"A Culture of Indifference"

Feministing has an excellent post on the culture of indifference that enables a sexual assault epidemic to persist unchallenged at most US universities. I can confirm, from personal experience with how universities deal with these matters, that most all of the important points from the post are commonplace at many colleges. For example:

• Many times, victims drop out of school, while their alleged attackers graduate.
• Students deemed "responsible" for alleged sexual assaults on college campuses can face little or no consequence for their acts.
• 75 to 90 percent of total disciplinary actions that schools do report are minor.
• The full extent of campus sexual assault is often hidden by secret proceedings, shoddy record-keeping, and an indifferent bureaucracy.
  

All of these are facts that apply to virtually every university in the country. I and others at my undergraduate institution arrived at identical conclusions just based on circumstances particular to that university. It's appalling how widespread and uniform these problems are, and even more appalling how college administrations and student culture turns a blind eye to it.

I'm convinced that it is going to take direct action (be it civil disobedience or class-action legal attacks) of some kind to force (mostly male) administrators to take steps to stop institutionally-sanctioned rape at universities. Of course, this problem is much, much larger than universities and no doubt speaks to deep problems with our (sexist) legal system and culture (e.g. as the post notes: we have college newspapers printing pieces that blame rape victims and women's magazines spreading the myth of "gray rape.")

Something needs to be done, and we can't wait for university big wigs to take care of the problem.

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Pro-sex? Anti-porn? Where do I fall?

Deep inside my brain there is an ongoing dialogue about pornography, about sex, about relationships, about misogyny, and about love.

There are, in this dialogue, two competing sides. There is what I consider my more idealistic side, what I sometimes fear is naive (in fact, what I've been told is naive by pro-feminists even), and yet still can't decide is actually wrong or any more unreasonable than any desires for utopia.

Every so often I'm forced to reckon with the way popular culture depicts sexual relationships between men and women. Most recently, it was the tragedy in Pennsylvania where a man who blogged about how cruel women as a whole were for not having sex with him targeted and killed women at a gym. Men all over the internet expressed horror at what he did, but expressed that they understood what he was talking about, that yes, women are uppity, and yes, women do dismiss the wrong guys, and yes, women do send the wrong signals and then insult their dignity.

What's clear is that a lot of men think they have a right or entitlement to have sex with women, simply for being alive, and it's not like this is happening in a vaccuum. Most romantic comedies these days, especially those geared at men (or can we not consider, say, Judd Apatow movies to be romantic comedies, even though they involve both romance and comedy, simply because they're geared at men?), involve some sort of conquest where sex is the end prize, where sex marks the man's success in life, or success as a man, and the woman involved is fairly irrelevant at least up until the big final moments when he realizes actual feelings aren't bad to consider.

The hilarious premises are about how to trick the opposite sex into having sex with you or being in a "relationship" with you. Men and women are in competition. Sex is a game. Human connection is irrelevant. This isn't like friendship where you meet a certain person and click and then rely on each other. Romance, or sex, is strategy. It's tricks. It's like an illusion. You either win the game, or you lose it, and that has nothing to do with the particular human you are pursuing or the particular human you are, but is a matter of technique and generalized truths about each sex.

It's not hard for me, as a feminist, to see that this cultural understanding of sex can be dangerous. Which isn't to say many people will take the path Sodini took and mass-murder a group of women because he sees them as the enemy or opposing team, which is, of course, exactly how they're portrayed in this love-game. But that's not to say it doesn't have widespread negative consequences, relating to partner violence, incredible possessiveness and jealousy, the sense of entitlement to women's bodies that leads to street harrassment, sexual violence and assault, and even puritanical protection of those bodies. The plain fact is that I don't like living in a society where sex boundaries are not only set up like this, but depicted as cute and funny in popular culture.


I think the love-game portrayal I described above is part of this problem, and I think porn is another part of it. A piece of culture created solely to sexually gratify the onlooker. How can there be a human connection when only one human is involved? The other is merely a performer on the stage, a character, sometimes just an object of gratification. It's not just masturbation that relies on the fantasy of another person, it's a sole focus on the image of a voiceless stranger.

I don't say all this expecting that, ideally, every sexual act would be the culmination of years of getting to know the other person, of knowing them deeply, and of wanting to love them. I don't pretend to advocate against completely casual sex between two people. What I want though, is the acknowledgement between both parties that their partners are humans, who are fully dimensional, with depth, and thoughts, and likes and dislikes and vulnerabilities.

And so, I say, when asked about the issue of pornography, that I'm not anti-porn in the sense that I'm actively campaigning to shut it down or outlaw it or even to chastise those who consume and produce it. But I do see its creation as a symptom of a society in which sexual relationships are not seen as fully human, and therefore, I see it as something that would not exist if my dream of a feminist utopia were realized. People would no longer get off by looking at one dimensional, voiceless, personless representations of the opposite sex, because they'd want sex to involve mutual humanity...(You have to already share my belief here that our sexual desires and the things that gratify us are, at least in part, constructed by the society we live in. If you disagree we'll discuss in another post)

And this, of course, is where the nay sayers, and, in fact, my own, other, nay saying strain of thought catch up with me. "But wait, it says, is there really ever going to be a time when people won't need visual stimulation to feel sexually satisfied when . Maybe if the actors in porn were just portrayed more like real people and there were real stories and realistic encounters it would be better. Maybe we could just improve porn. Maybe even in a completely economically just society, where education was available and free, and jobs were not in short supply, some people would still want to act in porn, and maybe in a society with no sexual baggage and a totally human outlook on sex, people would still want porn. "

Yes, maybe I'm being naive and judgmental about why people watch porn and why people act in porn. It's possible. And I can't help but be insecure about the fact that I did grow up in a subculture with pretty puritan views of sexuality. Could I have internalized that and could I just be trying to justify that from a feminist perspective? It could be. But I just don't think that's it. I don't FEEL like I have issues with sexuality. I don't judge people who have different sexual behaviors than myself. I just don't think sex should be about conquest. I don't think it should be a sign of someone's success as a person or a man or a woman or a social being. And not because I believe in some ancient view or morality or want to shame anyone for experiencing pleasure. Honestly, it's just because I think anything else is dangerous.

I can't shake the idea that porn and all those comedies I talked about above are not signs of a healthy societal view of sexual relationships and that they breed bad ideas about who gets to have pleasure and how. When we think of ourselves as having a right to have sex with others and players in a big game where sex is the prize, dehumanizing partners and potential partners seems like a natural consequence.

I'm at a stalemate with myself in this conversation. What knowledge or life experience would make me land more firmly on one side or the other?

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My alter ego did it: letting Eminem off the hook

I've never been much of an Eminem fan. But thanks to my younger sister's absolute worship of him throughout 1999, I've got a lot the Slim Shady LP pretty well memorized. His unforgettably pointed, nasal voice still goes straight to my bones. His voice, after all, is inseparable from his words: those dark, skillful raps were some of my first experiences with real misogyny in music. And that was before I would have named it as such.

The media blitz surrounding Eminem's return to the scene and his new album, Relapse, is as much about the artist as the art. It appears that Marshall Mathers (his given name) is rediscovering his creativity and talent, while recovering from some serious drug addictions.

But reviewers can't avoid mentioning -- and in many cases, rationalizing away -- the misogynistic violence that fills Eminem's songs. On National Public Radio, reviewer Robert Christgau points out Relapse's indebtedness to an obscure hip-hop genre called horror-core.

Horror-core songs are so outrageous, they're impossible to mistake for acts of advocacy. No one will think Eminem plans to lynch Lindsay Lohan with 66 inches of extension cord in "Same Song & Dance."

Whether these images of strangling Lindsay Lohan -- a young woman who has been the punch line of so many misogynistic jokes, it's a wonder she can leave the house -- are "acts of advocacy" is, for me, irrelevant. These descriptions of violence against women are the air we breathe. They make it easier to publicize -- and then dismiss -- the image of a pop diva's battered face. They change the entire context in which violence against women occurs.

The New York Time's piece on Eminem's return to the scene focuses on his "multiple-personality" schtick: at any point in the rap, the voice we're hearing could be Marshall Mathews, Eminem, or Slim Shady -- his particularly virulent alter ego. Slim Shady is the one who abducts, abuses and murders women, including Mathers' ex-wife Kim. And somehow, that ought to make these lyrics easier to swallow?

These folks seem eager to point out that Eminem's probably not really a bad guy: he's just playing a role. His songs are "exposing" male jealousy and rage. He's not advocating that anybody be abducted and strangled in a car. Lohan's name just happened to be the rhyme he needed.

I don't want to sound like Andrea Dworkin here, and I don't claim that violence has no place in art. But why is nobody talking about what happens to a society that can actually process this kind of violence ... and call it a joke?

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How could such a nice, upper-class white man do such bad things?

(This post contains potentially triggering descriptions of violent crimes against women.)

Philip Markoff is white, upper-middle class, highly educated, and engaged to be married. There is also strong evidence to suggest that he's committed some deeply misogynistic crimes. Why are these two realities so difficult for some folks to reconcile?

Prosecutors have alleged that Markoff prowled Craigslist for vulnerable women (who'd posted services as masseuses or sex workers), made appointments with them, and then robbed them. He allegedly tied up one of his victims inside a hotel room, binding her to the inside of the door, after robbing her. When his second target Julissa Brisman put up a fight, he allegedly killed her. She had three bullet wounds and a massive head injury when her body was found.

In the NBC news video available with this article, the anchor expresses incredulity that a man with Markoff's background apparently has the capacity for misogyny, violence, and -- in an aspect of the case that has particularly fascinated our media -- that he fooled his fiancee into believing that Markoff could never hurt a fly.

I know it's a really predictable narrative: good boy gone bad. Markoff isn't the first white man to kill a woman and be the subject of armchair psychological analysis of "what went wrong," or how he "snapped." Indeed, it's interesting how Markoff himself - instead of Brisman, his victim -- is the object of such intense fascination. We can only imagine how differently this case would be treated if Markoff were a young black man, or from a poor background, or an immigrant. And his victims' status as sex workers reinforces their invisibility.

The Markoff case isn't being framed as an issue of violence against women. But why shouldn't it be? If we're going to psychoanalyze, why not start with the patriarchal field of medicine in which he's being trained? Why not start with the culture of date rape on college campuses, where Markoff has spent the last six years of his life? Why not ask why Markoff selected these victims -- women doing sex work, women living somewhat on the margins -- to rob and terrorize?

Most of all, it is a dangerous assumption that a man who looks nice (in this case, "nice" means young, white, and educated) could not be a predator. Nice-looking, affable men may beat their female partners every day. Nice-looking men may be misogynists. Nice-looking men may abuse prostitutes, or rape their dates. Unfortunately, violence against women crosses race and class lines. As a culture, we must recognize that the dehumanization of women, particularly sex workers, is an equal-opportunity social phenomenon.

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Note to CNN: Rape within marriage is not 'rape,' it's rape.

AGHHHH. Lose the scare quotes, bastards.

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