There is a story we are told as little girls. It isn’t safe to go out at night, the tale explains. There are bad men on the streets; bad men who do bad things to girls. You shouldn’t go out after dark, and you shouldn’t go out alone. It’s different for girls, don’t you know?

The word ‘rape’ is associated with dangerous alleyways and after-dark assaults; women finding themselves victims to the heinous acts of twisted vagrants, who hang around in the unwanted corners of our society. The tale of the dreaded ‘stranger-rape’ is a precautionary tale that all women are told and re-told, from a young age. It has been used to frighten us, and to oppress us. It is a story with an untold counterpart. Whilst women are often told to stay inside the safety of their homes to avoidthe dangers on the streets, they are seldom told of the horrors that many women face behind the privacy of closed doors. Domestic violence is frighteningly prevalent within our society, and marital rape is an inevitable and unfortunate consequence. According to the 2007 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, 53 per cent of women had experienced physical and/or sexual abuse by their husbands.

The occurrence of marital rape is a fact which sits uneasily in our society. We are a society quick to cry out for the punishment of the vagrant in the dark alley, the ‘stranger-rapist’, but reluctant to acknowledge the atrocities being committed within the ‘private’ confines of another person’s home. This social reality is reflected in the law, which refuses to accept that a man can be capable of raping his own wife. Section 375 of the Bangladesh Penal Code, which criminalises rape, includes the following exception: Sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under thirteen years of age, is not rape.

Thus, women who are raped by their husbands are not even allowed to label their sufferings as rape, let alone seek redress from the law. Instead, our law parades under the absurd notion that the existence of a marriage certificate transforms what would otherwise be a criminal offence attracting up to life imprisonment, into an act which is legally acceptable. It is a reflection of deep seated attitudes in our society about the role of a wife and the ‘duties’ she has to her husband; the idea that she is obliged to make herself sexually available to him and that a husband has a right to demand sexual intercourse as of right. Women who are victims of marital rape suffer severe physical and psychological trauma, often with long-term effects. However, the law not only fails to acknowledge this suffering; it supports the culture which creates it.

A revision of the law will not, of course, provide an instant solution to the problem of marital rape. The issue of translating the proclaimed legal rights of women into actual, de-facto rights is a challenge which is faced in respect of the majority of women’s rights issues in Bangladesh. However, an abolition of the marital rape exemption would act as the first step in recognising that men can rape their wives and that we should not accept it. The victims of marital rape need recognition as well as redress. They can only be given a voice once the law allows them to speak.

Published in The Financial Express on 03.06.2012.

After this week’s recent report that Nicki Minaj deleted her Twitter account after several songs were exposed before the official scheduled release, I thought it only appropriate to review her latest album “Roman Reloaded” and see what all the hype is about. “Pink Friday Roman Reloaded” comes as a sequel to Minaj’s chart topping prior album “Pink Friday,” which included multi-platinum hits such as Super Bass. Minaj is known for being an artist that pushes the envelope, between her eccentric dress, risque lyrics, and controversial award show performances, she’s undeniably an original musician. However, as a female rap/pop artist in an industry dominated by men, the question remains to be asked: does Nicki Minaj promote misogyny or promote an over-sexualized image of women? If one was to listen to the lyrics of “Stupid Hoe” or “Sex in the Lounge” the answer would irrefutably be yes. Known for her overt confidence, Minaj portrays herself as tough, rich, and powerful, not unlike the men who rule the hip-hop business. She’s self-assured, at times armed with weaponry, and not afraid to threaten her position of authority. This being said, Nicki has many words for those who stand in her way, particularly women who she views as beneath her. The song “Stupid Hoe” clearly supports this claim as Minaj rants “stupid hoes is my enemy, stupid hoes is so wack, stupid hoe shoulda befriended me then she coulda prolly come back.” She has no shame in berating women she deems unworthy by classification of looks, or sexuality for that matter as she clearly establishes a separation from lesbian Ellen DeGeneres’ wife Portia de Rossi in one verse, “cause I pull up in the Porsche, but it ain’t de Rossi, pretty bitches could only get in my posse.” While Minaj may dispute that she’s complementing Portia de Rossi by labeling her a “pretty bitch” she directly infers that her relationship with women in only for show purposes, one that’s ultimately to boost her own self-image, and not in anyway a mutually fulfilling encounter. The term “bitch is used in the majority of the songs on “Roman Reloaded,” which is significant in correlation to her overarching messages of other women being lowlier than her. The song “Come on a Cone” illustrates this concept perfectly as Nicki taunts “bitches ain’t serious man, these bitches delirious, all these bitches inferiors, I just pimp my interiors, I just pick up and go, might pick up a hoe.” If the listener was oblivious to gender, one would assume this voice was male, a misogynistic masculine voice at that. Minaj furthers her degradation of women by including male artists such as Lil Wayne to rap on her tracks about sexual scenarios that leave a woman powerless and manipulated, “We didn’t use a rubber but I came on her body, I laid her down and kiss her neck, and talked dirty to her, like I get that p***y wetter than a dirty sewer.F**k with me, turn around and bust it open for me. Get on that d**k get that money go Oprah for me.” Minaj regularly uses profanity in her lyrics, but the male segments done by Lil Wayne and others such as Cam’ron, Drake, Nas, Young Jeezy and Chris Brown border on crude and express violence as a form of achieving pleasure (masculine, that is.)

Meanwhile, Minaj showcases her vocal talent in the latter part of her album, which makes a dramatic transition from rap to pop genres. Some of her most popular hits “Turn Me On” and “Starships” pursue a more united subject matter in the form of relationships. The material focuses primarily on having a good time, dancing, and feeling fine. The song “Marilyn Monroe” takes the album to a new level of lyrical expression, as Minaj examines the raw human emotions she equates to experiences/ quotes said by Marilyn Monroe.

          “Call it a curse!

Or just call me blessed.

If you can’t handle my words

Than you ain’t gettin’ my best.

Is this how Marilyn Monroe felt?

Well, must be how Marilyn Monroe felt.

Take me, or leave me,

I’ll never be perfect.

Believe me, I’m worth it.”

Altogether Nicki Minaj produced two levels of music. One level is simplistic, demeaning of women and sexuality associated with the female sex. It places its fundamentals in violence, arrogance and a lack of originality. The second level is a new awakening for Nicki Minaj. It’s basis has more substance, more creativity, inspiration, and lastly skill in her singing talent. My hope in the years to come for Nicki Minaj will be for her to embrace her natural ability to produce high quality sound, and move forward with lyrics that depict women in a positive, healthy attitude, so that little girls like Sophia Grace and Rosie will have an inspirational role model to look up to.

C'mon Nicki, turn those lyrics around so these girls can grow up to be more than just "stupid hoes"

Rape victims say military labels them ‘crazy.’

On the whole, being anti-porn is a pretty unpopular position to take. In feminist circles, the anti-porn movement has a pretty bad rap, in no small part due to anti-porn activist Andrea Dworkin’s collusion with the religious right. Her strange bed-fellows and desire to ban porn made her pretty unpopular with some feminists, for good reason (reasons I agree with). This is also part of the reason why I want to refute what I consider to be the myth that to be anti-pornography is to be anti-sex. Sex-positive feminism was born, in part, out of the resistance to anti-porn activism, but I think they are in no way mutually exclusive. I say this because I am 100% pro-sex, but I am also anti-porn. Also, I’m not really sure why most feminists are okay with critiquing every other type of mass media—music videos, movies, the news, T.V. shows, art, music, you name it—but porn is always off limits. And to not discuss the effects porn has on culture is unacceptable. Porn might not be the cause of misogyny, it’s not the cause of rape culture, but it certainly contributes its fair share.

I want to start off by saying, I don’t believe in banning pornography. Unfortunately, when you say you’re anti-porn, many people equate you and your beliefs to people like Rick Santorum, known to many feminists as the worst person on the planet, because he’s spoken out against porn, and wants to ban it. Unlike some feminists I’ve already mentioned, I don’t think there are any issues where feminist and conservatives can come together. Because, let’s be clear, Santorum and people like him are anti-porn because they are anti-sex. There is also a major difference in that Rick Santorum and his call porn misogynist but then hold seriously misogynist ideals themselves and have no desire to uproot women’s oppression and patriarchy. Whereas, for me, one of the biggest issues with pornography is that it upholds the same systems of oppression conservatives uphold—white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.

Here, I want to spell out my major critiques of pornography, of which there are many. (But I also want to make it very clear that I am not condemning the women who work in pornography). The porn industry makes $97 billion annually, which means its revenues are larger than those of Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Yahoo!, and EarthLink combined[1]. Which makes it seem like the worst of capitalism to me. To be able to make that much money, annually, off of the exploitation of women’s bodies is incredible. Porn, like anything else in capitalism, functions because of demand. There is endless demand for (mostly) degrading images of women and women’s bodies (I’ll be getting to that point in a minute). And because of a culture that manufactures demand for exploited images of women’s bodies and women’s sexualities manipulated for patriarchal male pleasure, porn provides the supply. But like other facets of capitalism, it is inextricably tied to racism and patriarchy.

The porn industry is undeniably racist, reinforcing conceptions of Black men as wild animals with uncontrollable, dangerous sexuality. Some porn titles include, Hot Black Thug, Long Dong Black Kong, and White Sluts on Black Snakes[2]. Porn demonstrates racism completely unmitigated, at its worst. Most of the people producing porn are white, meaning that white supremacist views pervade porn, so that people of color are reduced to degrading, harmful stereotypes. Women of color are ghettoized into racial genres, and Black women are only ever portrayed as the hypersexual jezebel figure—while women in porn are already portrayed as always ready and willing, women of color fair worse. As Dines notes, “In all-white porn, no one ever refers to the man’s penis as ‘a white cock’ or the woman’s vagina as ‘white pussy,’ but introduce a person of color, and suddenly all players have a racialized sexuality, where the race of the performer(s) is described in ways that make women a little ‘sluttier’ and the men more hypermasculinized” (123).

In porn, there’s no room for the word “no.” Active consent (and, therefore, positive sexuality for women) doesn’t really exist in a world where women are assumed to be constantly ready to have sex and willing to have any kind of sex with anyone. When women do say no, it’s ignored. Which is the definition of rape. But in porn, when rape occurs, it doesn’t matter as long as someone (the male perpetrator) gets off. In Pirates, the highest grossing, highest-budget porn film ever made, there’s a scene where a woman is told to perform sexual acts on another woman. The second woman cries and protests, repeatedly says no, and is gang raped by a group of (you guessed it), pirates. But in the middle of the rape she begins to “enjoy it” and when it’s over, she wants more. Of course, how are you really enjoying something when you have no choice. And in porn, women have no choice. You must enjoy it all the time. Think of the context: 87% of college men watch pornography. And this is probably what they’re seeing. I want to reiterate, I’m not anti-sex. But rape (and rape scenes are common in porn) isn’t sex.

As porn has become mainstreamed (think of all those Playboy TV shows, the way women have become increasingly sexualized in most forms of media), it has also become more degrading to women. Gonzo porn has become the most common type of porn that is consumed, and it features these four sex acts more than anything else: double penetration, double anal, double vagina, and ATM (ass-to-mouth where a man has anal sex with a woman and then puts his penis in her mouth or the mouth of another woman, what ends up happening is that the woman literally eats shit)[3]. So that’s mainstream porn. I’m not trying to critique people’s sexual choices, if this is what they enjoy, but I think it says something when these are the acts that are most common in pornography. Acts which stretch women’s bodies past their usual proportions, or make them eat shit. Matt Ezzell’s article about porn (a JMU sociology professor, by the way!) later quotes from Max Hardcore, a porn producer, who says, “Women are much more understanding and aware of their true purpose in life than ever before. That purpose, of course, is to be receptacles of love; in other words, fuck dolls.”

Mutual sexual pleasure isn’t the point. It’s not the point of any of the acts depicted in Gonzo porn. The point is for men to have places to put their dicks, and in, this case, those places are women’s bodies. There’s no understanding of women as human beings, women who deserve equal sexual pleasure and real orgasms. Max Hardcore says it pretty plainly, ladies, we’re supposed to be “fuck dolls.” What isn’t degrading about that? In mainstream porn, women are literally just objects to be fucked and thrown aside, because there’s always a newer, prettier, shinier, Blonder, woman to be fucked next.

So that’s why I’m anti-porn. Because I’m more than a fuck doll. Because women deserve to have their sexualities respected, and deserve to be in control of our sexual agency. We deserve better than any porn is giving us. Porn restricts creative sexuality—it gives us a narrow view of our sexuality and actually voids ability to experiment. It normalizes sexual violence. Now, obviously, like I already mentioned, I’m not saying that porn is the bottom line for patriarchy. Like most other things in patriarchy, porn exists because of patriarchy, and works to constantly reinforce it. Porn itself is not the cause of rape, but it upholds rape culture. It gives a strict rubric for the way we’re supposed to have sex, and if we don’t like it then we’re boring, unimaginative, or prudish. And it involves the worst of white supremacy, showing completely unmitigated racist imagery to porn consumers. Porn should not be exempt from feminist criticism. And it’s incredibly short-sighted to slap people who are anti-porn with an “anti-sex” label. Because I’m really really really pro-sex. I just think sex can be a lot better, a lot more positive, and a lot less degrading than porn would have us believe.

Just like any other feminist, I’ve grown tired of trying to defend myself. A few months ago at a student debate on women’s issues, one student made a comment about the issue of women’s safety, and mentioned that we live in a rape culture. When someone else responded by saying that we do not live in a rape culture, he claimed that “we are taught to keep our hands feet and objects to ourselves, and that’s worked for me.” The way that he so passively dismissed the idea that we have a pervasive and dangerous problem with the way we view women and that no more effort should be made to prevent it made me so upset that I have thought about it for weeks since. What I wanted was a way to show him and anyone else why I speak up so frequently about these issues. I wanted to show them how the world looks through the eyes of a woman.

Oh look, implied rape in advertising! Truly shocking.

I have been thinking about the perfect essay or blog post that I could write which would explain how women are treated as objects, or looked down upon, or violated, that would definitively prove that we do live in an unequal society. I’ve realized that there is no single combination of words that will do that. After a recent trip to the grocery store where I was followed by a man who offered audible commentary on the way that I walked and proceeded to stare at me and watch me walk back to my car, I became so frustrated that I was sitting alone in my car, rattled and afraid for my safety, all because I had decided to visit a public space. If only I could explain the fear and powerlessness I felt, and how frequently these instances occur. Then I realized that I can.

I have decided to keep an ongoing journal of times when I feel uncomfortable because I am a woman, and I have asked several of my friends to do the same. In it, we will record where we were when we felt that scared, violated, or powerless feeling that all women are too familiar with, and will include what happened and why we felt so disturbed by it. I know that it is easy for many people to rationalize the way women are treated because it is easier or more comfortable to do so than to admit there is a problem and try to change it. But I will do my part to show that there is a reason to change, and I’ll start by sharing my own stories. I encourage anyone who wants to participate with me to do so. I will write a follow-up blog post next semester, noting the frequency or nature of the incidents we have recorded and highlighting certain examples, and most likely will link to an ongoing document where the lists will be recorded in full. Though I know it will not serve as the ultimate proof that we live in a misogynistic or rape culture, I hope that it will encourage anyone who is skeptical to think more critically about the world once they have seen it through a woman’s eyes.

The event Remembering Yearley Love’s Story—A Discussion About Dating Violence seeks to educate the JMU student population about the prevalence, severity and preventability of dating and intimate partner violence on college campuses. Speakers Candy Phillips and Melissa Waite will share experiences working at First Step, Harrisonburg’s battered women’s shelter and Dr. Jenelle Boo and Patricia Crocker will inform students about counseling services for survivors and victims. This event aims to educate males and females about violence and will take place in ISAT/CS 136 at 6:30 pm on Tuesday April 10th.

If you don’t remember, the murder of Yeardley Love was a high-profile case of intimate partner violence. Love was a UVa women’s lacrosse player who was killed by her ex-boyfriend, also a lacrosse player, George Huguley. Following their brief relationship, police found evidence that Huguley had sent Love threatening text messages and emails, and uncovered stories of other violent episodes in which Love had been threatened. Huguley was given a 26 year sentence for second degree murder and grand larceny. I definitely recommend attending this very worthwhile event which is taking on a topic that is not often talked about and needs to be brought to light. The organizer also said, “I will also be showing segments of the “Bro Code” about how American culture breeds misogynistic and patriarchal men.”

[Trigger warning: graphic description of intimate partner violence]

The above video describes the brutality of the violence Huguley enacted on Love. The reporter in the video also notes that, at the time, Huguley’s lawyers were attempting to get a lesser sentence, arguing that Love’s death was an accident. These are words that are often thrown around in intimate partner violence cases – it was an accident, an act of passion, whatever. But the previous instances of physical abuse, and the consistent threats, indicate that there was no accident. Huguely intended to hurt Love. And in intimate partner abuse cases, the most violent acts tend to be when the abused partner leaves or attempts to leave. Women are eight times more likely than men to be killed by their partner. Yet the average prison sentence for a man who kills his partner is tw0 to six years, while the average sentence for a woman who kill their male partners is 15 years, despite the fact that most women who kill their partners did so in self defense. Clearly, there are serious issues in the way we, as a society, handle intimate partner violence.

Also, check out this trailer for the “Bro Code”:

Brad generously bestows force upon Angelina's face as a sign of his unwavering love for her. He must know how bad she craves pain in her sex life...

I recently came across a quiz in Cosmopolitan that inspired this week’s myth-busting post. The quiz gave a series of questions ultimately leading the reader to discover whether she liked it hard, gentle or a mix of both in the bedroom. I gave the survey some thought, and after doing a tad bit of research, decided to de-bunk this myth once and for all. 

The media’s portrayal of feminine sexuality is extremely inaccurate to say to put it mildly, we know. Whether it’s through film, print/video advertisement, or general “aura” of women, females are constantly depicted as lustful creatures craving an aggressive sexual experience. Just look at a hip hop music video, or check out a Dolce and Gabbana ad in a magazine. Women are pinned on the ground, with a look of pleasure painted across her face, or spoken about as animals, that just keep coming back for more. This voracious appetite never seems to be satisfied until that it,  she has a rough physical encounter with a man that can please her hunger for extreme sex. Women are thrust into submissive pain as the violence bleeds through lyrics. Take Lil Wayne’s popular “Mrs. Officer” where he makes “her wear nothing but handcuffs and heels. And I beat it like a cop.” He goes on to say “beat it like a cop” four additional times before justifying “but I ain’t try’na be violent.” Hypocrisy drips from the mouths of these artists who encourage this myth of sexual violence as erotic, pleasurable experiences for women. There’s nothing intimate about a beating, nothing pleasing about bondage while sex is performed violently on a defenseless victim. Similarly, in ads of popular monthly print sources such as GQ and Vogue, it’s hard to miss the blatant portrayal of violence as idealistic in sexual scenarios. Take Dolce and Gabbana for example. For years their ads have been controversial, but the playing field widens as violence is used as another mechanism to sell their products. Visuals of women being restrained by their wrists in clothing that’s quite minimal and in compromising poses, suggests nothing less than an interaction described best as rape. Ironically, it’s supposed to be interpreted as desirable, a scene in which a woman’s fantasy of masculinity is fulfilled as her “partner” displays dominance and complete control over her powerless body. The viewer is left to imagine the “ecstasy” of the moment, as the woman appears mesmerizing throughout the duration of the interaction.

She sure looks orgasmic, as she's surrounded by men and pinned down by her arms. Nothing says hot sex like gang rape.

This is not only unrealistic, but also sets a completely  inaccurate interpretation of women’s sexual fulfillment in terms of aggression. According to the Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre’s website about sexual assault, the myth that “most women enjoy sexual assault or like rough sex” severely contradicts the reality that rape occurs. The site states “this belief has evolved from society’s continuous tendency to link sex with violence. This is evident in modern videos/ popular films/music and fashion magazines. All suggest that ‘sexy’ sex is mixed with violence. The truth is, however, that no one likes to experience pain, fear, degradation, or humiliation” (http://orcc.net/violence/myths.html). It’s sad that humanity has come to have two different expectations for genders in sex, a natural union that’s supposed to provide pleasure and evoke love for both partners. The idea that promoting a practice causing men to feel pain and have a sense of anxiety in order to feel good is laughable. No man would ever support a movement to make sex hurt for them, so why is it okay to assume women feel differently? Is it because they find their own sense of eroticism in making a woman physically impaired by their own bodies? Does it enhance a man’s masculinity to be so “powerful” so as to actually please a woman by torturing her (even ever so slightly) first? These are questions we must ask ourselves if we are to truly counteract this myth and defy notions so obviously wrong. Sexuality shouldn’t come with a threat to a partner’s safety. Pain doesn’t bring pleasure. In this case, the only effect of pain is simple, ignorance.

[Trigger warning: discussion of sexual assault and rape]

April is Sexual Assault Awareness month, and this Tuesday JMU will be having Take Back the Night, a very powerful event where sexual assault survivors can speak out their experiences and participate in a march. Such an event is known as “breaking the silence,” and survivors are able to share their stories about an issue that is typically taboo and silenced in society. The purpose of the entire Take Back the Night and Clothesline Project events is to promote awareness of sexual assault on campus. The events are supported by First Year Involvement (FYI) and Student Wellness and Outreach (SWO), which also organized the “No Woman Left Behind” presentation in the fall which was about bystander intervention. Both the Clothesline Project and Take Back the Night are incredibly powerful events, and worth attending. Read more for more information about the unique Take Back the Night speaker, for more information about both, and for statistics about sexual assault at JMU and in the U.S.

The Take Back the Night Coalition worked with FYI to promote the Clothesline Project, which is in Transitions the first week of April, Monday through Wednesday, and Take Back the Night is Tuesday, April 3, in Grafton, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. The Clothesline Project consists of t-shirts that survivors have made to share their stories, hung up all over Transitions in Warren—it is an intentional  display to share stories, all of which are anonymous, and is a very powerful event – some shirts are even ones that survivors wore during the assault. It is a completely silent event, and an opportunity to create your own t-shirt.

Take Back the Night is the biggest event at JMU during Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Survivors share stories, and the community comes together to show support for those who have experienced assault or are secondary survivors. It includes poetry and musical performances by students—and the poetry is both written and in spoken word form. It also features an a capella music performance. This year’s guest speaker is Mark Dawson, and this is the second time TBTN has featured a male speaker. (The first was when Dr. Arnold Kahn spoke about 10 to 15 years ago). According to Lindy Bathurst, a member of the TBTN coalition at JMU, part of the intention is to gain male support, as he is a secondary survivor. Dawson will be talking about relationships, consent, and the support you can give to a survivor. He brings a new perspective to JMU and may be able to reach a wider audience. His talk will also, critically, focus on what is helpful for survivors, how to react positively as someone hearing about a loved one’s experience of sexual assault. He wants to avoid putting blame on males as a whole, as such an attitude can be isolating, making discussion of sexual assault hard to talk about, and addresses the importance of open communication and support. Part of the hope in inviting Dawson is that a male speaker talking about consent may be able to reach a wider audience and open people’s eyes to be more understanding, as it can be hard to deal with when someone tells you about being assaulted and you don’t know how to react.

After Dawson’s talk a speak out will occur—a completely anonymous session where people can share their stories and experiences which is very powerful. This will be followed by a candlelight march on quad. Each component of the event is focused on reaching a wide audience and helping people share their own stories and providing an environment of support to make this less of a taboo topic. Bathurst noted, this is a “very personal thing, and very powerful thing since you come together as a community. It can be overwhelming because it’s a heavy topic, but at the same time it’s a really good thing to provide support and help and understanding for survivors and secondary survivors.”

Sexual assault is a serious, pervasive issue worldwide, and at JMU specifically. According to TBTN’s statistics, one in four women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, which is the same for JMU too, although this just includes reported cases. According to RAINN, one in 33 men will experience an attempted or completed rape in his lifetime.  A majority of assaults are committed by someone the victim knows, unlike the common rape myth that most rapes are done by strangers. JMU has many resources and support systems, because the problem of sexual assault and rape are so common and widespread and can affect so many people. Student Wellness and Outreach has prevention programs. CARE (Campus Assault REsponse) has a 24/7 student run hotline, where survivors and secondary survivors can speak to a peer confidentially. Varner house features free sexual assault counseling, free support groups, and recommendations for places outside of campus.

Importantly, a recently implemented judicial rule states that if you report sexual assault and you are underage, and there was alcohol involved, you will not be prosecuted for underage drinking. The implementation of this rule has raised the number of reported cases on campus (note: the number of assaults have not increased, but reportages have).

For more information, you can:

Check out the National Take Back the Night Website.

See TBTN at JMU’s facebook page for additional information.

Go to RAINN — the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network — website for more information about sexual violence in the U.S.

Edited at 9:16 p.m. to change the statement that Mark Dawson was the first male speaker at TBTN.

In reflecting on this issue, I remembered that there had been occasions when a friend or I had been harassed in a place where we were supposed to feel encouraged to speak out on it, yet had not done so either. Even in places like school or work, where there are sexual harassment policies in place to protect us, why do we not utilize them?

One reason is vocabulary. Simply because a student has learned the term “harassment” or an employee has signed a declaration of their protection from it, does not indicate a complete understanding of the subject. Unless we are taught the words to describe what we have encountered, we cannot be expected to come forward. Learning the definition of harassment and what qualifies could make the difference between a victim thinking that they are just being teased and knowing that they are being harassed.

Another reason is circumstance. Women and girls especially are subjected to harassment in public almost all the time. Though there is legal protection (somewhat) easily available at school or work, we have little in the way of protection when walking down the street, in the grocery store, or at the mall. Seeing that street harassment is so often regarded as “no big deal,” and is infrequently validated as a problem, it can become easy to see all harassment this way. If we are trained to treat public harassment as something that comes with the territory of our gender, then it becomes difficult to differentiate between the harassment we can and can’t report.

A third reason is empowerment. Since we are young, girls are told that boys who tease and taunt them are “just being boys,” or worse, that they are doing so out of affection and to take it as a compliment. This attitude is pervasive, and often follows us to adulthood, where we learn to draw a parallel between unwanted playground attention and unwanted school and workplace attention. Unfortunately, we are frequently proven right as those in power often ignore or diminish complaints of sexual harassment, telling us loud and clear that speaking out will get us nowhere. Even women and girls who recognize harassment are often ashamed or afraid to come forward, out of suspicion that their claim will not be taken seriously or that they are somehow to blame for drawing unwanted attention.

Oh sweetheart, stop crying. He just LIKES you!

Harassment is a serious and awful occurrence, but not one that we have to accept. By teaching our children that anything that makes them uncomfortable is enough to come forward about, acknowledging and fighting public harassment, and taking action when they have the courage to speak up, we can show them that they have the right and the power to stop harassment. And maybe we’ll show those responsible that they don’t have the right to start.

Image via.

Everyone remember the transvaginal ultrasound state-rape law that was proposed in Virginia before an amended version was passed? Well, Texas has one of those laws on the books right now. It’s been the subject of several rallies and protests over the past few weeks because it’s invasive, unnecessary, and a violation of the bodies of people seeking abortions. Wendy Davis is a Democratic state senator from Texas, an outspoken advocate of Planned Parenthood who recently attended one of those rallies opposing anti-choice attacks on reproductive rights and justice.

This afternoon, her office was firebombed. Incredibly, no one was injured in the firebombing. If they had been, it wouldn’t have been the first time that someone was harmed or died due to anti-choice violence. You can go ahead and say that I’m making a leap, assuming that this is motivated by anti-choice politics, but I don’t really think it is. You see, anti-choice politicians don’t really find themselves getting firebombed, do they? This violence typically comes from one side of the issue. So we won’t know the exact motivations until the suspect is caught (if they are caught), but given a pattern of anti-choice violence I’m about to discuss I don’t think anyone would be surprised if the firebombing was over abortion rights.

Because in January, a clinic in Pensacola was firebombed. That’s how the year started off for advocates of reproductive justice. With a clinic set on fire. In 2011, a man plead guilty to arson at a Planned Parenthood in California. A man drove into a Planned Parenthood in St. Paul in 2009, claiming Jesus told him to do it. In New York an explosive went off outside a Planned Parenthood in 2001. I could go on listing instances of violence against abortion clinics and providers indefinitely. Arson. Firebombing. Explosives. Murder. Over 200 instances of arson and firebombing related violence have occurred since 1979. So it’s not really a stretch to assume a pro-choice politician’s office was firebomed because she is pro-choice since that happens a whole lot.

In the U.S. anti-abortion violence has directly caused the deaths of 4 doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, and a clinic escort. The first was David Gunn, in 1993, then John Britton the next year, then two receptionists in 1994, the death of guard Rob Sanderson in 1998 when the clinic where he worked was bombed, Dr. Slepian in 1998 who was shot at his home, and finally the most recent death in 2009 was the assassination of Dr. Tiller at his church in Kansas. Since 1977, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 assaults, and 3 kidnappings. One of the first major assaults was of Dr. Tiller, when a woman shot him in both of his arms to prevent him for performing more abortion. Dr. Tiller being the incredibly person that he was, worked to rehabilitate himself and despite this showed up to work until his death, usually wearing a bullet proof vest. His clinic was also firebombed in ’86, after this he hung up a banner saying “hell no, we won’t go.”

None of these events are isolated, of course. There’s a clear pattern here. A clear pattern of violence by one side of the abortion debate against another. Violence that is “justified” by belief in God or because abortion doctors are “baby-killers” (Bill O’Reilly coined the name “Tiller the Babykiller” inflaming hatred against George Tiller and spawning threats to his life). And the violence goes hand-in-hand with other tactics that the anti-choice movement uses. Tactics that students at JMU are familiar with, like comparisons of abortion to genocide and large displays of images allegedly depicting aborted fetuses.

In the 1990s, “Wanted posters” issued by Operation Rescue, an anti-choice terrorist organization, were widely disseminated, and a major factor in the murders of four doctors who performed abortions. These posters are terrifying, and contained the photos, names, addresses, phone numbers, and personal descriptive statistics of doctors and clinic employees. All four doctors that have been murdered had Wanted posters made about them, distributed by Operation Rescue. In 2010, new Wanted posters started cropping up in North Carolina, once again targeting clinic employees and doctors. Interestingly enough, Operation Rescue maintains they have no links to any of the individuals who murdered doctors, an utterly false statement (as you can see in the above Rachel Maddow clip) – Scott Roeder, the man who assassinated Dr. George Tiller, was in contact with their lawyers and actually became an anti-choice activist after being recruited by a friend in Operation Rescue. The first shooting of Tiller took place two years after the first Summer of Mercy – an event where thousands of Operation Rescue and radical anti-abortion activists convened outside his clinic for months with huge posters of aborted fetuses, among other things.

So there’s a history of violence against providers and clinics. A long history. A history of terrorism by people who claim to be pro-life against people seeking abortions, people who work at clinics, and doctors providing abortion. Is it any wonder that I’m assuming this recent firebombing is another example of anti-choice violence? It needs to be called like it is: this is domestic terrorism , and it’s going to continue as long as the “pro-life” side uses inflamed language and creates databases of abortion providers and get away with it. Is it any wonder that that sometimes I’m afraid because I’m dedicating my life to reproductive justice and this is what happens? This is what happens to people who want to protect the fundamental human right to one’s own body. But like Dr. Tiller, we won’t go, because this is important and we’re not going to stop fighting for the bodily autonomy of all people.

[Note: many of the links regarding abortion violence were originally posted by keepyourboehneroutofmyuterus.tumblr.com].

by Anne Archist

Phil Sheppard’s article, published on page 14 of The Cambridge Student today, might easily have been a scorecard for ‘patronising bingo’. First he sets the tone by telling us that “discussion of sexual offences is marred by miscommunication”; presumably he believes that nobody could possibly agree with them, if only they understood! Next, his opponents in the debate are told to “cease taking offence”. After all, we all know how emotional women are, right? And they do get “offended” at the silliest things like men pointing out that if they didn’t want to get raped then they shouldn’t have worn that skirt! I’m going to try to deconstruct most of what’s wrong with this particular article, but it’s part of a wider attitude towards rape and personal responsibility, and many of the same arguments could be applied to other examples of this general attitude. Note: I’m assuming Sheppard’s article is only supposed to address a contemporary Western audience, so I’m pretty much responding in kind.

The article’s argument is basically that although victims should not be morally blamed for any actions that may figure in their being raped, such as walking around late at night on their own, they are still causally responsible in a non-moral sense, and therefore more rapes could be avoided if we focused more on encouraging people to take precautions against being raped. It prominently features equivocation; this means using multiple meanings of the same term in an argument as if they were interchangeable. For instance: “All rivers have banks. All banks have cash-points. Therefore all rivers have cash-points.” This example plays on the multiple meanings of the word ‘bank’ in order to reach a clearly false conclusion. It should be evident this is a logical fallacy, meaning that all arguments of this form are invalid.

Sheppard’s equivocation is between two meanings of ‘responsibility’. First, he tells us that by ‘responsibility’ he means “situations in which … a person is a factual cause” (similar to what is known as ‘causal responsibility’ in the philosophical literature). He uses it accordingly when he writes that “If a homeowner leaves his house unlocked in a neighbourhood of renowned burglars, he is partly responsible for his losses”. However, he later writes that “Potential victims must be made aware that they have a responsibility to take reasonable steps to prevent being affected by crime”; here he uses ‘responsibility’ in the sense of an obligation or expectation laid on an individual to act in a certain way. He has therefore smuggled in the idea that women have some kind of behavioural obligations without attempting to justify this claim. After telling us he is using a narrow technical sense of the word at the start, he slips into a broader usage later on with no comment and no distinction maintained.

The claim of obligation looks justified, because the author seems to have followed a very rigorous, logical argument through to its conclusion. What he has actually done is use the same word in different contexts to make it sound like a logical argument, when in fact it is an illogical one. Being intellectually scrupulous, I should point out that his conclusion isn’t automatically false just because his argument is illogical. To illustrate: “My house is made of cats, therefore I have two eyes” is not a logically valid argument, but its conclusion is still true.

The article doesn’t rely entirely on this elision of meanings to reach its conclusion – Sheppard doesn’t just say that women have a “responsibility” to take precautions, but also (more reasonably) that perhaps it would be a good idea, purely from a practical point of view. There is certainly a difference here. To say that you are obliged to take precautions implies that you are held liable if you do not (i.e. that you will be considered “at fault” and therefore “blamed”, in Sheppard’s use of the word), and may justify less sympathy towards you, greater leniency towards the perpetrator, etc. To say that it would be a good idea to take precautions anyway is not necessarily to imply these things, in theory. This is the crux of the article – it says, in effect, “we won’t think any less of you if you don’t, but we’d prefer it if you wore a longer skirt”, etc.

There’s one obvious objection to this, which is more or less a recognition of the complexity of causality, the ‘butterfly effect’ model of causation. Yes, if the victim hadn’t walked down that alley, they wouldn’t have been raped. But similarly, if they had eaten a badly-preserved curry they found in the fridge the day before rather than throwing it away, they would have been suffering from food poisoning and not left the house at all that night. Or, if they had left the club an hour earlier they would have walked down the alley before the attacker arrived. Or…

The point here is not to be a smartass. The point is to say that responsibility in the sense of factual cause, which Sheppard says he is talking about, is highly dispersive – as you examine it, more agents become involved, more acts become involved, individual agents’ links become more tenuous and individual actions’ effects become harder to trace, etc. Even with a relatively limited frame of reference we can identify many potential agents and acts that could have changed the outcome in many cases.

Suppose someone takes a taxi to a party and rapes someone there. Is the taxi driver responsible for the rape? In the ordinary sense of the word, clearly not. In the technical sense Sheppard claims to be using, though, they are – their acts formed part of a chain of events that caused the rape. Of course the taxi driver has no idea that their actions will result in a rape, but this is irrelevant to their being a “factual cause”. The moment we start introducing judgements about whether someone knew or could have guessed the consequences of their actions,  we have gone beyond the type of responsibility Sheppard is addressing; frankly, we are starting to draw a line between merely being a part of a causal chain and having some moral significance in the causal chain, which is precisely what we have agreed we are not doing when we say a victim’s actions may be preconditions for their being raped.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Sheppard comes back with a response that goes something like this: “I’m not saying there’s any moral blame attached to the victim knowing their actions make their being raped more likely, I’m just saying that if they can see the consequences then they probably should act differently” – not in the sense of a moral ‘should’, just in the sense that you ‘should’ go to the gym if you want to lose weight (what Kant called “the hypothetical imperative”). This is the only way out of the dilemma that I can see.

This is where I really part ways with the article’s author. He comes across as entirely ignorant of the realities of rape and women’s lives. This isn’t necessarily his fault, as such, and it’s often difficult to know how little you know, so I don’t blame him for thinking he could write a well-informed and well-argued article. Perhaps he has actually studied rape statistics in depth and so on, but we can only go on the article, which puts across an impression of someone who still thinks that rape is something that happens only when a drunk woman in a short skirt walks down a dark alley on her own and a man leaps from a dustbin to violently assault her.

Among Sheppard’s paternalistic pronouncements is the exhortation to women to “begin taking care”. I get the impression that he, like many men, has never considered what he has never had to consider – what might a woman’s life be like? By that I mean both the events that take place in her life, objectively, and her own subjective experience and internalisation of those events. I’m sure Sheppard means well, but perhaps he should think before he puts pen to paper about how much sexual harassment women may have to deal with on a weekly basis, how many women have survived sexual violence and desperately want not to go through it again, how much more attention women may pay to their drinks in clubs, etc. The fact that he literally tells women to be more careful is perhaps the most patronising aspect of the article – but don’t get offended, remember!

Still, people could always take more care, right? Nobody’s perfect. I should re-state Sheppard’s advice as clearly as possible: “[There is] a risk known to, and avoidable by, the victim [who therefore should] take reasonable steps to prevent being affected by crime”. There are several problems with this thesis: firstly, sexual violence is not as easily avoided as he implies; secondly, it is not as easy to determine the reasonability of steps as he implies; thirdly, regardless of the author’s protestations, it puts the emphasis on the wrong party.

Certainly, we know that there is a risk of rape. Some women feel this as practically ever-present, at least in the back of their minds.  But the more you know about rape, the more you realise it isn’t something you can expect to protect yourself against. Multiple studies have confirmed that the majority of perpetrators are known by their victims, most commonly as a husband or partner. Around a third of girls have been sexually assaulted, often by relatives or other trusted adults. How exactly does one avoid these attacks? Should women stop entering romantic relationships? Should young girls lock their doors from the inside when they go to bed at night?

I know both men and women who have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted. One took the “precaution” of getting a (licensed) cab home and was harassed by the driver, who then tried to attack her. One was an adolescent boy attacked by a trusted older male. One was attacked by a stranger in a supposedly very safe environment. There are more, in varied circumstances. The vast majority of these were in supposedly safe circumstances, with supposedly trustworthy people; in fact, I know of only one person who was attacked while walking around in public on their own.

So what would Phil Sheppard have women do? It also seems strange that he doesn’t suggest that men take any precautions – most victims of rape are women, but not all, and apparently we all have a “responsibility” to avoid being raped… And what exactly counts as a reasonable precaution? Once we confront the real trends in rape, rather than the ‘stranger in the bushes’ mirage, should women avoid relationships with men, going outside their own home at all, letting men into their home, etc?

Chastity belts might be some help, but even they have their limits. I’m inclined to think all of these things fall outside the “reasonable” camp. I take it then, that Sheppard is just encouraging women not to dress too sexily, get too drunk, or walk around alone at night, and hoping this will be enough to avert sexual attacks. I hope it’s evident by now why this is basically useless advice. In fact, the advice may be worse than useless.

By writing an entire comment piece about how women are really – after all – partially responsible for their own victimisation by rapists, Sheppard focuses the spotlight squarely on the victim themselves. Sheppard contributes to the overall culture of questioning women’s consent or non-consent in an accusatory manner. In other words, if you didn’t take reasonable precautions, then maybe you really secretly wanted it. This is akin to reprimanding women for not crying out loud enough (as Deuteronomy 22:24 does, condemning raped women to stoning to death as a result).

Sheppard says quite explicitly that the focus should not be on reducing men’s willingness to rape, but on increasing women’s fear: “Educating men about rape is laudable, but only insofar as it does not detract from personal risk-aversion”; women should act more afraid than they currently do, in other words. This renders the argument amenable to those who use rape as a tool of power, whether husband, father, soldier, teacher, politician or priest. Note the wording of the comment (surely not intentionally phrased this way). It would be one thing to say that it would be unfortunate if the focus on men’s responsibility led to women letting down their guard and then being raped. Instead, the wording used states that educating men about rape ceases to be laudable the moment it in any way detracts from (women’s) risk-averse behaviour.

Women’s fictional “responsibility” to take precautions (established only through equivocation) is given priority over men’s real responsibility not to rape (easily established by basic moral reasoning: rape is wrong and one has a responsibility not to do things that are wrong).Similarly, in a singularly unfortunate choice of words, Sheppard writes: “The continued drive against victim-blaming is having a detrimental effect”; in other words, all this feminist noise about how a victim shouldn’t be made to feel responsible for their own rape is distracting us from the Real Issue, which is that women just aren’t trying hard enough to avoid being raped. The implicit trade-off here is having a relatively full life versus the threat of being raped, particularly for women; know that you run the risk of sexual violence if you want to go out alone at night, if you want to have close relationships with men, if you want to travel, etc.

For the record, I don’t think Phil Sheppard is an unreconstructed misogynist victim-blaming rape apologist. I think he’s a relatively intelligent person who’s trying to take an ‘objective’, ‘academic’ stance on a question of power politics that exists in the real world without letting the real world inform that stance. I think he’s got people’s best interests at heart, but I think his article is dreadfully-argued and counterproductive. It tells us nothing we can actually use – it has no actual suggestions of what people could do to take reasonable precautions. It doesn’t even acknowledge the areas that might be problematic, like how small the impact of “precautions” on rape may be, or the contested nature of “reasonable” precautions. This is compounded by the fact that he has worded some things very badly and adopted an air of patronising academia that has been abused to veil an invalid argument towards an empirically-ill-supported conclusion. Phil, I’m sure you’re not trying to blame rape survivors – I understand that, you haven’t miscommunicated it – but I do think you’re going the wrong way about supporting them and fighting rape.

You may have noticed that some people, especially feminists, use the word ‘survivor’ instead of ‘victim’ to refer to people who have experienced some form of gendered violence,* most commonly, rape, domestic abuse, childhood sexual abuse, or prostitution. This article will explain why this is, the context and history of the term, and some limitations.

[Disclaimer: I write this from the position of having experienced certain forms of gendered violence, but none particularly extreme or the ones named above. I have the privilege of not being described by society as a 'victim', therefore I do not claim the word survivor for myself. So I write this as a privileged outsider, who may well say oppressive things.  Please call me on stuff if you feel confident to.  Similarly, I'm going to touch on how these issues affect women with various identities, some of which I share, some of which I don't: if you know better, please correct me.]

‘Survivor’ is an excellent replacement for ‘victim’ primarily because it avoids the problems which ‘victim’ carries with it, in both social and psychological contexts. In particular, it communicates a fundamental passivity which is both inaccurate and damaging. At the same time, it carries connotations of blame: that the passivity is some how chosen.

Not a victim: social contexts

[warning for victim-blaming and other shitty responses]

So victim, the more ‘mainstream’ word, is used by lots of people.  The most common place I come across it is the police, and the media, those two famous bastions of resistance to rape culture.* On the one hand, its use often shows one positive thing: it at least recognises that someone committed a crime against this person, and that they were injured by it.  Getting this recognised is still a struggle: remember when a US lawmaker wanted women** reporting rape in the criminal justice system to be referred to as ‘accusers’ instead of victims?  As a society, we are particularly bad at recognising the victimisation of women who are coded as hypersexual, and therefore ‘unrapeable’, by our cultural norms, e.g. women who are poor, young, black, trans, prostituted, and/or bi.  (Side note: hypersexualisation is one thing society expects of all those groups, but they all have different extra myths and oppressions that further add to their being seen as unrapeable.)  So when ‘victim’ is used, we know they’re getting at least one thing right.

However, the word ‘victim’ is extremely disempowering. It is a noun which identifies a person solely according to what someone did to them: nothing about what they did to resist or respond, or anything about any other identity they may have. In this way, it also plays into our ideas about what a victim really looks like: passive, perfectly compliant with police and prosecutors’ demands, not angry, sexually pure (which isn’t just about her history, it’s about her race, class and other identities and what meanings are attached to them). This fits well with the standard treatment of ‘victims’ in the courts and media: investigate the crime by interrogating her to discover any deviation from this ideal, which must necessarily mean it wasn’t rape.  These problems aren’t caused by the word victim, of course, but it fits right in to this social context, and helps it to continue.

It also encourages others to see people who’ve experienced violence as pitiful, helpless and in need of rescuing. Clearly not capable of making their own decisions and looking after their own interests, they need a ‘normal’ person, a non-victim, to take control and look after them.  Hence the commonness of storylines where victims are coerced into (supposedly) therapeutic activities (e.g this House episode where House manipulates a woman into talking in detail about the rape, and this Desperate Housewives episode where a husband pressures his wife into getting counselling for the impacts of childhood sexual abuse). (Note: do not do this. Ever.  Even if you mean well. Please leave a comment if you would like me to write an article on how to support people who are dealing with the impacts of sexual abuse and/or other violence).

Deeply tied into this air of pitifulness is the idea that victimhood is somehow chosen. This may extend to blame for the violence itself (e.g. ‘why didn’t you fight back?’***), or blame for their experiencing its on-going psychological impacts (e.g. ‘I can’t help her when she’s being such a victim’). These attitudes have a clear overlap with myths and prejudices about mental unwellness, and some aspects of physical unwellness, in general. One of the reasons it’s so common is because people want to believe in a just world, where they have control over the niceness of their life: believing that people are happy and healthy if they chose to be and work on it is a protective belief.  But that doesn’t excuse it.  Needless to say, expression of these attitudes, and the support which using ‘victim’ lends to them, is really harmful to people dealing with the impacts of violence, and props up rape culture in general.

These connotations of pitifulness and passivity can be particularly hurtful for women with identities already seen as those things by society, e.g. women who are disabled and/or young.  Perhaps white women also belong in this category, I’m not sure.  The connotations of blame for mental dis-ease and general screwed-up-ness can be used against women with mental illnesses particularly powerfully, and women who do things which are pathologised in a victim-type way, e.g. women who are submissive BDSM practitioners and/or adherents to certain religious traditions and practices.

Not a victim: psychological contexts

These meanings of passivity and blame which accompany ‘victim’ should also be avoided because they are inaccurate. Both during and after sexual abuse and other violence, women use active strategies to reduce, avoid and recover from the harm done to them. For instance, some people use dissociation* to limit their contact with the experience and reduce the damage done by it. Other may imagine a better life, plot revenge, or keep some aspect of their life and thoughts safe from the abuser. Even what may look like a passive response is usually a crucial survival mechanism. (See the link in the *** note at the bottom).

An important part of dealing with the impacts of sexual violence is honouring these often-ignored acts of resistance. Many women’s organisations work along these lines, treating the people who come to them not as an ‘object’ that has been acted upon negatively, and must be acted upon positively in treatment, but as an ‘agent’ who has already responded effectively to violence, and can continue to. Other crucial parts of working with people in this way include revealing and rejecting language which, under rape culture,

“(a) conceals violence, (b) obscures and mitigates perpetrator responsibility, (c) conceals victims’ resistance, and (d) blames or pathologizes victims.”

From Coates & Wade’s article Telling It Like It Isn’t: Obscuring Perpetrator Responsibility for Violent Crime, published in 2004 in the journal Discourse & Society.  (Or, more accurately, I got it from Wikipedia.)

So instead of phrases like “unwanted sex” we say ‘rape’; instead of “she was raped”, we say ‘he raped her”; instead of “why didn’t you tell anyone?” we ask, “how did you cope with that?”; and instead of seeing psychological distress as ‘effects’ of abuse, we see them as responses following abuse, which are often useful coping strategies.*  And instead of ‘victim’ we say ‘survivor’.

These ideas are common in feminist organisations working against rape and abuse. One place where these ideas have been solidified into more respected professional practice is in Response-Based Therapy.

Where does this come from?

Using the term ‘survivor’ to refer to people who experienced abuse probably arose from the early radical feminist activism against rape and childhood sexual abuse. Kathleen Barry has been called the first person to advocate for this usage in the late 1970s , but the term itself cannot be attributable to a single woman, especially working in movement where collective action was so crucial. So, right from the start of the feminist ‘discovery’ of rape, domestic abuse and child sexual abuse, when radical feminists set up the first refuges, held the first speak-outs and first joined together in consciousness-raising groups, the agency and power of women was recognised and highlighted.

So, for instance, Barry writes (in Female Sexual Slavery, 1979) that before widespread rape and abuse began to be recognised, it was essential to prove the non-complicity of women in these acts, and hence passivity was stressed, and the label ‘victim’ claimed. However, due to the meanings which a pro-rape culture attaches to that term (see above), the ‘victim’ can become a term to describe a person’s identity and attitude, and “in doing so, contributed to the continued objectification of that person which had commenced with the act of sexual violence.” (From Breaking the Silence: Restorative Justice and Child Sexual Abuse by Shirley Jülich, which is downloadable as a PDF.) Instead, Barry advocated using the term survivor, which acknowledged the agent-hood of the child or woman, and the strategies they had constructed to resist and deal with the impacts of sexual violence.

Today, the word survivor is much more common, and this is largely due to the efforts of feminists working against violence to publicise the word and our need for it, especially those working in Rape Crisis centres and similar feminist organisations.

One of the common arguments within feminism is around the victimhood of women.  It is usual to hear some feminists criticise radical and/or second wave and/or violence-focused feminists of clinging unproductively to victim status, and denying women’s power and agency (e.g. Naomi Wolf’s idea of ‘victim feminism’ vs ‘power feminism’. I hope I’ve shown here that this is a completely strawfeminist.

Limitations

At the end of the day, the word survivor, is, like victim, a noun. It describes a person according to their experiences of (and resistance to) violence, and nothing more: it is one-dimensional. I have heard some women who have experienced violence reject it for these reasons: they felt that it limited and patronised them. So I try to use phrases like ‘women who have survived childhood sexual abuse’ where possible.

Another limitation is that the replacement of ‘victim’ with ‘survivor’ can be seen as a complete rejection of ‘victim.’ Instead, the word victim should be able to be reclaimed by anyone who feels it applies to them. Stripped of the additional meanings it is given by a kyriarchal and pro-rape culture, it simply means one who had violence done to them, and as such must be freely available to be used by anyone in that position.  More than that, we need to completely change our culture so that victim no longer carries those negative connotations, because we recognise women’s strength and lack of culpability in crimes committed against them.  Rejecting ‘victim’ and everything that goes with it can be particularly harsh on people with identities such that society expects them to be strong, e.g. black women (see this excellent post).

Something to beware of with ‘survivor’ language is the ‘victim-to-survivor’ discourse and how that can play right into the problems I covered in section one.  I think this is too big an issue to deal with in one paragraph here, so I’m saving it for a future post.

The last limitation is a big one: for all that getting language right matters, it is not the be-all and end-all. At the moment, the use of survivor usually marks people who ‘get’ this to some extent from those who don’t, and so can be useful for anyone seeking solidarity or support, but it does not always accompany good understandings or good behaviour. I have heard the term survivor used by: abusers, politicians co-opting the anti-rape movement for their own gain, politicians slashing funding for survivors’ services, and police and other professionals trying to show that they have understood the issues, when they really, really haven’t.

So, what can we actually *do* to make survivors’ lives easier? [This list is intended for people who have not experienced sexual abuse or other violence, but obviously everyone else can join in too if you'd like!]  Disclaimer: not everyone is able to do everything on this list, and that’s totally fine.  Also, just because you *can* do something, doesn’t mean you should run yourself into the ground doing it.  Activist self-care and all that. (More on that story later.)

• Get in contact with your nearest Rape Crisis centre, women’s refuge or other political anti-violence organisation, and find out if they need anything you can give. E.g. campaign against cuts to their funding, fundraise for them, or help to publicise them.
• Go and make sure you’d know how to react if someone disclosed their experiences of abuse or other violence to you. Read everything you can, taking care of your own emotional health as you do.  When you’re confident you wouldn’t be a wombat, and have supported a couple of people in this way, start asking the question.
• Look for online activism: sign some petitions, send emails to MPs, share things, write complaints.
• Find out if your workplace/campus has a decent sexual assault policy, and if not, campaign for one. (Get in touch with the women’s branch of your union if you think this might get you in trouble).
• Talk about these things. Once you’ve read/talked enough to be angry, and confident of some facts, start spreading the word. Get into arguments. Online or off.  Bear witness to rape culture and women’s experiences of victimisation and secondary victimisation.  Doing so won’t just (hopefully) persuade a few ignorant people, it will let any survivors listening know that someone’s on their side.

*Other vocab I use in this area, like gendered violence, rape culture, coping strategies or dissociation could be the topic of another article like this: would you read such an article?

**Referring to people who have experienced sexual abuse, rape and other gendered violence I use female and gender-neutral pronouns and nouns interchangeably.  I use female ones because persuading people that the vast majority of people targeted by rapists and abusers are female is a struggle we have not yet won.  I use gender-neutral ones to acknowledge that, because these crimes are a cause and consequence of inequality, other inequalities are relevant, so for example, boys, and men who are imprisoned, disabled and/or queer are targeted as well.   It also includes non-binary gender and agender people for similar reasons.

***This is never an acceptable question to ask someone who has experienced rape or other violence; it is unacceptable to interrogate their behaviour rather than the attacker’s. However, it may be useful to point out that there are many social and interpersonal limits on people’s resistance to such attacks, such as not wanting loved ones to hear, and having been taught (generally or specifically, by the attacker or by others) not to resist authority. Beyond that, there are often also physiological limits on physical resistance, which kick in regardless of what the person decides: you’ve probably heard of the neurological responses to threats known as ‘fight or flight’, but you may not have heard of the other three responses known as ‘freeze’, ‘flop’, or ‘friend’.

You may have noticed that some people, especially feminists, use the word ‘survivor’ instead of ‘victim’ to refer to people who have experienced some form of gendered violence,* most commonly, rape, domestic abuse, childhood sexual abuse, or prostitution. This article will explain why this is, the context and history of the term, and some limitations.

[Disclaimer: I write this from the position of having experienced certain forms of gendered violence, but none particularly extreme or the ones named above. I have the privilege of not being described by society as a 'victim', therefore I do not claim the word survivor for myself. So I write this as a privileged outsider, who may well say oppressive things.  Please call me on stuff if you feel confident to.  Similarly, I'm going to touch on how these issues affect women with various identities, some of which I share, some of which I don't: if you know better, please correct me.]

‘Survivor’ is an excellent replacement for ‘victim’ primarily because it avoids the problems which ‘victim’ carries with it, in both social and psychological contexts. In particular, it communicates a fundamental passivity which is both inaccurate and damaging. At the same time, it carries connotations of blame: that the passivity is some how chosen.

Not a victim: social contexts

[warning for victim-blaming and other shitty responses]

So victim, the more ‘mainstream’ word, is used by lots of people.  The most common place I come across it is the police, and the media, those two famous bastions of resistance to rape culture.* On the one hand, its use often shows one positive thing: it at least recognises that someone committed a crime against this person, and that they were injured by it.  Getting this recognised is still a struggle: remember when a US lawmaker wanted women** reporting rape in the criminal justice system to be referred to as ‘accusers’ instead of victims?  As a society, we are particularly bad at recognising the victimisation of women who are coded as hypersexual, and therefore ‘unrapeable’, by our cultural norms, e.g. women who are poor, young, black, trans, prostituted, and/or bi.  (Side note: hypersexualisation is one thing society expects of all those groups, but they all have different extra myths and oppressions that further add to their being seen as unrapeable.)  So when ‘victim’ is used, we know they’re getting at least one thing right.

However, the word ‘victim’ is extremely disempowering. It is a noun which identifies a person solely according to what someone did to them: nothing about what they did to resist or respond, or anything about any other identity they may have. In this way, it also plays into our ideas about what a victim really looks like: passive, perfectly compliant with police and prosecutors’ demands, not angry, sexually pure (which isn’t just about her history, it’s about her race, class and other identities and what meanings are attached to them). This fits well with the standard treatment of ‘victims’ in the courts and media: investigate the crime by interrogating her to discover any deviation from this ideal, which must necessarily mean it wasn’t rape.  These problems aren’t caused by the word victim, of course, but it fits right in to this social context, and helps it to continue.

It also encourages others to see people who’ve experienced violence as pitiful, helpless and in need of rescuing. Clearly not capable of making their own decisions and looking after their own interests, they need a ‘normal’ person, a non-victim, to take control and look after them.  Hence the commonness of storylines where victims are coerced into (supposedly) therapeutic activities (e.g this House episode where House manipulates a woman into talking in detail about the rape, and this Desperate Housewives episode where a husband pressures his wife into getting counselling for the impacts of childhood sexual abuse). (Note: do not do this. Ever.  Even if you mean well. Please leave a comment if you would like me to write an article on how to support people who are dealing with the impacts of sexual abuse and/or other violence).

Deeply tied into this air of pitifulness is the idea that victimhood is somehow chosen. This may extend to blame for the violence itself (e.g. ‘why didn’t you fight back?’***), or blame for their experiencing its on-going psychological impacts (e.g. ‘I can’t help her when she’s being such a victim’). These attitudes have a clear overlap with myths and prejudices about mental unwellness, and some aspects of physical unwellness, in general. One of the reasons it’s so common is because people want to believe in a just world, where they have control over the niceness of their life: believing that people are happy and healthy if they chose to be and work on it is a protective belief.  But that doesn’t excuse it.  Needless to say, expression of these attitudes, and the support which using ‘victim’ lends to them, is really harmful to people dealing with the impacts of violence, and props up rape culture in general.

These connotations of pitifulness and passivity can be particularly hurtful for women with identities already seen as those things by society, e.g. women who are disabled and/or young.  Perhaps white women also belong in this category, I’m not sure.  The connotations of blame for mental dis-ease and general screwed-up-ness can be used against women with mental illnesses particularly powerfully, and women who do things which are pathologised in a victim-type way, e.g. women who are submissive BDSM practitioners and/or adherents to certain religious traditions and practices.

Not a victim: psychological contexts

These meanings of passivity and blame which accompany ‘victim’ should also be avoided because they are inaccurate. Both during and after sexual abuse and other violence, women use active strategies to reduce, avoid and recover from the harm done to them. For instance, some people use dissociation* to limit their contact with the experience and reduce the damage done by it. Other may imagine a better life, plot revenge, or keep some aspect of their life and thoughts safe from the abuser. Even what may look like a passive response is usually a crucial survival mechanism. (See the link in the *** note at the bottom).

An important part of dealing with the impacts of sexual violence is honouring these often-ignored acts of resistance. Many women’s organisations work along these lines, treating the people who come to them not as an ‘object’ that has been acted upon negatively, and must be acted upon positively in treatment, but as an ‘agent’ who has already responded effectively to violence, and can continue to. Other crucial parts of working with people in this way include revealing and rejecting language which, under rape culture,

“(a) conceals violence, (b) obscures and mitigates perpetrator responsibility, (c) conceals victims’ resistance, and (d) blames or pathologizes victims.”

From Coates & Wade’s article Telling It Like It Isn’t: Obscuring Perpetrator Responsibility for Violent Crime, published in 2004 in the journal Discourse & Society.  (Or, more accurately, I got it from Wikipedia.)

So instead of phrases like “unwanted sex” we say ‘rape’; instead of “she was raped”, we say ‘he raped her”; instead of “why didn’t you tell anyone?” we ask, “how did you cope with that?”; and instead of seeing psychological distress as ‘effects’ of abuse, we see them as responses following abuse, which are often useful coping strategies.*  And instead of ‘victim’ we say ‘survivor’.

These ideas are common in feminist organisations working against rape and abuse. One place where these ideas have been solidified into more respected professional practice is in Response-Based Therapy.

Where does this come from?

Using the term ‘survivor’ to refer to people who experienced abuse probably arose from the early radical feminist activism against rape and childhood sexual abuse. Kathleen Barry has been called the first person to advocate for this usage in the late 1970s , but the term itself cannot be attributable to a single woman, especially working in movement where collective action was so crucial. So, right from the start of the feminist ‘discovery’ of rape, domestic abuse and child sexual abuse, when radical feminists set up the first refuges, held the first speak-outs and first joined together in consciousness-raising groups, the agency and power of women was recognised and highlighted.

So, for instance, Barry writes (in Female Sexual Slavery, 1979) that before widespread rape and abuse began to be recognised, it was essential to prove the non-complicity of women in these acts, and hence passivity was stressed, and the label ‘victim’ claimed. However, due to the meanings which a pro-rape culture attaches to that term (see above), the ‘victim’ can become a term to describe a person’s identity and attitude, and “in doing so, contributed to the continued objectification of that person which had commenced with the act of sexual violence.” (From Breaking the Silence: Restorative Justice and Child Sexual Abuse by Shirley Jülich, which is downloadable as a PDF.) Instead, Barry advocated using the term survivor, which acknowledged the agent-hood of the child or woman, and the strategies they had constructed to resist and deal with the impacts of sexual violence.

Today, the word survivor is much more common, and this is largely due to the efforts of feminists working against violence to publicise the word and our need for it, especially those working in Rape Crisis centres and similar feminist organisations.

One of the common arguments within feminism is around the victimhood of women.  It is usual to hear some feminists criticise radical and/or second wave and/or violence-focused feminists of clinging unproductively to victim status, and denying women’s power and agency (e.g. Naomi Wolf’s idea of ‘victim feminism’ vs ‘power feminism’. I hope I’ve shown here that this is a completely strawfeminist.

Limitations

At the end of the day, the word survivor, is, like victim, a noun. It describes a person according to their experiences of (and resistance to) violence, and nothing more: it is one-dimensional. I have heard some women who have experienced violence reject it for these reasons: they felt that it limited and patronised them. So I try to use phrases like ‘women who have survived childhood sexual abuse’ where possible.

Another limitation is that the replacement of ‘victim’ with ‘survivor’ can be seen as a complete rejection of ‘victim.’ Instead, the word victim should be able to be reclaimed by anyone who feels it applies to them. Stripped of the additional meanings it is given by a kyriarchal and pro-rape culture, it simply means one who had violence done to them, and as such must be freely available to be used by anyone in that position.  More than that, we need to completely change our culture so that victim no longer carries those negative connotations, because we recognise women’s strength and lack of culpability in crimes committed against them.  Rejecting ‘victim’ and everything that goes with it can be particularly harsh on people with identities such that society expects them to be strong, e.g. black women (see this excellent post).

Something to beware of with ‘survivor’ language is the ‘victim-to-survivor’ discourse and how that can play right into the problems I covered in section one.  I think this is too big an issue to deal with in one paragraph here, so I’m saving it for a future post.

The last limitation is a big one: for all that getting language right matters, it is not the be-all and end-all. At the moment, the use of survivor usually marks people who ‘get’ this to some extent from those who don’t, and so can be useful for anyone seeking solidarity or support, but it does not always accompany good understandings or good behaviour. I have heard the term survivor used by: abusers, politicians co-opting the anti-rape movement for their own gain, politicians slashing funding for survivors’ services, and police and other professionals trying to show that they have understood the issues, when they really, really haven’t.

So, what can we actually *do* to make survivors’ lives easier? [This list is intended for people who have not experienced sexual abuse or other violence, but obviously everyone else can join in too if you'd like!]  Disclaimer: not everyone is able to do everything on this list, and that’s totally fine.  Also, just because you *can* do something, doesn’t mean you should run yourself into the ground doing it.  Activist self-care and all that. (More on that story later.)

• Get in contact with your nearest Rape Crisis centre, women’s refuge or other political anti-violence organisation, and find out if they need anything you can give. E.g. campaign against cuts to their funding, fundraise for them, or help to publicise them.
• Go and make sure you’d know how to react if someone disclosed their experiences of abuse or other violence to you. Read everything you can, taking care of your own emotional health as you do.  When you’re confident you wouldn’t be a wombat, and have supported a couple of people in this way, start asking the question.
• Look for online activism: sign some petitions, send emails to MPs, share things, write complaints.
• Find out if your workplace/campus has a decent sexual assault policy, and if not, campaign for one. (Get in touch with the women’s branch of your union if you think this might get you in trouble).
• Talk about these things. Once you’ve read/talked enough to be angry, and confident of some facts, start spreading the word. Get into arguments. Online or off.  Bear witness to rape culture and women’s experiences of victimisation and secondary victimisation.  Doing so won’t just (hopefully) persuade a few ignorant people, it will let any survivors listening know that someone’s on their side.

*Other vocab I use in this area, like gendered violence, rape culture, coping strategies or dissociation could be the topic of another article like this: would you read such an article?

**Referring to people who have experienced sexual abuse, rape and other gendered violence I use female and gender-neutral pronouns and nouns interchangeably.  I use female ones because persuading people that the vast majority of people targeted by rapists and abusers are female is a struggle we have not yet won.  I use gender-neutral ones to acknowledge that, because these crimes are a cause and consequence of inequality, other inequalities are relevant, so for example, boys, and men who are imprisoned, disabled and/or queer are targeted as well.   It also includes non-binary gender and agender people for similar reasons.

***This is never an acceptable question to ask someone who has experienced rape or other violence; it is unacceptable to interrogate their behaviour rather than the attacker’s. However, it may be useful to point out that there are many social and interpersonal limits on people’s resistance to such attacks, such as not wanting loved ones to hear, and having been taught (generally or specifically, by the attacker or by others) not to resist authority. Beyond that, there are often also physiological limits on physical resistance, which kick in regardless of what the person decides: you’ve probably heard of the neurological responses to threats known as ‘fight or flight’, but you may not have heard of the other three responses known as ‘freeze’, ‘flop’, or ‘friend’.

Image via Common Sense Atheism. 

[Trigger warning: Discussion of misuse of the word rape and the transvaginal ultrasounds bill].

So I have a request to all Republican politicians currently talking about and actively restricting women’s reproductive rights and health. It’s a pretty simple request, I think. Here goes: if you don’t fucking know all the facts about an issue do not spout off your ill-informed opinion about it, and absolutely do not draft or introduce or pass legislation about it.

If you are going to do these things anyway, please know the consequences of your actions and don’t feign ignorance when asked the tough questions because people find your legislation to be unacceptable.

Specifically, I am talking about Delegate Bob Marshall, the author of H.B. 1, Virginia’s Personhood bill. You see, Mr. Marshall seems to have no idea what his piece of legislation would actually do, or he’s faking unawareness of the consequences to avoid opprobrium from the public. Either way, it’s not okay, and especially not from an elected official supposedly representing the white, straight, cismen people of Virginia.

Previously, personhood measures, which are designed to give full legal personhood to a fertilized egg, have been ballot initiatives in states like Colorado and Mississippi. Because of just how extreme they are they have been rejected by voters in these states, which is why in Virginia, personhood advocates went through the very conservative legislature instead. (Lovely, how they knew the people wouldn’t want it so they circumvented that whole thing…) By design, personhood laws would ban abortion and hormonal birth control. Bob Marshall has dismissed the concerns of pro-choice activists and people who don’t hate women insisting that his law will not ban abortion or birth control.

But Mr. Marshall is very, very wrong. The way hormonal contraceptives work, is that if a mistake happens and an egg does happen to be fertilized by a sperm, the birth control will prevent the fertilized egg from implanting. These types of hormonal birth control include the most popular form of contraceptives, the pill, as well as Implanon, IUDS, Nuvaring, and more. And it’s important to note that while the primary function of birth control is exactly that, to control birth, women also take it for a myriad of other health reasons– to control cramps and heavy periods, to prevent ovarian cysts, and so on. The negative consequences of banning birth control are far-reaching, and also unconstitutional, given the decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. When you grant full personhood rights to a fertilized egg and say that (I’m quoting from the text of the legislation here) “Unborn children have protectable interests in life, health, and well-being“ you are criminalizing abortion and birth control. If abortion gets in the way of the “protectable interests in life” of a embryo or fetus that you have declared to be a full legal person (despite the fact that it’s just a cluster of cells) then it will be made illegal by this law. And the Personhood movement knows this, because this is the point of the Personhood movement. In 2011, their spokesman confirmed that the Mississippi Personhood amendment would ban birth control. Sure, Marshall doesn’t want to say that because he knows how profoundly stupid it would be to support a birth control ban. But that doesn’t make these concerns untrue or scare tactics.

Honestly, I can’t really believe I have to explain this. I can’t believe that the man who introduced this anti-woman anti-choice legislation is pretending that it won’t have these effects. Furthermore, this is such a blatant overreach by the allegedly small government Republican legislature that interferes with the core principles of Roe v. Wade, that a woman has the right to privacy and a private relationship between herself and her doctor.

Another bone I have to pick with Bob Marshall is his liberal use of the word rape. The only acceptable time to use the word rape is when you are talking about rape. Don’t use it as a comparison to anything else, don’t make jokes, just don’t. But according to Bob Marshall, a man who supported the transvaginal ultrasounds law which would have mandated actual rape by the state, Obama’s healthcare law is “forcible economic rape.” First of all, fuck you, Bob Marshall. Second of all, no, the Affordable Care Act is not rape. Here’s the difference between these two laws: a nonconsensual, mandatory, and unnecessary 8-to-10-in probe forced in one’s vagina is rape. A law requiring Americans to have health care (a basic human right) is not.

So Bob Marshall clearly has a problem with reading comprehension and that’s sad for him, but health care is not rape and his bill will ban birth control and abortion. This tactic is not going to work, and all I ask is that Bob Marshall sit this conversation out, since he clearly doesn’t know shit about reproductive health. And if he won’t do that, then he needs to own up to the ramifications of his bill and stop playing dumb about it. The Republican party has overwhelmingly taken an anti-birth control stance, and Marshall clearly aligns with these beliefs.

What Republicans need to consider is this: do they really really want to be the anti-birth control party? And especially in a major election cycle? When 99% of women have used birth control (which includes 98% of Catholic women)? This isn’t about what Rep. Darrell Issa thinks it’s about. This isn’t about “religious freedom.” There is a clear disconnect between what Catholic women believe and practice in regards to birth control and what the all-male upper echelons of the Church believe about birth control.

As much as I hate to give advice to Republicans, here goes. Women vote in higher numbers than men. A vast majority of women have used birth control. And those women do not want their birth control banned. If you want to win elections, running on this extreme anti-contraception platform is not the way to go.

I was supposed to write my first full post on working women and feminism today. But lately, I’ve had something slightly more important on my mind. There’s been a lot of talk about rape in the news recently. From the Fox news reporter telling women in the military that they should expect to be raped to Virginia condoning government rape, I’ve been feeling pretty triggered lately.

That’s because 4 years ago, when I was 18, I was raped. It’s not something I talk about, or even write about, often. But it occurred to me that if all of this talk about rape in the news had left me feeling vulnerable and triggered, surely someone else felt it too. So I want to use this post to talk about the psychological effects of rape, from my own standpoint.

I know some of you must be wondering how this could affect me 4 years after the fact. There’s seems to be a perception that people just “get over” being raped in a short amount of time. But I’m here to tell you that that simply is not how it works. Granted, every person is different in their reaction. Personally, I didn’t start feeling severe effects until months afterward. But I began experiencing severe mood swings and frequent panic attacks.

At the end of my freshman year here at JMU, I tried to kill myself. I felt as though I had no control over my own life, like everything was just spiraling downward. I went over the nights I was raped over and over again in my head, trying to figure out what went wrong. I had myself convinced that it was my fault. I just felt like I couldn’t take it any more.

Luckily, I have a strong support group of friends and family who were there for me through every step of my recovery, even through a semester I took off from school. I also had a great therapist who spent months working with me, teaching me that I do have control over my own life and that things don’t have to be so bad. Thanks to her, I was able to return to JMU after a semester off ready to take on the world.

Since then, things have been pretty great. I’m able to maintain healthy sexual relationships and as time goes on it gets easier for me to trust people. But sometimes, I still show symptoms of the immense psychological damage that rape can do.  The worst are the flashbacks. I’d gone months without one, but in the last week I’ve been having vivid flashbacks while having sex with my boyfriend.

Now, let me explain about flashbacks. They aren’t just quick little snippets of memory flashing through my brain. For up to five minutes, I’m taken back to those moments. My boyfriend stops being my boyfriend because in my mind, he’s one of the assholes who raped me. I feel the same crippling fear I felt four years ago.  It is completely and utterly terrifying.

But it’s also incredibly frustrating. I want nothing more than a normal sex life. I wish I had lost my virginity in an awkward night with my high school boyfriend, instead of having it taken from me without choice. I want to be able to have sex without ending it curled up in a ball, hyperventilating for what feels like forever. I wish I didn’t have these flashbacks that leave my boyfriend looking confused and frustrated because he has no idea what to do. I just want to tell him to hold me and tell me that everything’s okay but sometimes I can’t even get the words out.

I’m sure you’re all wondering at this point how I deal with this. Honestly, some times I don’t know what to do. I can try my best to not watch shows that feature rape jokes, or movies with explicit rape scenes. But I can’t always control the news. And as a feminist activist, rape is something I have to hear about a lot. And weeks like this often end with me having increased flashbacks. I wish I had more advice to give, so that I could tell all the other survivors out there how to handle it. If any of you readers have advice, please share it, I know I welcome it. But sometimes, the most important thing is to remember to just keep breathing.

So call the governor and tell him that this is not okay, and that Virginia residents and his constituents will not stand for this bill. So we’ve written up some tips for you, when you decide to call him (and really, he deserves to be inundated with calls about this).

The number for his office is: (804) 786-2211. You can also email him at his official website.

Tips for calling the governor:

Make sure you say what you’re calling about – you are calling in regards to the bill mandating transvaginal ultrasounds for women who are seeking abortion.

Be concise and to the point – what does this law mean for you, specifically? (like, “This would be an invasion of my right to privacy and my right to an abortion”).

Say why you’re against it – it’s medically unnecessary, harmful to women, is a complete and utter violation of a woman’s body, is not cost effective, etc.

Give the exact action you want the governor to do – veto this bill.

Try and remain calm – you may want to call him and the Virginia GOP a bunch of stupid fuckers, but it’s for the best to save that for your blog.

Potential talking points:

Mandating ultrasounds, and specifically transvaginal ultrasounds, is an encroachment on a woman’s right to privacy and utterly unconstitutional. These ultrasounds are medically unnecessary, and amount to nothing more than a punitive violation of a woman’s body as mandated by the state.

Abortions are a necessary, sometimes lifesaving, medical procedure for women and people who can get pregnant, but a transvaginal ultrasound is in no way necessary for having an abortion.

Bob McDonnell should be a governor for all of his residents and constituents, including women and people who can have abortions. He should not succumb to ideological beliefs and require women have these invasive procedures to punish them for having abortions.

Women who live in Virginia deserve to live in a state that respects their rights and does not mandate unnecessary, harmful, and invasive procedures that violate their bodies, rights, and personhood.

From my friend, Molly – “As a constituent and a woman, I ask that Governor McDonnell veto the transvaginal ultrasound bill. It is medically unnecessary and invasive. No one should be forced to undergo such a procedure as a prerequisite to receiving a legal medical service. Not only would this be a waste of time, money, and resources, it amounts to state-sponsored rape.”

You can also sign these petitions to the Governor (and please do):

Repeal the Virginia “personhood” law and the abortion ultrasound law.

End the Virginia Personhood bill.

The number for his office is: (804) 786-2211.

Do it. Now.

Oh, and I would just like to note that not just women seek abortions, men and nonbinary individuals also need abortions too. So what I mean to say is if you’re in the category of a person who might ever need an abortion, you should move.

The fact that Chris Brown performed at the Grammys — the fact that he won a Grammy — just three years after he beat a woman with his fists so badly that she had to go to the hospital shows us just how normalized domestic abuse is in this country.

These reactions to his performance tell you pretty much everything you need to know about what we’ve taught women to expect from their relationships. Violence equals love. Any attention from a man is good attention, especially if he’s wealthy and talented.

We tell women that having a boyfriend or husband is so important that it doesn’t matter how he treats them. If you leave because of abuse, you must be overreacting, and what did you do to provoke him in the first place, anyway?

With this cultural mentality, is it any surprise that one in four women will experience domestic violence, or that 40 percent of girls between the ages of 14 and 17 know someone who has been hit or beaten by their boyfriend?

Sasha Pasulka already wrote a wonderful piece about just how not cool it was for Chris Brown to perform at the Grammys, and she said it better than I ever could have.

I’ll just add this:

If we ever want to stop gendered violence, we have to stop sweeping it under the rug. We can’t just forget about it because it’s inconvenient to stop downloading music from our favorite artist. We can’t forgive violent physical assaults because the perpetrator is attractive and talented or because he just seems like such a nice guy.

It’s time to start siding with victims of domestic violence and stop encouraging their abusers.

Razor blades, a common pair of scissors, even a piece of glass are all used as instruments in the process. Women who have had the procedure done not only deal with immense pain and excruciating recovery, they also deal with many severe side effects that can last for life. Problems with menses, urination, cysts, stillbirths, septicemia, shock, increased risk for the HIV infection, infertility, and even death can all be issues that result from FGM. Women who have undergone the procedure have also reported severe effects to her mental health, as it is understandably a traumatic experience done in her youthful years. Female genital mutilation is frequently performed in Africa, specifically the East African countries of Mail, Sudan, and Senegal, as well as Indonesia and the Middle East. Tradition plays a large role in FGM. Middle Eastern countries have been known to favor clitodirectomies as culture places a large emphasis on the absence of pleasure for women during sexual encounters. In Africa, marriage desirability commands FGM to take place, and female circumcision is viewed as a right of passage into womanhood. A woman is seen as marriage material once she has undergone the procedure, as men will refuse a woman who has not been “purified” by way of FGM.

Western culture notoriously views FGM as a demonic act that violates a woman’s right to her body and sexuality. While the medical implications and young age provide solid arguments in defense of the evils of female genital mutilation, Western feminism is frequently criticized on the basis of ethnocentrism.  Our class came to a group consensus that if there was an equivalent for men to endure then it would be less horrendous on the basis of feminism, as well as proper medical facilities that could ensure safe health practices for these young women. The idea of putting girls through excruciating pain when a reasonable alternative of antiseptic and anesthetic can be provided seems primitive in a modern world. Every life is important, and women’s health and well-being should not be sacrificed for the sake of tradition. It’s time to take control and compromise in practice, instead of compromising any more lives.

Recently, a friend of mine at a conference made a statement that post-apocalyptic films are a failure of the imagination, often being cheap translations of the contemporary moment’s anxieties into a future period where some protagonist eventually survives due to chutzpah or some other individualistic trait. They fail to provide any way for those watching the film in the present to address what are often legitimate concerns – overpopulation, disease, racism, etc. – and instead posit the only way out as a total failure of the system, a failure which often hinges on the continuance of some of the same traits in the present moment (think of the importance of canned food and Coke in the 2009 film adaptation of The Road). While I don’t entirely agree with my friend’s comment, it is hard to dispute it when discussing films like the 1976 Logan’s Run (which I quote only because I recently watched it), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009), and other examples. These movies are often critically panned, yet they do a brisk business at the box office which suggests to me that they fulfill some deeper cultural need for those viewers.*

I’m going to take my friend’s comment, which I admit was qualified and not a blanket dismissal of the genre, up and question the workings of the genre in a recent contemporary post-apocalyptic graphic novel: Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth. This series is now into 29^th issue due for release sometime in 2012 just as the 4^th collected paperback is also scheduled for release (January 31^st to be precise) in the new year. Jeff Lemire is a rising star in graphic novels, and one close to my heart, as his Essex County takes up small-town Ontario as a subject worthy of not just one but a series of graphic novels. Personal remarks aside, there is clearly a market for this series as it has been nominated for both Eisner and Harvey Awards in its relatively short life-span as well as maintaining strong enough sales to warrant its continuation by Vertigo. I’m only going to discuss the first collected paperback, Out of the Deep Woods, for the sake of brevity, even though I’ve read the other two. In discussing the genre and this work, I will give away some of the plot but I’ll try my best not to give away any of the later developments even though the second and third collections begin to develop interesting ideas and take the series in what I think is a better direction.

Some plot basics: the series is set in the United States after a devastating viral outbreak which causes the mass extinction of most humans. However, Lemire has given it a twist in that the virus has not only killed most humans but has also caused any new children born to be hybrid animal/human beings who are seemingly immune to the plague. As a result, these animal/humans are highly sought after by roving gangs of men and weird tribal cultists who worship them. The main character Gus, or Sweet Tooth as he is later named by Jeppard, is a young boy with deer antlers and pointed deer ears.

He is recognizably human, unlike some of the others in the later collections, and comes across as a naive and bumbling boy schooled in the the art of survival by his father but also taught a fundamentalist Christian worldview. The collection begins in the woods where he and his father have been hiding for a number of years but follows Gus as he leaves this wilderness with Jeppard after his father’s death. Jeppard is a hulking, ambivalent hunter who rescues Gus initially from some redneck hunters before promising to take Gus to a preserve especially for the animal/human children. Already you can see some of the defining traits of the post-apocalyptic genre at work here: a devastating crisis which destroys our current consumer/capitalist state, a reduction of humanity to violence and cruelty as their defining traits, guns as the primary form of law in this new world order, a journey undertaken by the main characters in hopes of a better future, and the absence of any real strong female characters.

Perhaps it is in the last post-apocalyptic staple that my friend’s comment bears the most truth on the genre. Most of the post-apocalyptic films, novels, and comics that I have read feature strong male protagonists and characters but almost never have strong female leads.** Recall The Road where the mother wanders off into the unknown rather than face the brutal future; the classic 1979 Mad Max where Mel Gibson fulfills a vendetta against Toecutter’s motorcycle gang after they murder his wife and child; Logan’s Run where Jenny Agutter, or Jessica 6, is basically arm-candy for Richard Jordan; or the 2009 film Carriers in which any significant decision made by a group of four adults comes from one of the two men. The genre in itself seems to create this problem: if you create a future where the current system has failed entirely and the worst has happened or is happening, then humanity will resort back to its more primal/basic instincts. In this scenario, the rule of violence and power comes to the fore, therefore men become the most powerful figures and women become property which is traded between or fought over by men. These scenarios seem to be a failure of imagination for two reasons: one that women, in the event of an apocalypse, will inevitably become weepy, weak, and submissive; and two, that there aren’t women who couldn’t do exactly what most of the men do which is find weapons, food, and survive by their instincts. Now I know plenty of women who stand a far better chance of surviving an apocalypse than I do. Some are biologists while others are athletes, far better suited to the rugged climate that features in almost every post-apocalyptic narrative while almost any woman from any military anywhere would certainly have better odds of survival than I would as an academic whose body is slowly melting away as a result of too much sitting around and reading.

Returning to Lemire’s series, Gus’s mother is missing from the beginning, glimpsed only as a wooden cross on a grave outside the cabin in the first few pages. The only live women who show up in the first collection happen to be prostitutes pimped out by a disgruntled married couple who are not averse to domestic violence in order to put them in their place. To be fair, Lemire doesn’t just leave them here, but frees them by having Gus guilt Jeppard into stepping in on the affair.

Gus's humanity

In writing this, I’m hearing Joe over my shoulder reminding me of the comics audience: an audience which happens to be primarily male. This may serve as a general explanation of why there are so few female characters in this series, but it doesn’t really address the general lack of strong female characters in the genre more broadly. Does this then suggest that the genre is primarily a male one? That it is disgruntled men who are viewing, purchasing, and producing post-apocalyptic narratives? Unfortunately I have no answer for this question as statistics showing the gender of film goers and comic purchasers are not readily available (if they exist at all). This, then, remains a key tension in the genre itself: how do post-apocalyptic genres configure gender relations, and can these narratives produce non-patriarchal power structures?

A second issue within Out of the Deep Woods that I would like to take up is the issue of nature and the natural world. This is an area close to my heart as my dissertation focuses on the role of nature in literature and how the way we talk about the natural world in cultural texts shapes our relationship to this external world. In post-apocalyptic texts, there is often a pervasive sentiment of anti-urban, misanthropic wilderness worship. I apologize for the clunky handle, but I can’t seem to put it in a more lucid phrasing. Basically it runs something like this: there is a crisis, the protagonists need to escape the city (because this is where lots of survivors are and they are competition for resources) into the wilderness in order to survive. At the heart is weird form of a masculine individualist ethos: get into the wilderness, survive by your wits and strength, and above all, avoid other human beings. My problem with this framework is that it suggests that wilderness will somehow save us all despite the fact that there may be some very compelling reasons it is wilderness in the first place (think of the Canadian tundra: it is wild because not a lot grows there and survival there today is touch and go at best ). The other, perhaps larger problem that I see is that it suggests that at a fundamental level humans cannot co-operate with each other in any sustainable way. This naturalizes consumerism’s inherent individualism and a weird form of social Darwinism common in capitalist thought where the brightest and strongest individuals survive.

Jeppard

Now I’m not completely convinced this is the case, I tend to see these concepts as cultural constructions rather than absolute facts (even though my rather limited knowledge of world history seems to suggest otherwise).

Returning from my digression to Out of the Deep Woods, Lemire’s text has a special place for the wilderness as the story starts here and some of the book’s best panels come in this section.

Gus meets a buck

Pastoral Eden, aka the woods

Such panels suggest that this is the kind of landscape best suited for survival, imparting it supreme value in a post-apocalyptic state. However, the problem becomes that such landscapes are pristine precisely for their lack of human inhabitants. The subtle suggestion running underneath this is that humans don’t belong in nature. That nature is best off when humans leave it alone, a theme that returns in the second and third volumes.

Returning to my opening anecdote and friend’s comment, while I see some flaws in Out of the Deep Woods, these seem to be genre or convention flaws rather than a failed artistic vision on Lemire’s part. This doesn’t let him totally off the hook for the way women are treated, but it does allow his other strengths to shine. I particularly like his innovative use of panels throughout the comic; he is not afraid to play with panel size and placement in a way that pushes the graphic medium further.

This may be my favourite panel in the issue. It's pretty amazing.

Note Lemire's use of red circles to highlight violence

He does not do it so much as to be distracting but chooses his points carefully. In such experimentation, I think Lemire shows that post-apocalyptic texts can be very imaginative and engaging. Moreover, I think that the way plays with the animal/human divide in not only its very premise but in the action of the narrative suggests an intelligent and compelling engagement with questions of what it means to be human and what it means to be non-human. Gus, despite his hybridity, continues to prove himself more human than Jeppard in this volume suggesting that Lemire himself may not be so uncritical of the violence he uses. Gus becomes the centre of Lemire’s social critique in the series, even though his naivete leads him into several tight spots. Gus suggests different possible ways of being in dire circumstances, a warning that is applicable to our own time amidst warnings of environmental collapse, economic meltdown, and other such cataclysms. Perhaps a return to wonder, compassion, and curiosity is our only way forward.

In closing, I politely disagree with my friend’s comment. Instead I would suggest that post-apocalyptic narratives can be fully developed and engaging imaginative exercises that offer a unique avenue of critique for our contemporary society. This is not to say that this is always the outcome of post-apocalyptic narratives. In fact, most post-apocalyptic narratives seem to contradict such statements. But as the old saying goes, don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

* The Day After Tomorrow collected $186 million at the box office and received an average rating of 5.3/10; The Road didn’t make much in the 2009 year at only $8 million (although this may be because the film was released in November) but did slightly better in ratings with a 6.9/10 ; 2012 made $166 million at the box office while receiving an average rating of  5/10. All totals are from boxofficemojo.com and reflect American gross totals (not international releases) while the ratings come from Rotten Tomatoes rating aggregator.

** One exception is Brian K. Vaughan’s Y:The Last Man which despite its male protagonist boasts a primarily female cast although one could take issue with the entire premise of the series which seems to read like a male sexual fantasy even if the series doesn’t really devolve to this level. A second exception is the 1985 Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome which stars Tina Turner as Aunty who controls Bartertown through an uneasy truce with Master Blaster. However, she is the villain of this movie even though she begrudgingly allows Gibson to live after earning her respect.

I was speaking with my girlfriend last night at Carrier, neglecting and procrastinating to review Plato, after my friend viewed a piece of work which used the “N” word.  My friend, she is African American, and was a little uneasy seeing the word explicitly, scattered in think paint.  This began our conversation on claiming these little words.  The little words being: the N, F, C, B, G, S words.  Or, as I would like to call them, the GSBCNF words.  I may, be forgetting a word here and there, and I apologize.  However, these are the words I see and have heard more frequently than the rest.

My opinion, you have no right to use these words if you are not of the group in which these words are used to slander.  And, if you are not of the group attempting to reclaim such words. Several times, and the “N” word is maybe the best example, when my African American friends use it, when I was younger, I wondered why they were “allowed” to use the word, when I wasn’t.  Of course, I must clarify, this was the times of high school.  Before my time of Africana Studies, before gender and minority studies.  This was at the time where I did not even though where the word grew out of from or why this group had begun reclaiming it.

As I wrote a previous blog, god knows how long ago (well I guess the date is on it), my entire blog was a contradiction.  And that is exactly it, is it still a contradiction to use these words?

Well, see, the whole point of this, I cannot speak the words of another group and I cannot speak for, necessarily, these other groups, that I myself am not socially constructed into.

As for the Cunt, Bitch, and Slut words, I occasionally use them.  But, though I may be right but most likely I am wrong as one of you will probably comment on eventually, it is not about reclaiming these words for me.  Instead, these words are used to slander the group I am apart of, though they have not explicitly been used against me personally.  Nevertheless, these words are apart of my group, therefore I have a little, little “leeway” to say them.

Unlike the N (Black), F and G (Homosexual)  words, I have no business, no business whatsoever using them.  Theses words,  I can never reclaim, words that no one could use as defamation against me.

Whether reclaiming, whether using because they are apart of your group, I hate to say, but keep within your group.  Of course, some of these words, to some individuals, should never be used by anyone.  My opinion, the F word should never be spoken, but guess what, I hear it all the time and I am sure you do too.

As well, the N word, should never come out of a white person’s or another race’s mouth.  The F and G words should never come out of a heterosexual’s mouth.  And, the C, B, and S words should never come out of a male’s mouth.

As I have begun to understand the impact these words have on individuals, it is best to familiarize ourselves with this impact and the consequences it has on not only the individual but also you.  Words themselves do hold meanings, because when a word is spoken, there is a whole entire history behind these words.  Histories we may not necessarily understand, reasons as to why individuals continue to use these words, we too may not understand.

But, if we can do a little nit-picking, if we can remove words not of our group, from our vocabulary, it is a little chipping away of prejudices.