feminist blogs

I’ve not posted for quite a while for a variety of reasons . . . I’ve lost my job, decided to go to law school, and generally been immersed in being very busy. What fun!

Now, part of what this means is that I missed the big WoC appropriation blow up completely. This is probably good, since I just don’t feel like I have anything useful to say that hasn’t been said better already by someone else. In the midst of all that, though, I was forwarded several wonderful blog posts written by African women, and I’ve finally got the time to write about them.

The first, and the topic of this post, is How to Beat Girls And Women by Mama Wangari of A Life Less Perfect. Everyone should read it in its entirety, of course, but it’s an autobiographical post about being beaten by her father when she was 16, how she avoided it, and the larger expectations and culture surrounding beatings.

“Please don’t beat me. I’m having my period,” and he turned abruptly away from me, dropping the belt to his side, and marched away to the end of the path to stand staring at the fence for a few dangerous moments. Then he turned and marched back to me and handed me the belt. My heart leapt.

“What you just mentioned to me,” his voice had gone low. “Never mention it to me again. Never. That’s between you and your mother. Go!”

It’s a great story, but the part that really makes it shine is her mother’s reaction, later:

A few days later I was walking home with my mum, down a steep rutted path, when out of a silence she suddenly asked, “Why did you ask Daddy not to beat you because of your period?”

“Pardon?”

“The other day, when you asked Daddy not to beat you because of your period. Did you think it would make you bleed more heavily or something? Why did you - ? What did you think would happen?”

I was puzzled. I decided to stick with pure fact.

“I wasn’t having my period,” I said.

“What? You weren’t?”

“No. I wasn’t,” I waited for her to burst out laughing and congratulate me.

“You mean you lied?” she was shocked.

“Of course!” so was I.

“But why?” she asked.

That really sort of sums it all up, doesn’t it? It’s not just that women and girls are expected to take their beatings, it’s that they’re expected to take them, and not object. The concept that she would object to being beaten is shocking and incomprehensible to her mother, because violence against women is a part of the natural order of things, like the weather. It’s just how things are.

Lying to avoid a beating is like lying to avoid a thunderstorm. It’s just not done. There’s no point. Why bother?

This, then, in a lot of ways, is one of the victories of feminism . . . the concept that, beyond women having the right not to be beaten, they, as human beings, have the right to object at all, to say, “this is wrong,” and, “no, I won’t just take it.” Abuse, institutionalized abuse, the culture of abuse, relies on maintaining the expectation that women will not say no and maintaining the expectation that objection to your own abuse is taboo.

It’s really an amazing post, and I encourage everyone to go read it.

Whoops — it’s a hoax. Barska denies having anything to do with these ads.

Original post below the fold.

The Nation has a detailed article. A woman working for KBR, a private contractor the US hires to operate in Iraq, claims to have been drugged and gang raped by her co-workers, possibly including her boss. The rape was then covered up.

This part enraged me (well, lots of it did, but this part too):

[Rape victims face] two major roadblocks in the fight for justice. The first is the battle to have the perpetrators prosecuted in criminal court — which, because of Order 17, may be nearly impossible. According to the order, imposed by Paul Bremer, U.S. defense contractors in Iraq cannot be prosecuted in the Iraqi criminal justice system. While they can technically be tried in U.S. federal court, the Justice Department has shown no interest in prosecuting her case. In fact, for more than two years now, the DOJ has brought no criminal charges in the matter. Rep. Ted Poe, a Texas Republican who has taken up Jones’ cause, reports that federal agencies refuse to discuss the status of the investigation; meanwhile, in December, the DOJ refused to send a representative to the related congressional hearing on the matter.

Even more appalling, the Justice Department, which can and should prosecute most of these cases, has declined to do so. “There is no rational explanation for this,” says Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School who specializes in the law of armed conflict. Prosecutorial jurisdiction for crimes like Jones’ alleged rape is easily established under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act and the Patriot Act’s special maritime and territorial jurisdiction provisions. But somebody has to want to prosecute the cases.

Horton wonders what the 200 Justice Department employees and contractors stationed in Iraq do all day, noting that there has not been a single completed criminal conviction against a U.S. contractor implicated in a violent crime anywhere in Iraq since the invasion.

[…] “You have 180,000 people over there, you’re going to have a few crimes. […] And if you eliminate law enforcement, the crimes are going to get worse because people will quickly learn they can get away with it.”

This is an important point. Rapists exist no matter what the US government does, and that’s not the Republican Party’s fault. But it’s reasonable to expect the government to work to reduce rape and to punish rapists; instead, Republican leaders have chosen to be accessory to rape, by refusing to investigate or prosecute the crime.

Do I really think that Bush and his managers want Americans raped and the rapists to get off scott-free? No. But they consider that better than the alternative. In Bush’s eyes, for American contractors to be arrested and tried for rape would be unbearable; letting them get away with rape is, in the administration’s view, the lesser evil.

I can’t wait until these cancers in suits are out of office.

That said, even if we had a competent administration staffed by people instead of soulless monsters, there would still be too many rapes committed by Americans in Iraq. ¹ There would be fewer such crimes, but they’d still happen, because the vastly uneven power relations and dehumanization brought about by war and occupation make rape of soldiers and of civilians inevitable.

This is one reason the Bush doctrine, which makes wars of choice inevitable, is evil. The cost of war is always hideous, and the rapes are just a small part of that. War should always be a last resort. It wasn’t in Iraq. The shame of it is that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, and thousands of Americans, have paid the price for the fecklessness and warlust of US leaders. It would have been far better — both objectively and morally — if Bush, and Cheney, and McCain, and the rest of the pro-war leadership class had died instead.

1. I’m ignoring for a moment the obvious point that if the current administration was staffed by competent, decent people, there never would have been an invasion of Iraq at all.

From an LA Times op-ed:

Prison rape occupies a fairly odd space in our culture. It is, all at once, a cherished source of humor, a tacitly accepted form of punishment and a broadly understood human rights abuse. We pass legislation called the Prison Rape Elimination Act at the same time that we produce films meant to explore the funny side of inmate sexual brutality.

Occasionally, we even admit that prison rape is a quietly honored part of the punishment structure for criminals. When Enron’s Ken Lay was sentenced to jail, for instance, Bill Lockyer, then the attorney general of California, spoke dreamily of his desire “to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey.’ ”

The culture is rife with similar comments. Although it would be unthinkable for the government today to institute corporal punishment in prisons, there is little or no outrage when the government interns prisoners in institutions where their fellow inmates will brutally violate them. We won’t touch you, but we can’t be held accountable for the behavior of Spike, now can we?

To quote myself: The prison rape epidemic is probably going to get worse. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ projections, if our current rate of sending men to prison is maintained, then at some point in the future 15% of American men will have spent time in prison. (6% of white men, 17% of Latinos, and 32% of Black men. For comparison’s sake, the projections for women are 1%, 2% and 6%.)

If those projections are true (or even partly true), and if the prison rape epidemic continues unabated, the overall number of American rape victims will vastly increase over the coming decades. This is true even if rape prevalence outside of prison doesn’t change at all. This is one reason why it’s essential to support strong measures to combat prison rape; unfortunately, all that’s gotten through congress so far are weak half-measures.

From my inbox:

Whoo Hoo!  We did it!!  BIG VICTORY in the Senate yesterday.  Last night, just before 9 pm, the Senate voted UNANIMOUSLY to approve restoring $100 million for the Violence Against Women Act into the Senate’s budget
proposal.   Thanks to everyone for your HUGE response to yesterday’s action alert.  We’ll have to keep on top of this as the appropriations process gets underway - but we’re
off to a great start!

NOW- we’ve got an important deadline in the House of Representatives!  Today is the last day for your representatives to sign on to the “Dear Colleague” letter urging full funding for  VAWA.  Let’s keep our momentum going!!

ACT NOW!

Use our easy to use tools to CALL your Representative  and ask them to sign on!! 
It’s easy!  We provide their name, phone number, a script and a feedback form.  You  provide the commitment to making a difference :)

and/or  SEND an email today!!

Your CALL is especially important since today’s the deadline. Please CALL if you can!!

Remember the movie “Teachers,” with Judd Hirsch as the principle and Nick Nolte as a noble teacher? In the movie, one sign of the principal’s corruption was when he allowed a teacher who had sex with a student to quietly resign.

From The Oregonian:

It would take months for the agency that licenses Oregon teachers to discipline a Salem-area teacher for inappropriately touching at least eight girls.

To get Kenneth John Cushing, then 44, away from Claggett Creek Middle School students immediately, administrators cut him a deal: If Cushing resigned, they would conceal his alleged conduct — clutching students’ waists, touching their buttocks and massaging their shoulders — from the public.

Cushing signed the pact — obtained by The Oregonian through public records requests — with Salem-Keizer Public Schools in 2004, and officials promised not to reveal the teacher’s behavior if potential employers called looking for a reference. They would attribute his departure to “personal reasons,” the document reads, and make “no reference to this agreement.”

Salem’s deal is just one of 47 similar confidential settlement agreements obtained or confirmed by the newspaper.

During the past five years, nearly half of Oregon teachers disciplined for sexual misconduct with a child left their school districts with confidential agreements. Most, like Cushing’s, promised to keep alleged abuse quiet. Some promised cash settlements, health insurance and letters of recommendation as incentives for a resignation.

The practice is so widespread, school officials across the country call it “passing the trash.”

Via Portland Women’s Crisis Line blog.

From the mailbag:

bean wants you to visit ClickToEmpower.com and show your support for survivors of domestic violence. For every click received, $1 will be donated by the Allstate Foundation to the Education and Job Training Assistance Fund with a total donation up to $300,000.

It’s simple to do and every click counts! Click on the icon today and be sure to tell a friend!

Thanks for your support,

The Allstate Foundation

I have no idea how and if this sort of fund raising campaign works — but clicking is pretty damn effortless, so I recommend giving it a click.

There’s been a brilliant discussion about Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti’s Call for Submissions for ‘Yes means Yes’.Firefly, BlackAmazon, Sylvia, Tekanji, Chris Clarke, Sudy, Magniloquence, and Theriomorph are just some of the people who have written about the original Call for Submissions (and when the discussion became about the criticisms of the proposals there were more fantastic posts Sly Civilian, brownfemipower and Ilyka Damen for a start). The discussions has been far-ranging and it’s well worth tracking through the links, following the trackbacks and reading the comment threads.

So it seems a little ridiculous for me to be responding to a revised call for submissions for Yes means Yes. The debate has well and truly gone beyond that, and some women of colour have, rightly, cried enough. But I stopped blogging in a timely manner a few months back, and I have a tangent I want to dart off in. A tangent much informed by the posts above.

There’s a new sentence in there that’s response to criticisms like Firefly’s:

The use of sexualised violence to dominate and control people isn’t addressed by consent-based activism, and often there’s no legal protection against this kind of assault because it occurs in government institutions or is otherwise mandated by the state. For instance, women in Australian prisons are subjected to daily strip searches and cavity searches, where no hygiene is observed. Evidence shows that these women exhibit similar symptoms to rape survivors. Sisters Inside, a women’s prison advocacy group, have a research paper about it here.

The new Call for Submissions lists a potential topic for the anthology as:

Beyond consent: state-sanctioned and institutional rape that even the healthiest sexual culture won’t stop

The most obvious problem with this statement, that I might charitably call a wording problem, is that implies that you could have a healthy sexual culture and still have state-sanctioned and institutional rape. I don’t believe that’s true, and I hope that Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti don’t either. But I think this wording problem reveals a problem with analysis. Institutional and state sanctioned rape are part of our sexual culture. ¹ Some stories:

A thirteen year old girl in a logging town walked past a police station. She knew the police officer, he worked on search and rescue with her parents. He called her inside. He raped her.

A woman went to the police to make a report about being sexually abused by a relative. The male police officer interviewed her alone in his car, he put his hand on her knee. Then, years later, he rang her up at 1am, told her he’s coming over and demanded sex. He forced her to perform oral sex and left.

Or, we’ll move to another time and place. A woman grew up in a revolutionary movement in exile. She was raped when she was 13 by the men involved in those movement all friends of the family. She grew up the movement won, or sold out, and one of those revolutionary friends of the family became vice-president. She was at his house and he raped her.

Brad Shipton, Jacob Zuma and the Murapara police officer who still has name suppression all wielded institutional power granted by the state and they were also all acquaintances of the women, or girl, that they raped.

Police officers, politicians, employers, border guards, soldiers, priests, and prison guards* have huge power over so many women’s lives. They can demand sex in a way that makes it clear that the answer must be ‘yes’; they can all ignore ‘no’. They can do this to women they know and to strangers. The more power a rapist has over a woman the easier it will be for him to rape her, the more entitled he will feel to her body.

These are not a side category of rape - our understanding of rape must include an understanding of power. I think that means that rape is, by definition, beyond consent. If a man has the power to force a woman to have sex with him, and is prepared to use that power if she does not give consent, then that limits her ability to say ‘yes’ as well as ‘no’.

I might put things in a different order than they did in the call for submissions. I would also say that until we build a society that doesn’t give men the power to rape, female sexual pleasure is always going to be constrained by the fact that our ‘yes’ may be irrelevant.

There’s a Möbius strip involved, obviously, and I do believe that one of the things that give men the power to rape is the belief that women’s sexual pleasure is irrelevant. But it’s not the only place men get power from, and, most importantly, there are intersections between the different sorts of power men have - they can’t be understood in isolation.

* not intended to be an exhaustive list

1. In this post I am writing I am writing about women who are raped by men. I didn’t acknowledge that in the original post. I think the circumstances under which the majority of rape against males happens underscores the relationship between rape and power. But that wasn’t what I was exploring in this post

A few weeks ago, Jacob Zuma was named the new head of the African National Congress. This is part of a larger struggle in South Africa against the policies of the ANC, which has been carrying out a neo-liberal agenda ever since it gained power. Zuma is the left-wing candidate; Zuma’s supporters sang Lethu Mshini Wami (bring me my machine gun). I haven’t read much discussion of this on the blogs I read, which surprised me. I don’t know enough about South African politics to offer any analysis of the ANC. But I wanted to comment on the discussion of Zuma’s election, or the lack of it. There’s definitely been more attention among the socialist blogs I read than the feminist blogs, and the analysis is a little bit like the paragraph above. From Lenin’s Tomb:

Zuma is far from the ideal man to lead such a fight, burdened as he is with corruption charges over bribes from a French arms company, and he is actually doing his best to present his policies as pro-business. He is in all probability an opportunist who has harnessed a unique chance based on the unrest. However, the fact that he has successfully channelled the energy of this revolt into a leadership bid which may lead to him taking power in the ANC (but not the country) is itself significant. And however disappointing Zuma is likely to be (Chavez, he ain’t - even Chavez isn’t always Chavez), the very fact of ousting the wretched Mbeki may give further confidence to the already insurgent working class.

There’s something missing from these stories. Zuma is a rapist. He was acquitted - they always are. But in 2005 he raped 31 year old woman who was a friend of the family. I wrote about the trial last year:

The trial sounds hideous, and familiar. She was put on trial and her sexual history, including other times she had been raped, was put into evidence. When Zuma took the stand he argued that she consented by wearing a knee-length skirt and complaining that she didn’t have a boyfriend: “She had never in the past come to my house dressed in a skirt. Including times when I was living in Pretoria. When she came to me in a skirt after those talks I referred to earlier on, well, it told me something.”

This has been treated as a side-note by many different people. From AP Zuma was acquitted of rape last year, but could still face bribery charges in a multimillion-dollar arms deal. From WSWS “Zuma was sacked from office as deputy president by Mbeki and then faced a further trial on rape charges last year, in which he was acquitted.”

Maybe it’s just that the New Zealand left has developed some clarity on these issues, but if a powerful man is accused of rape and is acquitted that doesn’t mean he’s not a rapist. It means he is a rapist.

The inability to call a rapist a rapist displays an indifference to rape as a political issue. When asked in 1999, 1 in 3 Johannesburg women said they had been raped in the last year - they deserve more than one line in an analysis of the political meaning of Zuma’s victory.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

I watch my wife as she snuggles and kisses and playfully fondles our son’s body–he is two–eliciting from him giggles of delight, and I wonder how he experiences the attention she pays to his penis. Not that there’s even the hint of anything inappropriate in the way she touches him, and not that I have any fear about her crossing the line into inappropriateness, but so much of adult sexuality, especially adult male sexuality, is focused on and in our genitals, and so unthinkingly do we impose the norms and values of adult sexuality on the eroticism of children–which we fear but do not want to admit that we fear–that it’s almost impossible not to see in my wife’s playing with our son the shadow of what it would mean if she did cross the line. As Rosalind Miles suggests in Love, Sex, Death and the Making of the Male, however, appropriateness–which is so often a matter of culture anyway–may be entirely beside the point. A mother’s touch on her son’s genitals, she writes, with the understanding that she’s talking about something other than an act of cleansing or instruction in personal hygiene, “does not merely awaken the male sense of self, but locates it, ensuring that for the rest of his life his penis incorporates his essence and identity: that he is his penis” (38)

I watch my wife and my son, and I think how easy it is to believe that Miles is right. My son plays a game, for example, in which he sits naked on my wife’s face, clearly a strategy for getting his penis as close to her mouth as possible, and there have been times when he has asked openly for her to kiss him there. Then I remember, though, that she also pays a great deal of attention to, and that he asks her regularly to kiss and snuggle, other parts of his body as well–feet, belly, neck, butt, ears, hands and more–and I have to wonder if he actually makes, at any level of his consciousness, the distinction that Miles insists he does between his penis and those other parts of his body.

To be fair, though, Miles is talking about a kind of touching that has a lot more in common with adult lovemaking than the play my wife and son engage in, and about boys older than my son who receive a “stroking, petting or playing with the child’s genitals [that] has the effect of harnessing all his restless energy, focusing it on [his mother or mother figure] and soothing his aggression, irritability or distress” (35). Miles describes this practice under the harem system, when boys sometimes remained in the harem with their mothers until they were as old as twelve, and during the British colonial rule in India, when children were cared for by native female servants known as ayah or amah, and she quotes a Brigadier James Faulder, who recounts how his Nanny Phillips used to “put Peter to bed” that way (36-7)–a practice that, whatever else it may be about, is clearly something other than the simple expression of a parent’s delight in her or his child’s physical presence.

I watch my wife playing with my son, and I envy the uninhibited familiarity they enjoy. For while I kiss and snuggle and fondle him in much the way she does, I generally avoid his penis. Not that I’m squeamish. When it comes to changing his diaper or washing him in the bath, I have no problem handling or otherwise paying attention to his genitals, but the idea of kissing or snuggling or fondling him there inevitably conjures for me the images and feelings of my own sexual abuse, and those feelings bleed over into, or undergird, or intensify–I’m not quite sure how to characterize the structure of this relationship–the cringe I feel in spite of myself of how wrong it would be for me, a man, to be playful like that around his genitals.

I won’t say that the kind of latent homophobia it’s almost impossible not to have in this culture plays no role in this cringe, but when I imagine myself with a daughter, somehow the cringe gets stronger; and while I would like to say I could set this cringe aside, or at least do so more easily, if it weren’t for the way they become entwined with the echoes of my abuse, I am not so sure that is true, because the fear the echoes and the cringe give rise to in me is the same, i.e., that if I were to play with my son the way my wife does it would, by definition, mean I had crossed the line that my abusers–you haven’t heard about the second one yet–crossed with me.

Intellectually, of course, I know this is not the case, that even taking into account the different relationship my wife has with our son’s body because she carried him inside herself, because she pushed him out of herself and into the world, there is no essential difference between my touch and hers, no reason why my touch would cross the line I am talking about just because it comes from me, while her touch does not. Emotionally, however, it’s a different story. One legacy that child sexual abuse often leaves to its survivors is a difficulty in distinguishing between sexualized and non-sexualized touching, both when the touch is received and when the touch is given. Even now, more than thirty years after the old man in my building took me up to his apartment, and more than twenty years after the second man–about whom I will tell you in the next section or two–did what he did to me, recognizing that distinction in the behavior of others towards me, as well as in my own process of deciding whether or not to touch someone, often takes a conscious effort that the people around me, judging by the ease with which they exchange touches of friendship and obviously non-sexualized affection, do not seem to have to make.

Outside of practical necessity, in other words, neither the idea nor the act of touching my son’s genitals is ever innocent for me, is ever simply about my taking joy in his physical presence in the world, about my teaching him to take that joy through the pleasure of my touch; and even when I try to imagine myself as someone who was not sexually abused as a child, and even when I imagine myself with an infant, or one- or two-year-old daughter–to remove the specter of homophobia (though the effect on me of this imagining is not so different from when I do it in terms of my son)–the idea of tickling or gently kissing her vagina, just because she is beautiful, just because I want her to feel from the world that I represent for her that she, all of her, every single inch of her flesh, is beautiful and loved, fills some part of me that I wish I could disown with revulsion; and it is revulsion not because that tickle or that kiss would, by definition, be incest; it is revulsion because the idea that a father should touch his daughter (or his son) in that way triggers the warning system that I have internalized–that I would suspect most of us have–about the dangers of male sexuality. Or, perhaps more accurately, about how potentially dangerous men are because we are sexual.

Not that this warning system exists without reason, and not that it is terribly effective in preventing sexual violence of any kind–though it is perhaps more effective then it was when I was first molested–and not that the warning system itself is not part of the social and cultural structuring of a predatory and violent male sexuality as both normal and natural, but if I can talk for the moment just about how it makes me feel that I can trigger this warning system in myself simply by thinking of my child, if I have given you any sense of the double bind I feel caught in precisely because I have survived the predatory and violent male sexuality I just mentioned, what I would like to tell you is that it makes me deeply, deeply sad. Angry too, but mostly, pervasively, sad. Because it means I am, no, I have been–my son is now nine, and the kind of touching I am talking about here would be now quite inappropriate–reticent with him in ways I wish I had not been; because I do not believe my reticence did not register with him, though I of course have no idea what lesson he took from it.

I do take comfort, though, that my son has the beginnings of the language and the desire to talk about what it means to live in this male flesh we have in common. For in language, at least, I know I can touch him without the corrupting shame of my own abuse; with language I can give him the words and concepts that will help him envision and, I hope, live ways of being male and sexual that are not simply not predatory and violent, but that stand in opposition to violence and predation; because it has been in language, through language, that I have been able to render myself, at last, unashamed.