The Serpent's Wisdom

I haven't thought for a while about the ethics of taking, but it's on my mind today. A couple of connected developments this week:

• Zerlina Maxwell, a feminist writer, made the comment to Sean Hannity that maybe we should put more energy into telling men not to rape. Hannity retorts that such an approach is useless because "criminals won't listen." Since appearing on the show, Maxwell has faced a wave of death threats and other violent, angry responses.


• A couple of high school football players are convicted of rape, setting off a wave of commentary in the media expressing sympathy for... those two poor rapists whose lives are now ruined. The survivor gets death threats; two girls were arrested just today for threatening to kill her. Her identity has of course been revealed by the press, despite guidelines meant to prevent this.

By now most of you have probably heard of "rape culture," which is what happens when you combine the "abuser planet" phenomenon with misogyny. Our cultural narrative inherently sides with the bully, with the abuser. They are the one whose lives and thoughts are clear to us, whose justifications we buy into without question. "Look what she drove me to do!" "She was asking for it." "She's responsible too." Say any of these things and people will nod knowingly. Say them and you automatically recruit at least half of all observers into co-conspirators. "She's just saying it for the sympathy" (only true if by "sympathy" you mean death threats).

The ethics of taking have something to say about this, and provide a counter-narrative. As I described it before, "this ethic would require us to consider what the costs are of taking anything that we feel free to take." Even if overtly offered, because offering is not always an act of free will. I originally applied it to resources, but it could just as easily apply to our relationships with other human beings.

You know, when I was growing up, the difference between the US and the Soviet Union was summarized with a two-word phrase: "papers, please." Now that's the law in Arizona. Law enforcement groups actually hate the law.

Meanwhile Oklahoma passed a law that requires probe-rape for pregnant women who want an abortion. Yes, when someone inserts an object into an orifice of your body without your permission, that is rape.

But, hey, the Republicans also say they want less government.

How *dare* the Pope's critics smear him... by... quoting his own words in public?

There's not really that much to say about this anymore. There's been extensive, prominent, very public worldwide discourse about the ways in which widespread sexual abuse by priests has been hidden from secular authorities, and therefore effectively enabled, by the Catholic Church for 20 years now. They haven't changed, they resist change even now (for example by directing their attorneys to very aggressively attack rape survivors), and it's evident they have no will to change at all.

There's a fascinating post today at Shakesville about reproductive coersion, which is when men act to override their female partner's reproductive freedom, essentially in an attempt to force her to become pregnant against her will. In the context of abusive relationships, which are at heart about controlling someone by reducing their freedom to act independently, it makes sense; but what surprises me is how common it actually is.

[Reproductive coercion] is when the male partner pressures the other, through verbal threats, physical aggression, or birth-control sabotage, to become pregnant. According to Miller's research, about a third of women reporting partner violence experienced reproductive coercion, as did 15 percent of women who had never reported violence.

Overall, rates of reproductive coercion among family-planning-clinic patients are surprisingly high: about one in five women report their partner having attempted to coerce them into pregnancy.

In other news, the Roman Catholic Church is actively fighting a bill in New York that would extend the statute of limitations for survivors of sexual abuse to file civil suits against their abusers. (Good catch, hai_kah_uhk

::burns with white-hot rage::

This lovely story at Pandagon has me thinking of the time i was stopped at a light on Claiborne Avenue just beside the French Quarter, when a guy walked up to the car and asked me for a date. By the time it dawned on me that what he was doing with his hand wasn't just a nervous tic, he was climaxing on the side of my car. Yes, all this happened in the time interval of a red light.

Reading the various accounts in the comments to the post i linked above has me wondering... how many people do i know who have had something like this happen to them?

For purposes of this poll, i am asking about cases where the event in question happened to you without your consent or prior awareness, especially in situations where you felt intimidated, humiliated, or threatened. However, i am not restricting this to strangers.

And yes, stuff that's happened on Bourbon Street might count. I would say, answer yes if what you saw involved non-consent, demands, or pushy creepiness. Not every instance of exposure in an environment like that is threatening or unwanted, but many times i've seen a pretty girl lift her shirt because a woman on a balcony asked her to, only to have 15-20 men crowd around her with their cameras out, or to then receive aggressive demands to show more or even do more.

ETA: Only a few people have answered so far, but i know that there could be a lot of responses to the poll. I think people don't realize just how common this sort of thing is; i'd love to see some dialogue on just what it means that aggressive creepiness is as common as it is.

ETA: Please comment if the event in question was reported to the police and/or if the perp faced any actual consequences (legal or, uh, extra-legal). None of the men who have done this to me faced any legal consequences whatsoever.

[Poll #1156275]

"Some studies have shown that crimes against the trans community accounts [sic] for 10 percent of all violent crimes in America." from National Day Of Remembrance Honors Murdered Trans People. I wish there was more information on this claim, it's the first time i've seen it.

I also wish there was more discussion in the trans community at large about the racial dimension of anti-transgender violence. Maybe there isn't enough awareness; or maybe it is not brought up because white transfolk are nervous about speaking for transfolk of color.

Anti-trans violence is painfully personal for me; tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of my sexual assault. Was i targeted for being trans, or for just being a woman? I will never know, but i *do* know that being trans affected my decision not to go to the police.

A wave of judicial misogyny has started to peak in the last couple of years. I'm still very disturbed by the Maryland rape ruling and the judge who instructed the survivor not to use the word "rape" when talking about what happened to her.

But this week alone there have been (at least) three major acts of misogyny by people sitting on the bench.

( cut for rape and battery triggers )

The Epoch Times is a newspaper which was founded primarily to report on human rights abuses in China. I have on my desk here at work a copy of a similar paper which was handed to me a few months ago in Harvard Square, carrying a story about the Chinese government basically farming dissidents for their organs -- rounding them up, carving them up while they are still alive, and putting their organs on the transplant market.

Excuse me, i don't mean to speak out of line, but didn't we, as a species, decide that we wouldn't tolerate this kind of thing the last time a government rounded people up and farm-cannibalized them? Every now and then some government or other will make a statement about this, but so far not a damn thing has been done about it.

And i don't know what to say to the people who stand on the street trying to hand these newspapers out to people who, for the most part, don't want to be confronted with it. It's truly chilling to know that you can stand on a streetcorner all day and talk openly about terrifying crimes going on against thousands of people right now, here's the evidence, and few will even care to listen, and fewer still will do anything about it.

Elsewhere in the world, millions of girls have had their developing breasts ironed by their parents to keep them from growing. This is ostensibly to protect them. The city of Bangalore in India is considering a law that would forbid many employers from scheduling women to work at night. This is ostensibly to protect them.

Elsewhere in the world, the Virginia Citizens Defense League organized a gun giveaway to pointedly spit in the eye of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who complains that people are buying guns in Virginia, where laws are lax and enforcement of them even laxer, in order to commit crimes in New York City. Gun control may or may not be the answer, but the message is clear: for trying to stem violence at the source, you get ridiculed.

At the source -- that is the key to what i am getting at with all of these things, the thread that connects them all. No one ever wants to talk about what is wrong with bullies and abusers; instead the attention goes on the victims, the survivors, or the potential victims. For example, the most popular answer to widespread gun violence in the US is to propose that more people get guns, so they can have standoffs with would-be gun criminals. Perhaps that may even work.

But what troubles me about this approach is that it leaves completely unquestioned the observation that people buy weapons and commit crimes with them. Try to address the problem from that angle, and people get furious. Why is the most popular solution to take thuggery for granted and meet thugs at their level, rather than try to change them?

Many cities in the US have a shelter system for battered women. These operate on shoestring budgets because abuse survivors are not a social priority. But this system is frustrating and disheartening because everything falls on the survivor. The abuser almost always gets off scot-free. The survivor often loses everything, including whatever social standing they had. After seeing this happen to one survivor after another, after seeing one abuser after another getting away with it and facing no consequences whatsoever, it becomes really disheartening. Is this truly a world where someone can beat a person they claim to love and no one will do a goddamned thing about it?

"But, Sabrina, the prisons are overflowing. We do hold thugs accountable." Yes, prisons are overflowing, but to what extent does this actually address or fix the problem? This subject demands its own series of journal entries actually, particularly the extent to which the prison system is itself a form of institutional bullying, and the extent to which crime survivors feel bullied by the justice system. Suffice it to say for this entry that the justice system and the prison-industrial complex takes for granted the existence of thugs and bullies.

Our justice system examines individual events as if they occur in a vacuum, excluding social and economic factors from consideration as much as possible. The goal of the court proceeding is to establish guilt or innocence with regards to single isolated incidents, with everything else being deemed irrelevant. The bigger questions of social environment are thus kept out, are never scrutinized; a verdict is reached, someone is imprisoned or goes free, and justice is said to be served. Court proceedings are part of the enforcement of laws which have been crafted to call attention to some forms of bullying while legitimizing other forms or creating loopholes for abusers.

And this criticism is not meant to say that we shouldn't examine individual events and seek accountability in such cases, but to say that this is not all there is to justice. We are leaving out the biggest part. Instead of addressing the systemic problems in society that cause and perpetuate abuse, our edifices of justice play whack-a-mole and, as often as not, whack survivors instead of perps. It is a reaction, not a response.

Not only are we accustomed to treating thugs as "inhuman others," we are unaccustomed to thinking of injustice as something that permeates a society. Catch the bad guy and you're done, right?

Lasting justice will require sustained focus and interest on thugs themselves, why they do what they do, and how they play on our fears in order to avoid scrutiny and accountability. It will require every single person to look inside themselves and face what they do not want to face -- the piece of them that sympathizes with bullies and sees their point of view as normal or even normative. It will require sustained scrutiny of our institutions for encroachment by abusers and their sympathizers. It will require facing head-on the culture of fear that keeps each one of us scrambling for our own survival instead of seeing the interconnected threads of injustice. It will require keeping some of the focus on the big picture, to recognize when our pursuit of injustice on the small scale has made it possible for some to get away with injustices on a bigger scale because no one was looking.

But most of all, we have to start expecting better from thugs and bullies. If we resign ourselves to the "fact" that there will always be bullies, we enable them.

Two different news items which on the surface couldn't seem less connected, and yet i saw a similar thing going on in both.

A restaurant trade group says it is insulted by an insurance company's planned Super Bowl ad that stars Kevin Federline as a fast-food worker. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co.'s 30-second spot shows Federline... performing in a glitzy music video. However, the punch line is that he's daydreaming — while cooking french fries at a fast-food joint.

The ad amounts to a "strong and direct insult to the 12.8 million Americans who work in the restaurant industry," wrote National Restaurant Association President and Chief Executive Steven Anderson in a letter to Nationwide CEO Jerry Jurgensen.

The commercial "would give the impression that working in a restaurant is demeaning and unpleasant," Anderson wrote.

from Restaurant group objects to K-Fed ad

::struggles to stop laughing long enough to write again::

Where to start, where to start... okay, first of all, the ad won't give people the impression that working in a restaurant is demeaning and unpleasant. Working in a restaurant gives you the impression that it is demeaning and unpleasant. Oh, you mean the execs enjoy it just fine? Some of them probably even "got their hands dirty" flipping burgers during a summer or two, in between terms at their Ivy League college. They have fond memories from that wild and carefree time of their life.

But here's what gets me about the first part of their statement. People who work in restaurants aren't going to be offended by the ad. THEY'RE they ones who are offended. But they'll expose themselves as the whiny self-righteous jerks they are if they don't make it sound like they're sticking up for the poor exploited underdogs (you know, the underdogs they employ whom they're hoping won't get a minimum wage boost this year).

And now the second story, considerably less funny.

"Hounddog" is the story of Lewellen, a girl played by 12-year-old Dakota Fanning, who is growing up in the 1960s South. ...

The disturbing scene lasts a few minutes but is not graphic. There is no nudity, the scene is very darkly lit and only Fanning's face and hand are shown. Kampmeier said it took her a decade to get the film made, largely because of the rape scene, but cutting it was a compromise she was unwilling to make.

"This issue is so silenced in our society. There are a lot of women who are alone with this story," she said.

... Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission and publisher of the Web site movieguide.org, claims "Hounddog" breaks federal child-pornography law. He said the law covers material that "appears" to show minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct. "Even if they're not actually performing the explicit act, we are dealing with a legal issue here," he said.

Baehr said Fanning is being exploited in the film, and that it should be considered an outrage. "Children at 12 do not have the ability to make the types of decisions that we're talking about here," he said. "If we're offended by some comedian's racial slur, why aren't we offended by somebody taking advantage of a 12-year-old child?"

from Film's child rape scene causes stir

::not laughing this time::

Do you see the parallels here? Again, we have a group claiming to speak on behalf of the oppressed -- in this case, survivors of childhood rape -- when they are really only attempting to further their own agenda. In fact, they are claiming to speak up on behalf of abuse survivors while at the same time trying to silence them. How perverse is that?

Secondly, last time i saw any legal definition of pornography, it involved the word "prurient." I don't find rape scenes to have anything to do with prurience -- do you?

Lastly, it's obvious that Baehr did not even ask Dakota Fanning for her thoughts on whether or not she was uncomfortable about the whole thing. Here's what she had to say about it:

Fanning said she and Kampmeier talked for months before the film was shot and spent a day painting pottery together and discussing the story.

"It's not really happening," Fanning said of a rape. "It's a movie, and it's called acting. I'm not going through anything. Cody and Isabelle aren't going through anything, their characters are.

"And for me, when it's done it's done," she said. "I don't even think about it anymore."