Remember, folks: humiliation/objectification is fine and dandy in the bedroom if both partners enjoy it. Keep it there, please, and off the streets.

TW: Rape culture, discussion of rape in comics

Movie Bob adresses a particularly horrid example of how superhero comics have a tendency towards misogyny…

petitefeministe:

Why Facebook’s rape jokes are no laughing matter

[TRIGGER WARNING: rape jokes]

I feel like this is all I post about these days.

By Frances Ryan, New Statesman:

Have you heard the one about the struggling woman and the rapist trying to pin her down? Rape is funny. It’s quite the joke, and Facebook apparently doesn’t mind if you spend your time swapping fantasised tales of abuse.

In between talk of Greys Anatomy and the annoying ones from X Factor, the global social networking site is home to pages dedicated to discussing rape in a positive light. “You know she’s playing hard to get when your (sic) chasing her down an alleyway”,”Riding your Girlfriend softly, Cause you don’t want to wake her up” and other delights have been on the site for for months, places where fans can discuss strategies of forcing women into sex in a so-called “comic” way. That this is, according to Facebook, acceptable, is the truly sick joke.

In response to calls to take the pages down, the site released a statement declaring that “groups that express an opinion on a state, institution, or set of beliefs — even if that opinion is outrageous or offensive to some — do not by themselves violate our policies.” A quick read of the site’s own terms and conditions confirms this is very much not the case. It is there in black and white with, “You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence”. According to Facebook, talking about raping your friend’s girlfriend to see “if she can put up a fight” is neither violent nor hateful, and advocating such a scenario is a “belief”. Not for the first time, we are told rape is something to be trivialised — the special crime that can be actively promoted with the confidence that few will bat an eye.

It’s not a newsflash that the internet is home to some deranged, offensive language — in many ways, it is the place where good taste comes to die. A distasteful liberation comes from the anonymity, as the author is comforted by the knowledge that they cannot be seen behind the screen. It’s a sense of security that is often misleading, it being illegal to stir up hatred on the grounds of race, religion or sexual orientation. When it comes to hatred on the grounds of gender, however, there is no such legislation, with anyone free to whip up misogyny.

Be it Facebook policy or our own laws, abuse against women is treated differently; separated and viewed as lesser than that leveled at other marginalised groups. The rules that would rightly apply if the victim were black, Muslim or gay are deemed irrelevant if the victim is female. The hate spouted based on this factor is not a type that counts. Women, it seems, do not count.

We exist in a culture that views the abuse of women as something less than serious. Rape can be encouraged on global networking sites, just as t-shirts and hair products can be sold based on the concept of coming home to your boyfriend and being smacked round the face. Facebook says it with confidence — if directed at women, violence is a joke. But abuse is abuse. That which is based on gender should be seen not simply as offensive, but a hate crime like anything else.

Slutwalk Burlington went amazingly! Thank you to everyone who came and supported.

If you’d like to see more photos, or upload your own, visit our flickr group:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/slutwalkburlington/

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU’RE UNDER ATTACK?

STAND UP FIGHT BACK.

whatfreshhellisthis:

Yeah, slight flaw in your wicked cool plan there buddy:

Unless they’ve told you their status RE: rape, sexual assult, molestation and other forms of sexual attack

You can’t tell!

No really, I don’t have a flashing sign on my forehead saying “THIS ONE HAS BEEN RAPED, MOLESTED AND SEXUALLY ASSAULTED BETTER NOT JOKE AROUND THEM HUR HUR HUR!”

And honestly dudebro, rape and sexual assault is fucking common. You walk into a room with sixty USian women in it, ten of them will have been or will be raped. You walk into a room with a hundred USian men, three of them will have been.

The likelihood of you knowing someone who’s been raped or sexually assaulted is so high I’d be willing to bet everything I own that you do.

And one day if you keep telling rape jokes this person you know- probably even persons- is going to hear, and they’re going to be glad they never told you.

Because if you can laugh about rape so easily, what on earth would you do to them if you knew? Would you laugh then too?

And just as likely, one day you’ll be telling that joke, about that bitch who got what she deserved, and a rapist will hear you. And he’ll laugh. And he’ll think that you’re on his side.

And as far as I know, person who told that joke, you are.

WHAT is so hard about that to understand? It must be hard, because I keep having to explain it to people…

aim2misbehave:

feministslut:

TW: Domestic Violence, Rape, Extreme Violence.

tumblinfeminist:

 

Do you believe in the rights of women, or do you believe in multiculturalism? A series of verdicts in the German courts in the past month, have shown with hot, hard logic that you can’t back both. You have to choose.

The crux case centres on a woman called Nishal, a 26-year-old Moroccan immigrant to Germany with two kids and a psychotic husband. Since their wedding night, this husband beat the hell out of her. She crawled to the police covered in wounds, and they ordered the husband to stay away from her. He refused. He terrorised her with death threats. So Nishal went to the courts to request an early divorce, hoping that once they were no longer married he would leave her alone. A judge who believed in the rights of women would find it very easy to make a judgement: you’re free from this man, case dismissed.

But Judge Christa Datz-Winter followed the logic of multiculturalism instead. She said she would not grant an early divorce because - despite the police documentation of extreme violence and continued threats - there was no “unreasonable hardship” here.

Why? Because the woman, as a Muslim, should have “expected” it, the judge explained. She read out passages from the Koran to show that Muslim husbands have the “right to use corporal punishment”. Look at Sura 4, verse 34, she said to Nishal, where the Koran says he can hammer you. That’s your culture. Goodbye, and enjoy your beatings.

A Lebanese-German who strangled his daughter Ibthahale and then beat her unconscious with a bludgeon because she didn’t want to marry the man he had picked out for her was sentenced to mere probation. His “cultural background” was cited by the judge as a mitigating factor.

A Turkish-German who stabbed his wife Zeynep to death in Frankfurt was given the lowest possible sentence, because, the judge said, the murdered woman had violated his “male honour, derived from his Anatolian moral concepts”. The bitch. A Lebanese-German who raped his wife Fatima while whipping her with a belt was sentenced to probation, with the judge citing his … you get the idea.

Indeed, in the name of this warm, welcoming multiculturalism, the German courts have explicitly compared Muslim women to the brain-damaged. The highest administrative court in North Rhine-Westphalia has agreed that Muslim parents have the “right” to forbid their daughter from going on a school trip unless she was accompanied by a male family member at all times. The judges said the girl was like “a partially mentally impaired person who, because of her disability, can only travel with a companion”.

Listen to Jasvinder Sanghera, who founded the best British charity helping Asian women after her sister was beaten and beaten and then burned herself to death. She says: “It’s a betrayal of these women to be PC about this. Look at the figures. Asian women in Britain are three times more likely to commit suicide than their white friends. That’s because of all this.”

As the Iranian author Azar Nafisi puts it: “I very much resent it when people - maybe with good intentions or from a progressive point of view - keep telling me, ‘It’s their culture’ … It’s like saying the culture of Massachusetts is burning witches.” She is horrified by the moves in Canada to introduce shariah courts to enforce family law for Muslims.

Yes, it would be easy to keep our heads down, go with this multicultural drift, and congratulate ourselves on our tolerance of the fanatically intolerant. But I can give you a few good reasons not to. Their names are Nishal and Ibthahale and Zeynep and Fatima, and, yes, they were women.

Some excerpts from “How multicultralism is betraying women” by Johann Hari. All emphasis mine. I found these paragraphs get the the heart of this argument. I recommend reading the full thing.  

This.

To add another perspective, I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian culture. While it’s harder to find outright justification for anti-woman violence in the Bible than it is the Koran, I’ve still encountered Christian men that have used their beliefs and worldviews to justify marital rape, child abuse, and emotional abuse of their families, and many Christian women who also believe the justifications. (If anyone’s interested in further reading, I’d suggest the blog No Longer Quivering as a good starting point). There’s a lot of Christian privilege dynamics that go into this and make it a bit different than the aforementioned situations, but I don’t have the spoons to deal with that right now :-(

But, even as someone who’s still a practicing Christian of some undefined sort (my personal beliefs line up pretty well with Unitarianism) I still don’t think that my religious freedom, or anyone else’s, should ever, ever extend to the “right” to practice my religion in a way that actively harms or infringes upon the rights of other human beings.

This is really outrageous! When some religious groups in Germany tried justifying beating their kids as ordered by the bible, the courts decided against them quickly enough, ruling that the rights of children not to be beaten was overruling the right of parental freedom/”religious practise” etc. Why this crap against women? And in one case, from a female judge too, I can seriously not understand it. Fuck that.

pantslessprogressive:

If someone is not strongly and widely chastised and disowned for using “I’ll rape a pregnant bitch and call it a threesome” in song lyrics, then our society has a giant fucking problem.

I’ll agree that it this is one clear example of rape culture. However, lyrics about murder etc. are also accepted without censure, wouldn’t you say? Which expands the problem in the case of song lyrics.

petitefeministe:

This is really long, but I’m posting it all because it’s really important.

What is it with our inability to find justice for victims?

If events of the last few months have sent any sort of message to women in America it’s this: if you’re raped or sexually assaulted, justice won’t be on your side.

What happens when the people who are supposed to protect you are the rapists themselves—such as in NY, when cops on separate occasions have been accused of committing rape? What happens when the press and public spend as much time parsing a victim’s history and “character“ than the person accused of brutally assaulting her (like the New York Post calling Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s accuser a “hooker”)? What conclusion can we draw when a rape victim’s attempt to confront a powerful entity is publicly acknowledged as futile?

Women can’t win. The structures, institutions and organizations supposed to help rape victims are often simply tools of a social attitude that blames them for the crimes committed against them.

This week brought the collapse of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case amid a nasty, frequently racist and sexist media frenzy. Then, on the very same day, came the absurd announcement from KBR that it was seeking repayment of legal fees from Jamie Lee Jones, who had lost her rape case in front of a jury. Jones had accused her colleagues of raping her and the company of trying to cover it up (while the verdict reflected problems with her case, it went to a jury and was given a serious day in court).

In May, two New York cops, who were caught on video repeatedly returning to the home of an intoxicated woman to rape her, were acquitted. Jurors said it was mostly because the victim was drunk. (The two men, who have both been fired from the NYPD, were convicted of “official misconduct” and received sentences of one year and two months, respectively.)

And then just this week, an off-duty police officer was arrested for allegedly raping a woman at gunpoint in broad daylight, abusing his authority in the grossest way.

Meanwhile, these cases take place outside the mainstream media spotlight. AlterNet noted the recent story out of Springfield, MO, about the young girl whose school utterly failed her after she reported her rape to authorities, instead humiliating her and sending her back to be victimized again, violently, by the boy she initially accused (he later confessed to the second crime). The school continued to deny wrongdoing and doled out punishment instead of remediation for the traumatized young woman.

That’s just this summer. Earlier in 2011 the women who accused Julian Assange of rape were tarred as CIA plants by even such progressive luminaries as Michael Moore and Naomi Wolf. Lara Logan, after being brutally raped in Egypt, had to face a firestorm of questions about whether women reporters belong in dangerous situations. An 11-year-old girl in Texas, who was caught on video being gang-raped by 14 men and boys in an abandoned house, had to face media scrutiny when a New York Times reporter reported accusations by townspeople about the clothes she wore and her mannerisms. And the Republicans kicked off the year by repeatedly trying to sneak a new definition of rape onto the books.

Yes, it’s been a miserable year so far, and reading the comments sections on Internet stories about any of these incidents is likely to make anyone sympathetic to victims feel sick to his or her stomach.

This rather sweeping conclusion isn’t meant to pick apart the legal details of any specific case—there’s plenty of both astute and idiotic commentary taking place in the media—but rather to talk about the climate these cases create for victims, and the way these incidents, and how authorities handle them, both perpetuate and reflect rape culture.

But first, what exactly is a rape culture, anyway? Personally, I always think of rape culture as all the assumptions that come from society’s assuming sex is a transaction involving men taking what women have to offer—but not offer too enthusiastically, lest they be deemed promiscuous—thereby creating a Catch-22 (and ignoring violence that falls outside the gender stereotype boundaries).

Toward the beginning of a long and comprehensive post on rape culture, Shakesville’s Melissa McEwan says this, which sums up the anti-rape message of the burgeoning anti-rape “Slutwalk” movement, itself a reaction to a policeman urging women not to dress like sluts to avoid rape:

Rape culture is refusing to acknowledge that the only thing that the victim of every rapist shares in common is bad fucking luck. Rape culture is refusing to acknowledge that the only thing a person can do to avoid being raped is never be in the same room as a rapist. Rape culture is avoiding talking about what an absurdly unreasonable expectation that is, since rapists don’t announce themselves or wear signs or glow purple.

This massive spate of 2011 rape cases and controversies in their wide scope and variety, and the inevitably depressing results, are a perfect illustration of the cultural problem writ large.

Let’s start with two examples from the winter and spring which are in fact on the opposite ends of what the media sees as a “rape spectrum.”

First, you have Julian Assange, a powerful man accused of “acquaintance rape,” based on two women’s accounts. One involved a forcible sexual encounter that began as a consensual one, and another involved penetrating a woman while she was asleep. Both women were sophisticated professionals who knew Assange, and both were alone with him when the alleged assaults took place.

Both women were blamed, smeared and their identities revealed online, accused of being part of a supposed worldwide conspiracy to bring Assange down (just as the press has insinuated that DSK’s accuser, Nafissatou Diallo, was an unlikely pawn of a conspiracy to silence Strauss-Kahn).

Second, we have the Texas gang-rape case, in which a large group of boys and men were caught on video brutally and repeatedly gang-raping a young girl. In this case, there was physical corroborating evidence, the victim was too young to legally consent, and the accused were relatively powerless men in a poor community. 

The cases couldn’t have been more different, and yet in this case also, the young woman was smeared when prominent newspaper stories fixated on her appearance, her dress, and her behavior rather than the demeanor and histories of the men involved.

So the lesson is clear: if you report an unexciting rape that happened in your home while you were alone with the perpetrator, you get blamed. If you are recorded on video being repeatedly raped by a massive number of people, you also get blamed. If you’re a grown woman: blamed. If you’re a child: blamed. If it’s your word: blamed. If there’s physical evidence: blamed. 

And that mentality extends to the jury: read this heartbreaking piece by one of the jurors in the “rape-cop” case who was sympathetic to the victim but wouldn’t convict because of her intoxicated state. “There were holes in her story, again because of blacking out and-or passing out,” the juror said. 

Is it any wonder, then, that it’s next to impossible to get clear and decisive justice for these crimes in a system that is tainted by social attitudes toward rape? In cases like this one, Jamie Leigh Jones and Diallo, it may be that well-intentioned people have been simply unable to use the law to the advantage of redressing victims’ wrongs.

And is it any wonder that some real victims, when questioned about an assault, might embellish or shade their accounts (both Leigh Jones and Nafissatou Diallo have been accused of doing this) in the fruitless effort to be a “better” victim, to not be blamed for something that was done to them?

That’s the other essence of rape culture, which was distilled so memorably by Amanda Hess; it confuses women, too:

Rape culture does not just encourage men to proceed after she says “no.” Rape culture does not simply teach men that a lack of physical resistance is an invitation. Rape culture does not only tell men to assert ownership over whichever female body they desire. Rape culture also tells women not to claim ownership over their own bodies. Rape culture also informs women that they should not desire sex. Rape culture also tells women that saying yes makes them bad women.

Both rape and rape accusations are products of the roles assigned by rape culture. In the traditional seduction scenario, a woman is expected to not desire to have sex, and to only submit after the man has successfully coerced her into submission. When the preferred model for consensual sex looks a hell of a lot like rape, an array of fucked-up scenarios are inevitable: the woman never wanted to fuck the guy, refuses to submit, and is raped; the woman submits to the man’s coercion in order to avoid other negative consequences (like being raped); the woman had desired the sex all along, but must defend her femininity by saying that she had been coerced into sex. Thankfully, a good deal of modern men and women reject these antiquated ideas, but they’re far from being banished from the sexual landscape.  

The landscape may seem somewhat bleak at the moment, but there’s hope in the grassroots movements for media justice and for countering the rape-culture narrative that have sprung up this year.

Online activism like a petition demanding the Post retract its nasty characterization of Diallo and a similar campaign directed at the Times’ rape coverage are beginning to hold the media accountable for the lens they hold to victims.

And Slutwalk, whose message is encapsulated by the idea that nothing causes rape except a rapist and a lack of consent, is creating a powerful and conversation-starting counter-narrative to these high-profile defeats.

Where justice and authority let victims down, solidarity, activism, and a massive effort to create awareness will have to fill the breach.