Jessica, I’ve been thinking about the issue of women and drinking and rape ever since I read the victim’s statement the other day, on the NYT’s City Room blog, particularly the passage:

I have waited two and half years for closure that will now never come. Hearing that verdict brought me to my knees; it brought me back to my bedroom on that awful night when my world was turned upside down.

I don’t want to minimize the importance of having conversations on this matter, even if we’ve been debating about drinking and rape ever since the dawn of feminism and not gotten anywhere. But all this theoretical conversing  ignores a very unpleasant reality. Rape is ugly and miserable and terrible. And so we need to be more pragmatic.

On the one hand, alcohol consumption is no different than dressing: Just because a woman wears revealing clothes doesn’t mean she’s asking for it, and neither does a woman having a few drinks.

On the other hand, we make all kinds of concessions to the affect alcohol has on our minds and bodies. If “friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” as the old PSA goes, why do friends let their drunk friends go home with strange men? If we have friends or relatives who are endangering their health or their relationships with alcohol abuse, we’ll encourage therapy or stage an intervention or drag them to an AA meeting. Because we know the risk outweighs the personal freedom to drink. But if you try to suggest that drinking too much and going home with a stranger isn’t a wise idea, you’re castigated as anti-feminist.

The victim of the NYC police offers (and I’m going to stick with calling her a victim, rape conviction or no) has chosen not to identify herself, and we don’t know much about her. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, were it possible for her to go back in time, she would gladly give up the few hours of carefree drinking in exchange for not having to spend two and a half years waiting for “closure that will now never come.”

This is what happens when you are raped: If you go to the police, you have to tell your story to complete strangers, several times. You have to submit to a physical exam, letting nurses touch you in precisely the areas you don’t want to be touched. You have nightmares. You’re easily spooked. You might go months or years before you feel safe spending the night alone. You hate walking to your car late at night, or driving by yourself late at night. It’s awful.

Rape will never be eradicated. But in many cases, it can be prevented. It doesn’t require women to become teetotaling prudes,  but it does require the exercise of common sense.  I don’t agree with everything Kate Torgovnick writes in her Frisky piece, because I think it leans too far in the direction of blaming the victim. But we can take her advice that we need to watch out for our friends. That’s something we should all be able to agree on.

Tags: feminism, NYC cops rape, Rape, sex and drinking

Toronto police officer Michael Sanguinetti probably thought of himself as a noble warrior against the arbiters of political correctness when he, at a crime safety seminar at Osgoode Hall Law School, claimed that the key to keeping men from raping you is to "avoid dressing like sluts." But what he actually ended up doing was putting the final nail in the coffin of the narrative of the "humorless feminist" vs. the yuk-yuking sexists who have a monopoly on the funny. The result of his comment—a series of protests across Canada and the United States called SlutWalks—demonstrated that the narrative has been completely turned on its head. Increasingly, it's the sexists who are clutching their pearls in horror at the lack of ladylike decorum on the left, and the feminists who are embracing nose-thumbing humor as their primary weapon.

Contrast the SlutWalk with its rape-protesting predecessors, the Take Back the Night rallies that emerged in the '70s and '80s. The rallies were historic and empowering, but they weren't especially amusing, which is understandable considering the gravity of the crime they were protesting. But because of this, Take Back the Night rallies were open to right-wing criticism accusing feminists of being prudish and humorless. Of course, actual feminists were not as humorless as was claimed, nor were the eye-poking artists of political incorrectness like Andrew Dice Clay or Rush Limbaugh particularly funny. But the narrative stuck, to the point where feminists that were born after the era of political correctness still feel they have to contend with negative stereotypes.

Now the stereotypes have completely reversed. Famous female comedians like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are associated with feminism, shows like The Daily Show use explicitly feminist themes in their humor, and feminist writing and organizing online (like much of the online world) values snark over earnestness. Meanwhile, the right is defined solely by its priggish lack of humor, which was on full display in the responses to SlutWalk. I even found myself in a recent Bloggingheads post being forced to make explicit the fact that SlutWalk is about using humor as a political tool, because it was becoming clear in my discussion with Daniel Foster that this was an aspect of the SlutWalk he hadn't considered. The image of the pinch-mouthed feminist scold telling the fun-loving boys to keep it down has quickly become a dinosaur, replaced now with the image of the knuckle-rapping church ladies telling third-wave feminists to roll up their stockings and tone down the dirty jokes on their ironically named blogs.

Tags: feminism, slutwalk

Hey, batterers: Do me a favor. Move to New York City. There are five boroughs, it's a big place. So just move ANYWHERE in New York City. Please.

Since last year all prisoner calls there, save for those to physicians or their attorneys, have been recorded, and boy have they been helpful to domestic violence prosecutors.  Here's what these face-burning, chick-punching, child-abusing sphincters say to their victims while staring at an "All Calls Are Taped" sign:

“I need you to prepare the kids to start lying.”

“Whatever you do ... do not speak to the D.A.”

“I just stuck her like a little.”

It's hard to choose, but this one might be my fave:  “I need you right now in my corner,” begged Eric Persaud, the man charged with branding his girlfriend’s cheeks with [an] iron. He had a strategy, he said: She should vanish for the trial. “ 'I’m smarter than you,' he said in one of what prosecutors have said were 437 calls from Rikers Island."

According to the Times, 1,200 such calls seems to be the record. Given that 75 percent of victims drop their cases or stop cooperating before trial, these tapes have been crucial in proceeding without a victim and in convincing juries of just how the abusers go about controlling their prey.

Liberal/libertarian as I am, I can't imagine running a jail whose inmates could concoct all the escape, violence, and smuggling schemes they saw fit, so I see no way around reading their mail and listening in on their calls. For months at a time over the years, I've visited and traded letters and phone calls with the incarcerated and certainly assumed we were being monitored. I've sent inmates weeks' worth of letters and hundreds of dollars worth of books (they must come directly from the publisher) that "never arrived." There needs to be a way for inmates to get word out of abuse and the like, though unmonitored phone calls to anyone at all are not that way.

But catching these perps with their own words? Not too shabby.

Tags: criminal justice, feminism, New York State, technology

Amanda, I have to disagree with your opposition to Naomi Wolf’s argument that rape claimants should identify themselves in order to prosecute.  I’m with Wolf:  Women—anyone—who files rape charges should put their name, and face, on the accusation.

My eyes quickly glazed over with Yalie-Wolf’s disquisition on the relics of the Victorian age in The Guardian, the Suffragettes and Oscar Wilde yadda yadda because we don’t need more than a splash of historical argument to cut to this chase. We’ve been through this: Rights that we aren’t willing to face danger for will never be recognized. Power concedes nothing without a demand and that demand needs to be full-throated. It needs to be in their faces. If all the liberation movements of the past century haven’t taught us that, I don’t know what will.

In the short term, fewer women will file rape charges. More rapists will roam free. In the long term, more women will file rape charges and those charges will have full force behind them, not women understandably hiding behind blue dots, weakening their claims. It was the Klansmen who hid their faces;  they made sure the world saw their victims’ faces. Let the scum-sucking rapists, and those who defend them, vainly demand the blue dots of shame. Let us hound and expose those who try to slut-shame the victims.

Regardless of however many more rapists are punished, the world will start to get it that it’s the rapist who should hide their faces, not the raped. The world will also be forced to see what happens to raped women who demand justice (even, sadly, on the left when a sacred cow is in the dock). The world couldn’t see rape, violence and injustice when it was directed at blacks by whites—not until the Civil Rights Movement made it do so with its judicious selection of victims willing to risk it all—and the same must continue to happen with violence against women in general. Most important of all, as more raped women identify themselves to prosecute, the stigma (if never the psychic toll) associated with having been raped will fade. Eventually.  Not at all quickly. This sucks. But it’s already much better than it once was and that change was brought about by feminists who faced beatings, jail, stigma, loss of their children, the whole schmear. What we face today is awful. But it aint the above.

But even if the stigma never fades, identifying yourself to invoke the power of the state to prosecute a fellow human, is, as Wolf puts it, a requirement of moral adulthood. I just have a hard time understanding why women fought so hard to exist as legal entities, as persons, apart from their fathers and husbands but demand anonymity when trying to deprive someone else of their liberty. Rather, I do understand it. I just can’t defend it. That’s what’s called in the law a ‘one way ratchet,’ and ipso facto suspect. Blows that rape goes to the heart, perhaps is the heart, of male privilege, misogyny, and the diabolically clever job done on women’s sense of sovereignty since the beginning of time, but we have to play the cards we’re dealt. We have to be brave and we have to fight, and we have to speak truth to power, whatever the knuckle-draggers pull from their bottomless bag of tricks. We have to make judicious use of our victims. Unless, of course, we’re not actually trying to change the world’s rape culture. We can try (vainly) to protect women from the horrors of rape prosecution or we can expose rape prosecution for the horror shows that they are so we can change them.

I’ve debated about adding this part but here it goes: A co-worker raped me in my own bed on Christmas night 1981 at Osan Air Base South Korea. I pressed charges, in that tiny little world we shared halfway around the world from my support system. I was 22. We all lived, worked and partied together. Mayberry was less claustrophobic. Anonymity? Yeah. Right. My rapist confessed within minutes of the investigators showing up at his door. It made no difference. The weight of the military tried to squash me. My fellow soldiers were…let’s go with ‘unsupportive’. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t hide. But I couldn’t live with the injustice so I lived with the consequences of demanding my rights instead. Good lord I was naive:  I honestly didn't see the alternative. There’s nothing special about me that either got me raped or got me to stand up for my rights. I just knew I had to though I was a psychological wreck for the following decade. I spent eleven more years in the Air Force, excelling and living with the constant, out of the blue punishment. My fave was a new commander introducing himself to me thusly: “So. Hear you were raped.” Air quotes were involved. (For the record: the USAF slapped my confessed rapist as lightly on the wrists as possible. After a few months of playing volleyball in the  military's version of Camp Cupcake, he went on to finish his career and retire honorably. A wrench stolen from the flight line would have had him cashiered, after doing hard time.)

In the 60’s, my embittered, Jim Crow’d dad used to carp that those “Civil Rights fools need to get their fists out the air and get jobs!’  He had no faith that things could, or would, change. Had it been up to him, with his fully internalized oppression, they wouldn’t have, bless his heart. Imagine his surprise—and guilt—when those fools made him free. We needed folks going to work everyday during the Movement. We needed them to do that while the MLKs and the Marian Wright Edelman’s put their bodies and soul on the public line while they demanded their rights. Fuck the blue dots.

Tags: Civil Rights Movement, criminal justice system, feminism, Naomi Wolf, US Air Force

From the "You GOTTA Be Freakin' Kidding Me!" Department: Some "clinic" in Estonia hired two pretty (and, of course, blonde) chicks to parade around together publicly wearing T-shirts that actually read "Before" and "After." Before and after what, you ask? Why, liposuction of course. Before-chick is round and curvy. Kittenish as hell. After-chick is skinny. That's all. Not more attractive. Just skinny.

Let's just pick one of the very many things that's so heinous about this: What is the deal with Before-chick? Why on earth did she agree to this, to proclaim to the world that she understands and accepts her body as so ugly that it requires expensive medical invasion? Times may well be hard in Estonia, but this hard? After-chick is a traitor to her gender--and her self--as well, but she couldn't play her role without a willing Before.

This is a female minstrelsy, plain and simple. Sure, the people who offer you money to engage in minstrelsy, or who come to watch you do so, are wrong, but not as wrong as the minstrels.

One can only hope that they didn't realize how masochistic and humiliating this "enterprise" would be before they accepted the gig. God help us if they don't think so now.

Tags: Estonia, female beauty, feminism, liposuction, weight loss

Two very different stories about women—i.e., strength, beauty, femininity, fantasy, cowardice, bravery, and acquiescence—struck me this week.  I still don’t know whether they fill me with hope or sadness.

First, there was the 22-year-old U. of Illinois student Disney recruited online and telephonically through a campus event. She had to rock to snag an internship with a company like that.

It was a dream come true for Disney’s newest intern; she’d grown up revering the Disney princesses. Belle (Beauty and the Beast) and Ariel (The Little Mermaid) in particular. Also my 7-year old’s fetish-princesses. So the psych major worked her booty off, thrashed the competition, and moved that triumphant booty, that life, from Chicago to California for the fall 2010 internship for which her relatives likely held family celebrations, perhaps fundraisers, all summer.

On arrival, triumph became humiliation. One look at her and she was summarily “assigned [] to a more secluded stockroom.”

Silly Noor Abdallah. She’d arrived in her “scary” hijab.

She was guilty of Excelling While Muslim: They wanted her Muslim name on the rolls. Just not a visible Muslim on the grounds.

“Managers balked,” but at least didn’t immediately send her packing on trumped up "incompetence" or "insubordination" charges. Woulda been nice to see them go with "misrepresentation." Growing up '70s-style poor and black but bilingual (See: ability to "be" telephonically white while Afro'd) ... been there. Lived with that. But that was then, right?

While Noor languished in quarantine, “[c]ostume designers came up with a more suitable headscarf. Managers told her that likely would take the entirety of her internship.”

Ah, Noor.

"It broke my heart a little," said Abdallah.”...  “Like any little girl, I liked all the princesses."

So, while her fellow interns went free-range at a Disney Resort, Noor sat obediently in her decontamination chamber while designers whipped up “a blue beret atop a company-designed headscarf” to wear while “selling tickets in [the] box office.”

No picture was available, but here’s what they worked out for another Disney worker with the same “problem”:

Noor proclaims herself happy to have worked out a compromise: "I'd really hate to see another person lose the magic behind the Disney characters," she said, a third of her internship pissed away by our stupidity.

Ah, Noor.

But maybe she can make some lemonade by pitching them an idea for another Disney princess franchise: “The Little Intern.” And maybe they could have a special showing for these employers:  “A Lithuanian company says it plans to open an island resort in the Maldives ... with only blond staff. ... And it wants to bring visitors to the island on flights entirely crewed by blonds as well ... and yes, that includes the pilots.”

The firm claims to work in 75 different business sectors, mostly staffed and advertised by “sexy blond women.” It also claims not to discriminate. They don’t have to because “we find that when women with dark hair work here, they are surrounded by all these beautiful blondes, so eventually they end up going blond, too.”

See? No decon chamber needed when women are sensible enough to pre-homogenize themselves.

Photograph of a blonde ponytail by katehudson for Wikimedia Commons.

Tags: Disney, employment, feminism, Hijab, Muslim

Since yesterday, I’ve read and re-read—as almost an act of mourning—this depressing USA Today article that points out that the number of women in Congress is likely to decrease following the November elections. This despite the spate of media coverage about all the female candidates (including here, of course), despite all the rhetoric about the Year of the Conservative Woman.

Against the sobering numbers of this poll, I’ve been mulling whether feminism becomes a more or less powerful concept if its definition expands. This was the question running through my mind when I sat in on the Smart Girl Summit, a recent conservative women’s conference. These women—many of them middle-aged, middle-American mom-types with pro-life views—were shut out of the traditional version of feminism, and are aggressively setting out to reclaim the term. They’re not afraid to use the word feminist; they just take great care to put modifiers in front of it to distinguish is from “old”—liberal—feminism. One panelist spoke at length about women doing work like teaching or mothering that’s “unpaid or underpaid, and undervalued,” and added that “the new feminism affirms, admires, and lifts up that kind of sacrifice.” She set that in direct opposition to “modern feminists,” who are “willing to trade their maternal roles for temporary advantages in politics or business.” Conservative women “are not turning feminism upside-down, they’re turning it right-side up.” Another speaker, Dana Loesch, was even more explicit: “I’m all about liberating women from the bondage of carrying water for one party,” and added that “liberal feminism is a marketing schtick used by older women who are irrelevant in today’s society.” The white-haired woman in front of me clapped. Loesch even framed liberal women who believe in government spending as retrograde and lacking a modern woman’s independent spirit, calling Uncle Sam their “sugar daddy.” And she ended with a warning, that the left has “awakened the sleeping giant that is the conservative female movement.”

Fighting words, and it doesn’t really matter if they’re not entirely accurate ones. This is a movement that’s offering large numbers of women a way to ascribe a higher political meaning to their life choices, whether those are full-time work, part-time work, or staying home with the kids. Abortion wasn’t as important to these women as their shared views about the economy and the national debt. One panel at the conference offered women practical advice on how to seek office, even if they’ve not recently held a job, how to assemble a support group that includes not only friends but a husband who supports your goals and compromises in pursuit of them. The consultant who ran that panel explicitly said it was important to have female representation: She’d run for the Indiana legislature in part because no one in that chamber had “working ovaries.” Another speaker ran through the laundry list of all the ways women are going to control spending and decisions in important sectors like health care in the coming years—it could have been cribbed from Hanna’s “End of Men” article. This wasn’t back-in-the-kitchen conservatism.

The goal of the whole thing was to create a solid network, a sisterhood of likeminded women that is positioned to achieve hegemony as both gender and political power balances shift. I’d call that textbook empowerment, even if I don’t agree with what they’re working toward. Liberal feminists are doing the things we believe in a great disservice if conservatives are, well, more liberal in their definition of how women can wield power—that’s one of the lessons from that USA Today article and the probable setback for female legislators. And another is that conservative women, for their part, haven’t quite yet figured out a way to get their recent embrace of “new feminism” to translate from rhetoric into solid political movement forward. One pollster told USA Today, that “It's always been tougher for women to get elected in a tough economy because voters tend to think women aren't as good on the economy. … They don't want to take risks in a bad economy, and they perceive women as being riskier." Yet a major tenet of Tea Party feminism is that women are good at managing budgets and will bring that same fiscal responsibility to office; perhaps seeing that kind of prejudice play out at the polls will be a clarifying moment for conservative feminists, in which they realize that “modern feminists” were actually fighting against real barriers, and they don’t get a free hurdle over them simply by declaring that they aren’t precisely the same breed.

Tags: conservative feminism, feminism

Emily, thanks for backing me up on my criticism of Susan Faludi's article in Harper's.  While I still stand by everything I wrote, I did get a taste of the grumpies with modern feminism that made me more sympathetic toward the potshots Faludi took at spending time on high heels and Lady Gaga instead of more serious work.  And that's when I saw this blog post defending Bristol Palin against not just snickering jokes about teen pregnancy, but the slings and arrows of the straw feminists of Palin's mind, and I hit an emotional wall.  If we spent half as much time advocating for policies that actually move the ball down the field of equality as we do dutifully playing defense against perceived slights against our ideological enemies who happen to be female, we would be pouring the Gatorade of true equality over Gloria Steinem's head right now.

Or maybe not.   I'm not against the occasional use of sniggering sexism against a conservative leader to make the point that sexism is a slam against all women, not just the original target.  But still, you can call foul on sexist jokes against Bristol Palin without painting her as some sort of hero, as Caroline at Ms. Blog does.  She lauds Palin as a symbol of the struggle of teen mothers against the system, suggests that it's a feminist statement to vote for Palin on Dancing With the Stars and then even (gasp!) tries to drum up sympathy for the young tabloid sensation by reporting that Palin suspects that many feminists don't like her.

Well, I don't like Bristol Palin, so she's right about that.  Regardless of whether Palin is "struggling" in her wealthy family with her hefty stipends for speaking and going on TV, the reality is that she's an advocate for policies that roll back the progress of human rights, especially those of women and children.  I doubt her supposed job at a medical office (gosh, they sure are understanding of the fact that she never has time to actually, you know, work) is what's paying the bills in her household.  I suspect that she's really making way more bank going around the country playing the abstinence-only sidekick to her anti-choice mother.  If you're worried about the plight of teenage mothers, the Palin family are not your friends, not only because they advocate policies that create more unwilling teenage mothers, but they also promote conservative policies that take the safety net away from those teenage mothers who aren't lucky enough to get a fat check for going on Dancing With the Stars.

If you're worried about sexism against Bristol Palin, check yourself before scolding others.  Personally, I can't think of anything more sexist than treating a grown woman who makes her living as a well-paid activist like she's a child who can't be held accountable for her actual actions and beliefs.  Sure, it's tempting to suggest that Palin would break out on her own and become a feminist superstar if it wasn't for her scary mother breathing down her neck.  But we don't know that.  All we know is what Palin does when she goes out to impact the world, and what she does is rationalize abstinence-only ideology that is used to attack the basic rights and health of women and girls.

Of course, all this nonsense went on over at Ms. magazine, a venerable second-wave institution.  So Faludi's still wrong to chalk this up to a generational divide.

Bristol Palin and Mark Ballas on "Dancing with the Stars the Results Show," courtesy of © ABC.

Tags: Bristol Palin, conservative women, dancing with the stars

Amanda, in your post about why there would never be a liberal Palin, you had me agreeing with you for a sentence, when you wrote “if someone waved a magic wand and made her and Hillary Clinton sudden death contenders for the presidency right now, Clinton would win in a heartbeat.” No kidding. Even I’d vote for her. But then you lose me by stereotyping dirty rotten conservatives.

Interestingly, you write that Palin gets attention because she plays her role in a sexist culture. Yet you fail to mention that Clinton—her imaginary foe in your imaginary sudden-death runoff election for the presidency—got to where she is precisely because she rode her husband’s coattails to power. (Could Hillary have gotten there on her own? Maybe. But we’ll never know.)

You write that liberals can’t be fed a fantasy woman, but then you blame evil conservatives for “luring” liberals into being uneasy with feminism because then they won’t get to have hot sex anymore. (So, are liberals impressionable or not?)

And then, best of all, you write that liberals don’t have contradictory demands. Really? Feminism is a “sisterhood,” but you can’t be part of the club if you don’t believe in abortion. Women are supposed to have the opportunity to “do it all” if they want to, but when someone you don’t disagree with, like Sarah Palin, does that but by a different path than you think she should, well, she must be cheating or she’s not really doing it. (And I write that as someone who is long over my Palin crush.)

Lastly, I find it intriguing that liberals, whose emotional needs are too complex to be summed up to by photo-ops, can have their beliefs encapsulated by a poster.

Tags: conservative women, feminism, Sarah Palin

This morning, anti-abortion group the Susan B. Anthony List hosted a panel discussion at the Yale Club in New York called "A Conversation on Pro-Life Feminism." The panel included law professor Helen Alvaré, historian Jennifer Popiel, political science professor Catherine Wilson, sociologist Brad Wilcox, and philosophy professor Laura Garcia. A lot of the discussion was familiar to anyone who follows anti-abortion feminists with regularity: There was talk of Susan B. Anthony's pro-life bona fides (though these have been disputed by Anthony's biographer, who says the suffragette "spent no time" on the politics of abortion), and some chatter about how second-wave feminists denigrated motherhood, not to mention press materials decrying "fascist" "faux feminists" on the left.

But there were also more centrist ideas floating around the event. Catherine Wilson stressed that "feminism is not a monolith," and Brad Wilcox talked about how anti-abortion candidates could do a better job of addressing flexible work policies and the needs of working parents.

During the question and answer period, a 60ish woman in a bright yellow sweater and thick glasses asked about the potential for an anti-abortion female candidate who also supported liberal policies like government health insurance and social welfare. She said she had been working in the anti-abortion movement for decades, and felt that the alliance between pro-lifers and fiscal conservatives, like George W. Bush, was uneasy. "Is there a role for a left wing or liberal female politician who is also pro-life and can win?" the woman in the yellow sweater inquired.

Wilson mentioned that Hispanics, many of whom are anti-abortion, were also more in favor of health care reform than any other group, and said that as the Hispanic population continues to grow there could be potential for such a fiscally liberal, socially conservative candidate to be elected. But Alvaré argued that during the health care reform debate, anti-abortion Democrats were punished for their convictions. Though he wasn't mentioned during the panel, pro-life democrats like Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey do exist, but it's unclear whether or not these kinds of centrists will lose ground in the ultra-partisan environment of the 2010 elections. It's also worth noting that there are no prominent women candidates on the horizon who fit this description.

After I left the panel, I couldn't stop thinking about the woman in the yellow sweater. She is staunchly anti-abortion, so much so that she is an activist. And yet she is in favor of the social programs that pro-choice feminists like myself believe are so important. How many women out there who define themselves as pro-life are like her? What about the ones who would say they are pro-life, but for whom it is not their biggest issue? Aren't we alienating those women, who could possibly be persuaded to vote for a pro-choice candidate, when we say that feminism is only for women who are resolutely pro-choice? What do we gain by excluding Ms. Yellow Sweater and her cohort from our conversation? If it is our goal to make work policy and health care better for women and families in this country, we shouldn't be so quick to tell these women that they can't join the club.

Tags: anti-abortion, brad wilcox, catherine wilson, feminism, helen alvaré, laura garcia, pro-choice, pro-life, the susan b. anthony list