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I must have missed that part of PCU…

I must have missed that part of PCU… published on 1 Comment on I must have missed that part of PCU…

Yesterday in my hometown, a man received seventeen life sentences for the repeated rape of two minor girls, some of which occurred while they were as young as 11 and 12 years old, respectively. Complicit in these rapes was the girls’ mother– actually no, she was far more than complicit. She arranged for it to happen, and on at least five occasions actually sat and watched this man, who is now 49 years old, have sex with her two daughters. She received a life sentence with no chance for parole for 25 years.

Something else I heard yesterday? That this man, and that woman, are just like people who support gay marriage. Yep:

There is a movement on to normalize pedophilia, and I guarantee you your reaction to that is probably much the same as your reaction when you first heard about gay marriage. What has happened to gay marriage? It’s become normal — and in fact, with certain people in certain demographics it’s the most important issue in terms of who they vote for. So don’t pooh-pooh. There’s a movement to normalize pedophilia. Don’t pooh-pooh it. The people behind it are serious, and you know the left as well as I do. They glom onto something and they don’t let go. […] What is their objective? They want us to all think that pedophilia is just another sexual orientation. You know who’s gonna fall right in line is college kids, just like they have on gay marriage, just like they do on all other revolutionary social issues. Their own definition of the cutting edge, civil rights, freedom, understanding, tolerance. So I’m just warning you here. You think it can’t happen. “Impossible! Don’t be nutso and wacko on us, Rush.”

Pedophilia– all of the college kids are gonna be doing it!

At Dispatches, Ed points out that in this insane rant, Rush Limbaugh doesn’t clearly articulate who “they” are– presumably “the left” in general (to be defined here as anyone whose politics do not align with Rush Limbaugh), those bleeding hearts who are ready to take up “revolutionary social causes” whatever those might be, because they’re just into…normalizing stuff. Stuff that Limbaugh doesn’t like, which usually has something to do with women’s and minority rights and sexual practices he personally doesn’t want to engage in. And hey, pedophilia falls into that latter category for him, certainly, so why not for liberals? Because after all, liberals stand for the interests of people Rush is not and the ability to do things Rush doesn’t want to do, and they are therefore the enemy!

No, right wingers are not narcissistic. Not remotely.

But yes, there’s a movement to normalize pedophilia– it’s called NAMBLA; it has been around for a very long time; and despite its self-description as a “civil rights” group, their efforts have mysteriously not resonated with left-leaning people generally, possibly because– going out on a limb here– having sex with underage boys isn’t something they consider to be a civil right.

Because of the consent thing, and all.

Given the slew of jaw-dropping comments made by conservative politicians in the news lately regarding rape, however, my confidence in right wing comprehension of what consent means, let alone their regard for it, is on seriously shaky ground. In case you’re having trouble keeping track (and I know; it’s like trying to keep track of who’s been caught with a rent boy most recently), here’s a handy infographic:

Credit: The Frisky

Now, it’s not at all news to see a right winger, especially someone like Rush Limbaugh, compare homosexuality to pedophilia. It’s beyond common– Rick Santorum has practically built his reputation on it, Rick Warren has done it and then issued “notpologies” for it…heck, in the (continuing) wake of child molestation scandals in the Catholic Church and Jerry Sandusky’s locker room, homosexuality and pedophilia have been directly equated: If you’re a homosexual, you’re probably a pedophile, or at least there’s nothing stopping you (and please don’t mention that the vast majority of child molestation and rape cases are like the one which begins this post– straight adult man and female child).

But…do they realize what they’re saying?

Do they realize that they’re saying that they, personally, don’t grasp the importance of consent? Especially the female kind?

I don’t think they do.

Secret Agent Woman

Secret Agent Woman published on 3 Comments on Secret Agent Woman

Jennifer Shewmaker, a psychology professor at Abilene Christian University, has a blog post blaming the Steubenville rape case in part on objectification of women. You should go read it, but first read about the Steubenville matter if you haven’t already. I have some theories about what would possess teenagers to create videos of themselves mocking a fellow student for getting repeatedly sexually assaulted at a party and then post the videos online, but they’re half-baked. And right now I want to talk about the aspect Shewmaker focuses on.

First, I agree that objectification does contribute to this, but a “me too” isn’t good enough here. “Objectification” has become to pat a word, too cliche. It’s not wrong, but it’s so commonly used that I think the meaning has been largely sucked out of it and people’s eyes tend to glaze over when they see it. And I say this having written about objectification and the problems with it multiple times before, each time cringing a little internally while thinking about how the word, a very important word, has become a slogan.

So let’s focus instead on the opposite of sexual objectification– sexual agency. Or just, you know, agency to start.

An agent is a being with a will, desires, motivations, and responsibility. An agent does things for reasons, and can be blamed or praised when those things are wrong or right, respectively. In order to be a fully realized agent, you need to be capable, adult, mature.

An agent, when it comes to legality, is someone who can be party to a contract. We do not hold a person to a contract if important information was withheld from him or her in the contract’s arrangement (that would be fraud), or if the person him/herself was for some reason not mentally competent to enter into such an agreement, because these are factors that diminish agency. They make a person less capable of making an informed, responsible decision. And it’s wrong to deceive people into doing things against their best interest (that’s taking advantage of them), and it’s wrong to blame people for behavior that either wasn’t immoral or over which they had little or no control, or both.

When a child or someone with a severe mental disability does something bad, we temper our judgment according to their diminished agency. When an animal does something bad, we blame it scarcely at all. Children, the mentally disabled, and animals are placed in the care of rational, caring adults, fully-realized agents, who make decisions for them. Even though they are not fully-realized agents– especially because of this– we consider it wrong to abuse them. Though they are not moral agents, they are moral patients– beings we should treat morally, even though they may not be able to treat us in that same manner.

There are men who think that women are like children, the mentally disabled, or animals in this regard. No, they probably don’t think in terms of moral agents and moral patients, but to them the only people who can be fully responsible, mature actors are adult men. To this sort of person, sexually assaulting a woman is wrong– but primarily because it goes against the interests of whatever man is in charge of her, her husband or her father. A woman’s sexual “purity” (scare quotes here because having sex is not like dropping a bit of black paint into a can of white, or a fly into a pitcher of milk) is a commodity, the strength of which determines her value to these men. In that regard she hovers somewhere between child/mentally disabled person and animal, because children/the mentally disabled aren’t expected to provide a service, whereas animals often are. It would be more accurate to say, actually, that they are used for something– dogs for hunting or sniffing out drugs, horses for pulling carts, various livestock for eating, and so on. Women are used, to this mindset, for sex and baby-making. If they can no longer be used for these functions or nobody wants to use them for these functions, they are irrelevant. As Tina Fey said, “crazy” is a woman who keeps talking when nobody wants to fuck her.

To this mindset, rape is only as wrong as theft– and it’s theft not at her expense, but at the expense of another man. If no man is in charge of a woman, or if she’s been “used” too much, then….eh. If you take someone’s dog and beat it with a stick, you’re in serious trouble. If you take a stray dog and do the same thing, not nearly as big a deal.

A study performed earlier this year indicated that people, male and female, literally see women as more like objects and men as more like people. Of the images that Shewmaker used to accompany her blog post on objectification of women, the worst one to me is an ad depicting a woman in her underwear lying on a bed, with a Playstation controller lying nearby, its cord leading directly into her belly button. With this, you can control the woman, haha. The caption reads “Keep on dreaming of a better world.” Of all depictions of woman-as-sexbot in media– and there are so many the idea is well past cliche at this point– that’s certainly one of the clunkiest. Congratulations, Che Men’s Magazine– you’re even lousy at sexism!

But even so, even in spite of these, I find it easier to focus not on how women are turned into objects, but how they’re denied having agency. It seems more accessible to take what a man is generally considered to be, and then examine what is subtracted for a woman (“How do you write women so well?” “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability”). And then look at the ramifications.

There are people, and then there are women. 
There are two kinds of people: men and women.
There are people, and amongst them are men and women.

Yes, that’s better.

Proximate pratfall

Proximate pratfall published on 1 Comment on Proximate pratfall

Regarding Richard Mourdock’s “rape babies are a gift from God” comment…

It’s fun to see people all over the internet making fun of Mourdock saying that a pregnancy which results from rape should be considered a gift from God, because that life is something God intended to happen. They can see the obvious dishonesty of it, and are going to town drawing the logical conclusions of such a statement. Those logical conclusions are how we can know it was dishonest– if it wasn’t, then the most charitable thing that can be said is that Mourdock didn’t exactly think it through.

You see, the position that God intended for a pregnancy to have resulted from a rape can be interpreted in one of two ways:

1. Ultimate: Of course God intended for it to happen, because God intends everything! God is the author of the universe, the primary force behind everything and everything. He is the ground of being, or at least the first cause who set everything in motion. Therefore if something happens, it is by his intention.

Why Mourdock’s statement is ridiculous, if that’s what he meant: Rape pregnancies, then, are intended by God in the same sense as cancer, earthquakes, and car accidents. The implication of Mourdock’s statement is of course that a pregnancy resulting from rape is intended by God, therefore the woman should not have an abortion. But our response to disease, natural disasters, and human-caused mishaps is not to proceed about our day as if nothing happened, whether we regard those things as ultimately intended by God or not. When those things happen, we attempt to fix them– to put things right. Oftentimes, to a woman whose pregnancy resulted from rape, getting an abortion is putting things right (well, as much as she can). God intending the pregnancy is not an argument against her doing so any more than it is an argument against chemotherapy for cancer patients.

2. Proximate: A rape victim’s pregnancy is a result of special intervention on God’s part. For reasons known only to God– and apparently to Mourdock– God looked down on that woman who had recently experienced the suffering of sexual violation and said “Hey, that raped lady needs a baby.” And presto! He put one inside her.

Why Mourdock’s statement is ridiculous, if that’s what he meant: Because it makes God– and Mourdock– a sadist. Unfortunately Mourdock’s use of the word “gift” makes it much more likely that this is the sense in which his statement was made, and that’s why people are reacting so badly to it even though he still appears to have no clue of the enormity of what he said. That’s what is making people mentally dry heave.

And by the way, you can give a gift back. It might be rude, but you can do it. Just saying.

This lead me, though, to think of an earlier rumination I had about conservatives conflating God’s behavior in the proximate vs. ultimate sense, so I’m re-posting that here:

1. “Everything is caused by a higher power. I call that higher power God.”

2. “Natural disasters are acts of God– they are part of the structure of the world and we just have to deal with them as they come.”

3. “Now that (insert natural disaster) has happened, are the people of (insert region of the world) going to wake up and see that God has a message for them?  Are they going to see that God is not happy, and change their ways?”

Three very different statements. The third person is claiming that a natural disaster is a specific act of God, performed in reaction to the behavior of people in the area affected by it. This person is either too uneducated to know the reality of why natural disasters happen in certain times and in certain places, or does not mind appearing to be. To put it less delicately, if you claim that natural disasters are actually divine punishment you are not only stunningly lacking in empathy but can also safely be thought less than bright. I don’t expect people to stop doing that any time soon, but our collective willingness to call their statements ridiculous has increased.  Previously there would have been no need for Michele Bachmann’s PR person to declare that she was simply joking [when she said that Hurricane Irene was God “getting Washington’s attention”].

We still don’t– or at least, shouldn’t– want people who are willing to make statements like that running the country. We shouldn’t want governors who think that you solve problems like property rights violations and drought by appealing to God to solve them. We shouldn’t want a president who decided to run in the first place because he/she thinks God told him/her to run, or that God will tell him/her things like whether to go to war or not while in office.

Why? Because these put God in front of natural and human causes for things. They make him a proximate cause, rather than the ultimate one. God might indeed favor Herman Cain for president, but the rest of us should be primarily concerned with whether he’s what the country needs, and whether he’ll do a good job. God might be concerned about property rights, but since it’s the job of politicians to make things right in that regard, they should be doing it. God might have an opinion about whether the country should go to war, but hopefully it’s based on the same things a president should be concerned about– whether the war is just, how much suffering it will cause, and so on. God might have very firm opinions about how Obama’s handling the deficit, but if you consider Irene to be a sign of that you’re a cretin and shouldn’t be in an elected position of power.

Reddit’s rape thread

Reddit’s rape thread published on No Comments on Reddit’s rape thread

I had a whole blog post written about the Reddit thread discussing what it’s like to be a rapist, and now I don’t like it. It was supposed to be about the psychology of assigning moral responsibility to rapists and rape victims, but ended up being preachy and not scientifically supported to my satisfaction. So, in the trash can it goes. As I usually do when something like this happens, I’m going to try and walk it back and distill it into a simple list of observations. If I do this and still end up sounding preachy, well…I apologize.

1. That thread is very likely filled with a lot of deception. The very thing which encourages people to come out and actually admit to doing something horrendous like rape– anonymity– also allows them to tell a story with no truth in it whatsoever if they want to. So there are doubtless at least a few people in there getting their chuckles by telling a lurid and shocking tale that is also 100% fabricated.

2. Nevertheless, I don’t think reading it is a complete waste of time because even a person’s totally made-up characterization of a rapist is interesting. It’s interesting to see if they agree with the characterizations given by those who claim to be victims (who are also posting in that thread), and because a person who fabricates a story of what it’s like to be a rapist is likely telling you what he would in fact do and think if he decided to ever become a rapist.

3. The mentality of a perpetrator of rape, like the mentality of any perpetrator, is worth knowing about. It’s disturbing to learn, but necessary to understand. We must always listen to the explanations of victims, but when the victims are the only ones allowed to explain then we end up verging into the myth of pure evil— the perpetrator’s motivations are simplified (must be hate/desire for power) and isolated (must be deliberate and malicious) in order to maximize his responsibility. That isolation is a problem if it turns out to be mistaken, because as I wrote last month, you can’t really discourage people from doing something that they don’t view themselves as doing to begin with.

4. The self-proclaimed rapists and attempted rapists in the Reddit thread generally (with some major exceptions like this) describe themselves as realizing what they were doing and how wrong it was after the fact, unless they realized actually during, and had to stop themselves when they finally grasped that their female partner wasn’t willing. The closest they come to admitting malice is stating bluntly that the comfort and wishes of their partners weren’t any sort of priority for them– they simply disregarded them in favor of getting what they wanted.

5. That disregard is where the term “rape culture” begins to make sense for me. A rape culture is a culture in which women’s desires generally, but especially their desires regarding sex, are not regarded. Unfortunately most of the things I could say about this are prone to misinterpretation, by both people who agree and those who disagree, in the same way that statements I make about what it means to be a feminist can be misinterpreted. For that reason I don’t place a lot of stock in whether someone brands him or herself a feminist or not, or thinks “rape culture” is a fitting description for a phenomenon existing in the United States or not. What matters is whether we’re talking about the same thing. Do we have a culture in which women’s desires are commonly dismissed or viewed as subordinate to men’s desires? Yes. Does that mentality enable rapists to rape? Most likely, if their own descriptions of their motivations matter and are accurate. That’s minefield #1.

6. Minefield #2 is the characterization of rape victims, which goes right to the heart of why rape is wrong. Even the word “victim” is repudiated by some people, at least as a permanent status, because they reject the idea that the rapist continues to have power over them. A commenter on Salon’s article discussing the Reddit thread remarks:

As a social worker, I don’t find this comment/pronouncement [a description of a rapist being a cheerful, happy person who has traumatized a woman for life] particularly useful. These women are survivors, not victims. Some have moved on from the trauma by not making it the main narrative in their life story. This working through does not diminish the culpability of the perpetrator, and more importantly, it does not trivialise the gravity of the crime. What it does suggest is that women don’t have to make trauma central to their identity. Yes, it will inform who they are and affect them, but laymen and observers must refrain from condemning women to a life of suffering by not making ‘damaged forever’ forecasts. These include such misguided statements as, “She will never recover”, “It’s going to ruin her life” or “People never get over that kind of thing”. At the risk of sounding glib and simplistic, I am reminded of the quote “Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.”

To which another commenter responds:

Let me guess – you blame the ones who haven’t “moved on” for their suffering, because they are obviously simply choosing to “make [the trauma] the main narrative in their lives.” As both a child abuse and sexual assault survivor, and as someone who suffers from chronic complex PTSD as a result: SCREW YOU. Yes, it is great when a survivor can heal adequately enough to “move on,” but the timeline for that is different for every individual, and your severe lack of empathy on that point makes me think that either, a) you are lying about being a social worker, or b) you are one of the terrible social workers of the world. 

I can’t help but sympathize with that. Whether the (supposed) social worker does in fact blame women for not recovering from their rapes or not, the perverse attempt at self-empowerment that allows a person to describe those women who have recovered from a rape as having done so “by not making it the main narrative in their life story” certainly doesn’t make a clear distinction there. I think it’s possible to both congratulate and respect the work a person who was raped has done in order to improve her perspective on life and possibly grow as a person without suggesting that such an effort is both a) universally possible and b) merit-based, but the second commenter clearly doesn’t view the first as having done that. A rape victim is responsible for how she deals with the attack to the extent that she continues to have an obligation to be a moral person, but expecting her to be her own therapist and “fix” herself does, in fact, both “diminish the culpability of the perpetrator” and “trivialize the gravity of the crime.”

There’s a simple alternative to this, of course, and that is to not pretend that the damage of being raped is exactly the same for everyone. We don’t need to do that in order to avoid adjusting our view of the severity of the crime, any more than it’s necessary to say that child molestation isn’t such a bad thing because some children who have experienced it grow up to be well-adjusted adults. If you follow “how you respond to it” far enough around the circle of responsibility, you find yourself right back at “what happens,” since there is a point at which your response is simply a thing that happens. In failing to acknowledge this, doctrines of self-empowerment play a cruel joke– while trying to emphasize the ability to be happier by asserting “This is within your power,” they implicitly endorse the corollary, which is of course that if you fail to become happier that is also your fault. And that, as you might expect (and see in the second comment), tends to provoke some bitterness from people who are not happier.

7. Because of this thread on Reddit, fantasy author Jim C. Hines (whom you may remember from his awesome blog post in which he tried to pose like the women featured on the covers of books like his) decided to cancel an author Q&A session he was going to do for Reddit readers. I don’t blame him, though I wish he hadn’t. As many Redditors have pointed out, even if the “how rapists think” thread has no merit whatsoever and all who are involved in it should be ashamed (which I don’t believe), it hardly represents the community as a whole, much less the portion who were looking forward to his answering questions about how books. Hines is fully aware of this, but says that in canceling he wants to attract the attention of people who can “make a change” at Reddit. Unfortunately, I think he has simply made the change of providing Redditors with one less non-rape-related topic to discuss than they had before.

You have the freedom to make rape jokes. Should you?

You have the freedom to make rape jokes. Should you? published on 1 Comment on You have the freedom to make rape jokes. Should you?

There is no way, I think, to more thoroughly annoy a proponent of free speech than to claim that criticism violates it.

It’s hard enough defending free speech sometimes. People don’t see anything wrong with stopping the Westboro Baptists from protesting. Denying the Holocaust? Yeah, go ahead and outlaw that. Hate speech– what, that’s not already illegal? By all means, ban that too. And nobody really needs violent video games or faux-violent porn, do they? Banish those, along with the burqas!

No, I’m not going to address any of those topics right now. I’m just going to say that when you’re talking about violations of free speech, more speech which happens to be critical of that speech isn’t one such violation.

I am talking, of course, about the Daniel Tosh thing. If you’ve been under a rock lately and aren’t familiar, he made some jokes about rape to an audience and then heckled a female heckler who didn’t like them by joking about her being raped. Yeah, I know. I know. And now we have to have this big discussion about the claim made by the woman which was that jokes about rape are never funny, and alliances have to be created and lines drawn between people who agree and people who disagree, and actually some really good and useful and even funny discussion can arise from it. For instance, you should go read Lindy West’s piece How to Make a Rape Joke at Jezebel. I really enjoyed her last two examples of funny jokes about rape, because a) I hadn’t heard of either of those comics before, and b) as with all four examples she gives, the joke isn’t making fun of rape victims. It’s about mocking the rapist, and the mentalities that feed into that, and the circumstances of people who go about their lives worrying about either being raped or being thought a rapist, or both.

Two of my favorite comedians, Patton Oswalt and Louis CK, have weighed in with support for Tosh. Oswalt’s has been conflicted and convoluted, and Louis CK is one of the people commonly accepted as being able to do a joke about rape correctly– he’s one of West’s four examples, for that matter. To call this disappointing would be an understatement. Both of these comedians are so much smarter and so much funnier than Tosh that it’s like seeing Batman sympathize with a police officer who was accused of roughing up a suspect. And there is actually a similar sort of closing ranks going on– they’re sympathizing as fellow comedians, people who also get up in front of a crowd and say things that might make the crowd erupt in laughter or erupt in rage. And they’ve also dealt with hecklers, and know what a trial that is. Hecklers don’t just pop up in the audiences of small time comics, but that’s where they’re most common. Generally speaking, the “job” of a comedian who is faced with a heckler is to shout him or her down. To make fun of and embarrass him or her. Some comics have developed this ability into a high art, while others prefer to simply say “Shut up, or you’re out of here.” And that, of course, requires having access to some sort of security personnel who can make good on that threat for you, since the comedian him or herself is not going to interrupt the show, step down off the stage, and personally deal with the person who has been disrupting things.

So yes, dealing with hecklers is rough. And the woman in question was technically a heckler, though in the interests of fairness it’s important to point out that she didn’t mean to go see a Daniel Tosh show. She meant to see Dane Cook (also offensive, but mainly because unfunny), and Tosh came on afterward. She apparently had no idea who he was, was disturbed to see rape discussed as a possible topic of jokes to follow, and declared that rape jokes are not funny to this person with whom she was quite unfamiliar. And what followed was really unpleasant, regardless of whether you go by the described linked above or the account of the owner of the Laugh Factory, who ended by saying “If you don’t want to get insulted don’t go to comedy clubs.” After being quite happy to condemn Michael Richards for his racist insults, of course, because those “came from hatred.”

Patton Oswalt and Louis CK offend audiences sometimes too, and they have an interest in not wanting comedians who offend to be punished too severely. But by and large they have no reason to fear this punishment, because they don’t make bigoted jokes. Making bigoted jokes is easy, which is why why lazier and less creative comics do it all the time. It’s hard to fail by appealing to the prejudices of your audience, provided your audience actually has those prejudices. And since audiences have warmly embraced or at least chuckled at sexist jokes for a very long time, it’s not at all surprising that a lazy, uncreative comic would resort to them. Because they work, and most likely because that comic shares those prejudices himself.  It takes work to make a joke about a sensitive subject that doesn’t involve mocking the very people who are so sensitive to it, and it also takes caring about those people in the first place. Comedians have an interest in appealing to a broad audience, obviously, and it’s doubly, triply challenging to make it and be successful without mocking minorities or even being a minority yourself– if you don’t believe me, give Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story a watch sometime.

Louis CK is a straight white man, and he makes fun of himself as a straight white man– constantly. He is the definition of self-awareness, sometimes even painfully self-aware, and that’s why his jokes on these topics work. Clearly he’s thought about them, a great deal. My favorite Louis CK rape joke isn’t mentioned in the Lindy West article, but it’s this (NSFW language, definitely):

Here we have Louis CK talking about trying to do the right thing, and not being appreciated for it. And it’s funny, because he is earnest. He’s thought about it. When Louis CK makes a joke that portrays him as an asshole, you know he’s not really an asshole. Possibly people who are assholes laugh at those jokes because they think he’s identifying with them, but he isn’t. Trusting the comedian is an important element, but you don’t really have to trust Louis CK because he makes it abundantly clear what he’s being literal about and what he isn’t. This is not a description that applies for Daniel Tosh.

Somebody in the comments for the Pharyngula post about this whole debacle linked to this essay articulating why and when rape jokes are or aren’t funny, and it’s definitely worth a read. It’s clear, it’s actually very light-hearted and casual considering the subject matter, and it’s very thoughtful. Give it a read when you’ve got some time to think and consider.

You know what it’s not, however? A freedom of speech issue. A freedom of speech issue is when you’re being censored by the government. Massive crowds of people looking on what you’ve said or done disapprovingly is not a freedom of speech issue. It is simply the assertion and exercise of their equivalent freedom of speech.

Follow-up: New York Times responds to complaints about their reporting

Follow-up: New York Times responds to complaints about their reporting published on No Comments on Follow-up: New York Times responds to complaints about their reporting

…poorly:

The Times responded Wednesday evening to The Cutline: “Neighbors’ comments about the girl, which we reported in the story, seemed to reflect concern about what they saw as a lack of supervision that may have left her at risk,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the paper. “As for residents’ references to the accused having to ‘live with this for the rest of their lives,’ those are views we found in our reporting. They are not our reporter’s reactions, but the reactions of disbelief by townspeople over the news of a mass assault on a defenseless 11-year-old.” 

With all due respect, Ms. Ha, I think you kind of missed the point.

How not to represent rape: a report on a Texas travesty

How not to represent rape: a report on a Texas travesty published on 1 Comment on How not to represent rape: a report on a Texas travesty

A horrible crime happened in Cleveland, Texas.  A small town just northeast of Houston, it has a population of only 9,000 people, but that apparently includes up to 18 boys and men who were willing to take part in the gang rape of an eleven year old girl.  I imagine that the fallout from this event will be extensive and the investigation will take quite some time (it began just after Thanksgiving of last year), but the coverage in the New York Times has already come under fire because of how it chose to portray the story.  The offending passages:

The case has rocked this East Texas community to its core and left many residents in the working-class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions. Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.” . . .Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said. “Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”

After reading the article my first reaction was “Wow, blame the victim much?”  And I apparently wasn’t alone–  Jezebel, Feministing, and Slate all have commentaries about how the article appears to focus on how the men and boys in this community are going to suffer from this incident and what could have prompted them to behave in this way, up to and including the suggestion that the victim is actually to blame for what happened to her. It is of course worth being concerned about whether people who actually weren’t involved in the crime might have been accused unjustly, but that specific worry isn’t actually mentioned in the body of the article.  Nor are the obvious attempts by members of the community to find some way to pin responsibility for the rape on this young girl labeled for what they are– victim-blaming.  Libby Copeland wonders

How can the New York Times fail to frame these quotes properly, to point out the stunning cultural misogyny that allows a brutal gang rape to be reinterpreted as vigilante moral policing? To report these details bare, without context, puts the misogyny squarely in the voice of the Times.  The kindest reading of what makes people blame the victims of rape is fear. We don’t want to imagine that what happened to this 11-year-old could happen to us or to our daughters, so we rationalize that it couldn’t, that we are not like her. But there’s much more going on. There’s deep-seated fear of and disgust for women and female sexuality. We don’t have the same reaction to a boy getting beat up as we do to a girl getting raped; we don’t tend to wonder what the boy did to provoke the bully.Here’s the thing: Any attempt to gain emotional distance on rape by transferring just a tiny portion, just one percent, of the blame onto the victim is an absolute moral wrong. It subtracts from the agency of the individual doing the raping. He is completely culpable. It is his crime — or, in the case of 18 young men and boys, it is theirs.

Amanda Marcotte blames this strange story-telling on journalistic objectivity gone too far:

I was under the impression that gang raping children is generally assumed to be such a horrific crime that reporters don’t have to strike a studied neutral pose, as you would with more overtly controversial issues, but apparently not. I feel strongly there’s a missed opportunity here.  I grew up in a rural Texas town on the other end of the state, and have more than a passing familiarity with how common it is for these kinds of communities to be shockingly tolerant of gang rape.  I don’t think it’s radical to point out that victim-blaming and assailant-sympathizing in a community sends permission signals to would-be rapists and makes crimes like this likelier to occur.  This could have been an opportunity to write a story examining the relationship between victim-blaming attitudes and the rapes themselves, much in the way that the murder of James Byrd in nearby Jasper in 1998 became an occasion to look at how racism still thrives in the South and created the context for hate crimes.

I agree, but such a story wouldn’t have been less objective– it would have been more objective, because objectivity isn’t simply dutifully recording people’s opinions and representing them in print.  It requires actually telling the facts of the story, including the fact that blaming the victim is what your sources are doing.  The story pays almost no attention at all to what the girl who was attacked in this way might have experienced or how difficult it must be to survive it physically and emotionally, but instead discusses how men might have been “drawn into” attacking her and how this ordeal must be affecting them.  I’m not sure it’s possible to be excessively neutral or objective, but it’s certainly possible to write an article that gives a definite impression of sympathy for the perpetrators, and that’s what happened here.  Marcotte is willing to give the article’s author, James McKinley, the benefit of the doubt and assume that he had no intention of lending credence to Cleveland residents who saw fit to speculate on how the girl provoked her own victimization.  I would like to do so as well, but if that’s the case I’m still mystified as to why the piece was written in this way and these specific quotes used without comment.  That isn’t a “studied neutral pose;” it’s just bad and biased reporting.

ETA: I missed this sardonic comment by Mac Mclelland at Mother Jones.  Money quote:

This is the point at which, as the writer’s editor, I would send him an email. “Dear James,” it would say. “Thanks for getting this in! I have some concerns that we’ve only got quotes from people who are worried about the suspects (‘The arrests have left many wondering who will be taken into custody next’) and think the girl was asking for it, especially since, even if she actually begged for it, the fact that she is 11 makes the incident stupendously reprehensible (not to mention still illegal). We don’t want anyone wrongly thinking you are being lazy or thoughtless or misogynist! Please advise if literally no other kinds of quotes are available because every single person who lives in Cleveland, Texas, is a monster.” 

Speaking of what makes people laugh becoming a moral issue…

Speaking of what makes people laugh becoming a moral issue… published on No Comments on Speaking of what makes people laugh becoming a moral issue…

…this is pretty much the definition of it.

I’m not sure if I want to write a full-fledged post on this topic or not.  As you can see from that timeline it’s a controversy that has been going on since August of last year with frequent twists and turns, and no shortage of different perspectives– but then that’s always the case, isn’t it? There are almost never just two sides. I think some timeless truths about online disputes can be drawn from it, though.  Such as:

  • It’s hard to overestimate the ability of gamers to be arses, particularly of the misogynistic variety.  And I say this as a person who loves to play the video games herself, but the community does have its share of misogynerds.  (I just learned that term today, and this will probably be the only time I use it.  But it’s fitting now, if ever)
  • Reasonable people may disagree, but they don’t threaten violence.  That’s an automatic and permanent revocation of one’s credibility card.  
  • As a debate about the value of something said on the internet continues, the probability that someone will interpret objections as threats to freedom of speech approaches 100%.  
  • Real or effective online anonymity plus an audience doesn’t turn everyone into total fuckwads, but it inevitably works like a charm for some.