Bits That Bite

Echidne on David Letterman:

Bosses harvesting their subordinates for sex is almost always a bad idea.

 

 

Dr. Eric Steele on the opposition to gay/lesbian marriage (via Pam’s House Blend):

. . . the clothing of rationality and God’s word have been used forever to hide the naked truth of racism, sexism and other prejudices. The arguments against the right of gays to civil marriage is no different; if you peel off the clothing, what lies underneath most opposition to civil marriage rights for gays is just naked fear, ignorance and prejudice.

 

Dave Zirin on football and homophobia:

Football came of age at a time when America was embarking on imperial adventures around the globe. Football was seen as a way to toughen up the youth so they wouldn’t become “sissies” and a way to teach the very “values” of Christian expansion and manifest destiny. This philosophy was known as “Muscular Christianity,” and its most prominent spokesman was an aristocrat-turned-boxer named Theodore Roosevelt .

 

Katha Pollitt on Roman Polanski:

What happened was not some gray, vague he said/she said Katie-Roiphe-style “bad sex.” A 43-year-old man got a 13-year-old girl alone, got her drunk, gave her a quaalude, and, after checking the date of her period, anally raped her, twice, while she protested; she submitted, she told the grand jury “because I was afraid.” Those facts are not in dispute–except by Polanski, who has pooh-poohed the whole business many times (You can read the grand jury transcripts here.) He was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge, like many accused rapists, to spare the victim the trauma of a trial and media hoopla. But that doesn’t mean we should all pretend that what happened was some free-spirited Bohemian mix-up. The victim took years to recover.

 

Diane Loupe on prostituted young women in Georgia:

A Future. Not A Past wanted to get a better estimate of girls on the street, so it funded independent researchers to track how many adolescent girls are being hawked. The research was based on scientific probability measures and estimates of the age of prostitutes, using methods similar to those used by scientists to determine the population of endangered species.

The number of young victims has been increasing since 2007, according to that research.

An estimated 374 juveniles were being commercially sexually exploited in August 2009 in Georgia, up from 251 in 2007 and 361 in 2008, according to Danielle E. Ruedt, public health programs coordinator for the Governor’s Office for Children and Families, which took over funding of the research from the campaign.

Numbers for the street, hotels and escort services have remained flat, but “the Internet number is going through the roof,” said Kaffie McCullough, campaign director of A Future. Not A Past.

Internet ads promising “young girls,” “barely legal” females and other code words for underage females got a much higher response from potential customers than other ads, the campaign’s researchers found.

While applauding the decision of Craigslist, an online provider of information about goods and services for sale, to eliminate its “erotic services” category, McCullough noted that many ads pimping girls have moved to other Web sites.

 

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness [pdf], Betsy Stevenson & Justin Wolfers

 

Katha Pollitt on Stevenson and Wolfers (and Huffington):

But how happy were women, really, in that golden pre-feminist era? Culture critic Caryl Rivers pointed out to me that in 1973, studies showing that married women had the highest levels of psychiatric problems, including depression and anxiety, prompted sociologist Jessie Bernard to declare marriage a “health hazard for women.”

 

Alex Dibranco on the student sex column movement:

Isabel Murray, feminist columnist for the Free Press, takes Cosmopolitan to task for its heteronormative, male-pleasure-oriented approach, while pointing out that it and similar women’s magazines are nonetheless the only noncampus media addressing female sexuality (explaining why until recently it was the most read magazine among college women). People are downright uncomfortable with the concept of female sexuality: even at Dartmouth’s SexFest, where Murray managed a table, she was struck by how “hesitant and disturbed” people seemed by her dental dams and a two-dimensional model of a vagina–far more so than by the condoms and three-dimensional plastic penis. The most controversial Dartmouth sex column took heat for dealing too explicitly with female sexuality.

 

Elsie Hambrook on women voters:

Women hang their vote on issues and often, on different issues than what men consider important. New Brunswick’s own Joanna Everitt, a political studies professor at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, is a Canadian expert on gender and politics. She says there are differences in how women and men vote, and that that split has been growing.

While men are more concerned with a candidate or party’s policies on the economy and federally, on the military, women are more likely to look at social policies, such as health care and education.

That difference has impacted the outcomes of some federal and provincial elections. Women and men vote in similar numbers, but differently, and parties need to be able to attract both genders.

Everitt recently concluded in a report, “If the (federal) Conservatives held as much appeal for women as they did for men in the 2006 election, they would not have ended up forming a minority government.”

 

Michael Valpy on women voters:

When he was host of BBC Two’s The Late Show in the 1990s, Mr. Ignatieff was called the thinking woman’s crumpet.

But interviews with Canadian women voters – businesswomen, academics, writers, PhD students in their 20s and 30s – elicited words well removed from crumpet. They called him stuffy, drab, arrogant, inauthentic, paternalistic, unmemorable, unsexy and, most of all, untrustworthy.

 

Michael Ignatieff on “Three Minute Culture”:

 

Stephen Harper tribute to friendship:

 

Harper and friends, redux:

 

But Harper hates more than 50% of Canadians:

 

So some women created a fan club [snark].

 

Let’s Not Look At Violence Against Women

Just noted by Antonia Z @twitter:  UK bans domestic violence ad by Keira Knightley – for showing woman abuse!  Antonia has a post at Broadsides in which she says, in part:

Real women are getting beaten up — and killed — by their partners all the time but the media don’t treat it as the epidemic of violence it is.

Fictional women get assaulted by their partners and the media make money off that.

But when a real woman plays a fictional woman getting beaten up to help real women who get beaten up all the time, well, kick that off the air because it might upset somebody.

Seriously.

See the rest of Antonia’s post here.  And here’s the Knightley ad:

Obscuring Violence Against Women

[UPDATED below]

A man kills his ex-wife in her workplace, killing two of her colleagues as well and injuring several others.  This is called male violence against women, though you would never, ever know it from the reports.  Who knows, these men may have been targetted for some reason beyond the fact that they were in a group with George Zinkhan’s ex-wife.  Or they may be dead simply because they were there.  What is beyond doubt is that Marie Bruce, the ex-wife of Mr. Zinkhan, was the main attraction.  This is “domestic violence”.  Why do journalists not call it what it is?  [rhetorical question]:

Authorities were on a nationwide manhunt for a University of Georgia professor in the shooting deaths of three people, including his ex-wife, Saturday at a community theater near campus.

Athens-Clarke County Police Capt. Clarence Holeman said authorities were searching for a suspect, 57-year-old George Zinkhan, who has been a marketing professor at the university in Athens since the 1990s, and lived about seven miles from campus.

Killed were Zinkhan’s ex-wife, Marie Bruce, 47, Tom Tanner, 40, and Ben Teague, 63, Holeman said. Both men were involved with Town & Gown Players Inc., a local theater group in Athens, about 70 miles east of Atlanta.

The shooting happened outside the Athens Community Theater during a midday gathering of the theater group. Holeman said the shooter left his two young children in the car when he opened fire on the group. A neighbor of Zinkhan’s in nearby Bogart said the professor later dropped off the children with him next door and left after saying there was an emergency. The children were with police.

The rest is here but you’ll find not a word about male violence, violence against women or domestic violence.

UPDATE:  See the esteemed Historiann, here for “another sickening example of the news media doing the work of our culture in erasing or obscuring the deadly combination of modal American masculinity and gun violence!” and here

QotD

In a story confirming that Rihanna is working with the LAPD to build a domestic violence case [against Chris Brown], the New York Daily News quotes sources who repeat noxious stereotypes about physical abuse. “She’s so beautiful and nice,” says an unnamed “industry insider.” “How do you hit her?” You know, because sending an ugly, mean woman to the hospital is totally excusable.

Judy Berman, Broadsheet

“Unfounded” Sexual Assaults

Women are such liars, eh?  From Jennifer O’Connor at This Magazine:

According to Statistics Canada, for a case to be deemed unfounded “the police investigation must establish that a sexual assault did not occur or was not attempted.” In 2002-the most recent StatsCan info available-an average of 16 per cent of sexual offences reported to police nationwide were classified this way, a rate that had remained steady since 1991. (By comparison, seven per cent of other violent crimes, such as homicide, abduction and robbery, were catalogued as unfounded in 2002.) “I think it’s a statement on women’s equality,” says Susan Havart, administrative coordinator and counsellor at the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Ottawa. “Sexual assault cases are perceived differently in the courts and through the legal system. It speaks volumes that those that they don’t want to do anything about or can’t do anything about get pushed into that unfounded category.”

Cases …  are not pursued to court, nor are they reported to the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System, a national database that allows police to identify whether someone may be responsible for multiple offences. They are not included in annual statistical reports, and, in many jurisdictions, information about them is only available through Access to Information requests. StatsCan no longer requires law enforcement agencies to supply data regarding these files. Most people don’t even know the term exists. How does an investigation establish that “a sexual assault did not occur or was not attempted”? Too often, by scrutinizing who a woman is and overlooking how investigations are supposed to be done.

[...]

Lee Lakeman is a spokesperson for the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres and has been a rape crisis counselor for more than 30 years. Having answered crisis lines across the country, she’s noticed some patterns. If a woman lives in a poorer neighbourhood, a rural area or on a reserve, if English isn’t her first language, if she’s reporting about a man with any social privilege, or if she has none, she is more likely to have her case labelled unfounded. “Our biggest problem,” says Lakeman, “is women are not taken seriously when they report and are immediately questioned as to their integrity.”

Just one more example of how women are made invisible.  By the way, the false reporting of a crime is a criminal offense.  I wonder why there aren’t more charges of public mischief against women reporting sexual assaults that are “unfounded”?  Not that it hasn’t happened, mind you …

This is a great article.  Go read

Here’s the website of the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres

When We Don’t Believe Women

About abduction, sexual assault, assault, rape:

Three unsolved murders in our area [Boca Raton, Florida] are about to get new, national attention.

Investigators need all the help they can get in tracking down the killers of Nancy Bochicchio and her daughter Joey, as well as Randi Gorenberg.

Those murders may also be connected to an attack on another woman and her young son, who managed to get away.

Dateline NBC will be sharing with the nation the terrifying Town Center Mall tragedies and incidents we here in South Florida now know all too well.

Dateline’s Boca Raton shoot wrapped up Wednesday.            

Correspondent Dennis Murphy and the Dateline team are now ready to reveal new details in the murder cases that all have ties to the Town Center Mall of Boca Raton. 

Boca Raton Police explain how they believe an armed robbery at Mizner Park could very well be the work of the same suspect from the Bochiccio and August incidents.

Police also explain why responding officers did not believe the victim from the August attack, we call her “Jane Doe,” the victim who got away.

For the first time, she comes out of the shadows and speaks in disguise.

Dennis Murphy: They asked you to take a lie detector test, didn’t they?

Jane Doe: Yes.

Dennis Murphy: You’d been a crime victim. What did that say to you?

Jane Doe: If they needed me to, for whatever reason, I was gonna do it. I wasn’t hiding anything.

Dennis Murphy: If there was a request for a lie detector test from the woman abducted, did that say something about initial hesitation in believing her?   [more]

The police thought that the report made by Jane Doe about the abduction of herself and her son was not believeable.  Mall security was told that the complaint was “not believable”.  One and a half weeks after Doe made her complaint, the police file was “inactive”. 

Faced with probable law suits and national press attention, including a report on 20/20 this evening, Boca Raton police are coming up with the usual excuses.  They say they never told mall security not to worry about Doe’s abduction – “why would we?” – and they say that just because Doe’s file was listed as “inactive” doesn’t mean they didn’t believe her.

Oh sure.

Check out the story at 20/20

As the story goes, police are now looking at the husband of Randi Gorenberg.  That’s typical too.  While it’s true that many women die at the hands of their boyfriends and spouses, it’s dangerous to make that assumption.  Sometimes, police do it when they haven’t done their jobs and are looking for some PR to make it look like they have.

The Usual from the MSM

From The Globe and Mail:

A father apparently distraught over job problems shot and killed his wife and five young children and then committed suicide at their home Tuesday, police said. The victims included two sets of twins.

The bodies were found when police responded to a report of a shooting in progress in the Wilmington area shortly before 8:30 a.m., Officer Sam Park said. The bodies were found throughout the family’s house.

The victims were not immediately identified.

Deputy Chief Kenneth Garner said the man killed his wife, an 8-year-old girl, twin 5-year-old daughters and twin 2-year-old sons. He then killed himself.

“He was despondent, clearly, over his job situation,” Deputy Chief Garner said.   [more]

Ah well, that explains it then.  The guy lost his job and killed his wife and children … makes sense, doesn’t it?  I know it won’t happen in my lifetime, but it will be a great thing when reporters actually start to make some sense.  When’s the last time you heard of a woman losing her job and killing her husband and family?

Towards Trangression

From Vision, Violence, and Voice: A journey from liminal to transgressive spaces by Stephanie Urso Spina:

What one does first and foremost is survive the trauma — to persist in spite of it. Then one works (perhaps for a lifetime) to process it, often in uniquely personal ways. Thus, it remains a part of one’s history, one’s self. Some after-effects of trauma will always be with me but I suspect that most of these are common, although possibly in a lesser degree, to the fortuity of having been born female. For example, I startle more than most at loud noises or sudden movements. Until a few years ago, I went to great lengths to avoid traveling alone at night, even if just a short drive to the local grocery store. I remain hyper-vigilant, but given the proclivities of the society we live in, that is more likely prudence than psychogenic pathology.

 The point is that the goal is not to transcend trauma but to endure — and not without cost. Proteanism recognizes that the pain and despair never completely disappear. It is not an effort to “fix people,” but to understand them in all of their complexity so that we may demystify the role of society and better understand the practices that construct our sense of self, other, and “reality,” and thereby fix our inappropriate social structures instead. In order to do this, we must challenge the legitimacy of the hegemonic order. We must create “becoming spaces” (Derrida, 1981, p. 27) where we can think, speak, and act in ways that both mark and transgress imposed limits; where we can disrupt the dominant discourse and so reconstruct it. Sexual abuse is not an isolated phenomenon or private event. It is woven into our social fabric. It is a public issue. It is our anger and our outrage, not our silence, that will hold society accountable and provoke change.

Read the whole article here at Radical Psychology

Hoping Obama Will Help

My dreams have been full of the women of the Democratic Republic of Congo for months and months and my heart cracks a little more each time I think of them.  The Bush administration, the U.N., my country and the powerful countries of the world have been unsuccessful in ameliorating he conditions for women in Congo, to the extent that anyone has tried.  These days, I often push thoughts of those women aside out of feelings of despair.

Thus, it was with a sense of relief and great hope that I read the following open letter to President-Elect Obama at The Huffington Post:

On December 5, 2008, a few days before the 60th anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a group of global and domestic women’s organizations gathered in New York to frame a shared agenda for advancing global women’s rights. Determined to use their collective strength and expertise to work together to advance a global agenda for women’s freedom, safety and agency, they crafted the following open letter to President-elect Obama and committed to working together to see their vision come true in this century.
Dear President-Elect Obama,

As a group of women leaders who have given our lives to the transformation, protection and empowerment of women in the United States and globally, we want to begin by congratulating you. We are honored and proud to have you lead the nation during this historic time. We also welcome your call to action, reminding us of what we have always known — that as global citizens we cannot solely rely on any one administration’s ability to bring about change, but must be steadfast in pushing forward our own vision and agendas.

We represent a historic movement for change: millions of women across the globe with innovative ideas, influential constituencies and collaborative solutions. We are calling on you to ensure that women are equally represented in everything, from your administration’s infrastructure to its decision-making and solution building. We are calling on you to exercise leadership in dismantling the structures that perpetuate gender inequality, impede women’s full participation in society and thwart real progress for people around the world.

As war rages in Gaza, it is clear that the time has come to dismantle militarism as the dominant ideology in world politics. We must ensure that women take the lead in building lasting peace in the Middle East, ending genocide in Darfur, stopping femicide in the Democratic Republic of Congo, fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan, and ending the war in Iraq.

Though the select-few women who hold leadership positions in this country’s political system inspire us; women represent more than 50% of the population and deserve more than marginal representation. We believe that in order for your vision of change to succeed, women must be in positions of power. While US women gained the right to vote 100 years ago, to date only 14% of the US Congress are women. This must change.

The major economic, security, governance and environmental challenges of our times cannot be solved without the equal participation of women at all levels of society — from the home to institutions of national and global governance. Women’s voices must be central in all major discussions including the economic crisis, overhauling our education system. Long-term investments in women’s education, health and leadership development are equally critical. Economic structures continue to marginalize women. Consider this: women represent two-thirds of the world’s labor yet we own less than 1% of the world’s assets.

In addition, more than 500,000 women die each year because of inadequate medical and reproductive care. Violence against women is a pandemic that determines women’s realities, impeding their access to education and economic self-sufficiency. This global epidemic is undermining the future of the world, as women are at the heart of all communities and families; we literally carry the future in our bodies.

Yet these are not “women’s issues.” In fact, such investments are vital to economic growth and the well-being of all individuals, communities, societies and nations. Consider India’s economic transformation of the past 15 years: The World Bank finds that states with the highest percentage of women in the labor force grew the fastest and had the largest reductions in poverty.

As policy makers, activists, researchers, and grant-makers we have spent our lives investing in women and know that these kinds of investments have immeasurable and fundamental impact for the better. Worldwide, women are uniquely positioned to bring innovative insights and creative solutions to global leadership forums. If we hope to improve existing economic, peace and security, and human development frameworks women must not only be included, but must be at the heart of the discussion.

We are calling on you to be the President who ushers in the time of women. Our vision of the future is one in which women and men are equal partners, standing shoulder to shoulder in confronting the world’s challenges. We welcome, with hope and anticipation, your shared commitment to this vision.  [emphasis mine]

We represent more than half of the world’s human potential. And our time has come.

Sincerely,

Linda Basch, PhD
President, National Council for Research on Women

Mallika Dutt
Executive Director, Breakthrough: Building Human Rights Culture

Eve Ensler
Founder, V-Day

Adrienne Germain
President, International Women’s Health Coalition

Sara Gould
CEO, Ms. Foundation

Christine Grumm
CEO, Women’s Funding Network

Geeta Rao Gupta
President, International Center for Research on Women

Carolyn Makinson
Executive Director, Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children

Kavita Ramdas
CEO, Global Fund for Women

Zainab Salbi
President, Women for Women International

In February, V-Day will be in  five American cities with its “Turning Pain to Power” tour – New York, Washington D.C., Atlanta, San Francisco and Los Angeles.  Dr. Dennis Mukwege will be on the tour with Eve Ensler.  Dr. Mukwege runs the Panzi Hospital in the DRC, offering services to women and girls who have been raped and won the 2008 UN Human Rights Prize.

Check out the V-Day site for more information on the tour and for tickets.  Please!

On December 6th

NDP MP Megan Ellis’s statement at the December 6th Not-So-Silent Vigil in
Halifax

 
Hello. Thank you for asking me to be here today.

I have been attending December 6th events my entire adult life. It never feels any less somber. Less affecting. Less urgent. Nineteen years later, and where are we?

I was 16 when the Montreal Massacre happened. The victims seemed like adults, I remember thinking that. Women in their early 20s, studying engineering. It was all pretty far away from my teenage reality a small mining town. But when I look at this list now, and read these 14 names and ages, it strikes me. They were so young. They seemed like adults, and yet, I’m several years older now than the oldest victim was then.

I’ve noticed over the years that we are very careful with ourselves when we discuss this shooting. We do not to say the name of the killer, just as I am not going to today. We also only talk about the fatalities. Not of the hit-list the shooter had prepared, containing the names of several prominent feminists, many of whom are our friends. We hold the events at arm’s length, and we squint. In looking for answers, we ask ourselves: “why?”. Because we can take comfort in that answer to “why?” It contains phrases that allow us some distance: “Lone gunman.” “Isolated incident.” “Psychotic break.”

Oh, we let ourselves think. That’s why. All of those reasons are separate from me. Unique. I am not culpable. I am not in danger.

But the question we don’t let ourselves ask is what. What is it about our culture that made the shooter blame “feminists” for all his troubles? What is it going to take to change things? What can *I* do?

The answer to these questions is unsettling, because it makes us face uncomfortable facts: We live in a culture of casual misogyny. We live in a culture that pays attention to women most often when it wants
to berate us, blame us, or compare us to each other. And we don’t do enough to fight it. Like when hundreds of Aboriginal women go missing. When the word “equality” is taken out of the Status of Women mandate. Like when on my first day in Ottawa as a new MP, another MP said something so sexist and so degrading to me that my first thought was “what am I wearing? Did I ask for this?” When victims of violence are referred to in the media as “hookers” and “junkies” rather than “women” or even “people”.

As a woman, we’re subject to these warning shots all the time. Be pretty. Be good. Be careful. When we talk about December 6th, we place it as an extreme end of a spectrum that begins with domestic violence. I am acutely aware that domestic violence touches many more lives than we are likely to ever know . It is a pandemic problem that provincial and federal governments have done little to address.

But I do not feel that the events of December 6th were an exaggerated version of domestic violence. I believe they were an extreme form of the gender terrorism that happens so much all around us that we hardly even recognize it for what it is anymore. In the wake of these shootings, big plans were made.
We promised ourselves an end to violence against women. And here we are today, for the nineteenth time, saying “Never again”, and trying to believe it.

We need to do better than this. We need to call out sexist behavior, even if it causes social friction to do
so. We need to support women who are working to create and reflect a culture of non-violence and possibility. We need to tell the media that they won’t talk us into hating ourselves and each other. We need to remind our government that women count. We need to look after each other, and ourselves.
The handbill for this event asks us to make a commitment to act against violence against women. I commit to naming sexism and gender terrorism. And I commit to going easy on myself when I don’t have the strength to stand up against it. And I commit to seeking support from others to make sure I have the strength to name it the next time.

On December 6th, 1989, fourteen women were shot because someone thought that they’d stepped out of line. On that day, all of their power and potential was taken from them. On this day, and on all days, we owe it to them to not waste ours.

From an e-mail sent by Martin Dufresne to the Par-L list.