Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[Kobi]

For years, women have had to pay higher health care premiums because insurance companies have used gender rating — a practice that, as of 2014, will be outlawed by the Affordable Care Act. The provision is one of the least controversial of the health care overhaul. But "Fox & Friends" still couldn't resist debating the issue Tuesday in a gender-baiting exchange (see video below) that's caused a controversy of its own.

“We only have the prostate,” noted Fox News medical contributor Dr. David Samadi, who fanned the flames by arguing that women actually should pay more than men. "Women have the breasts, they have the ovaries, they have the uterus, they get checked in every part."

It was just one of several surreal points raised by Samadi, who is a professor at Hofstra University and chairman of the Urology Department at New York's Lenox Hill Hospital.

Look, it's not bias, I'm not saying this as a man," he said. "They go through a lot of preventive screenings, they give birth, they have the whole mammogram, the Pap smear. Guys, we don't like to go to doctors, right? Seventy percent of health care decisions are made by women. In my own practice, I see it's the women who bring the guys, who say, 'Go get screened.' Otherwise, we would never go."

Host Gretchen Carlson couldn't help jumping in to note that those facts alone should actually earn women a discount (which got her a blank look from Samadi). She looked alternately amused and outraged by every one of the doctor's points, and responded to Samadi's argument that "women live longer" with a sarcastic "Let's just kill 'em off!"

Online criticism of Samadi has been swift, with Twitter commenters calling him an "idiot," "sexist," "stupid," "ridiculous," a "fool," and an "'expert.'"

Slate's Amanda Marcotte noted, "This newfound enthusiasm for strict economic fairness between men and women sadly did not lead Fox to also advocate that men stop getting paid more than women for their work." Marcotte also took Samadi to task for his vague response to Carlson's suggestion that maternity costs be shared since a pregnancy is created with two people, to which he said, "Not always."

"Was he suggesting that the ridiculously small number of pregnancies created in single or lesbian women by sperm donors was justification enough to spare men the responsibility of sharing childbirth costs?" Marcotte asked.

Freak Out Nation took the doctor to task for that sort of "mansplaining," countering his "Not always" comment with "Yes Dr. Dummy, always."

Wonkette offered pitch-perfect Samadi translations, with "Why are women so greedy, with their breast and ovarian cancer costing men all this money?" and "Man, women love going to the doctor like they love buying SHOES, amirite?"

There was a quick response from the National Women’s Law Center, which recently did an in-depth study of gender rating among insurers. "We did the research and the fact is that women are charged more for health coverage simply because they are women," the center noted on its website. "Yes, women access more preventive services, as the commentators point out. But shouldn't all of us get the preventive care we need to get and stay healthy? Why should women be discriminated against for simply going to the doctor?"

Daily Kos was over it. "I am not going to even list off the reasons why this statement made by an actual as-seen-on-teevee-medical-doctor-hi-doctor-nick-expert-guy is stupid, because it does not deserve even that much," read the post.

"Listen, Dr. Samadi, this isn't a kindergarten counting lesson — body parts don't operate under the 'three is greater than one' rule here," wrote Marie Claire blogger Maura Brannigan. "The fight for women's health and empowerment doesn't start in Congress, and it definitely doesn't start in the Whole House — instead, it starts with men like Samadi, who refuse to view women as equal partners, yet alone equal, insurance-deserving citizens."

http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-livin...172914267.html

[Kobi]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A midshipman testified Wednesday that she didn’t remember being sexually assaulted by three former Navy football players after a night of heavy drinking, but she said one of the men told her she had sex with him and another accused player.

The woman, who is now a senior at the U.S. Naval Academy, testified for more than two hours at the Washington Navy Yard at a hearing to determine whether the three midshipmen will face court-martial. She described a night of drinking in her room at the academy with a friend before going to the toga-themed party in April 2012 at an off-campus house in Annapolis, Md.

At the crowded party, which took place in what was known as ‘‘the football house’’ because of its association to the team, the woman said she felt ‘‘overwhelmed’’ and ‘‘dizzy’’ from drinking too much.

‘‘I felt like I was going to pass out,’’ she said, noting that she leaned against structural beams in the basement to keep from falling over.

The woman said she spent the night at the house and woke up the next morning without her phone or purse.

‘‘I was really confused, and I noticed my back was really sore,’’ she said.

She also testified that she had consensual sex that Sunday morning with a student at the house who has not been charged.

The woman described feeling troubled by not remembering what happened and asked Tate, who had initially invited her to the party, to come to her room to see what he knew.

The woman also noticed ‘‘lewd comments’’ on Twitter that seemed directed at her and tagged to people she had slept with in the past. She also testified that rumors had spread rapidly that she had had sex with multiple partners at the party.

When Tate came to her room, she testified that he joked about her not remembering and suggested he refresh her memory.

‘‘He told me that we did have sex,’’ she said.

The woman also said she asked Tate if she had had sex with Graham.

‘‘He said yes, and then I was like, ‘I don’t want to hear anymore,'’’ she said.

The woman also described being reluctant to seek an investigation at first.

‘‘Mainly, I was scared,’’ she said. ‘‘I didn’t want to anyone else to get in trouble.’’

She also said she feared her mother would find out and force her to leave the academy.

The woman said she decided to cooperate after hearing rumors that other people, specifically underclassmen, could be blamed.

Her cooperation with Navy investigators included wiretaps.

On cross-examination, Andrew Weinstein, Bush’s attorney, noted that the woman had had a previous sexual relationship with Bush. When asked by Weinstein whether she had ever considered him capable of rape, she said, ‘‘I don’t think that he would.’’

She also said, ‘‘He wasn’t mean to me by any means,’’ during their previous sexual relationship.

The female midshipman also testified that she didn’t remember whether she had sex with Bush that night. Weinstein noted that it was Bush who told her he had told Navy investigators that the two had had sex.

Testimony resumes today.

[Kobi]

NEW DELHI (AP) — A series of recent high-profile gang rape cases in India has ignited a debate: Are such crimes on the rise, or is it simply that more attention is being paid to a problem long hidden within families and villages? The answer, experts say, is both.

Modernization is fueling a crisis of sexual assault in India, with increasingly independent women now working in factories and offices and stepping beyond the subservient roles to which they had traditionally been relegated. They are also more likely than their mothers and grandmothers were to report rapes, and more likely to encounter male strangers in public.

"We never used to see so many cases of gang rape, and so many involving groups of young, unemployed men," said Supreme Court lawyer Kirti Singh, who specializes in women's issues.

While there are no reliable statistics on gang rapes, experts say the trend, along with the growing sense of insecurity it has brought for women, led to recent outbursts of public anger over the long-ignored epidemic of violence against women.

The silence broke in December, when a New Delhi student was gang-raped on a bus in a particularly vicious attack from which she died two weeks later. A juvenile court on Saturday handed down the first conviction in the case, sending a teenager to a reform home for three years for rape and murder.

The sentence, the maximum a juvenile can face, was widely denounced as too lenient, and the girl's parents vowed to appeal. The other suspects in the case are being tried as adults and could face execution if convicted.

While attacks on women occur constantly across India, often within the home, the brutality and public nature of the New Delhi case left many shocked and shamed. Thousands took to the streets in the capital to express their outrage.

The government, pledging to crack down, created fast-track courts for rape cases, doubled prison terms for rape and criminalized voyeurism, stalking, acid attacks and the trafficking of women.

The Tourism Ministry launched a nationwide "I Respect Women" campaign after a Swiss bicyclist was gang-raped in March in central India and an American woman was gang-raped two months later in the northern resort town of Manali.

Yet another high-profile gang rape last month, against a photojournalist on assignment in Mumbai, renewed public fury and sent the media into 24-7 coverage marked by daily front page headlines and talk shows debating how to make India safe for women.

"There is very clearly a class dimension" that is compounding the sudden outrage, women's rights lawyer Flavia Agnes said.

All five of the accused in the Mumbai attack had little to no education, and three had previously been arrested for theft, Mumbai police said. They lived in the slums near the abandoned textile mill where the woman was raped.

In both the Mumbai and the Delhi cases, "middle-class people identified with these young girls, aspiring professionals, trying to make their mark in a competitive world," said Sudha Sundararaman, an activist with the All India Democratic Women's Association.

Experts say the rapid growth of India's cities and the yawning gulf between rich and poor are exacerbating the problem, with young men struggling to prove their traditional dominance in a changing world.

"These are young men in the cities, without prospects, without hope. They feel rage against those who are perceived to have it," sociologist Sudhir Kakar said.

Cultural stigmas, police apathy and judicial incompetence have long made it difficult for women to even report rapes.

But if modernization is changing the risks women face, it is also giving them the ability to speak up. In the first three months after the December bus rape, the number of rapes reported in the city more than doubled to 359, from the 143 reported in January-March of 2012.

Those numbers, in a city of almost 17 million people, are still seen by experts as far below the actual number of attacks, but the jarring increase in just one year appeared to signal a significant change.

"The biggest change is that women in the middle classes are reporting crimes to police," Kakar said. They are fed up with the landscape of sexual harassment and fear, with the constant barrage of lewd comments and even groping — locally known as "eve-teasing" — and with being told they should stay indoors at night.

"Thirty years ago, even uttering the word 'rape' was almost taboo. That is changing," said Ranjana Kumari, a women's activist with the Center for Social Research. "There are so many cases, each more gruesome than the other, and people have lost patience, especially when no justice is served."

The photojournalist attacked last month stunned the nation by telling local media that "rape is not the end of life" — a groundbreaking statement given that many rape victims are still often dismissed as defiled. Many are shunned by their families, fired from jobs or driven from their home villages. As a result, most rape victims are still thought to remain silent.

"What's wrong with the system?" Supreme Court Justices R.M. Lodha and Madan B. Lokur said in a statement last week, while hearing a petition from the father of a 15-year-old girl gang-raped by three men in 2012, according to Indian media. The girl, who is a dalit, member of the outcast community once known as untouchables, has since been barred from her school in north India, and her mother was killed for refusing to withdraw a police complaint about the crime, according to Press Trust of India.

The court lambasted India's poor record of conviction in rape cases, saying "Why are 90 percent of rape cases ending in acquittals? The situation is going from bad to worse."

http://news.yahoo.com/india-fury-ove...102555774.html

[Soon]

Company in Texas Fails Hard with Tailgate Decal of Bound Woman

A marketing and advertising company in Waco, Tex. really wanted to drum up some new business, you know, make a splash. Most likely, there was a strategy meeting at which Hornet Signs’ owner, Brad Kolb, petitioned his crack creative team for some ideas. Maybe someone said tentatively, “We should all wear funny hats, like, everywhere,” but that idea was roundly rejected. Maybe some other someone then said, “Let’s use the INTERNET to, you know, make gifs of cats holding up our signs.” No, no — Hornet Signs needed to show the public how realistic its signs are, how they have depth, contour. Hornet needed to not just interest or entertain people — the company needed to alarm them, to spread panic across the Texas highways, which is how the “woman bounded in the bed of a truck” pickup truck tailgate decal was born.

The decal has attracted nothing but negative attention since local media got wind of it earlier in the week, though Kolb insisted to KWTX, “I wasn't expecting the reactions we got, nor do we condone this by any means. It was more or less something we put out there to see who noticed it.” Condone what, exactly? Violence against women? Kidnap? Rape? Wait, so you’re saying that this tailgate decal — that an employee had to slap on a truck and drive around with to “gauge how realistic [Hornet Signs’] decals are” — isn’t somehow an ad encouraging people to go forth, kidnap, and be prosperous? What you’re really saying, then, is that Kolb is just a sensationalistic asshole who mistakenly believes an image like the one on his company’s tailgate decals is provocative when, really, it’s just a graphic testament to the casual, callous misogyny that tries to assert some kind of ownership over women’s bodies.

By all accounts, Kolb has provoked exactly the reaction he no doubt was looking for: people have noticed, word is spreading, and the police have yet to get involved, although some alarmed Waco citizens have called the authorities (manufactured panic, which, notes The Frisky’s Julie Gerstein, said authorities must LOVE). The decal hit the streets a month ago, and, despite the ire on Hornet Signs’ Facebook page, Kolb claims that the bound-woman decal has done precisely what he wanted it to do, i.e. increase orders for more truck stickers.

That’s how utterly mundane this all is — quite likely, Kolb doesn’t really believe he or the people at his company did a horribly misogynistic thing. They’re just trying to grab some attention so they can peddle some stickers, even if their stunt has been done before, even if the public hates them for it. The stunt’s mundanity, though, is what makes this kind of thing so insidious. This decal is an act of visual violence, evidence of a misogyny that has blossomed like a cancer in someone’s worldview, eroding all empathy to the point where the image of a woman bound in the bed of a truck elicits only dumb snickers of, “Heh, heh — I’ll bet this’ll sell a whole mess of [insert stupid, useless thing that no one wants].”

[Kobi]

LONDON (AP) — About 1 in 10 men in some parts of Asia admitted raping a woman who was not their partner, according to the first large studies of rape and sexual violence. When their wife or girlfriend was included, that figure rose to about a quarter.

International researchers said their startling findings should change perceptions about how common violence against women is and prompt major campaigns to prevent it. Still, the results were based on a survey of only six Asian countries and the authors said it was uncertain what rates were like elsewhere in the region and beyond. They said engrained sexist attitudes contributed, but that other factors like poverty or being emotionally and physically abused as children were major risk factors for men's violent behavior.

A previous report from the World Health Organization found one-third of women worldwide say they have been victims of domestic or sexual violence.

"It's clear violence against women is far more widespread in the general population than we thought," said Rachel Jewkes of South Africa's Medical Research Council, who led the two studies. The research was paid for by several United Nations agencies and Australia, Britain, Norway and Sweden. The papers were published online Tuesday in the journal, Lancet Global Health.

In the new research, male interviewers surveyed more than 10,000 men in Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. The word "rape" was not used in the questions, but the men were asked if they had ever forced a woman to have sex when she wasn't willing or if they had ever forced sex on someone who was too drunk or drugged to consent.

In most places, scientists concluded between 6 to 8 percent of men raped a woman who wasn't their partner. When they included wives and girlfriends, the figures were mostly between 30 to 57 percent. The lowest rates were in Bangladesh and Indonesia and the highest were in Papa New Guinea. Previous studies of rape have been done in South Africa, where nearly 40 percent of men are believed to have raped a woman.

Of those who acknowledged forcing a woman to have sex, more than 70 percent of men said it was because of "sexual entitlement." Nearly 60 percent said they were bored or wanted to have fun while about 40 percent said it was because they were angry or wanted to punish the woman. Only about half of the men said they felt guilty and 23 percent had been imprisoned for a rape.

"The problem is shocking but anyplace we have looked, we see partner violence, victimization and sexual violence," said Michele Decker, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who co-wrote an accompanying commentary. "Rape doesn't just involve someone with a gun to a woman's head," she said. "People tend to think of rape as something someone else would do."

"It's not enough to focus on services for women," said Charlotte Watts, head of the Gender, Violence and Health Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was not part of the study. She said some programs in Africa based on challenging traditional ideas of masculinity are proving successful.

"It may be that the culture where they grew up condones violence, but it's not impossible to change that," she said

http://news.yahoo.com/study-1-10-men...062455382.html

[Cin]

Is This The Worst College for Women in the United States?

Rust College is under fire for re-hiring a teacher accused of raping a 16-year-old, who went on to rape multiple students on campus.

A Mississippi college is under intense fire after a student was forcibly raped in the office of a professor with a long and public history of past sexual assault and rape charges.

Courthouse News reported a lawsuit alleging that professor Sylvester Oliver had already lost his teaching license after being accused of raping a 16-year old girl. Yet, he was re-hired by Rust College, where he went on to forcibly rape a student in his office.

The student, plaintiff Jane Doe, is suing Rust College and Oliver in federal court. Doe is arguing that the college turned a blind eye to Oliver’s sexual exploitation of students by concealing his pattern of sexual misconduct and blatantly threatened to fire anyone who assisted in the investigation into her rape.

In her lawsuit, Doe claims that Rust College allowed Oliver to resign after he was accused of having "an inappropriate sexual relationship with at least one female student." Oliver then went to work for a school in Memphis but was fired and lost his teaching license after a 16-year-old girl accused him of rape. Yet, despite the knowledge of the allegations, Rust College re-hired Oliver. Soon after, he forcibly raped Doe in his office.

Doe claims that shortly after her rape she reported it to the college and the Holly Springs Police Department but the college did not fire Oliver. Moreover, she claims that Oliver was not the only male employee of Rust College that has sexually assaulted a student at the historically black liberal arts college.

Doe is seeking compensation and punitive damages for the ordeal. Oliver is currently awaiting trial on criminal rape charged.

Doe’s lawyers from the Cochran Firm, believe there are more victims out there and last week launched a website for the lawsuit: http://www.rustcollegeabuse.com

Since the launch of the website, the lawyers say that more women have come forward to say they were raped, Local Memphis reported.

“A team of investigators have uncovered what we think is a scandalous type of approach to monitoring this type of activity,” said Cochran Firm attorney Sam Cherry to Wreg Memphis News.

http://www.alternet.org/investigatio...-united-states

[Cin]

The six ways we talk about a teenage girl’s age
The idea that a teen can be "older than her chronological age" puts young girls in danger

Last week, Montana District Judge G. Todd Baugh declared a troubled, now dead, 16-year-old girl culpable for her own rape. (The girl was just 14 when the crime occurred.) While in the process of reducing her rapist’s 15-year sentence to 30 days, he explained that the victim was “older than her chronological age,” and “as much in control of the situation” as the 49-year-old teacher found guilty of raping her. After outraged protest and demands that he be removed from the bench, Baugh apologized and has called for a new hearing. This case bears striking similarity to one in the U.K. earlier this summer in which a 13-year-old girl involved was described, including by the judge, as sexually “predatory.”

This happens with dulling regularity, and has for years. One month ago, defense lawyers in Louisiana used similar reasoning in a case involving a juvenile detention guard and a 14-year-old in his care. They argued that the girl had consented to sex with the guard, though she was three years younger than the age of consent in Louisiana.

The language used in these cases demonstrates our confused notions about girls’ ages and what they mean.

An adolescent girl isn’t allowed to be “her age.” Indeed, she doesn’t actually have one age but many that people assess and judge as she goes through her day. When it comes to sexual assault, consent and justice, an individual girl’s “age” is especially a matter of social construction. Society constructs her age in at least six different ways:

First, there’s her chronological age. This is the easiest one, based on a girl’s birthday. Simple enough.

Second, there’s the age her body looks — which, for too many people in and out of the justice system, apparently makes a difference in rape. In 2000, a South Caroline Circuit judge halved a 27-year-old youth minister’s sentence in a case involving a 14-year-old, explaining, that the girl’s body “was [at] an unusual stage of maturity.” But what does this ridiculous consideration of “physical maturation” mean for girls starting puberty at younger and younger ages? That assault of an older-looking 10-year-old is more forgivable?

Third, there’s emotional age. There are 12-year-olds capable of more easygoing conversation, passionate feeling, emotional intimacy and mature deliberation than some 30-year-olds. That does not, however, make them, in any way, the equal of a 30-year-old. These qualities are separate and apart from experience, power differentials, authority, control and consent. Judges generally don’t take emotional maturity into account when adults engage minors in other unlawful activities, and they shouldn’t in cases of sexual assault either. An emotionally and intellectually mature 15-year-old is still not allowed to vote. When a 49-year-old provides a 13-year-old alcohol, does a judge take into account how much the 13-year-old may have wanted to drink, or that the 13-year-old can hold his liquor? We cannot excuse teachers, coaches, priests and mentors from rape prosecution when they assault children in their care. We have legal ages for a reason.

Fourth, there’s commercially profitable age. This is the age at which a girl begins to be targeted for sexualizing products, often but not always based on her appearance. This age has become depressingly young. Girls are saturated with marketing messages about body enhancing products and “fun” ideas about how to look, dress, stand, speak, run, sit, eat, walk, work, sleep, starve, fix their hair, shave, bleach, cut bits off, add bits on and pose so that they are sexy. In other words, so that they are pleasing to boys and men.

Fifth, there’s media age. This is the age at which girls begin to be represented as sexual products themselves, as legitimate sexual targets and as prizes for male heroes. We regularly see 12-year-old girls in media who “look older,” and “looking older” is desirable and lauded. Movies and television portray younger and younger girls as hypersexualized, sexually predatory or somehow complicit in sexual crimes committed against them in gross disproportion to boys, who remain central to narrative, nonsexualized and productive. Girls get a great deal of social sanction for turning themselves into eye candy.

Lastly, there’s the age at which a girl is portrayed as “fair game” for older men. Mainstream movies regularly feature older male actors with much younger female ones. Older women in media virtually disappear after the age of 40, certainly in relation to younger men, but moviegoers don’t think twice about pairing aging male stars like Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Harrison Ford, George Clooney with ever younger female costars. This double standard glamorizes double-digit age gaps in romantic and sexual entanglements (not to mention perpetuates sex-based, lifetime wage discrimination in the industry).

Consider the movie “Two Mothers,” a story about two “older” women who fall in love with each other’s sons, in a “taboo sex drama.” It was the “most divisive film to screen at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.” The movie is based on a Doris Lessing story actually called, “Two Grandmothers.” Compare this to “American Beauty,” which was based on the Amy Fisher story, in which a man falls for his teenage daughter’s friend. American Beauty wasn’t “taboo” and caused no audience outrage. It was described as “poetic and humane.” The “unreliable narrator” of Nabokov’s “Lolita” infuses our media and apparently permeates parts of our judicial landscape.

When you consider the many ages of adolescent girls, it is clear that our cultural imagination encourages boys and men to think of young girls as fair game. By the time a girl is 12, she isn’t even seen as a whole human being, but regarded for her parts. She’s “forbidden fruit,” “a temptress,” “a man trap” and “asking for it.” All she has to do to be targeted sexually is go for a walk. If she wears skimpy clothes, is overly friendly with a teacher, dances with abandon, especially if she’s a girl or young woman of color, she might be blamed for her own assault. This is a male fantasy. And I haven’t even mentioned schoolgirl pornography or designer vaginas.

Not one of these many ways of measuring an adolescent girl’s age excuses predatory rapists — and yet time and time again, they’re used to do just that.

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/04/the_...age_girls_age/