyond the Issue to Successfully Investigate and Prosecute Non-Stranger Sexual Assault,” by Kimberly Lonsway, Joanne Archambault, David Lisak. (Pdf link.) (back) (back)
4. I’m a bit skeptical of accepting an “admission by the complainant” as proof of a false rape report, for reasons described elsewhere in this post. In this case, it would depend on what their criteria for “clear and credible” are. (back)
5. Violence Against Women, Vol. 14, No. 3, 370-375 (2008). Pdf link. (back)

…as it does in this Pandagon post, I wonder whether anyone else felt like my husband and I did — that having rings was a tangible reminder of each other’s presence and love, even when we weren’t in the same place. I was living alone in Iowa when we got formally engaged (we’d been informally engaged for a long time before that), and it was nice to be able to put on my ring as a reminder of him. We got him an engagement ring, too, which I understand he wore (more often than I did) for the same reason.

I like gifts of jewelry for this reason. My best friend gave me a seahorse pendant with an aquamarine eye (my engagement ring features an aquamarine because we were not about to do diamonds, cuz no fucking way) that I wear to remind me of her. I still wear the $20 shell pendant my husband gave me when we started dating. And I make my own jewelry as memorials, for instance the blown glass pendant filled with suns and stars that I wear to commemorate the writing workshop where I decided I was going to be a professional writer.

I make jewelry for people that I hope will serve the same function. It’s really fun to sit down with a collection of stones and crystals and glass and try to figure out how to capture a friend’s tastes and personal style, as well as some of your affection for them, in an attractive, material object.

Then again, I know that other people are interacting with the cultural symbols of engagement and wedding rings differently than we did — simply from things like the scandalized and angry reactions we had when we went shopping for engagement rings and told people we weren’t going to buy diamonds. Several jewelers told us we HAD to. And then we left. It took a while before we found a small family-owned store where someone said “oh, how European!” and sat down and helped us decide on what we wanted, an aquamarine center stone with two violet sapphires around it, all of the colors supposed to wash together like the gray-blue of the sea on a cloudy day, which is both my favorite color and a very prevalent hue in the city where my husband and I met and left our hearts.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that consumer choice (I have a pink ipod instead of a green one! A relatively inexpensive aquamarine ring instead of a wow-expensive diamond!) is a true expression of individual identity… but I always figured the only reason to follow any of the wedding traditions would be if it was fun. And for me, finding relatively-inexpensive relatively-non-bloody jewelry was fun. And it gives me a tangible and shiny symbol for when I want my husband with me and he’s not there — or when he is with me, and we want to share memories and emotions or just look at pretty rocks.