feminist blogs

A guest-post by Nona Willis Aronowitz. Nona is a feminist journalist and co-author of Girldrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism. She blogs at Girl-drive.com.

Debates about “hooking up,” swinging from genuine concern to hysteria on both sides of political spectrum, have been raging throughout the 2000s.* And this week, it’s seemed to bubble up to the surface again. I’ve spent the day reading ruminations by teen girl expert and Teen Vogue advice columnist Rachel Simmons, the always-thought provoking Kate Harding of Broadsheet, and Amanda Marcotte, who gives us a searing and passionate rebuff of any sort of nostalgia we might have about dating rules and traditions.

This rips open a wound for me–I spent most of 2007 contemplating this issue. But I’m gonna weigh in afresh now that I’ve just celebrated 2 years with my healthiest, post-high-school, Completely Committed Relationship (technically marriage, but that’s another story)–the sex-and-love “holy grail,” according to the many women’s and teen magazines Kate lists in her Salon piece. Before, it was my “sorta” this or my “fuck buddy” that or my “I wish I knew what he was thinking” friend-with-benefits. And I gotta say, no matter how much I railed against Laura Sessions Stepp and Dawn Eden and Miriam Grossman and all the other rightwing, anti-feminist cautionary matrons, the facts remained: I knew how it felt to agonize over a text message. I knew how much it hurt to hear that the guy I’d been hooking up with “didn’t do relationships.” And I knew what it was like to use sexuality to coax a guy into being with me, only to have it fail miserably.

Feminist or not, that shit sucks. And it happens a lot, to women and girls everywhere. And yet, if you consider me and the vast majority of America who eventually couple up, it seems to end up okay. What to make of all this?

Rachel asks in the aforelinked post:

Now, just to be clear, I’m all for the freedom to hook up. But let’s face it: despite our desire to give women the freedom to plunder the bar scene and flex their sexual appetites, it would appear a whole lot of them are pretty happy playing by old school rules, thank you very much. Incidentally, one of the women smart enough to figure this out just sold her 5 billionth book, or something like that.

Does that make me a right-winger? Can I still be a feminist and say that I’m against this brand of sexual freedom? I fear feminism has been backed into a corner here. It’s become antifeminist to want a guy to buy you dinner and hold the door for you. Yet – picture me ducking behind bullet proof glass as I type this — wasn’t there something about that framework that made more space for a young woman’s feelings and needs?

I do feel where Rachel is coming from. But those old models are based on the idea that girls are fragile, that they need to be sheltered from the ills of the world. They’re based on, as Kate says, being the girl that guys want. They’re based on, as Amanda outlines, sexism plain and simple. So if we don’t want to go the “Girls Gone Mild” route and start waiting for dudes to ask us on candlelit dates, does that mean it’s hopeless to find a happy sexual medium as teens and young, single women?

Kate says no. “[I]f we teach all kids that there’s a wide range of potentially healthy sexual and emotional relationships,” she says, “and the only real trick (granted, it’s a doozy) is finding partners who are enthusiastic about the same things you want, then there’s room for a lot more people to pursue something personally satisfying at no one else’s expense.” That’s one of the smartest statements I’ve ever read on this topic. Amanda, meanwhile, says we need to stop making women shoulder the burden of keeping men in check, and concentration on getting “boys to appreciate girls more as human beings.” A-fucking-men. (No pun intended.)

But there’s also this: We need to admit as a culture that teens are sexual beings, and that more often than not, sexual maturity has a completely different timeline than emotional maturity. This is, to be sure, skewed by sexism and restrictive gender roles to make sexual coming-of-age worse for girls. But beyond that, maybe discovering what you want sexually and emotionally is just part of growing up–and that’s okay.

And for that matter, what’s with this still-dominant narrative that all teen girls should want a monogamous, snuggly, worshipping boyfriend? I wanted relationships from fantastic fucks all through high school and college, but something tells me that I repeatedly confused lust for love and convinced myself that I wanted a boyfriend, when really I just wanted a screwfest (although I can’t be sure). For the record, I am not–I repeat, am not–saying that when girls write Rachel about the pain they’re going through, they’re not being honest with themselves. I know better than anyone how that pain feels. It’s just that we never consider the power of cultural messages amid the mysterious phenomenon of girls wanting relationships more often than boys. I agree with Amanda that I don’t think it’s biological–there are societal patterns at work here. If we’re told that casual sex is unfulfilling and that we’re going to want relationships, chances are we’ll end up wanting them. And why not? That’s what Seventeen, Glamour, and all my friends always told me.

The interesting thing about my particular sexual history–the kind of narrative that I have yet to read about in all these books and articles about hooking up–is that I had great, pleasurable, safe sex in high school and college with guys who were nevertheless emotionally immature and noncommital and who hurt my feelings all the time. Does that mean I shouldn’t have had sex with them at all–or does it mean I should have been honest with myself (and them, too) about what our relationship was really about? I do remember obsessing, crying, wishing he’d want a “real” relationship with me, as many girls who write to Rachel express. But do I regret the sex, do I feel like I “gave myself away” too early at 15? Hell No. It was one of the most exciting, fascinating, and interesting things about high school. Girls deserve to discover themselves sexually at their own pace, to be neither rushed into having sex nor shamed into not having it. They deserve to have their very own “This is bullshit” moments without wearing a chastity belt.

So, as Rachel worries: Was I permanently affected by this nebulous, masochistic phase, from accepting less than what I wanted emotionally? Yes, but not in a bad way. In fact, I’d venture to claim that without all those past experiences, I wouldn’t have been equipped to be in the honest, nuanced, decidedly modern relaish I am in now.

The “hookup culture” must not be that new of a phenomenon if I was experiencing this stuff in the late nineties–and now at 25, I can employ my 10-year-old hindsight. Today, I found a fascinating piece of writing in my diary about “E,” my first “boyfriend” and first lay in high school who made it perfectly clear he was not into a relationship. In a rare moment of clarity, my 15-year-old self wrote this:

“I think people are wrong when they say that sex and love HAVE to be together. I figured out why me and E have good sex. Physically, we’re in love. Our bodies are perfect for eachother, we satisfy eachother’s sexual urges like we were born for one another. And we’re not really like that personality-wise. But that’s okay! I don’t know why that’s a bad thing, and why everyone looks down upon it. Just because mentally we’re not in love doesn’t mean it’s emotionless sex. It’s not. It’s kinda like our bodies have emotions. Like our minds don’t particularly click, but our kisses and heartbeats and waves of sex drive do. What’s wrong with that???? We’re not USING eachother; we just have a connection that is very hard for people to understand. If they saw us together, they would know what I mean. I’m fine with it, and I think it will go on as long as it takes for me to find someone I have mental AND physical perfectness with, because that’s what I need to be in a relationship…And as long as I got one half, why give it up because OTHER people think its morally wrong? I mean, I wish me and E had both, but it’s been clearly established that we don’t, so fine. It doesn’t automatically turn into a bad thing.”

There you have it. Love and sex don’t always go together, especially for horny 15-year-olds. I could be totally off-base, but I don’t think I was a freak for thinking this. If you’re comfortable with accepting that teens are sexual people with their own desires, there’s no getting around that boys and girls sometimes feel this way. I said this in 2007 and I still believe it now: Sex is the ultimate risk, a risk that makes human relationships complicated, intoxicating and wonderful. It’s an emotional risk when you’re 18 the same way it’s a risk when you’re 40. Each time, as long as you’re safe and armed with the right info, it’s amazing to feel alive and take that risk.

Granted, I was armed with the right info. I had good sex education and candid parents. But many girls are getting scolded by their elders and pressured by their peers. Some are in abstinence-only education classes and told they’ll be too “used” or “dirty” for their future husbands if they have sex. The vast majority are not given the space they need to figure out what they truly want from their sexual relationships.

I agree with Rachel that it feels awful to have to compromise yourself, but testing out your sexual and romantic bottom lines may just be a rite of passage for teenagers experimenting with their sexuality–which is what the sexual revolution should have been about, rather than expecting women to simply indulge men’s fantasies. I doubt things will ever be perfect the first time a girl tries to define a sexual reality that works for her–especially if she’s told to follow age-old dating rules that clearly didn’t work the first time around. What I do hope for the future is that young women be allowed to take moments of sexual confusion in stride without conservatives breathing down their necks, without being called sluts by their peers, without feeling like they’ve ruined their chances at marriage forever, without being made to think that boys are emotionless sexbots, without letting an unsatisfying relationship cross over into the abusive zone–all while getting factual information about sex and STIs from their schools and families. Don’t girls deserve that much?

*Most of the freakouts over the “hookup scene” happen in the context of heterosexual relationships, since according to the majority of sexual conservatives, queer teen girls don’t have peen-in-vadge sex and therefore, as Kate puts it, “don’t exist.”

A guest post by Kate. Kate is a freelance writer and full-time law student. Follow her @itscompliKATEd on Twitter.

Superbowl ads are sexist. This is well trod ground: Marketers objectify women and play up stereotypes in order to sell things to (heterosexual) men. But we knew this year was going to be special. This year there was going to be some extra anti-feminist flavor. This year, there was going to be Tim Tebow.

We’ll come back to Tim and his anti-choice ad in a second. But for now, let’s take a look at the companies that decided that it would be a great idea to isolate half the population from their consumer base.
There were fewer half-naked women and dick jokes this year. Instead, the 2010 Superbowl Ad Mantra seemed to have one common theme: “Feeling castrated? . . . by women? Man up.”

Dodge Charger: Man’s Last Stand

A male voice-over starts with a first person monologue of the mundane life of the American male (“I will walk the dog, I will have fruit for breakfast”), as the ad cuts to shots of men staring blankly, blinking at the camera.

“Yeah, life is boring,” you think, “a car could fix that.” But then there’s an eerie crescendo, and it becomes clear that this voice isn’t just listing his gripes with the world, he’s listing his gripes with a person — and not just any person, a woman: “I will say yes, when you want me to say yes . . .I will take your call, I will listen to your opinion of my friends. . . I will be civil to your mother.” Simultaneously the voice-over seems to be getting angrier as the shots get tighter, finally focusing on the twitching eyes of a man in a suit. “Because I do these things, I will drive the car I want to drive.”

The ad is actually frightening. Not only because the voice-over gets more incensed as the tasks get more mundane (putting your underwear in a hamper? you mean being an adult? you think you deserve a car for that?), but because it’s maybe the most explicit misogyny I’ve ever seen in a Superbowl ad. “Feeling emasculated by your wife?” the ad seems to be saying. “Reaching your boiling point? We know you probably want to hit her, but buy a car instead.”

Oh, and did I mention that a television serial-killer (Michael Hall who plays Dexter) does the voice-over? That’s not creepy or violence promoting at all.

Dockers: Men Without Pants

The first-wave feminist symbolism is almost too much. Literally pants-less men parade across a field singing, “I wear no pants,” seemingly happy until a baritone voice-over interrupts: “Calling all men. It’s time to wear the pants.” Man-up moment #2.

Flo-TV: Spine Removal

A man stands in a lingerie store draped in bras (explain to me why that’s so bad for a presumably heterosexual male?) while the voice-over begins with an “injury report” on Jason whose “girlfriend has removed his spine.” Nice.

Oddly, Jason seems perfectly happy to be shopping with his girlfriend. But he shouldn’t be, the pitch man suggests and closes with the admonishment : “Change out of that skirt, Jason.” Apparently, if you’re not actively feeling emasculated by women, you should be.

Man-up moment #3.

Dove: Men’s Lotion

Of all the man-up ads, this one is perhaps the least offensive, but it still carries the theme. A male voice lists the life of a man from birth to adulthood all to the tune of the William Tell overture — in what seems to be a gentler version of the Dodge Charger ad. It starts with climbing ropes in gym class and ends with changing flat tires in the rain while your family waits in the car.

As one Tweeter put it: “Have you seen this Dove for men ad? It’s pretty horrible. Basically life for man = work, meet woman, have kids, DOVE FOR MEN!”

Focus on the Family : Tim Tebow

I’m going to be honest: it didn’t seem that bad and maybe that’s what was so terrifying about it. I mean if I didn’t know the story behind the ad in the first place, or what Focus on the Family was, I’d be a little confused: “What the hell is she talking about? What’s she talking about ‘I can remember so many times when I almost lost it’ and ‘I still worry about his health’ on a Superbowl ad for?”

And maybe that’s the idea — because then a web address for “the full Tebow story” pops up at the end.

Oh, and “Timmy” tackles his mom in the middle. Funny, that’s just what *I* wanted to do.

But there’s a silver lining to this year’s ads: Watching these spots you’d think women never buy pants, cars or beer. You’d also think having ads with men complaining about being under the thumb of women made men want to buy your stuff. But you’d be wrong — at least according to the live voting at Hulu’s Adzone.

Throughout today’s game, Hulu has been posting the ads to its page. There, viewers can watch the ads and vote whether they like or dislike the ads. But here’s what makes this awesome: Hulu lets you see how other people voted, and break down the voting by demographic (gender, age, location).

And here’s what men and women are saying: they don’t like the sexist ads. Among men of all age groups and locations, the Tim Tebow mom-tackle; the Dockers’ men-should-wear-the-pants ad and the Dodge Charger misogyny rant were in the top five least liked ads. That’s right, apparently men don’t like being told how to be men.

The ads men did like? Google’s romantic “Search-On” ad was at the top, followed by Doritos “House Rules” spot, where a little boy tells his mom’s gentleman caller to respect his Doritos and his mom.

Maybe, just maybe, we’re making some progress after all.

A guest post by Renee at Womanist Musings; read the original over there as well.

This weekend Focus on the Family Plans plans on running a Pro-Life advertisement during the super bowl. From the moment that this was discovered, it received national attention. Groups like NOW and the feminist blogosphere waged a real effort to challenge this threat to women’s reproductive rights. The Center for Reproductive Rights wrote a letter to CBS pointing out that Ms. Tebow lived in the Philippines at the time of her supposed choice and therefore her only real option was to have the baby because abortion was and still is illegal there.

At the same time that this battle is being waged, another is going quite unnoticed. An anti-abortion group in Atlanta is targeting Black women by putting up billboards stating that Black children are an endangered species.

As proof of this claim they offer the fact that Blacks account for 30% of the general population and 56% of the abortions. When we consider the fact that Black children are universally devalued, this campaign has the possibility of being really effective. Over the last two years campaigns specifically targeting the ability of Black women to choose have been on the rise and yet there has been little to no commentary from White feminists regarding this issue and so I ask, whose reproductive rights matter?

These organizations repeatedly point to the fact that Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist and it seems that rather than countering this claim with the fact that Faye Wattleton, an African American woman was president of Planned Parenthood from 1978–1992, there has been a resounding silence. Is Planned Parenthood suddenly not worth defending when it is about Black women having abortions? It seems to me that highlighting a former Black president would go a long way to fighting the claims of racism.

How about the fact that Black women are impoverished due to racism and sexism? We already know that a woman living alone with a child is more likely to be poor and therefore when we factor in racism, it is quite obvious that poverty would increase. Would it really be so hard to suggest that part of the reason that the rate of abortion is so high is because Black women are already aware of the herculean task and are simply opting out due to a lack of community support and government funding?

Another factor to consider is education. The way to stop abortion is not by outlawing it but by ensuring that sex education is offered from an early age. We already know that schools which are located in impoverished neighbourhoods fall short in terms of education. Is it not possible to suggest a co-relation between this fact and a lack of good sex education?

I do understand that some White women may be reticent to enter this debate because it is framed as saving a Black child, who we know to be universally undereducated and invisible. Even when Black women place their children for adoption, they are less likely to be adopted and so it would appear that Black women are really reduced to two choices, abort or raise the child themselves. Even if we validate that point, there is still the issue of placing a priority on women’s agency when it comes to reproductive rights. We do not have the right to question these women on their decisions. No one chooses to abort without putting great thought into the matter and if we truly respect the right to choose, it must apply to ALL women.

Finally, as scared as White women may be to interact because of the racial undertones of this argument, I must ask don’t Black women matter? All of these campaigns revolve around saving the Black child and this is predicated on the idea that the child is infinitely more valuable than the mother. If abortion were to be outlawed tomorrow, more children may indeed be born, however you would also see a rise in the deaths of Black women due to back alley abortions. The Black woman has a right to life and this must be forcefully asserted.

I will continue to blog about this issue because I believe that choice applies to all women but I must ask where are the voices of my white sisters in arms? If you truly believe in choice, it is irresponsible to ignore the ways in which Black women’s reproductive rights are increasingly being challenged. The issue is that you either do not care enough to sound the battle alarm or that race is once again a sphere in which you are unwilling to engage because of a desire to center the concerns of White women. Here’s an idea for you to chew on, if abortion was ever revoked it wouldn’t apply solely to Black women, it would restrict your rights as well. I suppose that some of you may have the capitol to travel to Canada or Mexico to assert your choice, but invariably some of you would find yourselves in the same alley as a Black woman.

This is a guest-post by Eva Sweeney.

“Nice shoes!” “Great smile!” “You have pretty eyes!” Those are the kinds of compliments I get on a regular basis and they are wonderful. However, people never comment on my body. You might be thinking- as a woman, wouldn’t you be offended if someone came up to you and commented on your body? “Nice tits!” I would be offended by that. However, one little piece of information you should know is that I’m “severely disabled”. I have Cerebral Palsy (CP) and I use a wheelchair to get around. CP has influenced the way I developed physically. My muscles continually spasm and I have little control over my arm and leg movements. I definitely view myself as sexy and attractive. But other people are either afraid to look or think they shouldn’t comment on my body because it’s “broken”.

I am in no way condoning cat-calling. I definitely think that cat-calling is sexual harassment (and can be the beginning of sexual assault) and is a big reason that women don’t feel safe in their own neighborhood. That being said, my body is never the topic of conversation, eye-gaze, or interest with adults I have just met. My girlfriends have definitely been “interested” in that topic, but that’s after we got to know each other. I don’t want to be cat called. But I don’t mind people asking me questions about my body or flirting with me if we are having a nice conversation. Even something as benign as “I like your shirt, where did you get it?” would show me that they notice my body and aren’t afraid of it. People are conditioned to think that people with disabilities hate their bodies. They think they shouldn’t bring it up because they think it will offend me or remind me that I’m gross. The lack of attractive people with disabilities (and I define attractive as an attitude versus some standard of beauty) on TV, in movies, and in pop culture reinforces that stereotype.

Adults are afraid to ask me questions about my body. Again, they think it will remind me of the “hideousness” or it’s a taboo topic. One example of how uncomfortable my body makes some people is when I go to the sauna. Like every other female in the sauna, I go completely nude. And even though we are all there stark naked together, some of the women keep staring at me and I guarantee its not because they were checking me out. Because my body looks different, they have to look. And I wouldn’t mind them looking, except that their gaze says “Oh my god, what a weirdo. Doesn’t she know what her body looks like?”

Kids, on the other hand, will just come right up to me in public and say “why are your legs like that?” One little girl asked me, “Why are you in an armor chair?” I think that’s great because after I explain, kids are usually like “Cool!” and proceed to talk to me about other things. Their parents on the other hand, usually yell at them for asking such a “rude” question. I honestly wish that more adults would just come up and ask questions because then they might actually see that I’m attractive, intelligent, and disabled too. I know that some people would think that’s intrusive and this is just my opinion, but I’m totally cool with adults just saying “So tell me about your disability.” I am happy to answer any questions, even the “silly”ones. It all helps them understand something significant about me and it’s much more interesting than “Nice weather, eh?” Ignoring my body cuts out a huge section of who I am. And because people don’t want to learn or ask questions, they don’t get to know who the whole Eva is.

____________________________
Eva Sweeney is a 26-year-old college graduate. She majored in gender studies. She recently started The Deal with Disability (http://thedealwithdisability.blogspot.com/) which gives accounts of her daily life as a person with Cerebral Palsy. Her other hobbies are photography, creative writing, and painting.

Up until recently, I lived in Jordan. I worked. I played. I was in love. I had two cats named Fanty & Mingo. I also got sexually harassed. I got sexually harassed so much that I’d sometimes sit in my apartment after dark and seriously consider not doing an emergency tampon run, because I knew that inevitably, some dudes would wander into my path and have a field-day. Trying to prevent said harassment, I wore hijab for a while. The results of that little experiment were recently published in JO Magazine.

I tried to go for nuance. Hijab, for me, wasn’t a “wonderful cultural experience.” Neither did I emerge from that particular episode screaming about how it’s time to “liberate” Muslims from their headscarves. I tried to apply similar logic to the proposal to ban the burqa in France. I felt I could draw some parallels there, or maybe I was wrong to have done so. You guys can draw your own conclusions.

The saddest part for me today is that while that article hints at a happy ending, the reality is different. I had to leave. I let my ex keep Fanty & Mingo.

Having dealt with assault, I found I wasn’t coping with the aggression too well. It caused too much self-doubt. Like, “wait a minute, for years now, I’ve been telling myself – Natalia, you’re a human being and not a lump of meat, you deserve to breathe the same air as everyone else and walk on the same sidewalks and stuff – but the things in your head that you were running from, they’re now coming out of the mouths of the little kids outside. In the immortal words of Armageddon: ‘Wow, this is a goddamn Greek tragedy.’ ”

I’m in Ukraine right now, and I do miss Jordan. I miss what we had with my ex, I miss my Jordanian friends, I miss the kind of weather that doesn’t give me a hacking cough. I miss the way the people at the mini-market knew me by name. I miss the ancient history beneath my flip-flops. I don’t miss being a fake hijabi – in the end, I simply hated having to pretend to be someone else for a scrap of respect – though I must acknowledge that in Kiev, in the doldrums, it would keep the ears warm.

Dear newsmedia, Facebook page, friends, and assorted coworkers:

I have a little quiz for you! I know you like quizzes. But first!

A trigger warning for discussion of rape.

Let’s say a 44-year-old man invites a 13-year-old girl over to his house. First it’s so that he can take pictures of her–”modeling.” Then, even though she says she’s uncomfortable and he made her feel unsafe, he convinces her mother to send her over for a second session, where he plies her with champagne and, allegedly, drugs her with Quaaludes and, over her protests and begging, performs multiple sex acts on her.

Do we agree that this is rape?

Let’s say he’s charged with that rape, among other charges, and admits that he did it on a plea-bargain–but to avoid standing trial he jumps bail and flees the country.

Still unconvinced?

Let’s say right after he gets to another country, he begins a public and supposedly-consensual relationship with a different fifteen-year-old girl, one who had stated before that she was feeling exploited in the industry in which both of them worked.

This is looking pretty solid, right? But what if there are mitigating circumstances?

What if it’s been thirty years since the crime, and the now-grown woman who made the original accusation has asked that charges be dropped, because she knows her perpetrator will never face consequences or stand trial and she can’t take another round of the trauma of being known the world over as that 13-year-old the famous guy raped, especially now that she has a husband and kids? Still rape?

Let’s say he said he thought the 13-year-old was 18. Still rape?

Let’s say he said she asked for it. Are you convinced?

Let’s say he’s rich and influential and popular and has a lot of wealthy, influential friends, and shortly after he flees the country, the 13-year-old changes her story and asks that he be left alone. Still rape?

What if he had a really, really hard life–war, loss, murdered loved ones. Still rape?

What if he’s a genius, a virtuoso artist with many fans–still rape?

What if he’s really sorry? He’s been punished a great deal already, after all. In the thirty years since fleeing the US, the guy has been forced to stay out of the country and live in comfort in his country of birth instead, where he is ostracized and blacklisted by the film industry in which he works–and so is everyone who dares to work with him, including pilloried, hard-up, blacklisted actors like Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, Johnny Depp, Ewan McGregor, and Adrien Brody? In fact–let’s throw this in–he was so dishonored and shunned by his colleagues he had to have a friend collect his Academy Award for him.

Still rape?

So are you upset that this man has been arrested and may finally stand trial?

Then why are you upset when that man is Roman Polanski?

But, I’ve heard from plenty of places, isn’t there a statute of limitations for this kind of thing? Well, if there were, he wouldn’t have been arrested. Alternate answer: if she were you–or, if you can’t go there, your little sister–what are your feelings on that statute of limitations? At what point do we just say, hey, it was just child rape, can’t we drop it?

But, can’t we just drop a mere statutory rape charge after thirty years? You mean because the other charges were dropped on a plea-bargain, drugging a girl and having sex with her stops counting as a flat-out rape no matter what her age?

But, she’s grown-up now, can’t we just drop it? She wasn’t then. And if she were, it would still be rape.

Isn’t this just stuffy Americans judging a brilliant man on sexual peccadilloes like they always do, because Americans can’t handle sex as a culture? Yes. Absolutely. The rest of the world thinks raping kids is a-okay, whoops, our bad, we’re just too uptight about drugging people and forcing sex on them. You know us Americans. We’re always up in arms about sexual assault this, consent that.

But he’s an old man now. Yes, and due to the Oldness Exception Act of 1967, old people are no longer accountable for felonies and shouldn’t face consequences for doing things that are wrong.

But he’s really talented, and I really like his movies. That’s. Nice.

But we don’t know all the facts!

That’s what a trial is for.

If you believe arresting people and making them stand trial is worth anything, why the objection? Why the international outcry and circulation of petitions and raging French government officials?

Because seriously, the message I’m hearing is, if you have enough money and celebrity friends, if you’re talented enough, if you’re charming enough, everyone thinks that you should just be left alone to rape underage girls and how dare anyone call you on it or even suggest that you have to stand trial like anyone else. And the same news media that pruriently reports the horrible details of similar crimes done by non-famous people will back you up on it.

This, my friends, is what a rape culture looks like.

Edited to add: Kate Harding utterly nails it. And she nails the part I missed–that even Roman Polanski does not dispute that Roman Polanski raped a child. Period.

….it’s that time again. Mille grazie to the Feministe crew and the loyal readership. Hope to see some of you at my blog sometime in October, when I start posting there again (gonna be at a union conference this week, so…..little to no internet access. Believe it or not, not everyone has a laptop, or wants to haul one around!), where I’ll be blogging on damn near everything. Peace, love and extra sugu (”sauce”).

Sadly, my two-week stint at Feministe has come to an end. It’s been really fun and informative to read your comments–thanks so much for your feedback. I’m gonna plug my own blog real quick and urge you to contribute your story to Girldrive.com. I want to continue the conversation Emma and I started for as long as possible. Also, please check out the book–it comes out in late October!

And with that, I want to close by illustrating one of the many ways feminist blogs and their readers are truly influential and kicking ass. A few days ago, a factually inaccurate, blatantly slut-shaming sex-ed website was born: Sense & Sexuality, based almost entirely on the work of Miriam Grossman (of Unprotected fame). A number of feminist blogs condemned its decidedly unscientific tone (there’s a section on beer goggles) and its judgmental tactics to scare young women out of having sex. The comments on feminist blogs were indignant, proclaiming, “I’m gonna go give them a piece of my mind right now!” or simply “Um, what?” The site’s URL was tweeted dozens of times, mostly from liberal and feminist handles.

My week was insane, so I didn’t have a chance to check this site out (I shudder to even link to it, but here it is) until today. And damn. Feminists be representin’ in the blog’s comments section, fer real! They’re not angry comments–although between the posts condemning anal sex and insulting female PhD students, they have a complete right to be. But no, they’re just logical, smart, and articulate. They’re telling it like it is, and calling out the S&S bloggers on their bullshit. Sadly, as some posters discovered, the comments are highly moderated, but head-nodding comments on the site are virtually non-existent , far outnumbered by “WTF?” comments from, well, us. A few (very polite) examples:

S&S: New HPV vaccine’s side effects: good old-fashioned fear-mongering!

Commenter: “Where’s the post where you talk about the side effects of cervical cancer?”

S&S: “Let’s say for a second that global warming is actually real…”

Commenter: “For an ‘all-science-for-realz’ site, your global warming denialism is making that suspect.”

S&S: “Why are all of these conservative Christians having awesome sex? Because they’re in long-term committed relationships (sometimes known as “marriage” for our liberal readers out there). No wonder liberal feminists are so angry…”

Commenter: “Why do you assume that liberal feminism necessarily equates to promiscuity? It doesn’t – it simply means that you can make the choice without being condemned for your actions.”

And these are the only comments they’ve approved! If I were a young woman from a conservative town and I stumbled onto this site after getting false and harmful information about sex and STDs, reading these boo-ya comments might just make me think twice about visiting the site again.

I’m curious to chart the success of S&S, in the wake of abstinence-only funding being zeroed out and the millions of recent conversations about birth control. Most of all, I’m curious to see how far feminist blog readers can influence the relative success (or failure) of a bogus website like this. Let’s find out–comment on the blog and see what happens. And if the comment gets rejected via moderation, take out the curse words, soften the blow, and post again.

(x-posted at Social Science Lite)

In Black Identities, Harvard sociologist Mary Waters analyzes the racial and ethnic identities of first and second generation West Indian immigrants in New York City. At its core, Black Identities is a study of paradox. Waters eloquently states, “[For West Indians], America is a contradictory place…a land of greater opportunities than their homelands but simultaneously a land of racial stigma and discrimination. Immigrants readily buy into an image of American affluence, but are grounded in American racial and economic realities. One respondent noted despair that America is a “white world” in which “white people have all the money,” but in the same breath rejoiced in the fact that America is “a place where everyone has opportunity.” This is the inherent contradiction of the “American dream:” First generation West Indian immigrants must reconcile their lofty expectations of achievement with the myth of American social mobility as they grapple with structural and interpersonal racism in their day-to-day lives.

Second generation West Indian immigrants are also directly confronted with uniquely American race relations, resulting in contradictory immigrant identities. On the one hand, some immigrants embrace their Caribbean ancestry and construct social boundaries separating themselves from black Americans. On the other hand, many young, second generation West Indians (a plurality of her sample) buy into the uniquely American racial caste system and self-identify as black, abandoning other “ethnic options.” There wouldn’t be anything wrong with indentifying as “black,” if of course a slew of disadvantages and prejudices didn’t follow as a result. When race collides and interacts with social structure and culture, West Indian immigrant identity precariously wavers between ethnic loyalty and American assimilation. Paradoxically, the choice to remain loyal to their West Indian heritage affords these immigrants more social mobility than direct incorporation into American culture, as buying into American stereotypes often means downward mobility.

Sound familiar? Oddly reminiscent of a certain Brooklyn born rap legend? Indeed, The Notorious BIG represents an interesting case study—and exemplar—of Waters’ extensive empirical data. Biggie was born to a hardworking, loving Jamaican immigrant mother. While his father was largely absent from his life, Biggie’s mother held steady employment as a pre-school teacher and by all accounts was an involved parent. She enrolled her son in a private middle school in Brooklyn where he thrived academically. This scholastic success, of course, came to an end when Biggie began selling drugs at age 12. A (pun intended) notorious crack dealer, he eventually dropped out of high school, only to reach temporary stardom but ultimately suffer an untimely death.

A scene near the beginning of the recent biopic Notorious, in which Biggie’s character exhibits admiration and lust for the life of a street hustler, is telling. Waters’ research suggests that Biggie’s identity as a second generation West Indian immigrant could have, presumably, led him to continue his studies and perhaps achieve upward mobility—distancing himself both from the general stereotypes of American blacks and the actual hustlers in his immediate surroundings. But, when confronted with the reality of American race relations—in this example, Bed-Stuy/Clinton Hill in the early ‘90s—Biggie could have just as easily been propelled to identify more with the black Americans selling drugs on the corner by his house. Like many poor second generation West Indian immigrants, Biggie lacked local models of success, a disparity caused by urban economic marginalization and resulting in a push to identify with a certain type of black American.

Big had an ethnic “choice,” sure; claim his Jamaican roots, or step in line with America’s vision of race. But it was a structured choice provided under economic duress and within the context of a uniquely American racial order. The problem is, both paths of ethnic identity formation have problematic results for blacks as a whole. By distancing themselves from the “black underclass,” many West Indians reaffirm long-standing stereotypes of blacks as lazy, violent, and generally inferior. In this model, immigrants achieve individual mobility at the expense of group advancement. In other words, individual immigrants can use this boundary work to catapult themselves toward success, but it negates the possibility for the advancement of blacks as a group. West Indians face American stereotypes and norms of black insolence, and their rejection—and even acceptance—of this identity solidifies white preconceptions. This puts West Indian immigrants in a uniquely difficult position—a Catch-22 in which either path of identity formation reinforces a firm black-white color line.

Biggie’s life story dovetails nicely with Waters’ analysis, complicating traditional studies of race, immigration, and assimilation in the United States. Of course, Biggie’s life obviously doesn’t reflect the experiences of all second generation West Indian immigrants. Still, Waters’ analysis in Black Identities does help explain, in part, why “G-E-D, wasn’t B-I-G.”

(originally published at Social Science Lite, x-posted at Postbourgie)

Last Spring, Brown University economist Glenn Loury presented at Harvard sociology’s Workshop on Race and Black Youth Culture. He titled his talk “Culture, Causation and Confusion: Why Bill Cosby is Wasting His Time,” engaging with the pervasive “rhetoric of responsibility” frequently applied to blacks in the United States. As Loury argued, our public discourse is saturated with demands on the so-called black community to police its own ranks. This rhetoric of “black communal responsibility” suggests that the solutions to racial inequality are cultural, and the ill-defined “black community” should therefore bear the burden of “fixing” its collective deficiencies.

The rhetoric of black communal responsibility is a common response to discussions of racial inequality, and black folks seem to be hearing it from both sides. From within, you have Bill Cosby, John McWhorter and even President Obama stressing the role of black parents in the cultivation and education of black children. From the outside, you have a slew of white conservatives, wide-eyed and incredulous, wondering why the black community just can’t lift itself out of disadvantage.

The problem, as Loury astutely pointed out, is that categories such as “black community,” “black culture,” and “black leaders” are political constructs void of intellectual definitions. So-called “culture talk” imputes a sense of groupness where no such political collectivity exists. African-Americans, as a race, have no institutional structures to police themselves and bring about the kind of solutions culture critics (like Cosby) demand. They don’t hold conferences or summits—at least, none that all blacks are required to attend by virtue of their racial identity. There aren’t any meeting minutes we can rifle through to make sure they are working to “fix” their collective culture. This notion of an aggregate “black community” was invented ex post facto with a distinctly political motive: impute agency on a racial category where none exists, and wipe our hands clean of any societal responsibility for inequality.

That’s not to say that racial groups don’t share certain histories, privileges, or disadvantages by virtue of their socially constructed racial identity. Moreover, many racial and ethnic groups often share certain traditions, rituals, and affinities. As a Jew, I frequently refer to myself as a “member of the tribe,” implying both a shared allegiance and shared history with my fellow Tribesmen. Such is the general case for other races and ethnicities in the U.S., African-Americans included.

But that doesn’t mean they can be expected to act like a civic collectivity or a civic organization and, by extension, engage in civic action. Who elected Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson to be the spokesmen for the so-called black community? I don’t seem to recall a campaign or election for these self-appointed leaders. Yet the “black culture” rhetoric, purported so frequently in public discourse, assumes their civic appointment. The ability of blacks to act as a distinct group is taken for granted—an assumption of their collective agency. But a racial category is not a group with civic powers. Nor is it a collective body with a unified political or cultural agenda. As University of Chicago sociologist Mario Small has argued on countless occasions, there are multiple black communities and multiple black cultures.

The rhetoric of black communal responsibility imputes collective agency where none exists, assuming group-level cultural deficiencies while ignoring the society-level creation and maintenance of racial inequality. The logic is problematic and condescending at best, dangerous and incendiary at worst. It at once obscures the tremendous diversity among African-Americans and distracts our attention away from the actual causes of inequality. Whatever “the black community” is, we can’t exactly depend on “it” to solve, or do, anything without the institutional means to solve, or do, anything. Assuming communal responsibility is dead-end rhetoric, promoting a self-fulfilling prophecy of disadvantage. It serves a political purpose, but does little to advance our intellectual understanding of inequality.

Individual communities can certainly make important contributions toward greater social equality. But you just can’t expect an artificially constructed group, based on an arbitrarily constructed racial category, to solve inequality at the national level by itself. You can’t expect action where no institutional ability to act exists.