To read Part 1, go here.

You have to wonder what kind of research he did and how he did it. Did he interview women? Create a list of all the possibilities he could imagine and ask them to check off on a list “all descriptions that apply?” Did he talk to men, get them to narrate their sexual philosophies and techniques? Did he observe what he wrote about firsthand, somehow get permission to stand behind a wall constructed so that he could spy on the couples who had agreed to be his informants? Or did he just make it all up? It’s impossible to know, but when Sheikh Nezawi wrote The Perfumed Garden in the sixteenth century–it was translated into English by Richard Burton in 1886–he devoted an entire chapter to “The Divers Names of the Virile Member.” Some are self-explanatory, like Generative Organ, Hairy One or Bald-Head. At least one, The Pigeon, is interesting as a metaphor because of the way it feminizes the penis: “It is so called because, after having been swollen and at the moment when it is returning to its state of repose, [this kind of penis] resembles a pigeon settling on its eggs” (54). In most cases, however, Sheikh Nezawi treats the male genitals synechdocically, making it clear that, in describing certain kinds of penises, he is also describing the men to whom they are attached. Here, for example is The Creeper:

This name has been given to the penis because, when it gets between a woman’s thighs and sees a plump vulva, it starts to creep on her legs and pubis, then, approaching the entrance, it continues to creep until it has taken possession. When comfortably installed, it penetrates completely and ejaculates. (59)

And here is The Knocker

It is thus named because, when it arrives at the door of the vulva, it gives a light knock; if the vulva replies and opens the door, it enters; but if it gets no reply, it knocks again until successful. By knocking at the door we refer to the rubbing of the penis on the vulva until it becomes moist. The production of this moisture is what is called opening the door. (59)

My son will soon be nine years old. Especially during the first years of his life, when he began to learn the names for the parts of his body–though I am aware the question is relevant even now–I thought a lot about how the way we talk about our genitals in this culture expresses and, in part, creates the way we feel as a culture not just about the male body, but also about sex and the people we have sex with. Never before had I been confronted on a daily basis with the realization that someone else’s understanding of who he was, of what it might mean for him to live in his own body, hung quite literally on my every word.

When he was two, for example, my wife would tell me stories about how he occasionally got erections when she washed his penis in the bath. “I don’t like it like this,” she told he would say, starting to cry. “I want it to be soft,” and he would try to push his penis down, which of course did not have the result he desired.

One night, I happened to be home when this happened, and I walked into the bathroom to find my wife crouching at the edge of the tub, talking to our son in a very soothing voice, while he sat with the water running behind him, breathing the last gasping breaths of what had obviously been a two-year-old’s very heavy cry. When my wife explained that he was crying because he’d had an erection, I leaned over the edge of the tub, took our son’s face in my hands and said, “Sometimes my dool gets hard when I don’t want it to. I just wait and it gets soft again. You do the same thing. Don’t get upset. Just wait and it will go back to being soft.”

My son’s eyes widened with a feeling so big it left him speechless. I kissed his cheek and walked out, back to whatever it was that I’d been doing. Later, my wife told me that after I’d left the room, he’d turned to her and said, in Persian, which is her native language and was his dominant language at the time, “Maman, dooleh baba sefteh!” (Mom, Dad’s penis gets hard!) We puzzled briefly over what, specifically, he might have meant, and I tried to remember if, when I was a boy, any of my adult male relatives had talked to me about my own body in a similar way, offering themselves as a reflection of my biological maleness and the stance I might take towards it. I don’t think anyone ever did, but I did recall a moment when I was no older than six or eight in which I caught a glimpse of what I might have learned if someone had.

My father and I were in the locker room getting ready to leave the beach. His back was to me and he was talking about something I couldn’t listen to because he was naked. My eyes wandered among the whorls of black fur that ran from the nape of his neck, along his shoulders and arms, down is back and into the dark cleft of his buttocks. When he turned around, I could see where the hair of his back met the hair of his front in the bush between his legs. His penis hung like a pendulum, swinging slowly between his thighs when he walked, and I wondered if it got hard like mine did, if he played with it like I’d begun to do. I wanted to run and throw my arms around him, to pass through his skin and know what it would mean to live with such size. I was hungry with the prescience that his body would someday be mine, that my body was his in the making.

Read the rest of this entry »

“My Daughter’s Vagina” is the title of an essay I wrote about five years ago that was published online here but that I have never really felt comfortable with as a finished piece. Not too long ago, I came up with the idea of serializing the essay on my blog as I revised it, and so here I am. I originally had in mind that I wanted say a few things about the nature of the essay, but I think that, for the most part, it’s better that I just let the piece speak for itself. I will say that “My Daughter’s Vagina” is long, around 27,000 words, and so I will have to ask for your patience in letting the piece unfold at the pace that I am able to set for revising it; and I will also say that the goal of the piece is not to argue any particular position, but rather to raise questions about gender, sex and sexuality and explore them from within my own experience as a man in this culture. The narratives in the essay are deeply personal and very revealing, and do not always show me in the kindest of lights. I hope you will understand, therefore, that while I am perfectly comfortable reading and discussing good faith critiques of how I understand my experience in the essay, I am not going to tolerate any comments that even remotely resemble personal attacks on me or on anyone else who chooses to comment. Other than that, I am, for now, going to leave the comments section open to all comers. So, here goes:

My Daughter’s Vagina, Part 1

The first time a woman opened her legs long enough that I could look for more than the few seconds it took to bend to her with lips and tongue, or to climb up blind into her and start moving, I crouched between her thighs to get as close as I could, and I remember even now how the words began to list themselves in my head: pussy, beaver, twat, slit, fur, love muscle, muff, quim, cabbage, snatch, box…and all of them but one felt inadequate; and that was the one I wanted most not to use, not even to think, the one I’d come to understand as degrading of my lover by its very existence; and yet, somehow, no other word but cunt captured in my imagination the wet and hairy wildness, the pungent and disheveled and untamed and multi-shaded pink and red and brown and flesh-colored and even deep violet beauty of what I was looking at. I’d seen pictures of course, plenty of them, had discovered as a young teenager that I grew hard at the sight of them, but those images of carefully coiffed, sometimes completely shaven, meticulously arranged specimens of female genitalia were, I suddenly understood, so obviously composed, so clearly intended as artifice, that I felt, looking at my lover, as if I were seeing a cunt for the first time.

The more I stared, the more uncomfortable she became. “What are you looking at? Is something wrong down there?”

And when I didn’t respond right away, “Answer me!”

“You’re beautiful,” I answered, and I know it sounds like something out of a romance novel, but the words came in a whisper, and I looked up at her and I smiled, and then I tried in everything I did next with fingers and my lips and my tongue to make sure she knew I meant what I’d said; and when she asked me to fuck her, her words, not mine, tears–but how do I write this without sounding like I’m bragging? How do I make you see that this memory, even more than it makes me feel good about myself (which of course it does), humbles me and fills me with awe and gratitude–tears were filling her eyes. It was, she explained as we lay together afterward, the first time a man had told her she was beautiful “down there,” much less made love to her in a way that convinced her he really meant it.

“And all those other times,” I wondered to myself. “What had I meant then? What had she understood my meaning to be?”

///

The fundamentally alien universe that a woman’s experience of sex is to me. That mine is to her. So fully do we romanticize heterosexual lovemaking as a communion of souls, a synthesizing of opposites, the fulfillment and expression of our deepest emotional needs, that it’s easy to forget just how inaccessible the interior landscapes of male and female sexual embodiment are to each other. Or, perhaps more to the point, how strongly this romanticization invites our forgetfulness, encourages, even mandates that we refuse to see just how deeply, when it comes to sex, physical differences divide us.

When I began this essay, I was teaching an independent study project in creative nonfiction with two women, each of whom wanted to write about gender and sexuality, exploring specifically the meaning and consequences of the childhood sexual abuse she had survived. One of the books I asked them to read was Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, which is too often, and inaccurately, understood as arguing that heterosexual sex is by its nature–man penetrating, woman penetrated–a tool of the patriarchy and therefore exists almost solely to demean and exploit women. Given the way Dworkin writes, this is not a difficult misreading to come to, especially for college sophomores who are encountering her ideas for the first time, and so when my students asked me whether Intercourse should indeed be read that way, I suggested we discuss the following quote from the section called Occupation/Collaboration: “The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people–physically occupied inside, internally invaded–be free [...]?”

Easy to misinterpret and dismiss–after all, how can a woman who willingly has intercourse be understood as having been occupied and invaded, with all the connotations those words carry of warfare and colonization?–Dworkin’s question is less about any given woman’s personal experience of intercourse than it is about the nature of female identity. For while a clear distinction exists in most people’s imagination between a woman’s experience of rape and her experience of the kind of intercourse to which the term lovemaking is meant to refer, focusing on that distinction tends to obscure the fact that heterosexual intercourse is also generally understood in our culture–perhaps along with menstruation–to be the defining moment of femaleness and womanhood. More to the point, and this is what I understand the crux of Dworkin’s question to be, if a woman cannot be understood to exist fully as a woman until her body has been “physically occupied inside, internally invaded” by a man, then it doesn’t really matter how tender and/or loving and/or intensely pleasurable intercourse is for her. The freedom of her body was already compromised, by definition, not merely before she had sex, but even before she was born. If, in other words, intercourse is what makes a woman a woman, or, perhaps more precisely, if what makes a woman a woman in patriarchal culture is her capacity for being genitally penetrated–which means intercourse is both an expression and confirmation of her gender–then the question arises whether the difference between the kind of intercourse most people describe as lovemaking and the kind we call rape can accurately be described as one of kind. Maybe, Dworkin is asking, this difference is more properly described as one of degree, since in each case a woman is fulfilling the mandate of her socially prescribed gender identity.

I’d come to class prepared with references to passages in my students’ own essays that helped to demonstrate the validity of Dworkin’s question, but something in their eyes told they’d already gotten it and that to say more than what I have paraphrased above would have been both superfluous and self-serving. For now matter how important I thought Dworkin’s question was, it would never mean the same thing to me as it did to them, and so I fell silent, letting the room fill with the gap of otherness that had opened between us; and it was in this silence, watching the faces of these two women who had placed their trust in me both as a teacher and, given what they wanted to write about, as a man, that my imagination made the leap that was the starting point of this essay: Had I lived a different life–that of my parents, for example, who married when they were in their very early twenties–one of those two women was young enough that she could’ve been my daughter. I don’t mean that I felt fatherly towards her, or that she saw me as a father figure, but this abrupt awareness of the age difference between us brought me back to a conversation my wife and I had been having about whether or not to conceive a second child. I thought about how, if that still-hypothetical offspring turned out to be a girl, she would grow up–I would have to raise her–in a world where the validity of Dworkin’s question inhered, inescapably, in the fact of her body. I thought about how I would, from the first moments of her life, face this daughter across the same terrain of difference that was separating me from my students, and I thought about how, precisely because she would be my daughter, that silence would not be an option.

“And so what,” I almost asked myself out lout, “what will I say to her?”

 Cross-posted at It’s All Connected.

This week is the annual women’s refuge appeal week. Women’s refuges are desperately under-funded, the Wellington refuge gets less than half its money from government (and the amount they get is less than what Clint Rickards got paid for doing nothing last year). So I spent a few hours on the streets of Wellington trying to get money out of people. I quite like collecting, but not as much as I like collecting money

Starbucks was offering free drinks to collectors - I feel the same way about this as I do about the clothing industry raising money for refuge:

But I still took my free tea.

I expected more women than men to give money, but I would have expected two-thirds, or three-quarters. I’m obviously a ridiculous optimist, because one in ten of the donors was a man, maybe even one in fifteen.

I started to wonder about the women giving money. Was it solidarity that made them give? Or someone they knew? An insurance policy? A down-payment? Or just imagination?

Why did so many men not have this imagination? Why weren’t they putting money in the buckets for the women they knew? Their mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends who could need refuge?

I started muttering this at men who walked by without giving money - “You’re the problem, not me, not her, you, and you won’t even give me a dollar.”

There were some good experiences. I noticed a young guy hanging out in a T-shirt that said “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours” and rolled my eyes. But twenty minutes later him and his friend came and both gave some money.

My friend told me a story from collecting last year. A man gave twenty dollars, he looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. Later he came back and asked her if she wanted a drink, because it was cold, and gave another ten dollars. Then he said “I just want you to know that not all sons turn out to be like their fathers.”

That’s where the hope is, I guess. The possibility of change.

When I was walking to the movie theatre we were talking about what they would include and one of my friend’s said ‘don’t spoil me’ (and then claimed he was too busy to read the books, but apparently has plenty of time for the movies). Just to be clear that this post has spoilers for the movie, and every book that has been published.

The movie theatre had big stickers on the back of every fourth seat saying “1 in 4 women and children are the victims of domestic violence.” Apart from my dislike of running together ‘women and children’ I thought that was an awesome way of representing the effect of violence within families. This week is refuge appeal week so give money if you can (last year the government gave more money to Clint Rickards than Wellington Women’s Refuge, so it’d be good if other people could pitch in).

That wasn’t the only good thing to happen before Harry Potter started, because they showed a Northern Lights preview (well they’re calling it a Golden Compass preview, but whatever). I’m terribly excited.

I think the Harry Potter books are getting worse, and the movies are getting better, as the series progresses. I think this might be related. In the later books J K Rowling has no page limit, and doesn’t have to listen to an editor so they just sprawl. She’s particularly prone too over-foreshadowing, and overlengthy explanations by Dumbledore at the end of each book. I think all the unnecessary bits in the books make it easier to make a movie (even as the books are getting longer), as the movie can tailor itself to the essential story (which I think J K Rowling has been two drafts away from in every book after the third).

I’m not suggesting that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the greatest movie playing, but it is very engaging. David Yates was previously a TV director, and I think in some ways this services . In TV you are servicing characters and a story first and foremost. Previously directors (particularly Chris Columbus who directed the first two) were far too interested in set pieces to do either of those. Alfonso Curon, is a brilliant director, but in Prisoner of Azkaban he was more interested in creating mood and atmosphere than characters and story.

The casting directors did very good jobs and were very lucky, because the actors’ physicality continues to work for the parts. Ginny was a walk-on part in the first movie, and would have been 9 when she was cast and that the actress has grown up in roughly the way the character in the book did.

Imelda Staunton was brilliant as Dolores Umbridge, and everything about her costumes, and design of her room emphasised her character, and made the movie. To underscore the banality of evil isn’t a particularly new point, but it was incredibly well done. The movie is worth seeing just for Dolores Umbridge’s room alone (you’ll know what I mean when you see it).

While I have an affection for J K Rowling, it’s next too impossible to put a radical reading on the Harry Potter books.* But I feel this book, in particular, has a good heart. The students getting together to fight authority is a theme that works for me, and the movie really emphasised this angle. The simple scene of Fred and George sympathising with the first year who had had the (creepy and totally sadistic) crazy cutting lines thing underscored that nicely (and their departure was spectacular. And the ending is a reiteration of ‘we’re stronger together than we are alone’, which always makes me happy.

And just to go on the record with my (rather boring) predictions for the final book: Snape isn’t evil, Dumbledore was telling him to kill him, Snape was in love with Lily and the reason Dumbledore trusts him will be something to do with that love. More than one Weasley will die in the final book. The love stories will annoy me.

Feel free to add your own thoughts about Harry Potter in general and predictions (but no spoilers, although I don’t suppose there are any).

*And don’t even get me started on the gender politics - which are made worse in the movies by upping the ways Mrs Weasley conforms to a stereotype (which is quite an accomplisment in itself).

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.

I’d like to thank everyone who has posted and commented about James and Clint Heine’s comments.

Clint Heine appears to be claiming that he thought James was talking about masturbation (he also claims to know that James was only talking about masturbation too, although I’ve no idea how Clint could know that).

He seems to think that this would mean that there was no implications of non-consensual sexual activity in what James wrote.

He’s wrong.

James does not care about me as a person, he has no knowledge of, or interest in, my desires. His prescription of a dildo - whatever he imagined was done with it, was based on him, and what he wanted, not on me. To talk about sexual acts in a way that renders women’s desire invisible and irrelevant is to promote rape culture. To talk of ‘fixing’ a woman with a sexual act and ignore her desires is to threaten rape.

I’m aware that James, and Clint had no intention of taking any action, that discussion of sexual violence is just words to them. But the effect, and the intention, is to police women’s behaviour, with threats about what will happen if we don’t conform.

I promise to get back to things that aren’t about me tomorrow. I’ve still got a report on Angela Davis’s talk to write (although I’m afflicted by a kind of curse, whereby if I ever mention that I’m planning on writing a post on this blog then it’s guaranteed that I never actually get around to writing it).

* The post that Clint Heine and James were responding to was about an Australian unionist who called a boss a thieving parasite dog, and was expelled/suspended from the Australian Labor Party because of it.

On his blog, Clint Heine and his readers discuss Maia. Responding to Heine calling Maia a “parasite” and suggesting she’s mentally ill, “James” wrote:

Nothing a big black dildo won’t fix……

To which Heine responded,

James…..!!! Nice suggestion, go over there and tell her that :)

I’m not going to bother rebutting anything Heine and his cohorts wrote; they’re not human beings, they’re maggots and worms, and I don’t debate maggots and worms. And yes, I realize Heine and his maggoty friends doubtless consider such comments “jokes,” because they’re too stupid to know what an actual sense of humor looks like.

(I do wonder if James or Heine could look his mother, sister or girlfriend in the face and tell her “Today I said a woman on welfare whose politics I disagree with could be fixed by raping her with a big black dildo. Don’t you agree that’s how these women should be fixed, Mom?” Maybe if they imagined that they could begin to develop a vestigial, wormish understanding of what’s wrong with their “joke.” But maybe not.)

But it’s worth noting that Clint Heine (his real name) has been in a position of leadership in New Zealand politics (he used to head up the youth wing of the ACT party, which is the most right-wing party in NZ).

And it’s worth noting that there’s nothing unusual about James’ and Heine’s remarks. It’s not uncommon for female bloggers, especially feminist bloggers, to have to deal with such oh-so-hilarious rape threat jokes. The purpose of these “jokes” is to remind uppity women (especially poor women and women of color) of their place. (The pathetic nature of men who feel driven to put uppity women in their place is, I trust, obvious.)

James and Heine themselves are so meager and unimportant they barely exist. But they and their fellow maggots create an environment in the blogosphere that women have to deal with; that is important, and it’s unfair, and it’s bigoted, and it fucking sucks.

UPDATE: Maia comments.

[This post is a collection of comments I've read on "Alas" and on "Pandagon," which I thought it would be worthwhile to gather together. The first section is a comment I wrote on this thread in 2005. The other comments quoted are individually credited and linked. --Amp]

Many Men’s Rights Advocates (MRAs) demand that existing Domestic Violence (DV) shelters do more to assist male victims. Most Domestic Violence (DV) shelters feel that they can’t take in men because they can’t both allow in men and provide for the security of their female clients.

Some DV shelters have hotel vouchers or other such programs to help battered men; some don’t. I really think that if the MRAs would approach DV shelters with a spirit of cooperation –”we’d like you to have a hotel voucher program to help battered men, and we have a source of fundraising to make it happen, so that helping battered men doesn’t mean taking resources away from battered women” — they’d get a better response.

However, most MRAs are belligerent towards DV shelters and the people who work there. Most DV shelters are already turning away battered women and making due with insufficient staff due to lack of resources; into that situation comes stumbling some MRA folks who know nothing about DV shelters, who say, in essence, “You lying feminist bitches owe us help, and we don’t give a damn what it costs your current clients.” Is it any surprise that no fruitful relationships have resulted?

Despite this, as I said, many DV shelters do have voucher programs to help the rare battered men who needs help — because contrary to MRA mythology, most feminists aren’t man-hating monsters. But that there is DV help for men available is no credit to MRAs. Nor has any MRA organization, that I know of, made a point of seeking out those DV shelters that do help men and helping them with fundraising or other needs.

Ironically, if the MRAs were right - if there were as great a need for battered men’s shelters as there is for battered women’s shelters - then it would be a viable idea for MRAs to build their own shelter network, modeled on the work that feminists did building DV shelters. Fortunately, however, men aren’t that bad off, and in most areas of the country men’s shelters would die out for a lack of men needing their services.

For that reason - and here I disagree with many other feminists — helping the few battered men who need shelter-style help will probably have to be something added on to what already existing DV agencies do (conditional on doing so in a way that doesn’t take resources away from female victims). There simply isn’t enough “business” for a separate men’s network to be viable, and it’s morally necessary to help the (relatively rare) male victims, just as it is to help female victims.

But it’s not fair to demand that DV shelters divert already insufficient resources from battered women. If MRAs want existing DV shelters to expand what they’re doing to help men, then they’ll have to start working with existing DV workers in a respectful, reasonable fashion, including working on establishing grants to allow existing DV shelters to voluntarily add on or expand help for men. And I haven’t seen any sign that MRAs are willing to do that. (For more on what MRAs aren’t doing — at least, not that I’m aware of — see this comment by Robert.)

I thought this discussion of help for abused men, from a comments on Pandagon, was interesting. First, a comment by Jesurgislac:

I agree that the lack of support for male victims of domestic violence is an issue. But it’s an issue best resolved by the folks complaining that there is no support for male victims of domestic violence turning to and setting up that support: helplines for men to call, appropriate support for men wanting to leave abusive partners. Because men tend to be in a very different financial/social position from women, whether men suffering from domestic violence are in same-sex or mixed-sex relationships, it’s unlikely that the same support provided for women would be at all appropriate — not to mention, that what’s needed is more support, not less.

To give an example: suppose a man in a heterosexual relationship finds that whenever his wife loses her temper, she punches him. Her blows are not life-threatening and never do worse than bruise. Talking to her about this gets him nowhere - she’s either angry or dismissive. He’s embarrassed to talk about it with anyone else he knows, because it just doesn’t fit his world view or anyone else’s he knows - women aren’t supposed to hurt their husbands. He thinks about divorce, but on the surface they’re happily married, and the thought of having to admit to a lawyer that he wants out because his wife leaves nasty bruises almost every week is just too humiliating. Besides, what would he tell the children? They see their mother hitting their father, but they have no idea it actually hurts him.

I wouldn’t say this man doesn’t deserve help: he does. But it would be inappropriate to offer him the same help as offered to a woman who’s being beaten by her husband: because he doesn’t need that kind of help. He needs help specifically tailored towards a man being abused in a hetero relationship….

Which was followed by this response from Paul:

Male privilege is also a powerful trap keeping men in abusive relationships. After all, how could a (mere) woman, who might not even be able to inflict lasting physical damage, be abusing a real man? Any man who considers himself abused must therefore be a wimp and a coward, and if he’d just suck it up everything would be fine. I think men have to figure out for themselves how to help other abused men, from consciousness-raising to the kinds of counseling and physical help that might be appropriate to dismantling the structures that make “traditional” relationships ripe for abuse. Right now we’re barely at the Masculine Mystique stage.

In 2005, in a comment that’s unfortunately no longer online, Bean wrote::

I have written before about DV shelters for men.

The shelter I currently work for was founded and started by feminists. We help women who are in need of confidential shelter due to domestic or sexual violence.

We don’t have any sort of “all men are evil” mentality. In fact, for many years our Children’s Program Coordinator was a man — he left recently to pursue his Master’s in Counseling, and we were all very, very sad to see him go. While many of the women were a bit startled (and a few were uncomfortable) with a man working there, for the most part it was an extremely positive experience, especially for the children who were able to have a healthy relationship with a man. While that particular man has left, we do still have a couple of men who volunteer there on a regular basis. They are great, and very much welcome.

However, we are able to do a much better screening/interviewing process for staff and volunteers than we are for residents. And, sadly, most abusers (men and women) are upset (to say the least) about losing control over their victims. They do everything in their power to find them. Abusers have been known to call the shelters looking for their victims, coming up with all sorts of stories (including claims of being police, family, and even victims, themselves). If we were to accept men, we would be greatly increasing the chances of allowing an abuser access to their victims and knowledge of where the confidential location is.

Also, staff and volunteers are not living at the shelter — which brings up a number of other issues.

Now, we do have times when a female resident is the victim of a female abuser — a partner, a family member, etc. There are also times that a male abuser could ask a female family member or friend to seek shelter in order to help him find his victim. And because of this, we have to take a lot of precautions when accepting women into the shelter, as well. Honestly, the vast majority of our residents have male abusers — so this isn’t as big of a concern. But it’s one we do take seriously. And women who are abusive to other residents (whether they knew them previously or not) are not allowed to stay at the shelter.

Allowing all men access to the shelter puts all of the residents, staff, and volunteers at risk, not just the victim of a particular abuser. The longer a shelter is in one location, the harder it is to maintain our confidentiality. We are at constant risk of abusers (past and present) of locating us and doing damage — to the shelter, our residents, and to ourselves. That’s why we have a number of safety precautions, one of which is not allowing men in as residents.

Now, some shelters take this further than others. Some shelters do not allow teen boys to stay at the shelter. The shelter I work at once had that policy, too — but we changed it several years ago. We now allow boys up through the age of 17 (so long as they are coming in with their mother). While I am extremely glad that we have this policy, and would have a hard time working at a shelter who didn’t allow this (knowing how many more women would have to be turned away), I have also seen the problems this can create. We have at times, for example, had teen boys (as children of the victim) who are older than some of our residents (for example, a 17-year-old boy with his mother and a 16-year-old teen mom). In addition, some of these teen boys look and act like men, and some are already exhibiting abusive behavior — this can be extremely intimidating to the women there. We deal with these cases on a case-by-case basis, doing whatever we feel will be best for the mom and the shelter.

When we have the funding for it, we will voucher a hotel room for a male victim. Of course, we have almost no funding, and have already had to shut down programs for women because of this. We have extremely limited staff and resources as it is.

In my time working for various DV agencies, I have had very, very few legitimate calls from men seeking help. And even then, most of them did not want to come to shelter, and actually were just calling to find resources specifically for male victims (and I referred them to a couple of those resources in our area — yes, they are there, although admittedly, there aren’t enough).

I just spoke to Bean; she wanted to add that one shelter in our area — Monika’s House in Washington County — provides shelter to battered men (as well as women). Bean’s current employer makes a conscious effort to use language in their materials that applies to male as well as female victims.

In a later comment in the same discussion, Silverside wrote:

In my opinion, the entire emergency shelter concept, as a concept, has its ups and downs. It’s good insofar as there is supportive staff right there at the location 24/7, and that it’s easier to conduct group support meetings. There is often better security for the inhabitants, through sometimes not. But I have often heard it said by shelter inhabitants (not to criticize the fine work that Bean and other shelter workers provide), that living in emergency shelter, like living in any emergency shelter, means losing your privacy, having to live by rules that often seem intruding and coldly institutional, and leaving the comforts and familiarity of your own home and belongings behind. Living with other people in crisis is not always conducive to your own mental health either. Sometimes I think there is something to be said for letting victims stay in their own homes and remove the abusers to another location. I have heard of victims returning home, partly because their children were doing so poorly in an unfamiliar environment, that they figured they might as well go back home and deal with the crap that’s familiar.

Frankly, if I were in crisis (think Katrina here), I’d much prefer a motel room where there’s peace and quiet than a noisy emergency shelter with other people’s traumatized kids running around. So I wouldn’t be so quick to buy into me-tooism. Vouchers are a very workable solution in areas where there is a small population in question, whether that’s in remote, very low-populated rural areas, or among specialized relatively small sub-populations of homeless persons, such as men, heterosexual or homosexual, who are rendered homeless and without resources, due to domestic violence.

It should be noted here, that abused women with resources -– better paying jobs, family resources, etc. — generally do choose other options other than emergency shelter. It is generally the solution of last resort. That’s one reason why men, who tend to have more money relative to women, would seldom choose to go into a shelter. You would not only have to have a male who was beaten by an intimate partner and afraid to stay in his home, but so devoid of resources (unemployed?) that he couldn’t go elsewhere. Apart from who hit who and how hard, the domination and control cycles that battered women experience also affects their ability to earn a living and be economically independent, something I have never seen claimed about abused men.

(In that discussion, Bean responded to Silverside, and in essence agreed with what Silverside wrote.)

I’m not making the comments feminist-only. Comments discussing the best ways to help abused men are welcome; comments about how eeeevvvvvvviilllll feminists are, either said explicitly or implied, are subject to being deleted without warning.

On Pandagon, Amanda relates what she calls some good news: Egypt has outlawed FGM.

From the article:

Officially the practice, which affects both Muslim and Christian women in Egypt and goes back to the time of the pharoahs, was banned in 1997 but doctors were allowed to operate “in exceptional cases”.

On Thursday, Health Minister Hatem al-Gabali decided to ban every doctor and member of the medical profession, in public or private establishments, from carrying out a clitoridectomy, a ministry press official told AFP.

On the Pandagon thread, a commenter called Dan writes: “Obviously, banning FGM is always a step in the right direction…”

I am not convinced that this is obvious. Nor am I necessarily convinced that this outcome is good news.

Some Background
One thing that one learns in the study of anthropology is that culture is a holistic entity. That means that you can’t split it up into tiny bits and interact with those bits piece by piece. You can’t hold up — say — dowry burnings and say “this is what dowry burning is, this is what it means” outside the context of the rest of the culture, anymore than you could hold up “I Love Lucy” to people who didn’t understand Western gender roles or Western materialism or a Western sense of humor and expect them to understand it.

Female genital surgeries (FGS) are the same way; they exist within a cultural context that gives them meaning. The cultural contexts are different, so the meanings are different.

Let me take a brief digression to deal with the issue of terminology. I’m going to call the procedures FGS, which is the term that an anthropologist friend of mine favors when he teaches Intro to Anth. FGS is not a perfect term. However, it is an attempt to ameliorate some of the problems with other terms. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a term that many African women, and others, object to as stifling conversation because the term itself is alienating and inflammatory. Female circumcision is inaccurate, and leads to a false equivalency between male and female circumcision since it creates an ersatz linguistic link between the two procedures.* FGS is an attempt at a middle ground.

Female genital surgeries exist in many different forms, in many different cultural contexts. Here are some of the physical manifestations of the surgery:

• Nicking of the clitoris or removing the tip of the clitoris - relatively unusual
• Clitorodectomy - the most common form of FGS, involving removal of the clitoris. Often practiced along with the removal of the labia minora. May or may not be accompanied by a procedure intended to kill the clitoral nerve, such as pressing hot needles into the affected area.
• Infibulation - the removal of the clitoris, labia minora, and labia majora. The inner walls of the vagina are scraped and then sewn together, leaving a hole as small as a woman’s pinky finger. This procedure can make menstruation and urination very difficult and lead to an increased probability of health complications like uterine prolapse. Tough, inelastic scar tissue is unyielding, making birth a dangerous process. Infibulated women must be cut open for sex and birth, and are often resewn afterward.

FGS are also done for a variety of reasons. Each culture that practices FGS will be practicing its own variation — in terms of what the surgery consists of, and why it is done. For this reason, it’s very difficult to talk about FGS as a monolith. And there’s a good reason for that. FGS are not a monolith.

For instance, it’s not uncommon to encounter feminists arguing that FGM is done to eliminate female sexual pleasure, or to prevent women from cheating. FGS are not done solely for either of these reasons, although they are some of the reasons stated by some cultures.

For the Kikuyu in Kenya, who practice clitorodectomy, FGS is practiced as a rite of passage in order to create a more visible separation between men and women. The clitoris, or masculine part, is removed to make the woman more womanly (conversely, the foreskin which is seen as being like the labia, is removed to make men more manly). Therefore, any attempts to eliminate FGS among the Kikuyu will have to react to these cultural motivations.

It would be inappropriate for the same solutions to be attempted among the Kikuyu as would be used in infibulation-practicing East African countries like Ethiopia and Somalia, countries that are very patriarchal and have clear interests in establishing inheritance laws. Unlike the FGS practiced by the Kikuyu, Ethiopian and Somalian infibulation appears to arise from an interest in protecting paternity rights (Carolyn Martin Shaw). They want to make sure that inheritance goes to genetic sons. Women - often upper-class women - bear the brunt of this (as they did in Europe with chastity belts, in the middle east with seclusion, in China with footbinding) because the patriarchy (supported by both men and women) views them as vessels for heirs. Reducing their ability to become pregnant by men who are not their husbands makes it more likely that inheritance will go to genetic heirs. Cultural practices grow around this desire. Later, these practices are fetishized.

Clitorodectomy and infibulation are both practiced by some cultures that believe the touch of a woman’s uncircumcized genitals will sap a man of his ability to hold an erection, cause hydrocephally, and/or kill any infant the woman bears. This myth is enduring. You may think that decades of interaction with white women who are uncircumcized and yet able to bear children would have shaken the myth, but this is often not the case. White women often choose not to bear children or to bear very few children, which means that white women are often seen as infertile. Thus it is possible for African women from FGS-practicing cultures to interact with uncircumcized white women and still believe that circumcision is necessary for fertility.

The point of all this is: FGS is not something that exists in isolation. It exists for particular reasons. You don’t get rid of those reasons by changing the law. All you do is create a situation in which the reasons still exist (need for a rite of passage, to ensure paternity, to ensure fertility), but the traditional method of meeting those needs has been outlawed.

Laws Against FGS Analogized to Laws Against Rape

On a Feministe thread about the ban, Jill writes in defense of the law. “I don’t think anyone is saying FGM is going to disappear,” she writes, acknowledging that the ban will not be a cure. She goes on to say, “But it is important that they’ve outlawed it, since that reflects a profound social shift, and it allows people to be prosecuted for it… Rape laws don’t get rid of rape, but I’d rather have them than not.”

I think Jill is erring in comparing FGS to rape. FGS is a culturally sanctioned, overt part of how the society functions. Rape is at best a covert part of our cultural function. While it holds up patriarchy by limiting women’s movements, it also subverts patriarchy because it is a threat to paternal property. FGS is not like that.

In my opinion, a better analogy would be to compare FGS to - say — capture marriage as its practiced in Nepal, in which a young man kidnaps a young woman and marries her by force. To western eyes, these marriages look superficially abhorrent (and they’re certainly not 100% good). But we’re missing the subtleties of the capture marriages. These marriages are often arranged before hand and approved by both families as a way of allowing a young couple to marry when they do not have the financial resources to put on a huge wedding. In many (I think most) capture marriages, the woman is not actually in danger, or experiencing surprise; she feigns both ritualistically. However, the bride is not always told of the capture marriage beforehand. Capture marriages are a culturally sanctioned process which serves particular culturally sanctioned purposes (allowing a way for the children of families who have fallen on hard times to marry), and which puts the interest of families above the interests of the woman.

It would be possible to make laws against capture marriage, in ostensible defense of the woman’s independence. However, the kinds of laws that tend to get enacted in situations like these are made with a western gaze. We see the surface effect of a capture marriage and apply it to known situations — the biblical Sabine women of Roman mythology, for instance. We aren’t looking at the reasons why capture marriages exist, or how they are rooted in the culture. Addressing the symptom by making capture marriages illegal may actually make the situation worse for women.

And this is what we have seen, time and time again, with regard to legal remedy for FGS.

A Brief Overview of Some Historical Consequences of Outlawing FGS

Missionaries who got down to Africa really didn’t like FGS. Well, I don’t either. Many of them did what seems like the logical thing to do when you are in ostensible control of a group of people who are doing something that you think is a major violation of human rights, moral decency, and God’s law. They decided to ban it.

Early bans had a number of consequences (not all of which occurred in all places).

• Circumcision began to be performed on younger and younger girls. Because it was less likely that missionaries or western colonial agents would be messing in the lives of infant or very young girls, and because infants and very young girls would be less likely to understand what was going on well enough to discuss it with missionaries or western colonial agents, it made sense to do it on younger girls. (Here, again, we reach the problem with discussing FGS as a monolith. Some cultures started out performing FGS on younger girls. But many didn’t, and many of those started performing the surgeries on younger and younger girls.)

  Why is this a problem for women? Among other things, it decreases the likelihood of sexual function. Among the Kikuyu of Kenya, circumcision rituals were proceded with kinds of genital stimulation and body play that appear to have been intended to teach women how to orgasm once they had been cut. Adolescent girls and boys would wrap their bodies in tight strips of leather and rub up on one another. This kind of all-body stimulation is likely to have been instructive in helping women adjust to the altered physical sensations of a circumcized body. When circumcisions are done at a younger age, these kinds of rituals are likely to decline or disappear altogether.

  Women are also much more likely to acheive sexual pleasure after circumcision if they have orgasmed before circumcision. This is, obviously, more likely to be the case in girls who are adolescents than girls who are toddlers or infants.

  Circumcisions and younger ages also contribute to:

• The destruction of social practices that surround circumcision, such as coming of age rituals, that provide context and meaning to the procedure. These contexts may not have anything to do with sexual pleasure (which is why I’m making this its own category), but are likely to have to do with community building and the function of a healthy culture. Destroying these rituals, but KEEPING the circumcision, is the opposite of good. The better option, of course, is to figure out how to keep the rituals while changing their object (as some activists have worked on doing).
• Circumcision was often driven underground, to be done in private, furtive spaces, which makes it difficult for the procedures to be done in clean, healthy ways that minimize risk to the girls.

Perhaps the most important effect of banning FGS is that it created a dichotomy, the effects of which activists are still dealing with today. It underlined the idea that female genital surgeries are African, and not practicing female genital surgeries is American. Not to practice female genital surgery is to capitulate to colonialists. To practice FGS is to be genuinely African.

When Western feminists insist on framing the discourse about FGS on our terms, we make this problem worse. When we emphasize statements like, “African women are being denied sexual pleasure,” as if it were the worst part of the situation, we grind home this dichotomy.

It has been repeatedly proven to be much more effective to talk about FGS in terms of women’s and children’s health. FGS kills women and children. According to a study linked by Feministe last year, women who’ve undergone infibulation are 50% more likely to die or to lose their infants than women who have not. Women who’ve undergone clitorodectomy are 15% more likely to die or to lose their infants in childbirth than women who have not.

This is the kind of information that tends to persuade women, because it is culturally situated. It addresses what they are worried about. Sexual pleasure tends to be coded as decadent and western. It is therefore not only not of concern, but can be specifically opposed. It’s therefore not always useful to talk to African women about it. Our insistence on framing the narrative in our terms can damage African women’s actual lives.

Because while sexual pleasure is a big deal, in my personal opinion, poor childbirth outcomes are probably a bigger deal. Spreading HIV through the use of dirty razor blades is a bigger deal. Injury and lameness are bigger deals. Uterine prolapse is a bigger deal. Death is a bigger deal.

There are real world harms to the ways in which westerners have typically framed debates about FGS. The dichotomy I mentioned earlier, where FGS is coded as genuine, African, and anti-colonial, gained teeth during the pan-African movement. Since that time, in some places, FGS has become a marker of cultural superiority. Cultures that did not practice FGM have taken it up, in order to emulate other cultures that are considered more prestigious. And other cultures that did not practice FGM have taken it up, specifically in order to show that they are African and anti-colonial. Our attempts to legally ban FGS have not lessened cultural attachment. They’ve increased it.

The Egyptian Ban, in Particular
Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say something about the latest crime to become a media circus.  I’m sure by now most of you have heard about the murder of Jessie Davis, who was almost 9 months pregnant and was likely killed in front of her two year old child by the child’s father.  Since Davis and Cutts were a black/white couple and I am someone who studies black/white interracial relationships and who is in a black/white interracial relationship, I know many people are wondering what I think about this case.  I’m not here to offer any opinions on the particulars of the case¹ , but I do want to talk about the media coverage of the case.

I went around to a few blogs, and I visited AOL Blackvoices and a couple white supremacist message boards to see what they were saying, and quite frankly it was horrible.  Many people were saying that the victim deserved it; that she was “white trash;” that her child was ugly; and that she was a sleazy, homewrecking whore.  Not surprisingly, the accused murderer, who is the poster boy for anti-black stereotypes, was also being trashed as a violent womanizer who lusted after white women.  I can’t tell you how many racist and misogynistic comments I read; and not surprisingly the white supremacists were giddy over this case.² 

Terrence Says has a reasonable post, which anonymous bigots tried to take over in the comment thread, and in his post, Terrence engages with the question that many folks are thinking–is the media circus surrounding this case about race? Terrence cites a recent case of a white man who killed his white wife and three children:

Today, like Bobby Cutts, Jr. who was arrested in Ohio, Christopher Vaughn was also arrested. Christopher Vaughn was arrested two hours prior to the funeral of his family in St. Charles County, Missouri (suburban St. Louis) where the family originated; yet, so far, there has not been a mention of Vaughn’s arrest that I have been able to observe on the weekend news shows.

As sad and tragic as the Jessie Davis story is, I can’t help but wonder if this story had involved a missing pregnant black or Latina woman if it would have the same media traction.

Well several of the anonymous commenters went crazy, saying that the case received so much attention because Davis was pregnant, because Cutts was a cop, because the child was left in the house alone, and everything but race.  I certainly agree that all of those things make the story more sensational, but I really can’t fathom that it is much more sensational than the Vaugh family case mentioned above.  However, I find myself having a slight disagreement with Terrence.  I agree that white women victims get much more attention than Black, Asian, Latino, and American Indian women, and I agree that race is a big factor in the media attention the case has gotten, but I would be more specific than Terrence.

It’s about interracial sex.  Interracial crimes make big sensational news stories, but crimes that involve interracial sexuality arouse the deepest passions of American bigotry.  The OJ Simpson case, the Duke Rape, the Kobe Bryant rape case, and now this one–they all have tremendous sexual overtones.  For a long time, I was surprised at how much attention the Duke case received, because I was focused on the fact that the accuser in the case was black, but I missed the mark.  It’s more than the races of the people involved; if the crime is perceived as involving interracial sex, something snaps in people, suddenly they perk up.

The truth of the matter is that the US is a culture obsessed with interracial sex, but nobody will say this in polite company.  During the slave era and the Jim Crow era, white people spoke with repulsion and disgust at interracial sex even though many white men were routinely engaging in sexual encounters with black women. In the colorblind era, people are still obsessed with interracial sex.  However, they do not publicly say, “Wow, interracial sex is: bizarre, disgusting, exciting, adventurous, morally repugnant,” and so on.  That’s part of the reason nobody in the mainstream polite media is going to openly say–”Damn that negro had two white baby mama’s.  He must have really been packing some heat below the belt.  Why else would those white women be interested in him?” ³  Nobody is going to say, “Those white women are white trash, whores for sleeping with this black guy.  They probably only did it for his big dick.”  Nobody is going to say, “Why can’t these black men just take care of their kids and stopping hopping from bed to bed.  Only a white women with no self esteem will get with a guy like that.”  They are not saying these dispargaing comments publicly, but when they get home to their families and friends, they are saying it.  When they go on line to search for interracial porn, they are thinking it.  When they can leave anonymous comments on blogs, they are expressing it.

I think my traffic at this site is evidence for the American obsession with race and sex.  Within the last week here are a select few searches I have received:

• black men impregnating white women stories
• savages on blondes
• Biracial family pictures black and white
• BLACK ATHLETE MARRYING WHITE WOMEN
• Black men breeding white girls
• black negro slave woman naked pictures
• black women with white men in adult movies
• differences between white and black women’s breasts
• blacks in bed sexing
• george lucas in love black women
• how do you feel about interracial relationship

And this was a really slow week, I’ve gotten at least 100 searches over the past few months for “savages on blondes,” which was a popular racist pornographic website featuring black men who act like “savages” who want to have sex with white women.  I mentioned that site exactly one time on this blog, and I still get people looking for it. 

For some reason, people think interracial sex is exotic and daring, particularly when it involves Black men and white women and Asian women and white men.  Numerous people, who clearly have no random sample to draw from believe that race is correlated with penis size.  They believe race is correlated with a person’s level of sexual desire.  They believe people who engage in interracial sex are deviant, rebellious, daring, gross, odd, oversexed, and ugly. But, most of them will not admit it publicly.  Instead they go home and post horrible messages discussion boards. (Probably while masturbating to interracial porn.)  They try their best to hide their discomfort, but most interracial couples can see how the stares they get in public often belie the facade of tolerance.

When it comes to interracial sexuality, the US is still not ready to come to grips with our racism, and the discomfort with the intersection of race and sexuality fuels the public obession with many interracial crimes.

NOTE TO READERS: I know this thread is going to be an ultra-sensitive subject, and white supremacist trolls will likely be coming out of the woodwork, so I am limiting this thread to anti-racists and racial abolitionists only.  Moreover, this is not a thread to debate the merits of any of the cases mentioned in the text, so let’s focus on the larger issues.  Finally, anyone who leaves bigoted white supremacist comments will be banned immediately.

Amending The Note To Readers to include feminist posters as well.  So the thread is opened to anti-racists (or racial abolitionists) and feminists only.

1. I also want to say that my heart goes out to the family of Jessie Davis and her child.  I hope they are able to get justice in this case. (back)
2. I have a policy of not linking to organized white supremacist sites, but you can check out the big ones to see what they are saying. (back)
3. I don’t know if his wife is white or not, so I can’t comment on the third “baby mama.” (back)

Genarlow Wilson, the teenage boy who was sentenced to ten years in prison for consensual¹ oral sex with another teenager (at the time, he was 17 and the girl was 15, which is “aggravated child molestation” according to Georgia law), had his sentence thrown out by a judge who called his sentence “a grave miscarriage of justice.” But the Attorney General of Georgia has appealed, meaning that for now Wilson remains in prison.

Wilson’s long minimum sentence stems from the fact that Georgia’s laws, at the time of Wilson’s conviction, called for a harsh 10-year minimum sentence for “aggravated child molestation” (which includes oral sex). If Wilson had had coital sex with the 15-year-old, rather than getting a blow job, he would have been sentenced to one year instead of ten years. I suspect the harsher penalties for non-coital sex were based on the association of non-coital sex with homosexuality; so although Wilson is being punished for straight sex, he may be a victim of homophobia.

It’s also hard not to suspect that the system would have found a way to be more merciful — or the Attorney General would have given this appeal a pass — if Wilson weren’t Black.

One last disturbing note about this case: Wilson was also acquitted of raping a different girl at the same party. Of course it’s impossible to be 100% certain, but from what ABC reported, it sounds to me like Wilson probably is a rapist, despite the acquittal.

In a portion of a tape obtained by “Primetime,” Wilson, then 17 and an honor student and star athlete who was homecoming king, is seen having intercourse with a 17-year-old girl, who was seen earlier on the bathroom floor. During the sex act, she appears to be sleepy or intoxicated but never asks Wilson to stop. Later on in the tape, she is seen being pulled off the bed.

Other portions of the tape show a second girl, who was 15 and later said she did not drink that night. She was recorded having oral sex with several boys in succession, including Wilson.

The following morning, Wilson got a phone call that would change his life. He learned from a friend that the 17-year-old had gone to the police to report that she’d been raped.

“I was, like, ‘What? When was this happening? Did this happen at the same party I was at?’” Wilson said. “It was shocking to me.”

Authorities believed the 17-year-old alleged rape victim and said she was too intoxicated to consent to any sexual acts, which is what Georgia law requires, otherwise these acts can be considered rape.

Wilson maintained his innocence. “I know that it was consensual,” he told “Primetime.” “I wouldn’t went on with the acts if it wasn’t consensual. I’m not that kind of person. No means no.”

Five of the boys accepted plea deals, but Wilson — the only one without a police record — held out. [...] Jurors voted to acquit Wilson of raping the 17-year-old.

“I mean it wasn’t even an hour,” said jury forewoman Marie Manigault. “We immediately saw the tape for what it was. We went back and saw it again and saw what actually happened and everybody immediately said not guilty.”

Notice that Wilson’s defense — that he understands that “no means no” — is exactly the kind of thinking that leads a lot of date rapists to think their rapes of semi-conscious victims are justified. “She didn’t say no,” in their minds, is enough to make the event “not rape”; that she actively say yes is not required, in this view.

Unfortunately, that belief is held not just by a lot of date-rapists, but by a lot of people everywhere, which is (perhaps) why the jury found acquitting Wilson of rape so easy. My view is that when someone is nearly asleep during sex with a half-dozen boys and men, and when she’s so out of it that she has to be pulled off the bed (presumably because she wasn’t able to get up by herself), and then she says that she didn’t consent — that’s rape.

EDITED TO ADD: Just to be clear, folks, I am in no way claiming that punishing Wilson for consensual sex is okay because in a separate incident he probably raped someone. Obviously, I don’t want the law to work that way. Sorry if my post was unclear on this point.

1. According to Wikipedia, the girl herself has repeatedly said that the oral sex was consensual. (back)

From the Washington Post:

Durham District Attorney Michael B. Nifong, under fire from the North Carolina State Bar for his handling of the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case last year, appeared in court today to defend his own conduct on grounds it was a prosecutor’s duty to pursue a case if he believed a crime had occurred.

“It is not unethical to pursue what some may see as an unwinnable case,” said Nifong’s lawyer, David Freedman, as his client sat at a table before a three-person panel of the bar’s Disciplinary Hearing Commission.

Nifong is fighting to keep his law license. The allegations him include making pretrial inflammatory statements, withholding evidence helpful to the defense and lying about it to a judge.

If it can be proven that Nifong withheld evidence and lied to the judge, he should be disbarred and, ideally, put behind bars.

The Post article makes it sound as if the state bar’s attorney, Katherine Jean, is really emphasizing the “she changed her story” angle:

At that time he learned that the accuser had already twice recanted to police and had given conflicting accounts of the number of men involved in the alleged assault, ranging from three to five to 20, Jean said.

The “she said she was raped by 20 men” claim is complete bullshit, and Jean shouldn’t be using it. The only evidence Mary Doe ever claimed that “20 men” raped her claim was a thirdhand report from a police officer who never actually spoke to her; no police officer, or other witness, has said they heard her make this claim.

Looking at this from a broader perspective, the expectation that a rape victim’s story will never change is an instance of “The Platonic Rape Victim Fallacy” - the belief that there is a single, correct fashion in which all True Rape Victims behave. If a rape victim acts in any other way — for example, in in the earliest hours after the alleged rape she fails to produce a simple, coherent, well-organized narrative when talking to police — then according to the Plationic Rape Victim Fallacy, she wasn’t raped at all.

Whether or not the Duke Lacrosse Players committed rape that night (I now believe they did not, although of course I could be mistaken), thinking that an inconsistent narrative shows no rape took place is wrong.

I’m also bothered that (again, according to the Post article, which may not be giving complete info) Jean is not attacking Nifong over the bad photo ID procedures used, an example of genuine misconduct.

(Curtsy to a comment left by Sailorman).

A NOTE ABOUT COMMENTS: With trepidation, I’m not limiting the comments here to feminists. However, obnoxious drive-by comments will not be tolerated. If you have something intelligent to say, and you can say it without being belligerent, then go ahead; otherwise, please go away.

From Scoop:

Top established Wellington fashion designers Robyn Mathieson, Ashley Fogel, and Voon will join some of the city’s most promising up-and-coming new design talent to raise money for Wellington Women’s Refuge, on Thursday June 7.

Fashion HQ will showcase Wellington fashion talent at an All-Star fashion auction on June 7. Organised by a team of Massey University public relations students, the auction will feature garments donated by deNada, Paris House and Haley Smith NZ, as well as renowned Wellington designers Fin, Robyn Mathieson, Ashley Fogel and Voon. All proceeds will be donated to Wellington Women’s Refuge.

The designers who are so generously donating their garments to a good cause, live off the labour of garment workers. In New Zealand those women would be paid near the minimum wage of $11.25 (that’s $6-8 in the US, depending on what the exchange rate is doing at the time), and when the garments are made off-shore, the women workers are paid much less than that. The people who made the clothes that were donated to Refuge wouldn’t be able to afford to leave an abusive relationship.

I don’t want to simplify the dynamics of violent relationships; I don’t think pay equity alone would end abuse, but it would make it easier for women to leave. So until they pay the women who make their clothes enough money so that the women would have no financial problems if they needed to leave a violent relationship, those designers are full of shit.

PS - I have lots more I want to write about, but am quite distracted, so I may not be posting much till the end of the week.

I attended the launch of All Our Rights - a campaign to repeal the “Homosexual Panic” defence. This defence is used by straight men who murder gay men. The argument is basically that for some straight men, the mere existence of a gay man causes the straight man to panic and beat the gay man to death. Therefore there was no intent to kill, therefore the killer deserves a lesser sentence. All Our Rights - a campaign to repeal the “Homosexual Panic” defence. This defence is used by straight men who murder gay men. The argument is basically that for some straight men, the mere existence of a gay man causes the straight man to panic and beat the gay man to death. Therefore there was no intent to kill, therefore the killer deserves a lesser sentence (No Right Turn has a good post on the campaign).

It is less than a week since Judge Michael Lance imposed no penalty on Craig Busch for assaulting his partner. The judge said that Craig Busch’s violence was the ‘human and inevitable’ response to seeing his partner in bed with another couple.

I don’t believe jail does anyone any good. I don’t support the judicial system. I’m not even really arguing for tougher sentences. If Craig Busch’s sentence was the standard sentence for assault, I wouldn’t complain.

What I am arguing against is a judicial system that openly states that some of us are not fully human and deserve violence.

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts