Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[Cin]

A Case Study in Awful: The 8 Worst Parts of the Recent Naval Academy Rape Hearing
by Erin Matson, Editor at Large, RH Reality Check


Recently, attorneys defending three former Naval Academy football players against allegations of sexual assault at an off-campus party spent more than 20 hours over five grueling days questioning, taunting, blaming, shaming, and what appears to be re-victimizing a 21-year-old female midshipman.

At one point, the midshipman said she was too exhausted to continue testifying and the commander presiding over the hearing granted her a day off. “This is borderline abusive,” her attorney Susan Burke said upon leaving the Navy Yard that day. Abusive, yes, and sadly all too instructive in how rape culture encourages attorneys, members of the media, and others to turn sexual assault victims into the accused.

The routine process of victim blaming, as illuminated by this Article 32 hearing, serves to silence other sexual assault victims, generate sympathy for rapists, and create doubts that the definition of sexual assault includes anything beyond a stranger jumping out of an alley and raping a sweet, chaste woman wearing modest clothing.

In this case, the midshipman saw social media posts that led her to believe she was raped while drunk. All three defendants admitted sexual contact with the midshipman on the night at the center of the allegations—either to her, or prosecutors. What follows is a look at some of the horrible insinuations, statements, and questions used by defense attorneys to impugn the character of the midshipman, which offer an entry point to talk about and refute rape culture as a whole.

How do you perform oral sex?

Defense attorneys repeatedly asked the midshipman how she performs oral sex. This question is irrelevant, even though one of the defendants has said that he put his penis in her mouth that night. Here’s the deal: It doesn’t matter if a sexual assault victim has had sex, and it doesn’t matter how she (or he) prefers to have sex. People are biologically driven to have sex. Sex is part of normal life. A history or manner of having oral sex, or rough sex, or any specific style of sex, does not mean that you can’t be sexually assaulted orally, or roughly, or in that specific style. There are infinite ways to have sex, minus one: Sex without consent isn’t sex. By definition, it’s rape.

Tell us about your sex life.

Along with repeated queries about how she performs oral sex, the midshipman was asked to describe her sex life in detail. This, like the oral sex question, is also irrelevant and demeaning. Casting the spotlight on a victim’s sexual history in the context of discussing her (or his) rape serves to make others imagine the victim sexually. It serves to degrade her (or him). Sharing your sexuality with others is a personal choice. Being cast in a sexual light can be highly desired, even great, when freely chosen. But painting a sexual picture of someone when they haven’t asked you to serves to shame, silence, and sluttify.

You had sex with him before, right?

The midshipman and other witnesses were called to say that one of the defendants had a history of consensual sex with her prior to the night listed in the sexual assault charges. But this is irrelevant. There is no social role—boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, best friend, casual sex partner, community leader, religious official—that renders a person unable to rape. The only way to not be a rapist is to not rape. Further, consent is never permanent. Consenting to sex once or even 1,000 times is never consenting to future sex. Consent must be given for every single sex act, every single time. Sexual contact without consent is sexual assault.

But you were flirting!

In tandem with conflating and purposefully confusing previous consensual sex with rape charges, defense attorneys suggested that she was flirting that night. The dog whistle hangs rather obviously in the air: She’s a slut, they’re arguing, she wanted it. As nearly everyone who has attempted romantic interaction with another can say from personal experience, the interpretation that someone is flirting with you does not mean that someone has the intent to flirt with you, and vice versa. Heck, let’s even say she was flirting. Flirting is neither a crime nor an invitation to commit a crime. Flirtation never forces rape. Flirtation never excuses rape.

Did you “feel like a ho” the next morning?

This really happened: The defense attorneys asked the midshipman if she “felt like a ho” the next morning. Applying derogatory terms about sex workers to anyone, including sex workers themselves, is a tool of sexual dominance. Questions like these make it so painfully obvious why sexual assault victims can be hesitant to come forward. If you say something, they’ll trash you. They really will.

You must be hiding something.

While being compared to a “ho” and asked to describe how she performs oral sex, the midshipman said that she hadn’t always been totally forthcoming with information. For any sexual assault victim, it’s not hard to fill in the blanks and explain why. When people come forward about sexual assault, the spotlight is put on them, and it is not flattering. Giving rapists a pass and denying that victims have been victimized, or at least making them appear unreasonable, is what rape culture is all about.

“Drunk sex is not sexual assault.”

Defense attorneys said that a blackout state induced by alcohol “is a function of memory. It is not an attribute of capacity.” This argument is to say that a person saturated with alcohol can do anything, they just may not be able to remember it. That is not true physically, legally, or mentally. An extremely drunk person may be too incapacitated, physically, to walk or speak, or too incapacitated, legally, to drive or operate certain equipment. So, too, an extremely drunk person may be too incapacitated, mentally, to consent to sex. It is irrelevant how much, if any, alcohol is involved: The burden to not rape will always be on rapists, not victims. There is no free pass to rape a person unable to offer meaningful, understanding, reasonably aware consent to sexual contact.

What should we take away from this awful hearing?

Defense attorneys painted the midshipman as a “bad girl” in order to raise doubt about the rape charges against the three former Naval Academy football players charged with sexually assaulting her. In so doing, they relied upon sexism and stubborn myths that make it easy for rapists to get away with rape.

The myth that “good girls don’t get raped” is one of the cruelest lies to be found in the intersecting worlds of male dominance and rape culture. It serves to shift the focus of sexual assault conversations from perpetrators to victims. Culturally, we can understand why this happens, even when women, who are more likely to be victimized by sexual assault, participate.

If there were a checklist to follow that means we couldn’t be sexually assaulted, then we wouldn’t have to live in fear of the reality that sexual assault will almost inevitably touch our lives or the lives of people we know. We wouldn’t have to filter online dates with a wary eye, or drink apple juice at the party, or clutch our keys when we walk home at night. We could just not be sluts. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way, and the practice of victim blaming neither protects anyone nor creates a climate where women can participate freely in public life the same way men can, including taking a keg stand at a college party where football players are present.

In the context of legal proceedings, a negative focus on victims carries an additional punch. The Naval Academy rape hearing is so gut-wrenching because the woman for whom prosecutors are seeking justice was treated as much (or more) of a defendant as the three alleged rapists.

In our legal system, the burden of proof is on the state to prove that a defendant is guilty. It is a flaw in logic, to say nothing of lazy lawyering on behalf of a defense team, to insist that if a victim is proven guilty a defendant is innocent. Unfortunately, this is often the case when men are put on trial for rape allegations, and it’s happening here within the context of the military chain of command presiding over a sexual assault case.

As RH Reality Check‘s Adele Stan has written on the ongoing push to remove the military chain of command from sexual assault prosecutions in the context of this case:

Those who advocate taking the authority to prosecute such cases out of the hands of the commanding officers of those accused of sexual assault say there is little hope that the military’s rape-culture crisis will dissipate until the immediate commanders of the accused are taken out of the picture.

Certainly, rape culture is a terrible beast, and it came out on full display within this brutal rape hearing at the Navy Yard. It’s a vicious lie to insinuate that you can avoid the threat of rape by being a good girl. Good girls can get raped and bad girls can get raped, and every time, it’s rape. Women (and men) can wear miniskirts and flirt and still get raped. Drunk people can get raped. Drunk people can rape. Victims are not the problem.

A decision is forthcoming as to whether this specific case at the Naval Academy will proceed against the defendants, and it’s also up for grabs whether the U.S. Naval Academy Superintendent will be removed from the case. Given an ongoing push on Capitol Hill to better address military sexual assault, it is likely that additional legislative debates about military sexual assault prosecutions will come along on their own timelines. Whether the routine practice of victim blaming within a broader rape culture is allowed to continue, however, is up to all of us. Perhaps this case has been vomit-inducing enough to advance the conversation.

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/20...-rape-hearing/

[Kobi]

ATLANTA (Reuters) - A Georgia Tech university fraternity member has apologized for the "lack of judgment" he showed in writing an email with offensive language, including the term "rapebait," about how to pick up women at campus parties.

The Georgia Institute of Technology student newspaper published the apology on Thursday. It was signed only "Matthew" and the paper's editor did not return a call seeking comment on who wrote it.

"I am deeply sorry for the pain and embarrassment my actions and lack of judgment have caused the students at Georgia Tech and my Phi Kappa Tau brotherhood as well as those who otherwise came into contact with the email," said the letter.

The email was "written as a joke for a small audience that understood the context and that it is not my nor my fraternity's actual beliefs on the subject," the letter said.

Georgia Tech spokesman Matt Nagel said Friday he could not confirm whether the letter writer was the same student who sent the email, which offered frat members tips on how to "succeed" with women by plying them with alcohol at parties.

"If anything ever fails, go get more alcohol," said the email, which signed off with the phrase "luring the rapebait."

In a statement earlier this week, Georgia Tech said it was looking into the incident.

"The Institute does not condone this type of behavior and continues to provide resources and education designed to create a supportive campus environment for all students, even those who exercise extremely poor judgment," the statement said.

Phi Kappa Tau's national office said in a statement that it has suspended the student, pending the outcome of the investigation.

The email is "extremely inappropriate and does not reflect the values of the Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity," it said.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/georgia-tec...230219118.html

[Gemme]

Missouri Teen Shunned by Community After Rape

Daisy Coleman, Missouri Teen, Shunned By Community After Rape Allegations
By Simon McCormack


A teenage girl in Maryville, Mo., claims she has been repeatedly threatened and harassed after she said she was raped last year by a classmate from a well-connected family.

The Huffington Post generally does not identify rape victims. However, the family confirmed that they wanted to go public with the information.

The Star explains the family's claims of the January 2012 incident:

A high school senior had sex with Coleman’s 14-year-old daughter, another boy did the same with her daughter’s 13-year-old friend, and a third student video-recorded one of the bedding scenes. Interviews and evidence initially supported the felony and misdemeanor charges that followed.
Daisy Coleman was then left on her front lawn, nearly unconscious in the freezing cold.

Nodaway County Sheriff Darren White told the Huffington Post his department presented a "strong case" to prosecutors that then 17-year-old Matthew Barnett raped Coleman's daughter.

He said charges were dropped when Daisy Coleman declined to cooperate with prosecutors.

Melinda Coleman told CNN's Erin Burnett on Monday that White's claims are "absolutely not true," and said the police report from the incident proves it.

"The victims decided they no longer wanted to participate in the case," White told HuffPost. "They gave no deposition or statement and invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves. The charges being dismissed had everything to do with the victims not wanting to assist in their case."

Prosecutor Robert Rice eventually dropped all charges against Barnett, who said the sex was consensual.

In an interview with the Star, Rice dismissed any suggestion the decision had to do with Barnett's grandfather, a former lawman and four-term state representative in the Missouri legislature. White also insisted to HuffPost that politics played no role in the decision not to prosecute.

Melinda Coleman told the Daily Mail that, after the allegations came to light, her family was continually threatened by residents in the town of 12,000. Her daughter suffered from depression and even attempted suicide.

Daisy Coleman told KCUR, "I just felt like if I'm this ugly on the inside, I might as well look it on the outside,” she said. “You're the s-word, you're the w-word…b-word. Just, after a while, you start to believe it.”

Melinda Coleman eventually decided to move the family back to Albany, Mo. The family had lived in Maryville for three years.

"Basically I was terrified, I wanted to protect my children, I wanted to get them out of there," Coleman told the Daily Mail.

Coleman moved in August 2012. Eight months later, her house in Maryville, which was still on the market, burned down under mysterious circumstances, detailed further in the Star's report.

"On one hand, it would almost be a comfort to think it was an electrical problem that caused the fire," Coleman told the Mail. "But on the other hand, there’s a part of me that really thinks that the fire could be part of all this."

Gawker reports that the accused teen is currently attending the University of Central Missouri and "apparently having a great time" based on a now seemingly deleted retweet:

“If her name begins with A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z, she wants the D."

Raw Story reports that Anonymous has threatened to target Maryville in much the same way the loose-knit "hacktivist" group did in the Steubenville rape case.

"Why was a suspect, who confessed to a crime, released with no charges?" a post from the group said. "If Maryville won’t defend these young girls, if the police are too cowardly or corrupt to do their jobs, if [the] justice system has abandoned them, then we will have to stand for them. Mayor Jim Fall, your hands are dirty. Maryville, expect us."

[Gemme]

Due to public outcry and the threat of Anonymous, the case is being reopened. I really hope this girl gets a fair shake this time.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...6pLid%3D392513

[Wolfsong]

A military friend of mine forwarded this to me this morning. I love his conviction and wish more people felt this way.

[Cin]

http://www.alternet.org/why-naked-pi...ess?page=0%2C1

A few excepts from the article highlighting the mentality that fosters the rampant rape culture at institutions of higher learning:

a woman filed a lawsuit against Wesleyan University citing a fraternity known on campus as the “rape factory.”

At Miami University of Ohio someone thought it was a good idea hang a poster titled “Top Ten Ways to Get Away with Rape,” which closed with, “If your [sic] afraid the girl might identify you slit her throat.”

A University of Vermont fraternity surveyed members in 2011 with this question: “If you could rape someone, who would it be?”

At USC, two years ago, some boys released a Gullet Report (named for a “gullet,” defined as “a target’s mouth and throat. Most often pertains to a target’s throat capacity and it’s [sic] ability to gobble cock. If a target is known to have a good gullet, it can deep-throat dick extremely well. Good Gullet Girls (GGG) are always scooped up well before last call.”). For good measure they added some overtly racist material as well.

Yale’s Zeta Psi fraternity took photos of members holding up signs reading, “We love Yale sluts.” Another fraternity had fun running around campus singing, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” Meanwhile, the school’s recommended punishment for sexual assault violations was a written reprimand.

Wales’ Cardiff Metropolitan University hung a poster for orientation week events that featured a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the text: “I was raping a woman last night and she cried.”

More excepts: Time to fight back:

Last week at Swarthmore College a pledge posted a photograph on Instagram of his offer to join a fraternity. The picture was of a booklet cover featuring a mosaic of hundreds of naked or nearly naked women. … The fraternity has used this format for several years — but this year, a group of students led by senior Marian Firke protested the use of the photography.

Objectifying girls and women is tightly bound up with suppressing women’s speech. Consider these comments about Firke on the website Total Frat Move in response to the protest: after some throwaway “feminist cunt” ramblings, commenters described her as a “Stupid girl who stick[s] [her] opinions where they do not belong.” Mild enough. But, one commenter went on to say that “somebody needs to send their pledges over to fuck the bitch out of” her. Another, that she “deserved to be face raped so hard that she will be incapable of spewing any more of this bullshit.” The interweaving of violence, objectification and desire for her to shut up are inseparable.

But student activists aren’t shutting up. They have coalesced into a national movement and are taking matters into their own hands. Yesterday FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, whose successful faux Victoria’s Secret Consent campaign launched a series of an anti-rape activism pranks, named student recipients of its Consent Revolution Awards at four schools for their efforts to educate their peers. Recently, to great effect, the group created a fake consent-themed Playboy 2013 Top Ten Party Commandments that captured national attention. While these projects may seem trivial or funny, they are, in actuality, deadly serious. So are the efforts of Know Your IX, a student-led coalition created to educate students about their rights on campus, launched earlier this year.

Young men are going to colleges and universities way too comfortable expressing themselves in exploitative, sexist ways that denigrate their female peers and are corrosive to the academic environment. In addition, the notion that rape is a serious crime for which they can be held responsible seems not to have entered their heads.* Somehow we’ve gotten to the point where discussing a person’s “rape potential” is a thing.

*And where would they get an idea like that? Perhaps given the fact that they are not prosecuted and even the universities themselves refuse to take rape seriously calling it non consensual sex (somebody please tell me how this is not rape?) and giving written reprimands as punishment for sexual assault.

[Soon]

Originally Posted by Gemme

Due to public outcry and the threat of Anonymous, the case is being reopened. I really hope this girl gets a fair shake this time.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...6pLid%3D392513

I'M DAISY COLEMAN, THE TEENAGER AT THE CENTER OF THE MARYVILLE RAPE MEDIA STORM, AND THIS IS WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

[Soon]

This ad, created for the United Nations Women campaign (which is unfortunately shortened to the UN Women campaign), becomes more devastating when you realize that the Google search boxes are the results of genuine searches, and although the ad-crafting and Googling were all done by Christopher Hunt at Ogilvy & Mather in Dubai, Copyranter points out that some of the automatic results are the same in the U.S.

About the ads, Hunt says:

This campaign uses the world's most popular search engine (Google) to show how gender inequality is a worldwide problem. The adverts show the results of genuine searches, highlighting popular opinions across the world wide web.
The distressing thing about this is that it’s a no-copy-required ad. Or, a found-copy ad. Patriarchal culture filtered through individually misogynistic Google searches has written all the pithy copy required for the world to take a serious look at how generally far away people are from living in a world with true gender equality. So, if this work were to earn a Clio nomination, the patriarchy would be called up on stage to accept with Hunt, right? Obviously, you can’t get the whole patriarchy up onstage (it’s currently filming a new superhero movie), so Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets would have to accept on the patriarchy’s behalf before telling a story about how much they hate political correctness that began, “In my day…”

http://jezebel.com/ad-for-un-women-c...rch-1448647030

[Martina]

Black Boys Have an Easier Time Fitting In at Suburban Schools Than Black Girls
By Aboubacar Ndiaye

Though I’m sure my name was a hint, I happen to be black. My parents are West African (Mali and Senegal to be exact), and I was born and raised in France. When I was 13, my family and I moved to a suburban community outside of Atlanta. The school I attended, though relatively diverse for Georgia, was majority white. I had an easy time there. I made friends quickly, a lot of them white. To this day, more than ten years later, my friend circle is still very much white, populated by the people I met at my mostly-white high school, or at my mostly-white university, or in my mostly-white neighborhood. I have always attributed my ability to fit into both multicultural and white environments to my personality and my immigrant's need to adapt to whatever environment I'm in.

But recent research published in the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Education journal shows that my gender (male) was one of the determinative factors in the relative ease of my social integration. In an article published last year, Megan M. Holland, a professor at the University of Buffalo and a recent Harvard Ph.D., studied the social impact of a desegregation program on the minority students who were being bussed to a predominantly white high school in suburban Boston. She found that minority boys, because of stereotypes about their supposed athleticism and “coolness,” fit in better than minority girls because the school gave the boys better opportunities to interact with white students. Minority boys participated in sports and non-academic activities at much higher rates. Over the course of her study, she concluded that structural factors in the school as well as racial narratives about minority males resulted in increased social rewards for the boys, while those same factors contributed to the isolation of girls in the diversity program.

Another study looked at a similar program, called Diversify. Conducted by Simone Ispa-Landa at Northwestern University, it showed how gender politics and gender performance impacted the way the minority students were seen at the school. The study shows that “as a group, the Diversify boys were welcomed in suburban social cliques, even as they were constrained to enacting race and gender in narrow ways.” Diversify girls, on the other hand, “were stereotyped as ‘ghetto’ and ‘loud’”—behavior that, when exhibited by the boys in the program, was socially rewarded. Another finding from her study was that because of the gender dynamics present at the school—the need to conform to prevalent male dominance in the school—“neither the white suburban boys nor the black Diversify boys were interested in dating” the minority girls. The girls reported being seen by boys at their schools as “aggressive” and not having the “Barbie doll” look. The boys felt that dating the white girls was “easier” because they “can’t handle the black girls.”

The black boys in Ispa-Landa’s study found themselves in peculiar situations in which they would play into stereotypes of black males as being cool or athletic by seeming “street-smart.” At the same time, though, they would work to subvert those racial expectations by code-switching both their speech and mannerisms to put their white classmates at ease. Many of the boys reported feeling safer and freer at the suburban school, as they would not be considered “tough” at their own schools. It was only in the context of the suburban school that their blackness conferred social power. In order to maintain that social dominance, the boys engaged in racial performance, getting into show fights with each other to appear tough and using rough, street language around their friends.

In the case of the girls, the urban signifiers that gave the boys so much social acceptance, were held against them. While the boys could wear hip-hop clothing, the girls were seen as “ghetto” for doing the same. While the boys could display a certain amount of aggression, the girls felt they were penalized for doing so. Ispa-Landa, in an interview, expressed surprise at “how much of a consensus there was among the girls about their place in the school.” She also found that overall, the girls who participated in diversity programs paid a social cost because they “failed to embody characteristics of femininity” that would have valorized them in the school hierarchy. They also felt excluded from the sports and activities that gave girls in those high schools a higher social status, such as cheerleading and Model U.N., because most activities ended too late for the parents of minority girls. Holland notes that minority parents were much more protective of the girls; they expressed no worries about the boys staying late, or over at friend’s houses.

Once minority women leave high school and college, they are shown to continue to struggle with social integration, even as they achieve higher educational outcomes and, in certain locales, higher incomes than minority men. Though, as presaged by high-school sexual politics, they were still three times less likely than black men to marry outside of their race.

For the second time in as many sessions, the Supreme Court heard a case about affirmative action last Tuesday. Following last year’s Fisher v. Texas non-decision, the court will now be deciding whether states can ban the consideration of race in college admissions through ballot initiatives as the Michigan did in 2006. Based on the tenor of the oral arguments, some court watchers have predicted that the court’s conservative majority will now take the opportunity to further limit the use of affirmative action in admissions across the nation. As Garrett Epps noted last week, it is nearly impossible to have a measured conversation about affirmative action, an issue that splits even the most ardent liberals. However, there appears to be a general consensus that minority populations benefit from these programs. But very rarely do commentators stop to consider the diversity of that minority population, and even fewer consider what impact affirmative actions programs have on the disparate, intersecting groups who participate in them.

A couple of months ago, Ebony.com editor Jamilah Lemieux started the Twitter hashtag #blackpowerisforblackmen to discuss the little-talked about but deeply-felt existence of black male privilege. Tweets like “#blackpowerisforblackmen because the Black men's problems are the community's problems” and “#blackpowerisforblackmen bc although black women played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement, we're only told about MLK&other blk men” speak to a history of minimizing of the experience of black women. The hashtag, which attracted no small amount of blowback from black males, revealed the dilemma that many black women face: having to combat both racism and sexism. Like the research about the diversity programs, the conversation showed that what we sometimes instinctively think of as “the black experience” is complicated by gender. The ostensible purpose of affirmative action is to increase the presence of minorities in colleges and universities. But as the Supreme Court considers further limiting the scope of such programs, it is important to remember that unless cultural expectations about race and gender change, full educational integration will remain a pipe dream.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/education...-girls/280657/
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

[Kobi]

[Greyson]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Looks like "college men" are still boys that have not been taught the concept of "No" means no and you are not the prince the adults and society led you to believe you are.

[kittygrrl]

Originally Posted by Greyson

Looks like "college men" are still boys that have not been taught the concept of "No" means no and you are not the prince the adults and society led you to believe you are.

Greyson, it's positively scarey It wouldn't take much to shatter the veneer.

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by Kobi

You know, I'm going to ask, do you have a source on this? Not because I think you're bullshitting, but because frankly I wish this were a load of shit and want to hold onto a glimmer of false hope for a few brief moments.

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Allison W

You know, I'm going to ask, do you have a source on this? Not because I think you're bullshitting, but because frankly I wish this were a load of shit and want to hold onto a glimmer of false hope for a few brief moments.

It is from Body Wars by Margo Maine

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by Kobi

It is from Body Wars by Margo Maine

OK, that's good to know.

From the reviews of the book I found on Amazon, the studies are apparently accurate (according to a student who has access to the studies cited in the book), but an important detail that was omitted in your post is that the book was published in 1999.

This makes me feel a little better. It's still a scary-ish statistic even at fifteen years old, but at least it's describing last generation's college students and not this generation's college students. (Of course, for all I know, if the study were repeated today the results might not be any better--for all that I would hope they would be--but the age of the study is still extremely important.)