Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[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?

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by Kobi

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?

No. Usually I try to stick up for my generation, but... fuck it. It's not as though any of this is actually news to me, but it's still depressing.

(However, ideal response to the University of Vermont frat survey: the asshole who wrote it. He probably wouldn't find that so amusing. I doubt many of these young men would if it were something they had to live in fear of.)

[Kobi]

Allison,

This is the mentality I saw back in the 1960's (if memory serves, that is a few decades before you were born). Rape victims back then were interrogated by law enforcement. Their sexual histories, their lifestyles, their clothing, etc were all used to blame the victim for her assault. Plus, she was subjected to describing the assault in detail with questioning as to did she enjoy it? Did she orgasm?

Male privilege and entitlement is alive and well and deeply ingrained in our culture and cultures around the world. And, it is kept alive not only by individual people (men and women) but by institutions like colleges, the military, the workplace, the media etc who cant quite seem to grasp that this isn't ok.

Internalized sexism and misogyny and the privilege and entitlement is part of our socialization from birth. Both males and females are TAUGHT their respective places and the places of their opposites. It's about control and power. It starts at birth and is an exhausting never ending battle.

Isms have been very carefully and deliberately woven into the social fabric of the world. When we have to address sexism and misogyny and the rest of the isms, internalized and externalized, here on the Planet, the insidiousness of it should hit home.

[Kobi]

The message that women are untrustworthy liars is everywhere in our culture—from TV and music, to politics and religion, says Soraya Chemaly.

Two weeks ago a man in France was arrested for raping his daughter. She’d gone to her school counselor and then the police, but they needed “hard evidence.” So, she videotaped her next assault. Her father was eventually arrested. His attorney explained, “There was a period when he was unemployed and in the middle of a divorce. He insists that these acts did not stretch back further than three or four months. His daughter says longer. But everyone should be very careful in what they say.” Because, really, even despite her seeking help, her testimony, her bravery in setting up a webcam to film her father raping her, you really can’t believe what the girl says, can you?

Everyone “knows” this. Even children.

Three years ago, in fly-on-the-wall fashion of parent drivers everywhere, I listened while a 14-year-old girl in the back seat of my car described how angry she was that her parents had stopped allowing her to walk home alone just because a girl in her neighborhood “claimed she was raped.” When I asked her if there was any reason to think the girl's story was not true, she said, “Girls lie about rape all the time.”

She didn’t know the person, she just assumed she was lying.

Fast-forward three years, again in a car. This time a 13-year-old refused to believe that when the newly appointed pope was 12 he’d written a “love letter” to the girl living next door. The child insisted stubbornly that the woman, now in the news, had to be a liar because the pope, even as a boy, would not have written a love letter.

In both cases, to my children’s bottomless pool of chagrin, I pulled the car over so I could ask the girls why they were so sure that the women’s accounts were not credible. We talked about their assumptions, about who gets to be believed, double standards regarding sex, and how culture portrays women. Fun times with Mom.

No one says, “You can’t trust women,” but distrust them we do. College students surveyed revealed that they think up to 50% of their female peers lie when they accuse someone of rape, despite wide-scale evidence and multi-country studies that show the incidence of false rape reports to be in the 2%-8% range, pretty much the same as false claims for other crimes. As late as 2003, people jokingly (wink, wink) referred to Philadelphia’s sex crimes unit as “the lying bitch unit.” If an 11-year-old girl told an adult that her father took out a Craigslist ad to find someone to beat and rape her while he watched, as recently actually occurred, what do you think the response would be? Would she need to provide a videotape after the fact?

It goes way beyond sexual assault as well. That’s just the most likely and obvious demonstration of “women are born to lie” myths. Women’s credibility is questioned in the workplace, in courts, by law enforcement, in doctors' offices, and in our political system. People don’t trust women to be bosses, or pilots, or employees. Pakistan’s controversial Hudood Ordinance still requires a female rape victim to procure four male witnesses to her rape or risk prosecution for adultery. In August, a survey of managers in the United States revealed that they overwhelmingly distrust women who request flextime.

It’s notable, of course, that women are trusted to be mothers—the largest pool of undervalued, economically crucial labor.

*****

So how exactly are we teaching children that women lie and can’t be trusted to be as competent or truthful as men? I mean, clearly, most people aren’t saying “girls and women lie, kids, that’s just the way God built them.”

First, lessons about women’s untrustworthiness are in our words, pictures, art, and memory. It’s simple enough to see how we are overwhelmingly portrayed as flawed, supplemental, ornamental, or unattainably perfect. It’s also easy to find examples of girls and women routinely, entertainingly cast as liars and schemers. For example, on TV we have Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl, Don't Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23, Devious Maids, and, because its serpent imagery is so basic to feminized evil, American Horror Story: Coven.

The lessons start early, too. Take, for example, the popular animated kids movie Shark Tale, which featured the song “Gold Digger,” a catchy tune that describes women as scheming, thieving, greedy, and materialistic. There is no shortage of music lyrics that convey the same ideas across genres. It's in movies, too. Consider, for example, the prevalence of untrustworthy mad women, or the manipulative women of Film Noire, and the failure of most films to even allow two women to be named or speak to one another about anything other than the male protagonists.

But pop culture and art are just the cherry on the top of the icing on a huge cake. The United States is among the most religious of all countries in the industrialized world. So, while some people wring their hands over hip hop, I’m more worried about how men like Rick Santorum and Ken Cuccinelli explain to their daughters why they can’t be priests. I know that there is hip hop that exceeds the bounds of taste and is sodden with misogyny. But, people seem to think that those manifestations of hatred are outside of the mainstream when, in reality, it's just more of the same set to great beats.

Sometimes, however, there’s a bonus, synchronous two-for-one! Delilah, a renowned biblical avatar of female untrustworthiness, made it into the lyrics of JT Money's “Somethin' ‘Bout Pimpin'”:

I got a problem with this punk ass bitch I know
Ol’no good skanlezz switch out ho
An untrustworthy bitch like Deliliah
Only thing she good for is puttin’ dick inside her

In other words:

"Amongst all the savage beasts none is found so harmful as woman." -- John Chrysostom

“What she cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions. One must be on one's guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil." -- St. Albertus Magnus

“Women were made either to be wives or prostitutes.” -- Martin Luther

“I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.” -- Augustine

While most religious leaders aren’t going around spouting overtly denigrating opinions about women, many, through default and tradition, casually and uncritically expose children to religious texts that are fundamentally misogynistic. I have to believe that most Sunday school lessons are not concerned with deconstructing, say, the creation story, a seminal text in our culture whether you are religious or not. Religious misogyny is tied to institutional power that ends up in children and women being impoverished and dying.

Ideas about women, credibility, legitimacy, authority and—notably—Catholic and Evangelical “priesthood” are important and have deep roots in religious thought and philosophy. And those ideas have contemporary expression (see links): Tertullian: "Women are the devil's gateway." Thomas Aquinas: "As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten." St. Clement of Alexandria: "Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman...the consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of shame." St. John Chrysostom: Women are "weak and flighty...For what is a woman but an enemy of friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a domestic danger, delectable mischief, a fault in nature, painted with beautiful colors?" St. Jerome: "Woman is the root of all evil." There’s Origen, one of Christianity’s greatest thinkers, a man who castrated himself and who considered women worse than animals. And, not to be left out, St. Augustine.

Why focus on these musty, long dead theologians and philosophers? These thoughts are alive and well and have a super long tail outside of religion—think: domestic work, pay discrimination, and sex segregation in the workplace. Every time a young girl can’t serve at an altar, or play in a game, or dress as she pleases; every time she’s assaulted and told to prove it, it’s because she cannot, in the end, be trusted. Controlling her—her clothes, her will, her physical freedom, her reputation—is a perk.

Conventional Abrahamic religious thought cannot escape the idea that we have to pay, as women, with lifelong suffering and labor and be subject to the authority of men lest our irrationality and desires result in more evil and suffering. Until religious hierarchies renounce beliefs and practices based on these theologies, these long-dead men, creatures of their time, might as well be the ones repeatedly showing up in Congress to give their massively ill-informed opinions on women’s health and lives.

Especially in our political lives.

Is it really surprising to anyone that a Santorum staffer said, in the run up to the last election, that women shouldn’t be President because it’s against God’s will? What about the “news commentator” who thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote? The Senate candidate who thinks rape is a gift from God? Or the Senator and presidential aspirant who thinks it’s just another form of conception? Or the doctor who thinks women deserve to die for having abortions? How about the nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia who thinks fetal birth defects are punishment for parents' (read: mothers’) sins? If women die bearing children, so what, that’s what we’re here for.

Even if we insist on not talking about the degree to which legislators' religious beliefs inform their political actions, it is obvious that they do. An entire political party’s “social policy” agenda is being pursued under a rubric that insists women need “permission slips” and “waiting periods.” The recent shutdown? Conservatives holding the country hostage because they want to add anti-abortion “conscience clause” language to legislation. Whose consciences are we talking about? All the morally incompetent and untrustworthy men who need abortions?

It’s no exaggeration to say that distrust of women is the driving force of the “social issues” agenda of the Republican Party. From food stamps and “legitimate rape,” to violence against women and immigration policy. “We need to target the mother. Call it sexist, but that’s the way nature made it,” explained the man who penned Arizona’s immigration law. “Men don’t drop anchor babies, illegal alien mothers do.” I could do this ad infinitum.

The pervasive message that women are untrustworthy liars is atomized in our culture. There is no one source or manifestation. It fills every nook and cranny of our lives.

I find it sad and disturbing that children learn so quickly and normatively to distrust women. Any commitment to parity means challenging the stories we tell them. It means critically assessing the comforting institutions we support out of nostalgia, habit, and tradition. It means walking out of places of worship, not buying certain movie tickets, closing some books, refusing to pay for some music, and politely disagreeing with friends and family at the dinner table. It's not easy. But, really, what's the alternative?

Soraya L. Chemaly writes about gender, feminism and culture for several online media including Role/Reboot, The Huffington Post, Fem2.0, RHReality Check, BitchFlicks, and Alternet among others. She is particularly interested in how systems of bias and oppression are transmitted to children through entertainment, media and religious cultures. She holds a History degree from Georgetown University, where she founded that schools first feminist undergraduate journal, studied post-grad at Radcliffe College.

http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-an...omen-are-liars

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by Kobi

tales of religious sexism and misogyny

And people wonder why I don't like religion.

[Kobi]

I have seen a sixteen-year-old boy weeping in distress after getting a girl’s pube stuck in his teeth, I hear he was unshaven.

I have seen boys showing each other porn on their iPhones on the train home from school, in bars and whilst strolling along the Champs-Elyséés.

I have had a boy ask me to text him screenshots of porn films because he was on a wifi-free family holiday.

One boy turned to kiss his date in the cinema but not before romantically whispering ‘don’t struggle’.

One friend drunkenly walked off into a park in the early hours of the morning and when a male friend brought her back without ‘trying anything’, he was heralded as being ‘soo nice!’ rather than ‘soo normal!’.

I have friends whose boyfriends have posted naked pictures of them all over the Internet.

I have heard consent described as ‘de-romanticizing’.

I have had a shockingly sober boy say to me ‘Why can’t I just slap my dick on your arse? Doesn’t cost you anything!’.

This just scratches the surface of my store of depressing anecdotes; the most violent of which I won’t go into out of respect for the girls involved.

2014 is not a good year to be a teenage girl. The last of the 90’s kids are growing up and we are starting to see the effects of being raised with the Internet.

For generations before us, hormonal teenage boys looking for sexy images of women had limited options; they could brave the embarrassment of going to the counter and buying Playboy, they could look through their sister’s Cosmo or they could use their imagination.

Porn today has rid itself of the embarrassment-factor by embracing the anonymity of the World Wide Web; Playboy isn’t really considered to be porn anymore, the real stuff lives in your phone, on your laptop, your tablet; it is available anywhere, anytime at the touch of a button.

In fact this very website receives a steady stream of hits that result from someone googling some combination of ‘housekeeping porn’ + ‘sex’, ‘lesbian’ and/or ‘rape’.

As you read this, somewhere there is an eleven-year-old boy curiously typing ‘porn’ into Google, probably hoping to see some big boobies. Fast forward a couple of years and he is masturbating to a video of a crying woman who is being tied down, simultaneously penetrated by three men, spanked, and being called a whore. Young boys are being de-sensitized to violence and the more they consume, the more abusive, the more graphic the porn has to be to excite them.

The most popular type of porn is called ‘Gonzo’ which is essentially wall-to-wall abusive sex. There is no foreplay or romance; it is literally hardcore sex from the first to the last frame. The sex is almost always violent; spanking, gagging, anal fisting and choking are commonplace. A very popular image is a close-up of the woman’s face with tears streaming down caused by her being choked whilst performing oral sex, directors like to make this obvious by making her wear lots of mascara; for dramatic effect.

There is no way that this could not have a profound effect on the consumer’s psyche specifically on their attitude towards women. Most boys make no secret of the fact that they watch and enjoy such porn, watching it in groups in the presence of girls or brashly and explicitly describing their fantasies.

Girls know boys watch porn and girls know what porn stars are; they are hairless, they have hourglass figures and they never say no. And so a massive amount of pressure is placed on girls to live up to this. Shaving pubic hair is painful and unsanitary (it leaves hundreds of minute cuts which increases the risk of STDs). And yet girls as young as 11 are doing it.

The porn industry is the primary source of sex ed for the boys who will grow up to be the decision-makers, thinkers, writers, husbands and fathers of tomorrow. A brief overview of what they are being taught/brainwashed to believe;

1.
That it is their birthright as males to have sex with whichever female they want when they want regardless of consent or age.

2.
That the only way to have good sex and the only way to be masculine is to be aggressive, forceful and violent

3.
That they must always be in control and always want to be in control

4.
That their pleasure comes first and foremost


It hardly needs stating what kind of pressures and expectations this puts on girls and women. They have to be living breathing sex dolls and they have to love it. The porn industry is women abuse.

http://www.bad-housekeeping.com/2014...nd-gonzo-porn/

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Very sad. And we wonder why there is a rape culture and rape mentality?