Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[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]

More grim statistics for future Sheryl Sandbergs and Marissa Mayers

After sixty years of asking a random sample of Americans which gender they prefer to work for, Gallup recently found that both men and women still prefer a male boss over a female boss — a gap that has barely budged in the last ten years.

In a survey of 2,059 Americans from a variety of work backgrounds, 35 percent said they prefer a male boss, while 23 percent said they prefer to work for a woman. 41 percent, meanwhile, volunteered that they don't care either way — the largest percent in the history of the survey.

Since 1953 the gap has narrowed: 66 percent preferred a male boss in 1953, while just five percent preferred a woman, and 25 percent saw no difference.

But, like other aspects of gender imbalance at work, the move toward equal boss preference has lost steam in the last decade. In 2002, 19 percent of Americans preferred a female boss, and 31 preferred a male boss — a similar difference to the one Gallup found today, and one that mirrors the gender wage gap. For comparison, earlier this year, the U.S. Census Bureau said women in full-time, year-round jobs still make 77 cents for every dollar men make — a zero percent change since 2002. Many have been lamenting this fact for the last half-decade, asking why a movement that once seemed unstoppable is apparently stuck in neutral.

The answer for both the wage and attitudes-about-bosses gaps are likely more complicated than run-of-the-mill sexism. One factor for the latter poses a kind of catch-22. When it comes to taking directions from superiors, people may tend to prefer what they know: 54 percent of those surveyed say they currently work for a man, while only 30 percent work for a woman. And the percentage of male bosses grows on the way up the corporate latter, says a Catalyst Census. In 2012, women held only 14.3 percent of executive officer positions at Fortune 500 companies, and just 16.6 percent of board of director positions. One quarter of these companies operated with no women executive officers at all.

This matters because Gallup found that those surveyed who currently work for a woman are more likely to prefer a female boss than those who work for a man. The preference didn't entirely fill in the blank space, but it helped. Gallup puts it like this:

Those who currently work for a woman are as likely to prefer having a female boss as a male one. This is one of the few subgroups of the population that does not tilt in the "male boss" direction. Those who currently work for a man prefer a male boss, by 35 percent to 17 percent. [Gallup]

Still, the polling company is careful to warn against reading too much into the data: "[I]t is possible that workers who initially prefer a female boss are more likely to end up in circumstances in which they have a female boss," it says. But it's not an outlandish proposition: That a world with more female bosses would also be a world with more people who like female bosses.

Clearly, we're still a ways off from such a world. As Sheryl Sandburg pointed out earlier this year in her blockbuster career book, Lean In, some of the stunted progress women are experiencing at the top level might be due to a "likability gap." Studies have suggested that the more promotions, raises, and accolades a woman earns in the workplace, the less likely she is to be liked by her peers and coworkers. Whereas likability and achievement for men are often positively correlated. This argument seems to align nicely with Gallup's findings — maybe people prefer male bosses because they don't yet see female bosses as "likable."

But Gallup's results also suggest that this could change. American workers may see a stronger link between female success and likability when more female bosses are signing more checks.

http://news.yahoo.com/latest-depress...113800543.html

[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.)

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Allison W

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.)

Agreed, the age of the study is important. I'm not sure how much of a difference there would be if it were repeated today.

Look at the other stories just on this page about current campus rapes:

- 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.”

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

This is a link to current stats on college campuses:


http://www.campussafetymagazine.com/...and-Myths.aspx

That's from 2012. Does it sound like things have improved?