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To recap: See Women owe society neither babies nor excuses. As this post does, it jumps off from the following remark by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to Nina Funnell:

At that point one of my friends introduced me, dropping in that I am completing a PhD. At this, Rudd rolled his eyes and in a terse voice lacking any sense of irony remarked that is the “excuse” that “all” young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families. Since then I’ve come up with numerous one-line retorts, but in the moment I just froze in shock.

I’d like to think this was a one-off thoughtless comment, but it’s not. It’s just a slice of the “wimminz are for babiez” pie. I’d like to share with you another slice, one Rudd might have thought of before making his comment, as this kind of sentiment is heaped on his deputy all the time.

Julia Gillard is Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister. And the Minister for Education, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and also the Minister for Social Inclusion. She became the first woman to run the country (well, you know, apart from the Queen) when in 2007 she assumed the role of Acting Prime Minister while Kevin Rudd was overseas. I don’t like everything she’s done, but you’ve got to hand it to her, Gillard is an accomplished politician. Yet her short red hair is a constant topic of national conversation. In fact, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail has a whole gallery of her changing hairstyles! There’ve been rumours and jokes that she’s a Sekrit Lesbian because apparently some people (read: straight men) can’t deal with the idea of a powerful woman who doesn’t take shit and thus must, um, well, the logic fails, really. (I must say I am rather amused that my blog’s the number one result on google for the search term ‘julia gillard dyke’.) But the thing that has disgusted me the most have been the assertions that she’s not fit to lead and that her opinions don’t count because she hasn’t any children.

Famously, in 2007, Senator Bill Heffernan of the Liberal Party (Gillard and Rudd are members of Labor) said that Gillard wouldn’t do well at running the country because she is ‘deliberately barren’. He subsequently apologised. It was… well, you can imagine how jaws dropped across Australia. But it didn’t end there.

Recently there’s been a national discussion, shall we say, about virginity. This was sparked by an interview given to the Australian Women’s Weekly by Tony Abbott, who is the Federal Opposition Leader. (That is, the head of the Liberal Party. The role of the opposition party is to act as an alternative government, pushing against the government and being the rival party during elections. Liberal and Labor are the two main Australian political parties, so one is always in power or in opposition. The Liberal Party is actually the primary conservative party, and Labor is more to the left but not actually to the left. Anyway, back to Tony Abbott.) He discussed his advice to his daughters about virginity and his thoughts on abstinence in general; you can read a bit about it here. His remarks could take a post all on its own, but I want to talk about a chain of responses that ensued. Julia Gillard said, ‘Australian women want to make their own choices and they don’t want to be lectured to by Mr Abbott’. To which Liberal Senator George Brandis replied ‘the vehemence of her reaction in fact shows that she just doesn’t understand the way parents think’.

‘I think that although Julia Gillard is a very clever politician, she is very much a one-dimensional person and I do think her reaction, her over-reaction to the, in my view, quite unexceptionable remarks Tony Abbott made as the father of daughters, is not something she would have said if she were herself the mother of teenage daughters.’

Emphasis mine. Gillard continues to be treated as though she’s a person of fewer dimensions than some because she doesn’t have children. Less worthy of being in power, of having an opinion. She’s being held to different standards than a male politician without children in her position would be. Implicitly, she’s not worthy as a woman, because she’s not fulfilling women’s roles: she’s politically powerful and she’s not a mother. The way Gillard is treated is pretty disgusting, and it’s shameless and public, too.

We need to make it okay for women to be in public life; to be prominent, and powerful, and successful, and a woman all at the same time. We need to make it no big deal to be a woman with no children in the public sphere, and we need to make it viable to be a woman with children in same. We need to accept all women as proper women irrespective of whether they reproduce or not (which isn’t, as Brandis seems to think, a choice for everyone). We need to make it okay.

I salute Ms Gillard for holding her head up through all the bullshit she has to deal with.

There was a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald the other week you should have a read of, Don’t be rattled by the baby guilt trip by Nina Funnell.

Funnell was recently in attendance when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave a speech ‘about the ”crisis” of Australia’s ageing population and the various economic challenges we will face as a result.’ For context, Australia’s birth rate has been below the replacement rate of 2.1 since the 1970s and Australia is strict on immigration. After the talk, Rudd came to speak to some under-30s who had grouped together, including Funnell:

At that point one of my friends introduced me, dropping in that I am completing a PhD. At this, Rudd rolled his eyes and in a terse voice lacking any sense of irony remarked that is the “excuse” that “all” young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families. Since then I’ve come up with numerous one-line retorts, but in the moment I just froze in shock.

You should read the whole piece as Funnell takes this down beautifully. (‘Why do we assume it is the obligation of all women to reproduce? And why do we label them as selfish when they don’t? We never label career-driven men as selfish.’) I’m reluctant to tear apart Mr Rudd’s statement myself as, well, while the sentiment is pretty clear, what’s not clear from the article is what he said in full.

In any case, we can turn to the general sentiment. There are various harms in treating women as a monolith. I resent the assertion that not having children and at the “right time” is a bad thing. It holds women to be essentially baby makers who aren’t doing their duty to their country if they don’t follow the script – and this is something that needs an excuse. It also holds women responsible for the difficulties involved in pursuing higher academic study and starting a family at the same time. If Mr Rudd’s government, and governments worldwide, would be more supportive of those in that position, fewer people would have to face a choice between them. Until then, that some are put in this position is hardly their fault, hardly something for which women ought to be treated condescendingly.

What this script also does is assume that “avoiding” starting families (avoiding the right and inevitable thing, those naughty girlies!) is a choice for all women. Not every woman is able to reproduce or adopt or some such, or is able to keep their children if they do. Some women are actively forced into reproducing. And some women, rather than having this obligation to reproduce weighed on them, are considered to have quite the opposite obligation, to not reproduce at all. Disabled and poor women, for instance, are often discouraged – if not actively prevented – from having children. You know, supposedly for the good of society. Placing the emphasis on “avoiding” reproducing means adopting a monolithic view of women’s experience, erasing many. They’re written out of the script.

And, moving back to the idea that women who don’t reproduce according to the script owe excuses, I think it’s important to determine precisely to whom these women are supposed to be offering their justifications and apologies. Really, who? We’re autonomous human beings, we don’t need to go around with bowed heads and guilty expressions for doing as we please, or as we must, with our own bodies and lives. Women certainly don’t owe babies to society, or to politicians, or to those judging them, or to anyone at all.

Women’s reproductive choices should be ours alone. We ought to be accountable to our own desires in these matters, not those of onlookers who think they know better.

Next time, I’m going to return to Mr Rudd’s remark and some of its particular significance in Australia’s federal political context.

(Video transcript below the jump)

Chally recently posted a reminder about International Women’s Day coming up on Monday, March 8th. There are all kinds of events taking place all over the world, but I received an email about one particular set of events that I thought I’d highlight here.

As most blog readers are probably aware, due to war, women in both Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo face incredibly high rates of rape and other violent assault. On March 8th, Congolese and Rwandan women are taking action to demand an end to war and violence against women. Via the email:

On March 8, hundreds of Congolese and Rwandan women will unite on a bridge to demand an end to the violence that has caused 5.4 million deaths and hundreds of thousands of rapes. They will tie together banners of fabric on which they’ve painted their visions for a peaceful future.

To honor and support their resilience, Women for Women International is hosting a global campaign – Join me on the Bridge – which will replicate that meeting at bridges in different cities all around the world in a show of global solidarity. Already supporting the Congolese and Rwandan women in their call for war’s end will be thousands of women from Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan, the UK and the US.

In New York City, we are rallying people to the Brooklyn Bridge at noon on Monday, March 8. Sponsors such as kate spade new york, Marie Claire and the ONE campaign are also joining us. Project Runway’s Tim Gunn will be in attendance. Self-organized bridge events will also be taking place in other cities, towns and schools nationwide.

Check out the Women For Women International website to see all of the events that will be taking place. The two largest events will take place in New York and London, but there will also be many, many events in other cities. Most are in the U.S. and U.K., but there are also events in countries such as Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, and Nigeria. Almost all of the events will be held on either March 7th (this Sunday) or March 8th (Monday). Please consider attending if there’s one near you.

Video Transcript:

Video shows a collection of images of women from the DRC and Rwanda, including both still photos and video. Images include women smiling, embracing each other, teaching in a classroom, holding their children, and working.

Voiceover: Women across the globe are living amidst violence, yet dreaming of peace. Women for Women International is asking you to join us to honor women survivors of war. March 8th is International Women’s Day. Join me, along with thousands of women and men on bridges around the world. Join us in solidarity with women of both Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who will unite to call for an end to war.

Two women: (speaking into camera, each giving a “thumbs up” sign) Join me on the bridge

Voiceover: Join me. Say yes to peace and hope.

Women for Women International logo

Sexual assault trigger warning on this post.

Matt Yglesias writes about incidences of sexual assault in college, and a recent NPR story about David Lisak’s extensive research on college rapists. Thomas has also written extensively about this, and I would recommend reading his takes. NPR summarizes Lisak’s findings thusly:

There’s a common assumption about men who commit sexual assault on a college campus: That they made a one-time, bad decision. But psychologist David Lisak says this assumption is wrong —-and dangerously so.
…
It might seem like it would be hard for a researcher to get these men to admit to something that fits the definition of rape. But Lisak says it’s not. “They are very forthcoming,” he says. “In fact, they are eager to talk about their experiences. They’re quite narcissistic as a group — the offenders — and they view this as an opportunity, essentially, to brag.”

What Lisak found was that students who commit rape on a college campus are pretty much like those rapists in prison. In both groups, many are serial rapists. On college campuses, repeat predators account for 9 out of every 10 rapes.

In other words, the people who insist that on-campus rapes are the result of two people getting drunk and making a bad decision and the woman regretting it in the morning? Those people are wrong.

Unfortunatley, Matt’s take on the issue is… somewhat troubling. I’ll preface this by saying that Matt is a really smart guy and a feminist ally, and I also initially misread his post (I confused his comments about Lake’s quote to be about Lisak’s research) and I made the mistake of reading some of the comment thread, so that’s probably coloring my take a little bit. But I find his take-away from the NPR piece to be a bit lacking.

Here’s what NPR writes, and what Matt posts, about Lisak’s research:

[Lisak] found them by, over a 20-year period, asking some 2,000 men in college questions like this: “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?”

Or: “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used physical force [twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.] if they didn’t cooperate?”

About 1 in 16 men answered “yes” to these or similar questions.

And these dudes who admit to having sex with people against their will? They don’t define what they did as “rape.”

Later in the NPR story:

“It’s very common for them to go out Wednesday through Saturday at a minimum, drink fairly heavily and hook up sexually with people that they may not know particularly well, may have met for the first time that night, or had been introduced through friends, or MySpace or Facebook,” [Peter Lake] says. “So you have a lot of sexual activity, you have alcohol, you have a population that’s sort of an at-risk age, and it’s in some ways, it’s a perfect storm for sex assault issues.”

And here’s what Matt says:

It’s seems incredibly pernicious to me to be running these things together. Lisak’s question specifically posits that the victim “did not want to” have sex, but was “too intoxicated … to resist.” What Lake is talking about conjured up an imagine of a young woman with impaired judgment doing something while drunk that she later regrets. Obviously, that does happen. But it’s quite a different situation from an encounter where even the perpetrator acknowledges that the victim was unwilling.

He updates later by saying:

Let me clarify this, as I don’t think I made my point very clearly. What I’m trying to here is that insofar as we’re talking about rapists who are clearly aware that their victims are unwilling, the effort by Lake to paint this as a situation where “drink[ing] fairly heavily” is the key variable is hugely problematic. A person who’s going to rape women he knows perfectly well don’t want to have sex is engaged in pathological violent behavior and would be a menace even if all alcohol were extirpated from the planet. The booze is incidental.

Well, no, the booze isn’t totally incidental. The booze is what makes the victim more accessible to the rapist. The rapist is seeking out situations where he knows he can find targets who will be less able to defend themselves. It’s like muggers who rob old ladies — the age of the old ladies isn’t incidental. Matt is right that a rapist is pathological with or without booze, and would be a menace even without alcohol. But it is important to recognize that some rapists do purposely use drugs to incapacitate their victims.

Matt also says that “What Lake is talking about conjured up an imagine of a young woman with impaired judgment doing something while drunk that she later regrets.” Now, he’s talking about that final quote about people going out drinking and whatnot — he isn’t talking about the Lisak study. But that line about how young women go out and get drunk and then regret their choices later? That is used all the time both to justify sexual assault and to warn women of the dangers of leaving the house to socialize. So if Matt is wondering why his feminist readers are a little salty at this post, that might be why.

That said, I do think Matt makes a good point that it is dangerous to conflate so-called “hook-up culture” and college drinking with rape. As Lisak’s research bears out, dudes who commit rape do it on purpose. These aren’t one-time misunderstandings or miscommunications or next-day regrets. These are men who know that the person they’re with either does not want to have sex or cannot possibly consent to having sex, and they have sex with that person anyway, explicitly against that person’s wishes. They know they are doing harm. They get off on doing harm. The Lake quote implies the opposite — that with a bunch of people drinking, it’s a “perfect storm for sexual assault issues,” because alcohol impairs everyone’s judgment and, whoops, now someone is saying something about rape!

It’s tough to discuss the interplay between alcohol and sexual assault, because too often the conversation veers into “drinking will get you raped” territory, with women being warned of all the things they should or shouldn’t do in order to avoid rape. Of course, drinking won’t get you raped — only being in the presence of a rapist will result in rape. At the same time, though, rapists do use certain tools to get to their victims. Often, they exploit trust — if you’re a regular feminist blog reader, you probably know by now that most sexual assaults are committed by people the victim knows. Women are also much more likely to be assaulted in their own home or in the home of someone they know than in a public place — the rapist in the bushes exists, but isn’t nearly as common as the rapist you hung out with a few times.

And college dudes who rape their classmates? A lot of those dudes rely on alcohol. It makes their victims less able to physically resist, and it has the bonus of laying some of the blame on their victims. After all, dudes know that women are treated to Ways To Not Get Raped lectures all the time — don’t go out at night by yourself, don’t walk down a dark alley, don’t drink too much. I don’t have any actual statistics on this, but my bet is that the woman who is raped by the stranger who jumps out of the bushes is more likely to report the rape than the woman who is raped at a party by the dude in her Bio class, especially if she was drinking. Men who rape on campus are repeat offenders in large part because they can get away with it. The discourse around sexual assault assumes that women must take self-protective steps, and if they’re raped anyway then they must have done something wrong. Campus serial rapists rely on that bias.

As Thomas points out, serial rapists also tend to embrace hyper-masculinity and woman-hate. If a dude sounds like he hates women or wants to control them? He’s probably not lying. And dudes on campus use alcohol instead of (or in tandem with) brute force as their tools. Thomas’s thoughts draw an apt conclusion:

Guys with rigid views of gender roles and an axe to grind against women in general are overrepresented among rapists. That won’t come as a surprise to most readers here, I expect. But it is important confirmation. Guys who seem to hate women … do. If they sound like they don’t like or respect women and see women as impediments to be overcome … they’re telling the truth. That’s what they think, and they will abuse if they think they can get away with it.

Lisak doesn’t actually say this, but having read some of his work in depth now, I really think the major difference between the incarcerated and the non-incarcerated rapists are that the former cannot or do not confine themselves to tactics that are low-risk to them. The undetected rapists overwhelmingly use minimal or no force, rely mostly on alcohol and rape their acquaintances. They create situations where the culture will protect them by making excuses for them and questioning or denying their victims. Incarcerated rapists, I think, are just the ones who use the tactics that society is more willing to recognize as rape and less willing to make excuses for.

 [image is from here] Or not so slightly... ***TRIGGER WARNING FOR GRAPHIC IMAGES OF WHITE HET MALE VIOLENCE AGAINST HUMANITY*** (Oh, and there's also a feminist's book cover, so be prepared for that too.) "Femi-Nazi" is a term for the deranged fringe of the feminist movement (Andrea Dworkin, for example), which I have heard used in talk radio by everyone from Russ Limbaugh to Bill Maher. It is

The following post was made to indicate, rather effectively, how misogyny factors into the reporting of gang rape by men of women, or of one woman. What follows is from *here*, at the radical feminist lesbian of color blog Gorgon Poisons, which I've happily added to my blogroll on the lower right. Thank you, Allecto!!! This quote is at the end of her post, but I'll put it first and leave it in

You know, if they were really pro-life, they would also criminalize masturbation and menstruation. Every sperm is sacred! Every egg is a potential baby!

Snark aside, I do think it’s interesting that anti-choicers will put significant effort into a bill like this and into, say, prosecuting women who use drugs while pregnant, but they do absolutely nothing about the fact that enormous numbers of fertilized eggs — unique, individual lives, they argue — naturally fail to implant and are flushed out of a woman’s body. When I bring this up with anti-choice people, they always point to the causation factor — abortion is bad because a woman takes steps to end a pregnancy. It’s the difference between murder and natural death. Prosecuting women who used drugs while pregnant and gave birth to stillborns is acceptable because the woman did something which may have ended the baby’s life (that’s scientifically debatable, but a detour from the actual point of this post, so I’ll leave it alone for now). The Utah miscarriage law is understandable because it targets women who intended to have miscarriages.

I understand that. We do hold people more culpable for things that they do on purpose; we also hold people accountable for a lot of things that they do negligently. My question, though, isn’t with the punishment aspect, but with the activism aspect. Let’s say that we take anti-choicers on their word that they really, truly believe that a fertilized egg is a unique, individual human being, and that the death of that egg is like the death of a person. If that’s the truth, then why no activism around trying to find a cure for the close to 50 percent of fertilized eggs that naturally don’t implant, and are flushed out of the woman’s body? Sure, it’s not intentional, but if there were some disease that killed 50 percent of all five-year-olds, I’m pretty sure we’d be doing something about it, no?

I realize this is all pretty far afield from the actual Utah legislation, but it’s illustrative, I think, insofar as it demonstrates that the concern here isn’t really about fetuses or life or any of that. It’s about punishing women.

What follows is from *here* and was sent to me by A.R.P.'s UK correspondent, Christina. Thank you, Christina. [sic]Why British men are rapistsJoan SmithPublished 23 January 2006 In the world of stag-night excess, lad mags and lap dancing, paying for sex is losing its stigma and more and more men do it. These "clients" are responsible for a grotesque crime, yet they get away scot-free

[image of U.S. white male figure skater Evan Lysacek is from here] [image of U.S. white male figure skater Johnny Weir is from here] Click on the following heading for the link to the original site. Tanith Belbin, Johnny Weir Share Room in Olympic Village by Daniel Kobialka on Feb 17, 2010 12:14:57 AM U.S. figure skater Evan Lysacek can't be a happy camper. According to The

A guest-post by Miranda from Women’s Glib.

It has come to my attention that there is a Facebook fan page entitled, “Killing your hooker so you don’t have to pay her.” The page boasts such updates as, “Ever stab your hooker with a blunt object to add insult to injury?” The page was created about a month ago.

And, as of today, it has 22,127 fans.

This is a deeply offensive, misogynistic, and outright violent page. Hypothetical violence is not funny, but real violence is even less amusing — and this violence is real. The murder of sex workers is frighteningly commonplace, and all too often is excused under some bullshit pretense that sex workers are expendable, are unhuman.

What happens online matters. George Sodini showed us that much. Wrote Bob Herbert in the aftermath of Sodini’s shooting:

We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.

…We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

Facebook pages like this one are surely a form of entertainment, of shits and giggles, for those involved. For the sex workers who are killed for no other reason than hatred, the amusement fades.

This “entertainment” is what happens when people hate women, hate sex workers, and see violence as a viable solution to their rage.

Please, please visit the “Killing your hooker so you don’t have to pay her” Facebook fan page and report it for its offensive content. (Scroll down and look in the lower left corner of your screen to find the link to report it.)

Cross-posted at Women’s Glib.