Category Archives: Double Standards

FEMALE PRIVILEGE – Evidence collection -Police violence and who it targets

Posted on by
9

By now most of us in the US are aware of how much “special attention” the police seem to give black men in general but especially young black men. Cases like that of Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima make the news, but Oscar Grant my not be as familiar. And these black men don’t have to men at all; the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in March of 2013 that police had acted properly in handcuffing and then tasering a minor for approaching a woman who happened to be his mother. (The police said they acted out of caution for the women’s safety; they ended up arresting her too so it’s not likely she felt very threatened until the police went after her son.) To be sure, white men are often roughed up by the police, get shot for no particular reason. Whiteness helps but it is no guarantee of your civil rights.

What does appear to guarantee your civil rights is being of the right gender. I am looking for examples of similar police violence, to the point of death, inflicted on women. I do not recall any and I can’t find any. I suspect if we do find instances, the incidences for various dempographic groups will resemble that for incarceration.

This is an appeal for assistance in finding these cases of police violence against women. It will be interesting to see how much of this is directed against white women.

I have heard at least anecdotally that youngish white women are targeted for traffic stops and that sounds plausible to me. I don’t know if they are cited at disproportionate levels and I doubt they are arrested, even at the same level as other demographics. Thanks for your help in this.

Also I think we will find this is a Western pattern of discrimination, if in fact it exists. Ni Yulan’s gender certainly did not lead the Beijing police to spare her at all.

Again, thank you for your assistance in this.

Mary Koss: The Corruption Continues Manboobz Style

Posted on by
17

by Tamen

Sometimes I do futile things – like posting a comment on Manboobz (this time on some quotes about rape and consent from Farrell’s 1993 book The Myth of Male Power.) I posted the link to the Mary P Koss paper where she calls it inappropriate to call men rape victims unless they have been penetrated as a example of other crappy things about rape that were published in 1993.

That was considered an attack – they sure are a reactive bunch over there. Beside the invectives, quote-falsifications, quote-misattributions, incapability to comprehend ratios and general rudeness I was spurred on to check to what extent Mary P Koss still adhers to the prevalency methods sha layed out in that 1993 paper. I have earlier stated that I suspect she is and that she has and is serving as advisor and consultant at CDC has influenced CDC’s decision to classify “being made to penetrate” as not rape.

I’ll post the full comment I posted at Manboobz (even though it contains a paragraph on CSEW which restates what I’ve written in earlier comments in this thread) – it follows in it’s entirety here:

Pecunium(Manboobz commentator):

I do not think Consent is the appropriate term here because, the victim could claim that “He/ she was too drunk” for consent or “He/ she was asleep”, and get away with it on grounds of Technicality, and accuse the Perpetrator successfully, even when the Perpetrator did not necessarily Force the Victim.

I haven’t written that drivel and I find it absolutely galling and dishonest that you attempt to pass it off as a quote by me,

On to your question/challenge:

I’d say it doesn’t, not unless she is on the review panel for all grants for studies used by the CDC in aggregating data; and that definition is the only one she has ever accepted.

Moreover, since we know you’ve not actually read the study (and I’ve not read it), I don’t know that the quotation you used compltely explains the justifications for the operational definition.

The Koss paper which is behind a paywall is the 1982 where they looked at rape prevalency among college women. I have made no claim one way or the other about the content of that paper (I reported that Ampersand wrote that it included men in the sample after Aaliyah wrote that she thought it didn’t). The operation definition I quoted is not from that paper.

If you are talking about the “Detecting the Scope of Rape – a review of prevalence research methods” paper by Mary P Koss where the (inappropriate to call a man rape victim…) quote came from I can assure you that I’ve read it. You can read it as well since I linked it in my first comment on this thread. For you convenience I’ll link it again [redacted for copyright reasons.]

The paper has been cited numerous times, including by the CDC. The extent of how involved Mary P Koss has been and is with the CDC can be seen from her public CV.

Can you show that it has been accepted as the working definition for rape studies afterwards? Is it a current usage in the field?

No? Than go to hell.

You know, I really do wish I could bring up some studies which doesn’t use something to that effect as a working definition of rape. Do you know of any?

CDC apparently found it inappropriate to call it rape – or rather they think it’s an unique male victimization that is separate from rape. The Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) does not even bother to include it in the survey even if it under Sexual Offenses Act of 2003 Section 4 is punishable with a sentence up to life (SOA 2003 doesn’t call it rape either). The latest CSEW did a split-sample experiment to test a new set of questions. The new questions had an option that male victims who had been made to penetrate could answer yes. The analysts classified those who answered yes to that question as NON-VICTIMS.

Because once havging used a shitty operational definition she can never again use a non-shitty one? Of course not, that might undermine your claim to it being, The One True Feminist Idea of Rape.

There is no One True Feminist Idea of anything. But Mary P Koss’ having an operational definition and arguing for it academically in peer reviewed journals and very possibly on advisory boards for federal agencies who conduct national surveys on sexual victimization and publish reports on the results is a tad bit more influental than Jane/Joe/non-binary feminist blogger/blog commenter who thinks it’s should be classified as rape.

As for Koss changing her mind since 1993, here is a quote from her paper co-written with Lehrer and Lehrer on sexual victimization of men in college in Chile published in 2010:

It would also be desirable to conduct further quantitative inquiry using the revised SES (Koss et al. 2007), which contains items that have been crafted with behavior-specific wording to elicit information on a range of SV experiences. This will make it possible to base men’s rape prevalence estimates with more specificity on acts that involve sustaining forced penetration, leaving less leeway for men’s individual perceptions of what constitutes ‘forced sex.’

In that paper an affirmative response(from male respondents) to:

Someone forced me to have sex using physical force.

…was coded as physically-forced sex.

Lehrer, Lehrer, Lehere and Oyarzún have, using the same 2005 dataset, written a paper called : Prevalence of and Risk Factors for Sexual Victimization in College Women in Chile.

In that paper an affirmative response (from female respondents) to:

Someone forced me to have sex using physical force.

…was coded as rape.

But let’s take a look at the revised SES Koss et al would like to use instead on the Chilean dataset:

Here is a quote from the 2007 paper by Koss et al: Revising the SES: A Collaborative Process to Improve Assessment of Sexual Aggression and Victimization

We acknowledge the inappropriateness of female verbal coercion and the legitimacy of male perceptions that they have had unwanted sex. Although men may sometimes sexually penetrate women when ambivalent about their own desires, these acts fail to meet legal definitions of rape that are based on penetration of the body of the
victim. Furthermore, the data indicate that men’s experiences of pressured sex are qualitatively different from women’s experiences of rape. Specifically, the acts experienced by men lacked the level of force and psychologically distressing impact that women reported (Struckman-Johnson, 1988; Struckman-Johnson & Struckman-Johnson, 1994).
We worked diligently to develop item wording that captured men’s sense of pressure to have sex and draw their responses into an appropriate category of coercion instead of to rape items. The revised wording is discussed in more detail later in the article.

No, apparently it’s still inappropriate.

Both the SES-LSV (questions included in linked article above) and SES-LVF (link does not ask any questions about men being made to penetrate women without the man’s consent. They do ask men whether they have been anally penetrated without consent.

MALE DISPOSABILITY – Erasing male rape victims, Part II – Tamen evaluates a British and a Norwegian study on rape victims and finds invalidating methodological errors

Posted on by
15

Typhonblue asked Tamen about a British study of crime, the CESW, especially about the rape statistics:

“I looked at the source documents. Is the reason why there is such a low rate of men reporting “serious sexual assault” in both the alternative and current questionnaires?”

Tamen answered:

“Yes, there are two reasons I can see right away.

1) The number is low because it doesn’t count men raped by envelopment (I guess you knew this):

Serious sexual assault in the current questionnaire only includes rape by penetration by a penis or an object (sexual assault by penetration) and doesn’t include “being made to penetrate”. This in line with UK’s Sexual Offence Act of 2003 which defines rape in a way that requires that the perpetrator has a penis he penetrates the victim with (no female rapists in the UK, although I believe a woman has been convicted for accessory to rape when she encouraged, enabled and abetted a man who raped another woman).

Serious sexual assault in the alternative question set includes in addition to a comprehensive list of ways to be penetrated by a penis, body part or object the choice “Did some other sex act not described above” alternative which might be a fit for rape by envelopment. But if one read the methodology report carefully one finds that any respondents who answered “Did some other sex act not described above” is counted as non-victims.

As we know from the NISVS 2010 Report a large portion of men who are raped are raped by envelopment. In the NISVS 2010 it was 1.4% vs 4.8%, In CWES it’s impossible to say since “being made to penetrate” is not a single category, but is lumped in with “sexual touching”, but 0.5% – 0.3% are raped and 1.1% – 2.5% report sexual touching. I am afraid that doesn’t tell us much as I suspect sexual touching will not catch many of the male victims of rape by envelopment. I for one would never label what happened to me for mere “sexual touching”.

2) The number is low because it doesn’t count a large subset of victims who have been raped (as defined by the SOA2003):

The CSEW asked about incidents happening since the respondents turned 16. NISVS 2010 also included CSA in the lifetime numbers where they found that 25% of the men who experienced rape (as defined by CDC) did so when they were 10 or younger (12.7% for women). What percentage of male victims were victimized before the age of 16 is not reported in the NISVS 2010. If the age demographic of male victims in the UK is similar to male victims in the US then a large subset of victims are not reported in the tables in the linked report.”

Tamen expanded on this in an earlier comment at Reddit MensRights

http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1dbc0h/crime_survey_for_england_and_wales_victims_of/

” It has been brought to my attention that the Crime Survery for England and Wales (CESW) did a split-sample experience to evaluate a new question set. I have criticized the published report of the CESW (which apparently is based on the answers from the original question set) in a comment at FeministCritics.

Home Office published a methodology report titled Analysis of the 2010/11 British Crime Survey intimate personal violence split-sample experiment with an analysis of the differences between the old and the new questionaires. Among some of the more interesting findings was that the rate of men reporting victimization increased with the new question set. In fact the new question set found that more men than women reported having been sexually assaulted by their partner the last year (Table 2 page 22).

So what question does this prompts from the analysts?

If the alternative question set is favoured then are further amendments needed to minimise the risk of reporting experiences that should not be classed as IPV? Should these be limited to the stalking questions, less serious sexual assault questions or to others?

The cynic in me is pretty sure which incidents they think are overreported (not really IPV).

But then I was really floored. What I will quote here is related to the following question (NIPV35AA- NIPV35AF) in the new CSEW questionaire:

You said that someone has forced you to have sexual intercourse or take part in some other sexual act when you were not capable of consent or when you made it clear you did not want to. What did they do to you?

If this has happened more than once since you were 16, please select all those that apply.

We need this level of detail to allow us to classify the exact type of sexual assault experienced.

Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis
Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers)
Penetrated your mouth with their penis
Did some other sex act not described above
Don’t know
Don’t want to answer
Any male who has been made to penetrate someone else would answer “Did some other sex act not described above”. Let’s see how that is analysed:

In the analysis presented here those respondents who said that they had only experienced ‘some other sex act not described above’ were categorised as non-victims to ensure that the category of serious sexual assault retained the same definition as in the current question set (this is not an option in the current question set).

WHAT!? Non-victims!?”

This is the comment at Feminist Critics that Tamen refers to:

“I recently was made aware by a feminist Redditor of a report of sexual offences based on (among others) the Crime Survey for England and Wales. The report found a much higher victmization rate for females than for men. I took a closer look and what follows is a slightly edited version of the reply I made her:

The UK uses the archaic common law definition of rape in its Sexual Offences Act 2003 – it defines rape in a way that requires that the perpetrator must have a penis.
It defines Assault by penetration in a way that requires that the victim’s body has been penetrated by an object or part of the perpetrators body.

The Brits have their own version of the NCVS called CSEW – Crime Survey for England and Wales. The most recent one was published January 2013. The Ministry of Justice, Home Office and the Office for National Statistics published in January a report looking specifically at the sexual offences part of the CSEW as well as police reports, court proceeding, sentencing, duration of cases, offender management and offender histories (recidivist rates, multiple convictions etc.). The report was published January 10th 2013 and is called:

An Overview of Sexual Offending in England and Wales.

Let’s examine to what extent this report counts male victims of rape (including rape by envelopment) to see if it’s possible to estimate the number of male victims in the UK in a similar manner to how one could find the male number of male rape victims in the US by looking at the “being made to penetrate” category.

Rape and Assault by penetration are grouped by the report in a category called: “Most serious sexual offence.”

A man being forced to have oral, vaginal or anal intercourse with a woman without his consent is a victim of sexual assault by the law. The definition of sexual assault is:
Section 3 of the Act makes it an offence for any male or female to intentionally touch another person sexually without his or her consent. A person found guilty of this offence could be sent to prison for a maximum of ten years.

Meaning that by UK law a man raped by a woman forcing him to have unprotected vaginal sex with her without his consent are put in the same category as a woman being touched on the butt by a man — not to defend the latter, but there is a difference between those two.

It’s even worse in the CSEW survey because there it’s being categorized as “Other sexual offences”, which includes exposure, sexual activity with children (excluding rape and sexual assault) and sexually threatening behaviour.

In fact, when I look at the questionnaire used for the CSEW survey they base their findings on, I actually found a set of questions which male victims of rape by envelopment may answer affirmatively:

Since you were 16, has anyone ever forced you to have sexual intercourse or take part in some other sexual act, when you were not capable of consent or when you made it clear you did not want to?

By sexual intercourse we mean vaginal, anal or oral penetration.
This may have been a partner, a family member, a friend or work colleague, someone you knew casually, or a stranger.

If the respondent answered yes to the above they are asked another question (NIPV35AA- NIPV35AF):

You said that someone has forced you to have sexual intercourse or take part in some other sexual act when you were not capable of consent or when you made it clear you did not want to. What did they do to you?

If this has happened more than once since you were 16, please select all those that apply.

We need this level of detail to allow us to classify the exact type of sexual assault experienced.
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers)
* Penetrated your mouth with their penis
* Did some other sex act not described above
* Don’t know
* Don’t want to answer

Here one would think that any male victims of “being made to penetrate someone else” must answer “(4) Did some other sex act not described above” to be counted correctly. However, the question itself listed “some other sex act” as something separate from sexual intercourse — thus perhaps confusing the respondent. Conceivably, victims of a forced kiss, a grope and so on could also answer “yes” here, as those could be understood to be some sex act other than intercourse. As I understand it, respondents are more likely to respond to questions which describe the acts rather than the name of the act or a bag-name of a set of acts. It also really doesn’t matter that this question was under the heading “SERIOUS SEXUAL ASSAULT”, because if the answer is “4″ then it’s being put in the category “Other sexual offences” in the summary, tables and charts in the report.

Contrast that with this question asked under the section: “SERIOUS SEXUAL ASSAULT”:

Since the age of 16, has ANYONE ever done any of the following things to you, when you made it clear that you did not agree or when you were not capable of consent? This may have been a partner, a family member, someone you knew casually, or a stranger.

* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis, even if only slightly
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers) even if only slightly
* Penetrated your mouth with their penis even if only slightly
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis, but did not succeed
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers) but did not succeed
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your mouth with their penis but did not succeed
This is very specific, just about every possible combination of a way a victim can be penetrated is listed. It is therefore likely to catch more respondents.

There is a follow-up question to those who reported more than one sexual assault: they ask about the nature of the last one (SSA6A- SSA6I) and the answer alternatives are:
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis, even if only slightly
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers) even if only slightly
* Penetrated your mouth with their penis even if only slightly
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis, but did not succeed
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers) but did not succeed
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your mouth with their penis but did not succeed
* Something else
* Don’t know/can’t remember
* Don’t wish to answer

Here our hypothetical male victim of forced intercourse with a female perpetrator has to answer “7 Something else”.

Again, as soon as he does answer 7 he is put into the “Other sexual offences” category in the report.

This survey does a poor job of capturing men who have been raped by envelopment. The way questions are designed almost ensure that it will under-report male victims who were made to penetrate someone else. Grouping the percentage of men who actually had been made to penetrate someone else together with the likely-higher percentages of victims having been groped, flashed and so on effectively hides how many men are victims of “being made to penetrate someone else”. It also helps maintain the belief that women are victimized by sexual offenses more than men.
It reminds me of the commonly-voiced notion that more girls than boys experience childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Statistics and studies often leave it at that. However, the picture does change a bit when another study found that while more women have experienced CSA, women are more likely to report “touching,” and it turns out that an equal number of girls and boys experience CSA in the form of rape (intercourse).
[Comment slightly edited for clarity. —ballgame]

http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2009/01/05/can-women-rape-men-rp/#comment-504891

 

In answer to a question with regard to the situation in Norway on the comment thread for Mary Koss post Tamen responded:

“Thank you for your question Dr. Ramore.
I wasn’t aware of any studies done on male victims in Norway. Now you have spurred me on to dig a bit more to see what there is and I found that there has been a few studies done among youths, for instance:

Mossige S, Huang L. The prevalence of sexual offences and abuse within a Norwegian youth population Nor J Epidemiol 2010; 20(1):53-62 (in Norwegian with a short english abstract. It uses numbers from two large national youth surveys done in 2004 and 2007.
I haven’t read it in detail yet, but I haven’t found any clear description of the definition of rape which they use. They operate with some categories called “unwanted intercourse” (one for oral, one for anal and one for vaginal) which is separate from rape. I presume this is due to rape requiring physical force or threat of physical force in Norwegian law (unless the victim is incapable of giving consent, for instance by being unconscious). Amnesty and others have been lobbying for removing the requirement of physical force (or threat of physical force) from the legal definition of rape – making it only dependent on absense of consent.

They found the following:

About 1 in 10 rape victims are male (4.3% vs 0.4%)
About 1 in 10 victims of attempted rape are male (7.1% vs 0.7%).
Unwanted sexual experiences:
Someone has exposed themselves to you
Someone has touched in a sexual manner
You have touched yourself in sexual manner in front of others
You have touched someone else in a sexual manner
You had to masturbate while someone watched
You’ve had intercourse (vaginal)
You’ve had oral sex
You’ve had anal sex
You’ve had another form of sex
You have experienced one or more experiencesfrom the list
I’ll list the results from the more serious experiences:

1 of 3 who report unwanted vaginal intercourse are male (12% vs 6.5%)
7.7% of girls vs 5.8% of boys reported unwanted oral sex
2.5% of girls vs 1.5% of boys reported unwanted anal sex
35.6% of girls and 22.5% of boys report that they’ve experienced one or more items on the list of unwanted sexual experiences.

They survey asked about the perpetrator in the first and in the last experience. Girls report 99% male perpetrators and 1% female perpetrators – the same for both the first and last. Boys report 50-60% female perpetrator and 50-40% male perpetrators.
The largest category for perpetrator for both girls and boys are “friend, boyfriend/girlfriend or acquaintance”.

What form was the first unwanted sexual experience – voluntarily or under duress/force.
The question was; how well does the following statements describe what happened
Type: Girls vs Boys who answered that the statement described the experienced well.

Too young to understand: 25.8% vs 15.3%
Participated voluntarily, but regretted afterwards: 11.8% vs 8.9%
Was tricked/conned: 27% vs 13.9%
Was persuaded: 20.3% vs 10.5%
Mild pressure: 26.9% vs 10.3%
Strong pressure: 23% vs 7.4%
Physical force (constrained/pinned down, threats of violence or violence): 31.1% vs 9.6%”

Genderratic thanks Tamen for his analysis of these two studies.

He makes his case pretty conclusively that they appear structured to conceal male rape victimization. What makes this especially is that both these studies were government funded, funded by the very citizens who these studies erase.

PARENTING – Custody battles and dirty tricks

Posted on by
11

Stories of mothers resorting to dirty tricks to get custody and/or total control of their children away from their fathers are legion – and when I say dirty tricks, I mean the lowest kind of abuse of process and the legal system and utter contempt for any kind of decency – false accusation of sexual abuse, false accusations of domestic abuse, false rape accusations. Fathers and Families has a huge archive of these stories.

Well here’s one that flips the genders. It’s out of Des Moines, WA, where it’s the father engaging in dirty tricks. He and his ex-wife were in a custody battle – he had the kids while she had been in a voluntary drug rehabilitation program and now she wanted custody. So he doped the kids cookies with meth so they would fail a drug test after staying with their mother. How’s that for “fatherly goodness”?

“The children’s mother had been clean for nearly a year in September, when she failed a drug test. Concerned about the positive result, the woman recalled a pair of unappetizing cookies she’d eaten with her children the day before.”

Hmmmmm

“According to charging papers, the woman and a court-appointed monitor picked up the children at Holm’s home that day. Their 7-year-old son brought two pink-frosted cookies that Holm made for his ex; the woman and her 5-year-old son split one cookie, which they were unable to eat because it “tasted terrible.”

And guess what:

“On a subsequent drug test, the 5-year-old tested positive for meth, the Des Moines detective continued. The woman suspected Holm or his girlfriend were trying to sabotage her prefect drug test record before an upcoming child custody trial.”

It turns out she had very good reason to want to get those kids away from their father. It turns out that’s just what he was doing. That’s about as depraved as it gets – right on the same level as accusing someone of child rape or sexual molestation to pimp a judge into granting the mother custody. It turns out that kind of depravity is not gendered, even if the family court system’s response to it is. Here is one example of that.

DOUBLE STANDARDS – The tide seems to be turning – Joan Walsh denounces a London gym; no, she praises it by faint damnation

Posted on by
15

Joan Walsh has a good article up at Salon on a man in London suing his gym because they restrict hours to male patrons to provide male-free time to female customers but still charging the same fees. Walsh concedes he has a point, this is sexist discrimination, but where her article shines is she goes through all the reasons for this kind of discrimination and rejects them.

Note about the article on Peter Lloyd. Yes it’s in the Daily Mail and yes I am aware of what people say about the Daily Mail. But the Daily Mail is exactly where this sort of thing should be published, because this is about broad cultural change. This might be published in some publication with a little higher tone perhaps, so that the “right people” would read and consider it, but in this case the “right people” are the voting masses of people who read the Daily Mail. So that’s where it should go.

Lloyd is quoted:

“Several weeks ago, I formally complained to the general manager, asking him to change the policy with one of three alternatives: A) maintain a women’s hour but introduce a men’s alternative for fairness, B) keep women’s hour (and only women’s hour) but annually charge men less, or C) scrap single-gender sessions altogether.

Hardly controversial.

After all, if demand for women-only sessions is so great then the gym should put their money where their mouth is and fund it themselves.

Unsurprisingly, they declined.

‘A report by the Women Sport and Fitness Foundation showed that a significant proportion of women (26 per cent) “hate the way they look when they exercise”.’ they replied in an email.

‘This takes on an even greater significance when you consider that women feel even more self-conscious when taking part in sport and physical activity when men are present. If you are wondering who or what [we are] it’s a charity that specialises in increasing women’s physical activity levels.’

Translated into plain English, this means that a group of agenda-driven feminists say a minority of women ‘feel’ bad about their bodies. And because heterosexual men are naturally attracted to women, their very existence makes it worse, so they should be banned.

No, seriously.

That’s like trying to clean a dirty face by rubbing a mirror.”

In one of the comments a commenter named “Brittany Elizabeth” displays the smug and witless lack of empathy we associate with sociopaths:

“Please excuse me while I fetch a box of tissues and my tiny violin because this story has made me tear up. It’s so hard to be a man in this world. I don’t know how you all do it.”

You are so right, Brittany, my dear little spider – you have absolutely no idea how we do it. It would probably break you if you tried to do it.

Walsh points out:

“For many of us, there’s a vulnerability that comes with fitness training, with exposing our bodies and moving them in ways that may not always be perfect or graceful or deferential to the world at large. The appeal of safe, supportive, private environments — to both men and women — is understandable.”

Understandable but toxic. That sense of vulnerability is a problem in and of itself. It is not healthy, it is poisonous. And it is surely not something that should be honored and enabled. One of the female commenters makes this point.

Walsh sums up with:

“God knows I missed my Boston health club tremendously when I moved back to New York and found myself briefly at Club Juicehead, where the equipment room perpetually rang out with the EAAAAAAGGGGGHS of thick-necked musclemen.”

Well it couldn’t have been any worse than a gym perpetually ringing with the slap-slap-slap of hammy thighs (once again we see this trope of women’s bodies being inherently benign in a way men’s are not) but can’t we all just get along????

MALE DISPOSABILITY – How an abuser portrays herself as the abused and how her enabler goes down in flames –the Ballad of Jodi Arias and Alyce La Violette

Posted on by
48

Daisy Deadhead asked a few weeks ago if anyone here was paying any attention to the Jodi Arias trial. She considered this particular murder trial, with the now customary accusations of spousal abuse by the murder victim, to be a huge men’s rights issue. She was right.

Background – Jodi Arias shot her husband, Travis, and stabbed him 29 times. She can’t keep her story straight enough for anyone to figure out where she did it or quite how it all happened. Nevertheless there is an even chance she’ll be acquitted – because Patriarchy or something and the Duluth Model. Murder victim or not, he’s the only man in the situation, so he must be the abuser, right? That seems to be the way La Violette’s, expert witness for the defense, sees it.

But this is the real news. The star defense witness, a domestic violence expert named Alyce La Violette has stirred up a hurricane with her biased testimony portraying Jodi as a DV victim. Look at the reaction in the comments about her book at Amazon. DV victims and DV professionals are lining up – over 500 comments so far – to say how she disgusts them as DV victims, how she shames them as DV professionals, what a fraud she is. It is really quite the firestorm. And in comment after comment her man-hatred is excoriated. That’s a new development too.

And when someone ventures a positive comment it immediately attracts five and ten comments calling them frauds, maybe even Alyce herself, or else duped idiots. One such comment has 55 comments in response – that’s five pages of comments.

In fact the reaction has become so violent that saner voices, Janice Harper for instance, have had to speak up – not to defend Alyce La Violettee so much as to insist on some kind of civilized moderation.

This is news indeed. What’s news is that the enablers of these abusers are paying the price, for a change. There will always be Jodi Ariases and Ted Bundys – sociopaths who feel free to treat others as objects and simply do not see how the most basic rules apply to them. That’s not the issue. The issue is how society deals with that. In the case of a Ted Bundy no one saw it for years, but when they finally did, the hammer came down. No one testified at his trial trying to excuse his behavior on the grounds of some kind of mistreatment he allegedly suffered. Yet when it‘s a woman – this time it’s Jodi Arias, but it happened with Mary Winkler, with Andrea Yates and with many others – there is a heroic attempt to portray the perpetrator as a victim, and a willing audience, because that narrative fits their narratives.

And the enablers like La Violette are crucial to this. And always even in those rare instances where the woman does get held accountable, the enablers skitter out scott free to wreak havoc another day.

Well, maybe not for much longer.

DOUBLE STANDARDS – Dick jokes, dick staring, hypocrisy and control

Posted on by
26

EquilibriumShift commented in the thread on DOUBLE STANDARDS – Jon Hamm and the Female Gaze:

This is absolutely related to the previous post re: Adria Richards power play to police sexuality to her standards.

He’s right. This really is about women controlling men’s behavior and speech. Adria Richards had the management of a conference throw out two men based on her accusation, and this accusation later caused one of these men to lose his job. That’s power. In the case of Jon Hamm’s package, women are indulging in behavior they excoriate in men.

And that excoriation is not the impotent rage of the powerless; women have all sorts of powerful allies they can marshal against men they can portray as offending or threatening them.

It is the same vein of thinking that allows a woman to become offended when he makes a pun that alludes to a penis, when that very same woman has no problem making dick jokes herself. It’s the same thinking that allows women to become offended at the sight of pixelated titties in video games, while ignoring the hundreds (thousands?) of bare chested men. (Ever played the video game “Heavy Rain”? As a check on how highly you value sexuality of the two genders, were you more shocked by Ethan getting nude and taking a shower, or by Madison doing the same? I know I didn’t bat an eyelash when the guy got nude, but I was a little shocked I would “get to” see the chick get naked.)

Then he picks up on the false equivalence of breasts and penises when it comes to staring.

Somehow, breasts are always compared to penises, as you noted, Ginkgo. Sexual economy (and it’s inherent devaluation of men’s sexuality) at its finest. And the women who do so are the self-same writers who rage, all full of sound and fury, at “objectification” of women, and how women’s sexuality is valued so highly. Of course, they would never say it like that, because it doesn’t sound ominous that way. They would of course say a woman is judged by her sexuality, or that women only matter to men because of their sexuality. One might as well say that men only matter to women because of their ability to provide stability and safety.

This misuse of “objectification” is just one more instance of damseling, in this case, the form I call “Turning privilege into oppression.” Is female sexuality more valued than male, i.e., does it confer privilege? Then it must immediately be spun as an oppression, and the objectification narrative is trotted out.

He continues:

At any rate, I think this very well presents a solution to the argument that many 3rd wave feminists put forth:

1) An oppressed group always understands what it is like to live as both oppressed and oppressor

2) Women are oppressed by men

Therefore: Women understand what it is like to live as a man.

I don’t think the bullshit level on this argument really needs to be pointed out to people here, but the whole John Hamm situation really highlights just how wrong at least one of those two premises is. FWIW, I think both tend to be wrong, with 1) being pretty much wrong, and 2) being utter crap.

His point is that the women writing about Jon Hamm clearly have no clue about men, what men experience, what’s going on here.See Arwa Mahdawi’s article in the Guardian for an example. In other words, they are femsplaining.

To which I add:

The first half of that syllogism is false. Sun Zi tells us that if you understand your opponent and yourself, you will prevail. It follows then that if you do not prevail, you probably do not understand your opponent, your oppressor, as well as you imagine.

The second half of that syllogism is a matter not in evidence. Every instance of oppression of women that can be sited is a result of women’s social neoteny, a neoteny that obligates men to feed, house and protect women form the outside world and its perils. Women can decry this all they like but until they stop enjoying the benefits of that neoteny, those objections are hypocritical.

Hypoagency: These two cases put hypoagency and its uses on display. Here in both cases we see women being as agentive as they want to be and then disavowing that agentivity. Adria Richards aggresses two men, resulting in the loss of livelihood for one of them – and yet gets to present herself as the victim, and the believed! Women stare at Jon Hamm’s crotch, and yet somehow he’s the one aggressing them, he’s the one who needs to and his behavior.

Hypogency really is benevolent sexism. Its benevolent to women and sexist towards men.

DOUBLE STANDARDS – Jon Hamm and the Female Gaze

Posted on by
32

His eyes are up here, you pervert!

Actor Jon Hamm has been targeted for a whole lot of snickering about his genitals of the sort that no female actor has ever been, to my memory.

Ths is in the context of decades of blue-nosed hectoring abut “sexual objectification” when men look at women’s breasts – only now when the shoe is on the other foot, it’s quite alright for women to twitter over some guy’s bulge.

Bullshit. Make up your minds. The we can agree together on a standard of behavior. You don’t get to waffle and play cute and whine “But this is different…..!”

 

Hamm was instructed to wear more concealing underwear on the set because he was showing too much. Where’s all that indignation about hijab and how it’s not women’s responsibility…..

And let’s stipulate to something: breasts and penises are not equal when it comes to gawking. This is a point that seems to elude Alyssa Rosenberg. Andrew Sullivan tries to give her credit for sympathizing, when she really isn’t; she dismisses his complaint with a false equivalence to the way women actors’ breasts are gawked at.

Remember the flap over Seth McFarlane’s ditty at the Oscars, the one about “we see your boobs”. High dudgeon, lots of young wisps harrumphing like stodgy matrons over the crudity, the effrontery, the lack of respect for women… Remember that one? So where’s the dudgeon now? Have they all fallen silent?

Crickets chirping…..

This is how breasts and penises differ when it comes to being gawked at. Where men dress to hide their penises, women dress to flaunt them. It’s quite possible to wear clothes that reduce the visual signature of your breasts, but Western women don’t dress like that (and men thank them for that!). And that’s fine. But then they don’t get to turn around and castigate men for doing what they intend them to do as a way to manufacture plausible deniability of some supposed, bogus moral looseness. “Flaunt it if you’ve got it” and then just own it. Please, a little honesty would clear the air wonderfully.

This is what would be equivalent – when is the last time you heard a woman actor’s vagina discussed or snickered about in the press or on the internet? Alyssa Rosenberg mentions Ann Hathaway’s nipples below; what do we know about Ann Hathaway’s vagina? For all we know it could be the size of the Grand Canyon. Why is no one snickering about that? Because we don’t know and because we have the sense not to go there when it’s a woman – as we should not.

And why would we anyway – camel toes aren’t really as photogenic anyway.

Let’s say we make an exception for actors. Actors get paid to show it, especially women. And while you personally may think that’s unfair, that is after all the deal they make of their own very free and very well-rewarded will, but it makes my point. A woman actor’s career lifespan is limited by age in a way a man’s is not necessarily. (Although male actors have about the same shelf life in the main as women, let’s not be coy; when was the last time you heard anything about Josh Hartnett?). Limited by her age, not by her acting skills, which presumably improve with practice – so that’s what women actors are selling, their looks and attractiveness. So why the dudgeon when someone points that out in a song?

Now penises - what happens when a man shows his penis in public? Very rarely does he get a movie contract for it. Does he? Or that a new nickname for the Sex Offender Registry? So the actor exception does not apply in this case. Request denied.

And another thing. Rosenberg doesn’t know what objectification is. When she says:

“What makes Hamm different from, say, Anne Hathaway, who had to weather discussion about the appearance of her nipples in her Academy Awards dress, is that Hamm isn’t used to being objectified.”

(Right, because the nipples she is flashing, and I do mean FLASHING, through sheer fabric - are totes identical to her genitals. Not really the same thing at all, is it?)

She is showing both that she doesn’t know what objectification is and that she is ignorant of men’s lives and the multitude of ways men are objectified in society – cannon fodder, disposable industrial labor, subjectivity denied, silenced about their issues with traditionalist macho narratives and feminist privilege narratives and obfuscations…

Here’s the deal: Women who are all affronted that Jon Hamm is showing, you’re perving. You’re perving. Don’t even bother denying it. Women keep your pervy eyes off Jon Hamm’s crotch.

That’s my job. Yeah, no. He says he’s tired of it; that’s all the rest of us need to know. Are we all clear on that , ladies?

 No. Here’s the actual deal. I have no right to tell what you can and can’t do with your eyes. JUST AS YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO TELL A MAN WHAT HE CAN DO WITH HIS EYES.

So make up your mind. Either you are entitled to gawk at Jon Hamm’s crotch and have nothing to say when men stare at your boobs that you put on proud display, or else keep your eyes off of people’s genitals.

And no, you don’t get to have it both ways. You don’t get to giggle and bat your eyes and say a lady is entitled to change her mind – back and forth, back and forth. No.

 

EDIT: Re: Crickets - I spoke too soon. Brava, Arwa Mahdawi! She says a lot of the right things. But then she goes and stuffs her foot in her mouth:

“However, for the most part, men are still more relaxed about their bodies than women.”

And then the snide insinuation it’s all a publicity stunt. Why, Ms. Mahdawi, if anyone made the same suggestion about a woman fussing about having her vagina snickered at and discussed, it would be all furthering the rape culture and shit.

Oh well. It was nice while it lasted. Keep trying, Ms. Mahdawi. Treating people equally takes practice.

Nice try at empathy. It’s probably not really natural to you anyway.

 

FEMALE PRIVILEGE – Donglegate – This is what sexual entitlement looks like

Posted on by
55

Patrick Brown makes a very good point in this thread about women imposing their own standards of decency and speech on men in the workplace, or elsewhere for that matter:

Patrick Brown on 2013-03-26 at 9:51 am said:
Thing is though – as you point out with your link – it’s not actually a female norm. Listen in to a conversation between women and it’ll be every bit as filthy as a conversation between men. The books and magazines women read are as full of sexual references as anything men consume. It is not a female norm to recoil from mild sexual innuendo. This isn’t a norm of behaviour that’s assumed to apply when it doesn’t – nothing that innocent. It’s power. Richards will make dick jokes with guys she knows and likes, because fundamentally, she doesn’t actually object to dick jokes. But she reserves the right to make men she doesn’t know or like suffer for innocuous innuendo, because she can.

In this type of sexual entitlement a woman is entitled to use sexuality as a weapon against men. She can weaponize their comments against them simply by complaining to some authority, some Daddy figure, some patriarchal power elite. It’s very Victorian. In fact it really is Victorian.

dungone on 2013-03-26 at 10:38 am said:
@Patrick, yeah I agree with you. The goal seems to be to make men as uncomfortable as possible while allowing women to express their own sexuality to their hearts’ content. It’s definitely all about power and it is reflected by the lopsided costs of sexual access in our culture.
Donglegate, the way I see it, is really no different from Elevatorgate and both are no different than this: http://now.msn.com/heather-hayes-arrested-for-attacking-boyfriend-eric-zuber-because-he-would-not-have-sex-with-her At the end of the day, each one involves an attention-starved woman who lashed out because she was not satisfied with the exact nature of the sexual dynamic between herself and a male, even though none of the men had done a single thing wrong.

Schala went on to expand the discussion by connecting it to the classing of gender. She points out that female status entitles a person to take offense at things the lower orders may not, and also to have that sense of offense taken seriously and be acted upon.

Schala on 2013-03-26 at 10:00 am said:
This is a “female gender role is aristocracy” remnant from conservative Victorian-era roles.
The slaves, the working-class people and even the middle-class people cannot complain much about what is asked of them. They do it or they get sacked, out of work, starving, no insurance, and they die. Even truly hostile environment.
But the aristocrat? Their livelihood is usually nothing that they ‘do’, unless they’re the public face of a super rich company. Regardless, they can refuse, impose their standards, and “pay someone to do it” when they don’t like the work.

This Richards Affair is ripping a lot of scabs and septic bandages off.

FEMALE PRIVILEGE – Donglegate and the colonization of men’s spaces

Posted on by
39

Donglegate is about one more attempt to impose female norms in the workplace on the assumption that they are simply civilized norms. Supposedly one of the marks of privilege is that the norms of the privileged groups are just considered “the norm” for everyone. Donglegate is about feamea privilege and the sexism of a woman expecting her female norms of behavior to be adhered to because they are just the “normal” norms, and more than that, of an entire power structure enforcing them for her – sexual harassment policies that discriminate as to who is and is not a possible victim, laws protect abuse of these policies, firings as punishment.

This is what I mean by gynonormativity, where female norms become the general norms of the culture. It is a significant source of female privilege. In the context of the workplace, gynonormativity in the culture allowed women entering the workforce to weaponize sexual harassment and other policies, aided and abetted by apexual men.

The difference is this time there’s pushback. And this pushback is coming from a lot of people who never knew and don’t know anyone involved, because it’s personal for them for other reasons.

Richards was trying to police those two men’s speech – actually she was trying to make a bloody example of them to police all men’s speech in the industry. That’s what has brought so many bystanders into the fight – they know they are not just bystanders. And she was trying to police these men to her own female standards, in a male space. That is colonization.

(And by the way, this was a norm she clearly does not think she has to adhere to.)

And this gynonormativity in society is where these accusations of misogyny in the tech industry come from. Female privilege makes female norms “the norm’, and when someone used to that privilege goes somewhere they are not the norm, it is indeed going to feel like misogyny, when all it really is is equality.

I wonder if it would just be simpler if they hung signs over the doors of tech firms that said:

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A MALE SPACE. FEMALE NORMS ARE NOT VALID HERE.  ENTRY CONSTITUTES CONSENT TO THE NORMS OF THIS SPACE.

Or maybe it would be accurate if the sign said:

YOU ARE ENTERING A TECH SPACE. NON-TECH NORMS ARE INVALID HERE.

Because as odd as it may sound to an outsider, the tech industry is a creative enterprise, and creativity withers under strictures and counterproductive constraints.

And by the way, it might not be a bad idea to do the same at elementary schools:

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A FEMALE SPACE. MALE NORMS ARE NOT VALID HERE.

Or would that be too much clarity, would that be ripping the scab off of some fundamental problems in public education?

And now for a comment from the same and moderate middle ground, here is Marci Sischo.