Ilya Somin and Mark Kleiman have been debating prison rape.

Ilya, a libertarian, argues that it’s not politically plausible for the government to help prisoners. “Government is responsive to those who have political power, and prisoners are the classic example of a group that has almost no power, and is generally unpopular with those who do. … This is an extreme case of an important broader lesson about the nature of government: it usually can’t be relied on to protect the political powerless or even the relatively weak.”

Instead, Ilya suggests two (as he emphasizes) “libertarian” measures to reduce prison rape. First, end the drug war. No more drug war means fewer people in prison, means less prison rape.

Ilya’s second suggestion is to privatize prisons. Privatized prisons means less guard unions; less guard unions might mean less lobbying for pro-imprisonment legislation; which means fewer prisoners; which means less prison rape.

Mark responds by pointing out that prison rape is much less frequent in federal prisons, which indicates that it is possible for governments to act well. Ilya rebuts Mark’s argument effectively by pointing out that the differences in who is imprisoned in Federal verus State prisons makes it unlikely that comparisons are useful; it’s plausible that there’s less sexual violence in Federal prisons because Federal prisoners are more likely to be people who committed non-violent crimes in the first place.

But Mark also points out that looking at other industries — such as the defense industries, and I’d add the health insurance companies — suggests that privatization doesn’t make lobbying less likely. (As Rj3 sarcastically comments, “Yes, the subcontracting of military services has done a great job eliminating lobbying by defense contractors.”)

Another disturbing thing about Ilya’s anti-government approach is that its seemingly regards prison rape as an inevitable and irreducible problem; we can’t stop it or reduce it, all we can do is try to send fewer people to prison in the first place. I’d certainly agree with ending the drug war, and with many other crime-reducing proposals that would result in lower prison populations. But any reduction in prison rape that comes as a result of reducing crime is just a beneficial side effect; it doesn’t relieve us of the moral responsibility to protect those who are incarcerated from rape.

Ilya writes:

Kleiman also argues that the real way to address prison rape is to improve the quality of prison management and to elect politicians who will support reform in this area. These are worthy objectives, but he does not explain how they are to be achieved given that 1) prisoners themselves have almost no political power, and 2) most voters don’t seem to care about the issue.

It’s problematic for Ilya to claim that Mark’s reforms are politically difficult to bring about and therefore not good ideas. Is there any idea that less politically possible, in the current climate, than Ilya’s proposal of “eliminating or cutting back on the War on Drugs”? Congress took the first steps — baby steps, admittedly — towards addressing prison rape just a few years ago, when it passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003. There’s a lot more to be done, but at least Mark’s approach has some demonstrated traction in Congress; the same cannot be said for Ilya’s proposal.

(Just to clarify, I agree with Ilya that we should eliminate the War on Drugs. My point is just that someone who is seriously proposing ending the War on Drugs as a way of reducing prison rape, loses the ability to credibly criticize other people for proposing solutions to prison rape that aren’t an easy sell politically.)

* * *

So how should we be fighting prison rape? There are many approaches, but here are six I’d place high on the priority list:

1) Reform laws that have made it hard or impossible for prisoners to sue for maltreatment. In particular, laws that make it financially unviable for lawyers to take prisoner cases (by limiting the amount lawyers can be paid in such cases) practically guarantee that prison authorities who are indifferent to prisoner rape will never be held accountable. (Read this post at That Lawyer Dude for further information.)

2) Research has given us a fairly good idea of which prisoners are most likely to be targets of rape, and which are the most likely rapists (see chapter IV of the Human Rights Report). As much as possible, these two groups of prisoners should not be held in the same facilities, or in the same prison blocks.

3) Double-celling — that is, cellmates — should be eliminated. Where double-celling can’t be completely eliminated, extreme care should be taken to choose cellmates who are well-matched for safety; non-violent prisoners should only be housed with other non-violent prisoners, for instance. Even in prisons which not everyone can have a single cell, those prisoners who are most likely targets of rape (genderqueer prisoners, child molesters, etc) should be given singles.

4) Current tort laws make it possible to sue prisons for maltreatment only if it can be shown that the prison was aware of the specific problem and chose to ignore it (or encourage it). This gives prison administrations a huge incentive to avoid being aware of prison rape. The law must be reformed to make prisons responsible for the safety of their prisoners without a “see no evil” excuse.

5) Guard-Independent reporting mechanisms, so that prisoners can report rape and abuse to someone other than guards. This is especially important because sometimes the people raping prisoners are guards.

6) Federal grants to help fund prison equipment and construction should be used as a carrot to encourage substantial reform; states that aren’t pro-actively acting to eliminate prison rape should lose federal funds for their prison systems and prison equipment.

(For a longer list of potential reforms, see the “recommendations” section of the Human Rights Watch report.)

* * *

Last week I did a round-up of blog posts about prison rape. Here are a few more:

Bean provides a useful overview of regulations restricting the access of male guards to female prisoners, based on this amnesty international report.

Masculinities in Media writes:

As long as power is held by one so fiercely over another, whether by men over women, or by institutions like prison over their inmates, the dynamic will be recreated in the most intimate of ways – against our bodies. Our response to rape in prison cannot be only to push for more counseling services for prisoners, or more segregated housing units, but must include questioning the way we address crime in this society, and the role of the prisons themselves in creating this crime.

Simon at Stubborn Facts comments. Be sure to read Pat in the comments, as well. From Pat’s comment:

Although a friend of mine is an executive with a private prison company, my experience with them has been that there is less oversight of violence than in state-operated prisons. The amount of supervision and regulation of private prisons required to ensure safety and prevent exploitation of a cheap labor source negates any benefit from private operations. Moreover, incarceration of criminal offenders is a “core responsibility” of the state. These aren’t janitorial services or garbage pick-up. We shouldn’t privatize prisons any more than we should privatize the police.

Finally, anyone interested in this issue should visit the Stop Prison Rape site.

“The opposite of compassion is not hatred, it’s indifference.”
–Anonymous prisoner quoted by Human Rights Watch

In response to Ezra Klein’s two posts on prison rape yesterday (which themselves relied on a 2001 Human Rights Watch report), a lot of bloggers are discussing prison rape today, and past posts are being linked again. Here are quotes from some of the blog posts I’ve been reading:

Ezra:

I understand why this is a politically tough issue: There’s no political upside to helping criminals, and the prison guard’s unions are terrifically powerful on the state level. But politically tough as it may be to address, it’s morally abhorrent to ignore. And we have to remember: Every single time we sentence a suspect to jail time, we are tacitly consenting not merely to his imprisonment, but to his savage sexual assault, with all the physical and psychological damage it will bring.

If you want to get involved, or donate money, or learn more, Stop Prisoner Rape is the leading organization on the issue. Their website is here.

New Donkey:

Simple indifference aside, there are two obvious barriers to eliminating prison rape. The first is that most of the remedies are controversial (incarcerating far fewer non-violent offenders) or very expensive (building less crowded prisons, providing much higher pay and better training and supervision of prison staff, or radically improving monitoring of inmates).

And the second barrier to change is the really dirty little non-secret underlying tolerance of prison rape: the idea that it’s an effective deterrent to criminal behavior.

This “walk the line or get raped” attitude has undeniably been prevalent on the political Right, where for years politicians have railed against so-called “country-club prisons” and suggested that inmates deserve the most barbarous conditions imaginable. (There has to be a special place in hell for conservatives who want to criminalize loving, consensual gay and lesbian relationships, while smiling upon prison rape.) But it’s also found implicit currency elsewhere, among virtually every advocacy group that wants to deter some anti-social behavior, from drunk driving to white collar crime…

Robert at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

To add briefly to the point that Ezra has made, one of the most irritating aspects of CSI (which, sadly, I have been unable to break from) is the common, almost offhand manner in which the heroes threaten suspects with the prospect of rape in prison. It suggests to me that the public at large has simply concluded that a) rape is an integral part of prison life, such that a five year prison sentence automatically includes five years of rape, and b) that anyone who goes to prison is irredeemably besmirched, and thus deserving of constant rape.

To take this a bit farther, it’s interesting to compare modern conceptions of prison (sadly or no, I’ve never seen Prison Break) with the work of Johnny Cash or Merle Haggard. For Haggard or Cash, that a poor white family would have to deal with the prison system in some fashion was simply a fact of life, even if Cash himself only spent one night behind bars. Moreover, neither Cash nor Haggard dodged the question of guilt; even if the protagonists of their songs weren’t going away for life, they were usually guilty of something. At some point (probably as the War on Drugs saw a steady increase in the incarceration percentages of young black men) the idea that white people would have to deal with prison became alien. Is there music or other art today that deals with the possibility that guilty white folks might spend time in prison, and thus that prison should be made at least survivable?

Booman Tribune:

…Giving someone HIV and subjecting them to rape, assault, and torture is inhumane, it’s illegal, it’s immoral, and, in this case, it is completely incommensurate with the offense. It’s appalling what goes on in our prisons. I saw another piece on American prisons on 60 Minutes last night. A prisoner with mental problems was allowed to die of thirst in a Michigan prison. They were strapping him to his bed for 18 hours a day. They caught his death on tape.

Shakespeare’s Sister:

It’s interesting, by the way, to see how different the comments threads are from typical rape threads. No one is suggesting that rape victims in prison are “crying rape” for ulterior motives, for example.

Also, although no one is saying, “Hey—if people don’t want to get raped, they shouldn’t commit crimes for which they’ll be sent to prison if convicted,” unfortunately its absence isn’t because that sort of victim-blaming isn’t operative, but, instead, boasts such wide tacit agreement that it isn’t even worth saying. There are plenty of people (including progressives) who simply don’t blanch at the thought that rape is a likely part of any prison sentence.

I’ve heard that attitude ascribed to many things, from ignorance of the prevalence of prison rape to contempt for the rule of law, but I suspect the predominant quality which most closely tracks with holding the position is never having been raped oneself.

ACS Blog:

A recent ACS Issue Brief by attorney Deborah Golden warns that a federal law intended to prevent frivolous suits by prisoners involving such issues as “insufficient locker space, a defective haircut by a prison barber, the failure of prison officials to invite a prisoner to a pizza party for a departing prison employee, and yes, being served chunky peanut butter instead of the creamy variety” may also shield prison guards who rape prisoners from being sued by their victims. Under the Prison Litgation Reform Act of 1996, prisoners may only bring suits if they can demonstrate a “physical injury,” but the law does not define whether or not rape is such an injury.

Julian Sanchez at Hit and Run in 2003:

In the case of prisons, the state is at least a partial agent of the harm: It establishes the prisons in which convicts are confined and removes the ability of inmates to defend themselves against the felons with whom they’re compelled to coexist. You don’t get to throw someone naked into a pit of bengal tigers and then proclaim, with a look of wide eyed innocence, that it’s nothing to do with you if the guy gets mauled to death.

Brendan Nyhan:

If you asked me what issue Americans will see in retrospect as the greatest unacknowledged barbarity of our time, I would nominate prison rape, which is not only tolerated but frequently encouraged within our prisons and is still the subject of jokes in popular culture and politics.

The Hindsight Factor:

We spend a fair amount of time talking about detainee treatment and Guantanamo. But there is no greater, or more common, human rights abuses in America than those occurring in our overcrowded, constantly expanding, jails.

The Debate Link:

Ezra Klein wrote a series of posts on Prison Rape that are really worth reading. As it happens, my roommates were busy cracking jokes about prison rape while I was reading them, and I kind of flew off at them. Accuse me of having no sense of humor, if you will (and they did), but when the conceptualization of a problem as a popular joke is one of the key barriers to fixing it, I don’t think it’s a neutral action to play right into that structure…

Agorophilia, from 2004:

I’m still appalled that prison rape is not taken at least as seriously as the death penalty, given that (a) it’s imposed without regard to the severity of your offense, (b) no judge or jury officially approves of the sentence, (c) it’s systematically inflicted on the weakest and most vulnerable of prisoners, (d) the transmission of HIV can make it a de facto death penalty, and (e) it occurs at least an order of magnitude more often than the death penalty. Why isn’t allowing prisoners to be raped considered cruel and unusual punishment?

When I presented my position to a group of college students this summer, most of them libertarians or libertarian-leaning, I was surprised by their willingness to defend prison rape. They relied primarily on a loosely intent-based argument: that while prisoners may unfortunately get raped, that is not the state’s intent when it jails them…

Faith at The Point:

Prison rape is very much a taboo topic. Although rape is a horrific crime, the media has no qualms about reporting on the topic, but when it involves inmates, considered the scum of society, suddenly no one is interested. “They deserve what they get. Let’s leave it at that.” This speaks volumes of the de-humanized way we view those individuals within our justice system. But let’s not forget that those individuals are people, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. It is true that many have committed heinous crimes, but allowing rape to occur within the walls of an institution promotes chaos.

Eteraz.org:

Note in the [Human Rights Watch] report how the officer simply tells the raped prisoner to find someone who will protect him. When you hang out with the Muslims in prison, they will not rape you. I’m not sure how easy it is for a non-Muslim to gain entry to the Muslims, but someone who has some Muslim leanings, or knew a Muslim on the outside, its not that hard. And again, Muslims in prison might be all hardcore, but THEY DO NOT RAPE (and they don’t let theirs be raped either). So, let’s see, you got a prison system that is turning ablind eye to rape and violence, and you then you got a religion inside the prisons that protects you from those two evils. And people wonder about the spread of Islam in US prisons.

From a 2004 article in Legal Affairs (curtsy: Instapundit):

Many other films and books have also invoked the specter of prison rape; to say that it is an unacknowledged problem in American culture is clearly inaccurate. Yet while our culture may not be bashful about discussing prison rape, it has, for the most part, portrayed it as a problem with no solution. Evocations like the one in 25th Hour aren’t meant to inspire outrage in the moviegoer; they’re meant to stir up fear. In films like Lee’s, or Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential, rape is a fixture of prison life as unavoidable as lights out. In Hanson’s film, it’s a convenient shorthand for all the potential horrors of prison that can be used by detectives to extract confessions—from innocent suspects, no less. […]

Compiling statistics on prison rape involves the same pitfalls as compiling conventional rape statistics. […] The most authoritative studies of the problem, conducted by the University of South Dakota professor Cindy Struckman-Johnson, found that over 20 percent of prisoners are the victims of some form of coerced sexual contact, and at least 7 percent are raped. Extrapolating from Struckman-Johnson’s findings suggests that some 140,000 current inmates have been raped. […]

Despite its prevalence, prison rape has generally been treated by courts and corrections officials as it has by novelists and filmmakers—as a problem without a solution. Prison rape is rarely prosecuted; like most crimes committed in prison, rapes aren’t taken on by local district attorneys but left to corrections officials to handle. When inmates seek civil damages against the prison system, as Johnson has done, they must prove not merely that prison officials should have done more to prevent abuse but that they showed “deliberate indifference”—that is, that they had actual knowledge that an inmate was at risk and disregarded it. Showing that a prison guard should have known is not enough, no matter how obvious the signs of abuse.

This standard was established by the Supreme Court in the 1994 case Farmer v. Brennan, in which a transsexual inmate imprisoned for credit card fraud sued federal prison officials for ignoring his rape behind bars. While the court affirmed that prison rape is a violation of an inmate’s constitutional rights and stated plainly that sexual assault is “not part of the penalty that criminal offenders pay for their offenses,” it set up formidable barriers to establishing the culpability of corrections staff. At the cellblock level, the “deliberate indifference” standard discourages prison guards from shining a light into dark corners. What they don’t know can’t hurt them.

The quotes above, and the links below, are from both right and left bloggers; this is a curious case where it appears that everyone agrees, yet nothing ever gets done.

Other bloggers discussing prison rape (not a complete list by any means):
Formal Dressage Required (good post about the schizophrenic media approach to prison rape).
Echidne
Outside The Beltway.
Unfogged (”I’m so ashamed to have joked about this.”)
Rserven at Daily Kos (the writer was at one time a “correctional specialist” in the armed forces).
Dr. Mellisa Clouthier
Asymmetrical Information
Christopher Hayes
Some Guys Are Normal (the blogger implies he’d commit suicide before going to prison).
Patrick at Making Light.
Julian Sanchez (again)
Agoraphilia(again)
Live From Silver City (discussing a prison gang-rape case currently in the news)
David Archer
Rev. Chad (this post collects quotes from prisoners)

Further reading: If you have time, you may also want to read through this 300+ page ethnographic report (pdf link), by Mark Fleisher, on attitudes and beliefs about prison rape by prisoners. (Curtsy: Corrections Community.) And also this considerably shorter (15 pages) report from Notra Dame Law School (pdf link). And, needless to say, HRW’s 2001 report.

Houston Chronicle

Shifts in the legal system and public opinion have made it easier to prosecute women who molest boys in their pubescent years, experts say. And cases continue to draw public attention. But those who work closely with victims such as Diana’s grandson say rite-of-passage myths still make it hard for many, including jurors, to sympathize with older boys in such cases, who are also less likely to tell parents or police about abusive relationships with older women.

[…] Pam Hobbs, who heads the children’s court services program in Harris County district courts, said she’s seen police and prosecutors taking underage boys’ allegations more seriously in the past decade. Potential jurors, though, are another matter.

[…] When [Richard] Gartner [a psychologist who works with male sexual abuse survivors] started talking to fellow psychologists about the subject in the early 1990s, he said, he got a lot of “blank stares.” People thought he was exaggerating the problem. Now, there are national organizations, conferences and online listserves dedicated to the topic.

This continued belief in a dangerous myth is no surprise to me since the successful prosecution of any type of sex crime can be derailed by any number of dangerous myths which allow sexual predators to be seen as people who haven’t done anything clearly criminal. These myths are designed to prevent victims from speaking up and to prevent people from believing once the victim does speak up.

Besides being useful to sexual predators, these myths are useful to people who want the illusion that there isn’t a problem. If they refuse to see the problem then the problem doesn’t exist anywhere near them or theirs.

Only it doesn’t work that way.

(Crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)

This post is a feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only thread.

If you aren’t sure what that means, please read this before commenting.

Via Ezra, an interesting interview with Bruce Western, author of Punishment And Inequality In America. Here’s a couple of sample quotes:

What were some of the striking elements of your research?

There were two things that I found particularly striking. The first was the very high rates of incarceration among young black men, in particular if they haven’t been to college. When we actually calculated the estimates, we were finding that one in three black men now in their mid-30s had prison records, and that one in three black men who hadn’t been to college now had prison records; and if they had dropped out of high school the number was two in three. These were astonishingly high numbers and initially we thought we’d made mistakes in our calculations. We only have to go back 20 years to find a time when the penal system was not a pervasive presence in the lives of young black men.

The other surprising element involved reexamining labor market trends, particularly during the 1990s. The story about the 1990s was that economic growth and the labor market were so strong, particularly at the end of the 1990s, that the market was finally providing benefits to very marginal workers — young men with less than a college education — and their employment rates and wages were apparently increasing. All of these statistics, of course, don’t take into account the fact that a growing share of that population is increasingly in prison and doesn’t show up in any economic statistics. Once you take account of the growing numbers of poor young men in prison, you can see that black men obtained no real economic benefit at all from the economic expansion of the 1990s. This was a pretty surprising finding because there was a consensus that very strong economic growth could provide benefits to the furthest margins of the labor market.

What policy recommendations do you have for breaking the cycle of mass imprisonment?

We need to do at least two things. We need to re-examine our current approach to drug control policy. At the moment, incarceration is the presumptive sentence for drug offenders. I think we need to look at that and ask: Is this really the best way to spend our criminal justice dollars? Particularly in light of evidence that shows that many drug offenders really pose little risk of violent crime to the community. But changes in sentencing policy are not going to be enough. The fundamental problem is there is still no real functioning economy in poor urban neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage. And as long as a shortage of jobs remains, as long as we have these very high rates of unemployment among young unskilled men, we’re still going to get very high rates of involvement of these young men in the criminal justice system. So I think ultimately we can’t avoid trying to solve the social problems that we’ve so far only tried to solve through criminal justice policy with social policy.

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

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

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

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

Later on, he restated this concern in this way:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some things about the discussion and moderation:

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

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

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

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

Via Dylan at Handle The Truth, a fantastic article by one of my favorite writers, Michael Kimmel, regarding the so-called “Boy Crisis” in education.

After outlining the case for the Boy Crisis, Kimmel effectively goes over the reasons for doubting the “crisis” exists: That historically, panics over boys in crisis surface again and again (and women - whether in the form of female schoolteachers or of feminists - are always to blame); that wage gaps would lead us to expect boys to have less incentive to stay in school (someone who can earn $20,000 a year out of high school is a good deal more likely to drop out than someone who can earn $14,000);¹ how “No Child Left Behind” has hurt boys who would benefit from gym and sports programs, and from counseling; and that far from being a universal among boys, the “boy crisis” is virtually all among boys from lower-income families and boys of color. Kimmell writes:

Why don’t the critics acknowledge these race and class differences? To many who now propose to “rescue” boys, such differences are incidental because, in their eyes, all boys are the same aggressive, competitive, rambunctious little devils. They operate from a facile, and inaccurate, essentialist dichotomy between males and females. Boys must be allowed to be boys—so that they grow up to be men.

This facile biologism leads the critics to propose some distasteful remedies to allow these testosterone-juiced boys to express themselves. Gurian, for example, celebrates all masculine rites of passage, “like military boot camp, fraternity hazings, graduation day, and bar mitzvah” as “essential parts of every boy’s life.” He also suggests reviving corporal punishment, both at home and at school…

I was one of the boys who failed all the “masculinity” tests; I was gentle, overly sensitive, and could no more catch a ball than I could catch a jumbo jet plane. I can’t imagine how I would have survived the kind of schooling Gurian wants to shove boys into. But because wimpy boys don’t fit into the biological-essentialist worldview, their needs are never considered by the boy-crisis mavens. Their allegedly “pro-boy” reforms are really only about helping the jocky boys; all other boys can go hang.²

A crisis among lower-income and non-white boys is still a crisis, of course.³ But to talk as if an inability to do well in contemporary schools comes with the Y chromosome is deceptive. There already are many schools in the USA, right now, in which boys do just as well as girls. Boy crisis mavens tend to talk about how boy brains can’t learn if they’re expected to sit still in class, to read novels, to do homework, and to follow rules; but in schools where boys excel, boys are expected to do all those things.

Nonetheless, it’s a fact that among some groups, boys are doing worse than girls. Why is this? Kimmel argues that a false and damaging conception of masculinity harms boys by dissuading them from putting as much effort as they should into their schoolwork, even as it encourages them to be overconfident about their abilities.

Kimmel has angry words for the anti-male ideology underlying the “boy crisis” panic:

It is not the school experience that “feminizes” boys, but rather the ideology of traditional masculinity that keeps boys from wanting to succeed. “The work you do here is girls’ work,” one boy commented to a researcher. “It’s not real work.”

“Real work” involves a confrontation — not with feminist women, whose sensible educational reforms have opened countless doors to women while closing off none to men — but with an anachronistic definition of masculinity that stresses many of its vices (anti-intellectualism, entitlement, arrogance, and aggression) but few of its virtues. When the self-appointed rescuers demand that we accept boys’ “hardwiring,” could they possibly have such a monochromatic and relentlessly negative view of male biology? Maybe they do. But simply shrugging our collective shoulders in resignation and saying “boys will be boys” sets the bar much too low. Boys can do better than that. They can be men.

Perhaps the real “male bashers” are those who promise to rescue boys from the clutches of feminists. Are males not also “hardwired” toward compassion, nurturing, and love? If not, would we allow males to be parents? It is never a biological question of whether we are “hardwired” for some behavior; it is, rather, a political question of which “hardwiring” we choose to respect and which we choose to challenge.

The antifeminist pundits have an unyielding view of men as irredeemably awful. We men, they tell us, are savage, lustful, violent, sexually omnivorous, rapacious, predatory animals, who will rape, murder, pillage, and leave towels on the bathroom floor—unless women fulfill their biological duty and constrain us. “Every society must be wary of the unattached male, for he is universally the cause of numerous ills,” writes David Popenoe. Young males, says Charles Murray, are “essentially barbarians for whom marriage . . . is an indispensable civilizing force.”

By contrast, feminists believe that men are better than that, that boys can be raised to be competent and compassionate, ambitious and attentive, and that men are fully capable of love, care, and nurturance. It’s feminists who are really “pro-boy” and “pro-father”—who want young boys and their fathers to expand the definition of masculinity and to become fully human.

I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

1. Actually, Kimmel barely touches on the point about the wage gap, but it’s a hobby horse of mine so I’m including it on this list. (back)
2. And even the “help” offered jock boys is dubious; such “help” could be accurately termed “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” (back)
3. Let’s not forget, however, that the same crisis exists among lower-income and non-white girls, whose academic achievement is considerably lower than that of their middle-class white counterparts. The real crisis owes much more to class and race inequalities than to sex. (back)

UPDATE: The Lancet Study can be downloaded here (pdf link). A companion paper, which provides some additional details, can be downloaded here (pdf link).

A new study, due to be published on The Lancet’s website today, has found that there have been 655,000 “excess” Iraqi deaths since the US invaded, compared to how many would have died if previous death rates had continued. The confidence interval is from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths. From the Washington Post:

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country. […]

The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military, have died since then — a finding likely to be equally controversial.[…]

While acknowledging that the estimate is large, the researchers believe it is sound for numerous reasons. The recent survey got the same estimate for immediate post-invasion deaths as the early survey, which gives the researchers confidence in the methods.[..]

They visited 1,849 randomly selected households that had an average of seven members each. One person in each household was asked about deaths in the 14 months before the invasion and in the period after.

The interviewers asked for death certificates 87 percent of the time; when they did, more than 90 percent of households produced certificates.

According to the survey results, Iraq’s mortality rate in the year before the invasion was 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people; in the post-invasion period it was 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The difference between these rates was used to calculate “excess deaths.”[…]

Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.

As I argued last year, the earlier survey is “controversial” only in the sense that global warming and evolution are “controversial.” The dispute over the earlier study was not a genuine dispute about survey technique; it was more of a dispute between reality and right-wing ideology.

Like the earlier study, this study found that the large majority of Iraqis killed have been male:

Of the 629 deaths reported, 87 percent occurred after the invasion. A little more than 75 percent of the dead were men, with a greater male preponderance after the invasion. For violent post-invasion deaths, the male-to-female ratio was 10-to-1, with most victims between 15 and 44 years old.

Curtsy: Deltoid.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

I’ve just been reading a 2001 study by David Mustard, of the University of Georgia, called “Racial, Ethnic and Gender Disparities in Sentencing: Evidence from the US Federal Courts.”¹ Mustard’s study appears better-designed than other sentencing studies I’ve read. His sample is large and comprehensive: he essentially includes every federal sentence handed down for three consecutive years (1991 through 1993) in his analysis. Rather than focusing only on sex or on race, he simultaneously controls for the effects of race, sex, U.S. citizenship, and class on federal sentencing. (Legally, none of those four factors are supposed to have an effect on what sentence a judge hands down.)

The results aren’t pretty. Especially for drug crimes and for bank robberies, being white is a big advantage if you’re being sentenced for a federal crime:

Bank robbery and drug trafficking exhibit the largest black-white differentials. Blacks receive 9.4 and 10.5 months longer than whites in bank robbery and drug trafficking, respectively. The percentage difference is greatest for those convicted of drug trafficking, where blacks are assigned sentences 13.7 percent longer than whites. The aggregate Hispanic-white difference is driven primarily by those convicted of drug trafficking and firearm possession/trafficking, the only two crimes with significant Hispanic coefficients. For these two crimes, Hispanics receive 6.1 and 3.7 additional months compared to whites, or 8.0 percent and 7.0 percent longer in percentage terms.

Note that Mustard’s analysis only compared felons who were convicted for the same crime. So the above sentencing disparities do not include the infamous disparities caused by the much harsher sentences given for crack cocaine possession (usually a Black crime) than for powder cocaine possession (usually a white crime).

Being a woman is an even larger advantage for bank robbers:

The female-male difference is statistically significant for all six categories, the largest of which is for bank robbery, where females receive 21.6 months less than males.

Although the bank robbery differential was largest, women received a break on sentencing compared to men across the board.²

I was particularly surprised that controlling for dependents didn’t significantly alter the male/female difference - so the sentencing disparity is apparently not being caused by judges taking mercy on single mother defendants.

Class made a significant difference, but mainly for the very poor. That is, people who earned less than $5,000 a year get fewer breaks in sentencing than people who earn more than $5,000 a year; but there doesn’t appear to be much difference in the sentences given those who earn $10,000 a year and those who earn $50,000. An exception was sentencing for fraud: “Those with incomes greater than $50,000 receive significantly shorten sentences for fraud.”

Finally, being a U.S. citizen leads to lighter sentencing across the board.

Having no high school diploma resulted in an additional sentence of 1.2 months. Income had a significant impact on the sentence length. Offenders with incomes of less than $5,000 were sentenced most harshly. This group received sentences 6.2 months longer than people who had incomes between $25,000 and $35,000. Those with U.S. citizenship receive lower sentences by about 1.7 months, perhaps because they take advantage of their greater knowledge about the court systems and legal representation. Age is positively related to the sentence length. […]

The income and education results could be generated if people with higher levels of education and income use their resources to obtain more favorable sentences. However, if offenders utilize education and income to reduce their sentences, the impact is limited. The marginal productivity of income in hiring legal resources diminishes quickly after income hits a minimum threshold, because individuals with the highest incomes do not receive reductions in sentence length.

According to Mustard’s analysis, most of the sentencing disparities are caused by judges departing from the official sentencing guidelines; when judges decide to take mercy on a felon and offer a very light sentence - or to not sentence the felon to prison at all - they are significantly more likely to do so if the felon is not poor, is white, is female, and is a U.S. citizen.

Feminist readers are likely to take particular note of the harsher sentences given to men, compared to women convicted of the same crimes. Mustard suggests that this may be caused by sexist paternalism among judges; women are seen less as full adults, and as being less capable of being responsible for their own actions, and as a result judges depart from sentencing guidelines to give women lighter sentences. Although I can’t know if that’s true or not, it certainly seems plausible to me, and also compatible with feminist analysis of how women are treated and viewed by society.

Another study, by Max Schanzenbach of the Northwestern University School of Law,³ looked at sex disparities in sentencing according to the sex of the judge. He found that, for serious crimes, female judges did not give harsher sentences to men, but male judges did:

The greater the percentage of female judges on a district’s bench, the smaller the gender disparity. These results are hard to square with the suggestion that unobserved accomplice status or blameworthiness is behind the gender disparity. At the very least, male and female judges view the dangerousness, accomplice status, or blameworthiness of female offenders differently.

The female offender/percent female judge effects […] were not evident at all in the category of less serious crimes. (There was some evidence in the case of less serious crimes that more Democratic districts treated men and women alike when granting downward departures.) However, paternalistic views about the dangerousness or blameworthiness of female offenders may well be most evident in the case of serious crimes.

Schanzenbach also found that racial and ethnic disparities were only slightly decreased, or not decreased at all, in districts with more black and hispanic judges. However, he argues that this finding does not prove a lack of racial and ethnic bias in sentencing, only that if such bias exists, it’s not dependent on the race or ethnicity of the judge.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where moderation is light and frothy and tickles your nose. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

1. The Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 44, no. 1, pages 285-314. Pdf link. (back)
2. Mustard’s report didn’t include a discussion of the death penalty, but it appears that women are less likely to receive the death penalty than similarly-situated men. See, for example, Victor L. Streib (2006), “Rare and Inconsistant: The Death Penalty For Women,” Fordham Urban Law Journal, Vol 33 pp 609. (back)
3. Max M. Schanzenbach, “Racial and Gender Disparities in Prison Sentences: The Effect of District-Level Judicial Demographics” (April 2004). American Law & Economics Association Annual Meetings. American Law & Economics Association 14th Annual Meeting. Working Paper 4. Pdf link. (back)

Just to add another data point to the discussion in Rachel’s post…

It seems likely that part of the reason for the decline in men’s LFPR (Labor Force Participation Rate) is the general increase in women’s LFPR over the same time period. Obviously, more women working in the paid labor force means that more husbands will have the option of being supported by their wives. This is not a bad thing in and of itself; it’s only problematic if there’s an increasing trend of households in which women do all the work (paid and unpaid) and men do little or none.

UPDATE: Half Sigma writes:

I respect these guys who are enjoying their leisure instead of working. They haven’t let themselves be brainwashed by conventional middle class values which say that every man has to work otherwise he’s a loser.

As long as the guy isn’t financing his leisure in an abusive or unfair way, I agree.

[This post of Rachel’s was “lost” in the recent change of hosts, so I’m reposting it. –Amp]

Amp asked me if I would put up the Bunch-O-Links from Rachel’s Tavern over here, so I’m putting them up with a funny little story to tell you about. I’ll put up the story first, and the links second.

Men Don’t Cry??

So last year at about this time my stepson was at our house for a few weeks. At the time he was 5, and it was just before he started kindergarten. He doesn’t see us often, usually only a few weeks in the summer, so needless to say, he was a little nervous to be away from his Mommy. One day after he finished talking to his mother, I though he was unusually quiet so I walked into his room to find him teary eyed on the bed. I asked him what was wrong, and he started to sob uncontrollably. In between the heaves, I was able to get out of him that he was worried about his Mommy. My partner was really troubled by Branden’s crying, and after hugging him, the only thing he (my partner) could muster was “Branden, men don’t cry, and you and Daddy are men.”

Now, I’m pissed about this because this men don’t cry stuff is a crock of crap to me, so I look over Branden’s shoulder and give Daddy the WTF stare, followed by an audible “that’s not true.” As Branden gets calms down, I’m getting more fired up. I have a long discussion with my partner (away from Branden) about how a 5 year old is not a man, there’s nothing wrong with men crying, and what the hell is he trying to teach him. (Of course, I should note that my partner is very troubled by the fact that he doesn’t see his son often, and I think he sometimes says or does irrational things because of that, which would be great for another discussion.) After this point, on several occasions, I tell Branden and Daddy that men do cry, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

So about two weeks later Branden and I are walking down the hall, and Branden says, “Rachel, do you remember what Daddy said the other day?”

I said, “What did he say?”

Branden replies, “He said men don get angry?”

I start laughing hysterically. “Yeah, Branden. He said men don’t get angry.”

I didn’t take the time to tell him that men could get angry too, mainly because I thought Branden’s interpretation was hilarious, and I admittedly like statements that defy stereotypes. I also wondered how our world would be different if we said men don’t get angry, rather than men don’t cry.

Here’s the Bunch-O-Links

1. Changeseeker has a really good post discussing transracial identities.

2. Vegan Kid has a good post on Halle Berry’s reaction and the BBC’s inaction over racist comments a DJ made during an interview.

3. Gil at Lucky White Girl asks why we can’t know the corporate sponsors of politicians, NASCAR style.

4. A new book claims that mixed race people are superior? See more over at Mixed Media Watch.

5. An advice columnist admonishes a childless couple to change their mind about having kids. Republic of T and Feministe are talking about it.

6. Thespian CPA has a good post on the impacts of Black minstrel performers.

7. Women’s Rights Protesters Attacked in Iran. Here are several posts: Kash’s Newsroom, Iranian Truth (good list of the protesters goals/demands), Kosoof (has some good pictures, with writing mostly in Farsi but also a little English).

Sometimes it seems the following must be invoked whenever a feminist brings up the subject of childcare as a burden: “Lots of men who work long hours in high-stress jobs would give anything to spend more time with their children.” It’s supposed to prove that, far from being a burden, childcare is a privilege that women disproportionately enjoy and that, by implication, any feminists who complain are miserable, child-hating whingers.

It’s a red herring. I have every sympathy for the hard-working men - I’ve worked some terrible jobs myself to try to keep the credit card companies off my back - but their plight isn’t directly relevant to the question of whether childcare is or is not a burden. (Whether it’s indirectly relevant is a much larger question, far beyond the scope of this post.) There’s a huge difference between “spending time with” children and “looking after” them.

My dad spends time with my daughter. He sings to her, talks to her, encourages her to smile and clap her hands. And he can do all these things safe in the knowledge that if she fills her nappy or starts crying uncontrollably, or if he just wants to get on with something else now, he can hand her back to me and I’ll take over. Because I’m the one that looks after her.

I love my daughter, but I also know that there are very few high-stress jobs that can compare to the task of looking after her. In a job, you clock off at the end of the day and your time is your own. Parenting means being constantly on duty: even when the baby is asleep, you have to be alert for the moment when she wakes up and needs attention. If you have the financial resources, you can subcontract some of the work to a childminder, but even then you have to be alert for the call that says there is a crisis only you can resolve.

Looking after a baby is exhausting. Normal tasks like showering and preparing breakfast require careful planning so that the baby doesn’t get frustrated with boredom and start crying. Something as simple as reading the paper or writing an essay requires co-operation from someone else, otherwise the baby cries from lack of attention. Trying to cram everything you didn’t get done during the day into the evenings when the baby’s asleep means you don’t get enough sleep, which makes it even harder to cope with what can often feel like never-ending demands.

This is a partial explanation for why I haven’t posted anything recently.

So the second Washington Post article on Black men is out (Thanks to Joy Princess for the Update). The article basically summarizes the findings of their survey, so I figured I would take issues mentioned in the article and elaborate on the sociological trends.

On Suicide
One of the first issues they discuss is the increasing suicide rate of Black men. The assertion that the suicide rate of Black men has increased is correct, but it should also be noted that the Black male suicide rate is still lower than the White male suicide rate. I also found this excellent article from National Public Radio’s News and Notes With Ed Gordon. It my estimation one of there are two factors that have allowed the suicide rate among Black men to escalate. First, is the increasing number of Black middle class families. These young men are more likely to commit suicide than their lower income peers. The second factor would be the notion that suicide is a “white thing,” which I have heard on numerous occasions. For a long time the suicide rate was much higher in Whites, but the gap has closed dramatically.

On Who’s to Blame for the Problems and Opportunities Facing Black Men

Six in 10 black men said their collective problems owe more to what they have failed to do themselves rather than “what white people have done to blacks.” At the same time, half reported they have been treated unfairly by the police, and a clear majority said the economic system is stacked against them.

Black men said they strongly believe in the American Dream — nine in 10 black men would tell their sons they can become anything they want to in life. But this vision of the future is laden with cautions and caveats: Two-thirds also would warn their sons that they will have to be better and work harder than whites for equal rewards.

Well I guess Bill Cosby needs to read this survey because the majority of Black men are placing the blame on themselves not Whites. But I agree with the general way the Washington Post has framed this problem. There is an interesting irony in that a high percentage of Black men report experiencing discrimination, yet they feel that Black men are to blame for the problems facing Black men. I think there probably is the “well I’m not that way, but other Black men are” attitude going on here. The optimism is also ironic. I get the sense that many of these guys are thinking there is racism, but they will be able to overcome any of it. On an individual level I think that is probably a good attitude, but at a societal level I think it is a bad attitude. Personally, it keeps people from getting down and allows them to maintain a can do ethic, but it doesn’t really challenge the racism that does affect these guys.

On Self Esteem
I was also really annoyed with this quote:

Sociologists and social psychologists say that black men’s poor view of themselves may have its roots in several factors. Movies, music, television and the news media are full of unflattering images of black men, they say.

The article fails to distinguish between self esteem and group esteem. Self esteem is how I feel about myself, and group esteem is how I feel about the group that I am a member of. For example, for me myself self esteem would be how I feel about Rachel, and my group esteem would be how I feel about a group I am a member of such as White women. As far as I can tell the study did not ask about self esteem, they asked about group esteem. When is comes self esteem, African Americans usually have higher self esteem than Whites (numerous studies have found this); on the other hand there are not many studies about group esteem, so I’m not sure about racial differences in group esteem. But Black people do not suffer from low self esteem as a collective.

On Worries and Respect
This part of the study was interesting. I don’t want to comment on it to as much because I think that there will probably be a more through analysis on some of these issues later. But for now here is a brief quote on some of the worries of Black men:

Among blacks with college degrees and household incomes of $75,000 a year or more, six in 10 said someone close to them had been murdered and six in 10 said a family member or close friend had been in jail or prison — similar to the reports of working-class, less-educated black men. Three in 10 have been physically threatened or attacked in their lives because of their race, again no different from less-advantaged black men.

If anything, the survey suggests that better-educated black men experience more direct racism than those with fewer resources. For example, 63 percent of educated, upper-middle-class black men said they have been unfairly stopped by police, compared with 47 percent of less-advantaged black men.

From the shared experiences and worries of black men have emerged a set of priorities that are very different from those of white America. Three in four black men said they highly value success on the job, fully 20 percentage points higher than white men. Black men also placed a far highe