Tag Archives: Rape, aggression and violence

Third Party Harassment, Third Party Complicity

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My friend Emmylou wrote me after my Jezebel post appeared last Friday, noting that we need to remember the problem of “third party harassment”: the impact that the problem can have on witnesses.

On Friday I was crossing the street when I saw a man in a large panel truck inch up in his lane so he could stop and look down at a woman in the next car. She was in the passenger seat and never looked up and to her right as far as I could tell. While walking by, I saw she was wearing a tank top with some cleavage showing and the perv staring hard…not an appreciative look at all. Once I passed them, I turned around and yelled at him. “I know what you’re doing, creep! Stop staring at her!” She didn’t react but the truck driver did. He was both shocked and angered by my calling him out on it.

She didn’t know. But I did and I was offended by it and put off. Someone might say it is none of my business since it didn’t happen to me, but I think it is. It isn’t only the recipients of this kind of behavior who get to be outraged. I think if my goddaughter or nieces had been with me. They have every right in the world to not be exposed to this kind of lecherous behavior. And so do boys.

It isn’t just the one-to-one impact. It’s the example and influence on display for everyone else to see…

Emmylou is right on the money. Street harassment teaches all who witness it lessons about men, women, and sexuality. When children witness adult men leering and catcalling, they learn a lie about male desire. They learn a truth about our collective hostility towards women, and the way in which we use harassment to display power and to slut-shame. Harassment — even if it’s only a prolonged, silent, penetrating gaze — impacts everyone close enough to see it take place.

I’m perhaps too quick to bring up the unethical aspects of my past, but I’ve got some familiarity with this concept. As I’ve often written, I slept with many students during my early years at PCC. All of these relationships, however unethical, were consensual and not in violation of college policy — because the college had no policy against profs and students engaging in “mutually desired amorous relations.” But of course, I was about as subtle as a Labrador in a flower bed, and many of the women I was with “talked.” And as I learned, this all-too-true gossip proved shattering (or at least upsetting) to many other students, who not only lost respect for me but felt as if the classroom had now been sexualized. Indeed, the only people who ever complained to the administration were not the women I was involved with — but others who “witnessed” the behavior in one way or another. Arguably, the greatest harm I did during those years was not to my student lovers, but to those “third parties” who felt unsafe and confused when they found out what was going on.

Third party harassment is widely acknowledged in law. But while it is used in litigation in corporate settings, we don’t often talk about it when it comes to something like street harassment. But we need to remember that harassment is didactic: it’s meant to teach a lesson. The woman being harassed is being reminded that she’s vulnerable, that her body is public property for men to leer at and comment upon. She may be affluent or poor, she may be in a short sundress or in sweats — it doesn’t matter. She’s being “taught a lesson”, and it’s not a complimentary one. And when we hear it or see it, we’re being taught a toxic lesson as well.

My friend Emmylou made the courageous decision to “teach a lesson back”. Not everyone can be expected to do as she did; harassers can turn violent when called out. But where we can do something, we should. This is especially vital work for male allies to do. As I always tell my students, the litmus test of a male feminist is not just how he treats women, but how willing he is to challenge other men on their words and attitudes. As we know, harassment and sexual assault thrive in a culture that normalizes and accepts that behavior. Every rapist or harasser has someone in his life who is complicit in his behavior, who gives tacit approval to his actions. And make no mistake: harassers and abusers invariably interpret the silence of their friends and family as an imprimatur for their behavior.

Without completely disregarding personal safety, we need to be aware of our opportunities to be like Emmylou this week, finding ways to challenge those who make our public — and our private — spaces unsafe.

For more on ways to fight back (whether you’ve been harassed or have observed it as a third party) check out the international Hollaback community.

Fondling the “brave” White Swan

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As you can see in the photo below this post, Eira and I went to a Purim party on Saturday night, dressed as the “Black Swan” and the “White Swan.” Though my wife didn’t like the film, she was more than happy to go along with the costume idea that came into my head not long after seeing the movie for the first time. (Here’s my review of the picture, which I thought was the best of 2010.) I already have the obvious idea for next year’s party, which is to come as the Swans again, this time with me in the darker shade.

The costumes took a lot of time and work; the basic corsets and tutus came from Trashy Lingerie (on La Cienega), the tights and slippers from Capezio, and my wife’s red contact lenses from a specialty store in the valley. My mother-in-law, a seamstress, added sequins and fake feathers and made my headpiece; my brother-in-law, a make-up artist, did our faces. We were a big hit together.

At the party, I got a lot of compliments on my “courage.” (And when I posted photos on Facebook, more of the same.) I was surprised; we were at the Kabbalah Centre in West Los Angeles, hanging out with an ostensibly liberal, artsy crowd. In 2011, I wondered, does anyone think it’s particularly brave for a man to dress as a ballerina in L.A.? If I were a high school boy going trick-or-treating and wearing the outfit in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, that might be gutsy — but with my wife, in the 310 area code? It’s evidence that the bar is still set so disappointingly low for men; performing public sexual ambiguity shouldn’t be as revolutionary as it is.

I also got grabbed. A lot. On the crowded dance floor, drunken men and women alike squeezed the top of my corset, fondled my butt, lifted up my tu-tu. None of it was terribly aggressive, and all of it was done by people I know — and whom I knew to be intoxicated. I didn’t feel threatened, but I was exasperated. I knew damn well why they were doing it, because it’s happened to me every time I’ve cross-dressed for parties. They were grabbing me because they could, reminding themselves and me of my maleness. (Like it or not, we ascribe the willingness to be grabbed to men.) They were engaged, whether they knew it or not (almost certainly the latter) in “gender policing”. And they were grabbing me because it was a kind of safe transgression for them — an assault on something that was feminine without being female.

Of course, in real life, women are groped all the time, on dance floors and elsewhere. Though I didn’t need the reminder of that painful truth, it’s what I got on Saturday.

“A regressive change in service of a regressive change”: the looming disaster of H.R. 3

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As a number of outlets in both the feminist and mainstream media have reported, the Republican-dominated House is considering new restrictions on abortion funding. The so-called “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” is bad enough on its face for those of us who believe that the right to choose an abortion goes hand in hand with the right to access a full range of reproductive services. The truth is, it’s worse than it sounds.

The most devastating aspect of the NTFAA is its unmistakable redefinition of rape. What does that have to do with abortion? A great deal, when you consider the politics around “exemptions” for rape and incest. Many who oppose abortion support exceptions for cases of rape and incest (as well, at least some of the time, for the life of the pregnant woman). Those exemptions are popular, and only a small committed core of far-right political activists oppose them. (One thinks of the execrable but entertaining Alan Keyes, the clownish former presidential candidate, who was fond of asking “How dare we sentence a child to death for his father’s crime?” whenever the subject of these exemptions arose.) Smart pro-lifers know better than to take the radical Keyes stance, so they call for “reasonable” limitations on women’s right to choose, admitting to the wisdom of rape and incest exemptions.

But the NTFAA’s authors want to make sure that those exemptions are defined far more narrowly in the future. As reported Friday:

Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to “forcible rape.” This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion…

“This bill takes us back to a time when just saying ‘no’ wasn’t enough to qualify as rape,” says Steph Sterling, a lawyer and senior adviser to the National Women’s Law Center. Laurie Levenson, a former assistant US attorney and expert on criminal law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, notes that the new bill’s authors are “using language that’s not particularly clear, and some people are going to lose protection.” Other types of rapes that would no longer be covered by the exemption include rapes in which the woman was drugged or given excessive amounts of alcohol, rapes of women with limited mental capacity, and many date rapes. “There are a lot of aspects of rape that are not included,” Levenson says. Bold mine.

As any historian of women’s rights will tell you, the struggle against sexual violence and the struggle for reproductive justice are intertwined. The right of a woman to say “no” to sex and the right to say “no” to an unwanted pregnancy both rest on the same principle of sacred autonomy. Feminists fought hard in the nineteenth century for statutory rape laws that raised the age of consent. One hundred years later, we fought for women’s right to withdraw consent once given, and for the common-sense principle that intoxication vitiates consent. What we’re working towards is a culture that sees rape as defined not solely by the presence of life-threatening force but by the absence of enthusiastic consent. By insisting on the antiquated and inadequate definition of “forcible rape”, the House Republican majority seeks not just to limit women’s access to abortion, but to undo decades worth of expanded protections against sexual violence.

This is, as Thomas at Yes Means Yes put it, “a regressive change in service of a regressive change.”

Please contact your Congressperson, and urge that your representative to vote no on this unconscionable threat to women’s lives and safety.

That’s not hyperbole.

The Montreal Massacre: 21 years on

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Today, the feast of St. Nicholas, marks the 21st anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, when fourteen young female students were murdered by a misogynist named Marc Lépine. Lépine’s suicide note included a long diatribe against feminists:

Please note that if I am committing suicide today … it is not for economic reasons … but for political reasons. For I have decided to send Ad Patres [Latin: "to the fathers"] the feminists who have ruined my life. … The feminists always have a talent for enraging me. They want to retain the advantages of being women … while trying to grab those of men. … They are so opportunistic that they neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men throughout the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can.

The vast majority of anti-feminist men do not, presumably, sympathize with Marc Lépine. But this male rage against women for daring to usurp traditionally male prerogatives wasn’t– and isn’t — limited to a few deranged mass murderers, either. Those who repudiate Lépine’s actions might want to be sure that they also repudiate his rhetoric.

For more on what happened that terrible day and on the lives so cruelly snuffed out, see Clarissa’s blog and Womanist Musings.

And this thread is open only for feminist-friendly comments.

Not a dichotomy, a spectrum: on rape, consent, and desire

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In yesterday’s post, I made reference to a “rape spectrum” (also sometimes called a “consent spectrum”). In the comments, SamSeaborn and CornWalker asked me to clarify the concept.

I’ve written and spoken quite a bit about consent. There’s an ongoing discussion about consent, enthusiasm, and agency at the splendid Yes Means Yes blog. The book with the same title, edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, also explores the intersections of desire and culture and agency. One topic that has always come up in my talks about consent — and which came up in the book as well — was the difficulty of defining those sexual encounters that do not meet the prevailing legal standard for rape, but are still non-consensual to one degree or another. (This problematic concept is explored in a very fine piece by Latoya Peterson, a “Yes Means Yes” contributor: The Not Rape Epidemic.)

A recent survey in the Journal of Sex Research has led to the adoption of a new term to describe one aspect of the problem: sexual compliance. The authors define compliance as “consent without desire”. That’s an exasperating way of couching it — after all, as I usually point out in my workshops and lectures, consent comes from the Latin consentire, which means literally “with feeling” or “with desire.” Consent, I argue, both etymologically and ethically shouldn’t be understood as the mere absence of a “no” or even the mere willingness to comply with another’s wishes. Authentic consent is always charged with desire; “enthusiastic consent” is, in a very real sense, a redundant term!

But I recognize that the common understanding of consent refers to the granting of permission rather than the presence of desire, and I suppose that a lesson in Latin isn’t going to change that interpretation.

One way to think about sexual ethics and the problem of what Latoya Peterson calls “Not Rape” as well as what the Journal of Sex Research calls “sexual compliance” or “consent without desire” is to imagine a spectrum. Think of a long flat line, but without any numbers on it. (This isn’t quite the Kinsey scale of sexual identity.) Imagine that the left end point of the scale is marked “Absolute Enthusiastic Consent” or, better yet, “Hell, Yes!” The right end point of the spectrum is marked “Neither Consented to Nor Desired” or “Hell, No!” or “Everyone in Their Right Mind Would Agree that This is Rape!” It’s pretty clear that a lot of what happens sexually in our lives or in the lives of the people we love happens somewhere in between these two poles. Listening to the stories of how real people live — and in many cases, reflecting on our own pasts — most of us realize fast that it’s a false dichotomy to insisist that every act of sex is “either rape, or it isn’t.” There’s a lot of space in between our two poles. Continue reading →

The challenge of confrontation: dismantling rape culture one conversation at a time

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Clarisse Thorn wrote a Thanksgiving post, in which she raises an all-too-familiar problem:

One very intense, very important issue I grappled with this week was having a friend email me to inform me that another friend — someone I like and admire a lot — has been credibly accused of sexual assault by a person who will never press charges. This has come up before in my life; every time it’s a little different, and yet so many things are the same: a person is assaulted, the news gets out among friends, the survivor doesn’t press charges, there is confusion among the friends about how to act, eventually things die down, and I feel as though I should have done more.

Clarisse wrote to an ex of hers for his take, and he replied:

Nobody is composed of unmixed goodness or evil, no matter how much of a paragon/fiend 1) they seem to be or 2) their principles require. People we respect and love are not forces of nature or avatars of their cause of choice, no matter how thoroughly they embody it to us… I can’t see how it could ever be good to allow things like this to just slide. Honestly, I’m not sure what else you can do but (as you suggest in one of your messages) politely ask your friend about their take on the story. If nothing else, it will demonstrate that people are paying attention to this thing…

I agree with Clarisse’s ex, both about the necessity of confrontation in some form and the wisdom of acknowledging that those around us are never entirely what they seem. (This doesn’t mean that most people are fraudulent, merely that we tend to see blacks and whites more clearly than we see shades of gray.) And I think this willingness to raise hard questions is particularly important for men.

I’ve often made the case that the true measure of a man’s commitment to gender justice doesn’t just lie in how he treats women, but how he interacts with other men when there are no women around. Most young women have had the utterly infuriating experience of having a male buddy, boyfriend, or brother who is sweet and sensitive when she’s alone with him — but who turns into a troglodytic jerk when other men are around. That sudden shift from kindness to doltishness can be chalked up to the homosocial pressure to be “one of the guys”, a pressure that tends to trump everything else in young men’s lives. And so I repeat the message that I learned a long time ago: part of being a good male ally lies in challenging the sexism of other men even when there are no women around. Actually, if there is a litmus test that distinguishes a boy from a man, that might be it: the courage to stand up to other men and to endure the homophobic insults that will surely come when he challenges the attitudes and actions of his “bros.”

Feminists often talk about “rape culture.” Rape culture doesn’t just mean a culture in which rape happens — it means a culture in which sexual assault is condoned, or excused, or minimized, or even actively facilitated. For example, fraternity parties to which young women are invited and encouraged to binge drink are part of rape culture, as they involve the use of alcohol and social pressure to undermine young women’s capacity to give or deny meaningful consent to sex. Rape jokes are part of rape culture, as is the loathsome use of “rape”idiomatically to refer to any action of domination or success. (An example I overheard in the hall last week: “Dude, I totally raped that test.”) But nothing — nothing — sustains rape culture like silence. And given that men are raised to be homosocial (meaning they place intense value on the opinion of their male peers), and given that it is men who are doing almost all of the raping, it is the reluctance of the so-called “good guys” to challenge other men that allows rape culture to survive.

A true story:

As I’ve written many, many times, I had a series of consensual sexual relationships with my adult students when I was first a professor at PCC. The fact that most of these students were my chronological peers (one or two were even older than I), and that the relationships were often initiated by those students does nothing to mitigate the unethical and irresponsible nature of what I did. It was an abuse of power, and all sexualized abuses of power fall on what might be called a “rape spectrum.” What I did wasn’t rape in that it didn’t violate the consent of the adult women with whom I was having sex — but it was on that spectrum nonetheless because the power imbalance may have had at least some impact on the capacity of these women to give meaningful consent. (I acknowledge agency, but also acknowledge the social and cultural pressures that can undermine agency.) Continue reading →

From a long line of Dekes: on Yale, Cal, privilege, fear and misogyny

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One of my favorite family photographs — taken nearly eighty-five years ago — hangs in our living room. In it, some three dozen well-dressed young men smile at the camera from the front steps of a sprawling, Craftsman-inspired house. Some sit, others stand; some have hands in pockets, others have arms draped affectionately over the lads next to them. My maternal grandfather, Arthur Moore, sits next to his best friend Jerry Bishop. The two would eventually marry sisters, my grandmother and my great aunt. Next to Jerry sits Arthur’s cousin, Allan Starr. Behind them, standing on the porch, stands Allen Chickering, the man who — at the time this photo was taken — was engaged to the woman whom my grandfather Arthur would eventually marry. (The happy family story is that Allen broke off the engagement with my grandmother around 1929, and she married his friend Arthur instead. In 1991, both long since widowed, my grandmother and Allen Chickering married, 62 years after ending their original engagement.) Other family friends, including many who lived into my childhood and whom I knew well, are recognizable in the picture. To the best of my knowledge, every man in the photo is dead now; the youngest would be at least 102 were any still alive.

These were the brothers of Delta Kappa Epsilon, Theta Zeta chapter, at the the University of California, Berkeley. In 1926.

“Deke”, as it was called, was the “family fraternity”. Many of the older men who most deeply influenced my life were Dekes, including my uncle Stanley, Arthur’s younger brother, who became a renowned philosopher and communist. And it was thus with chagrin, but no great surprise, that I read of the vile behavior of DKE pledges at Yale University this month. As part of an ongoing initiation, the pledges marched around campus chanting “No Means Yes and Yes Means Anal” and other appalling misogynistic slogans. A video on Youtube brought the ugliness to national attention.

Michael Kimmel, the nation’s foremost historian of masculinity, has a great piece about the DKE pledge incident at Ms: The Men, And Women, Of Yale. He deftly explains the sexual anxiety that undergirds the chant the pledges repeated. The goal of the first part, “No Means Yes” (which was recited repeatedly in front of Yale’s Women’s Center, the safest place for women on campus) is clear enough. As Kimmel writes:It’s a reminder that men still rule, that bro’s will always come before “ho’s”. Even the Women’s Center can’t protect you. That is, it’s a way to make even the safe unsafe. In a world where more women go to college than men, in a world where women and minorities have made tremendous strides, the chant is an ugly attempt to reassert traditional dominance: “We are Dekes, and we are older and more powerful than the rules that protect the vulnerable.”

But Kimmel notes the second part of the chant is more telling, the bit about “yes means anal.” Continue reading →

“Keep quiet for the cause”: on sexual abuse in progressive movements

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I had a great time on KPFK last night. I like doing radio programs; there’s something thrilling about the adrenaline rush of being “live”, not having a script, and knowing that there’s nothing worse in the world than “dead air.” (The link to last night’s program is here; lots of pitching for Pacifica Radio but also some clips of Jackson Katz and me as we chat with the hosts of Feminist Magazine. I don’t come on until about 16 minutes into the one-hour show.)

The last question that both Jackson and I were asked revolved around what we saw as our biggest challenge as male feminist activists. I had a moment to think about it while Jackson gave his reply, and I flashed immediately to a meeting I’d had in my office yesterday morning. Dinah, one of my students, is a sexual assault survivor. A year ago, while working on a progressive political campaign in the Midwest, she was raped by a renowned male activist, a man in his thirties. Dinah was eighteen at the time. Dinah wants her anonymity protected, hence the pseudonym and no specifics about the group with which she and the perp were affiliated.

Dinah has been politically engaged since she was in junior high school, working on a host of left-wing causes. Articulate and brave, as soon as she turned eighteen she spent school breaks traveling around the country working on various campaigns. And on one such campaign, while traveling alone with this celebrated male activist through rural Wisconsin, she was raped by this man she looked up to and admired. The “culture” of this campaign was hostile to law enforcement, viewing the police through a class and race-conscious lens of suspicion. Instead of calling the cops, Dinah confided the truth about what had happened to some women in the movement, who insisted that she keep quiet. What had happened, she was told, was “regrettable” and “unfair”, but the harm was to her alone (or so these other activists claimed.) They suggested to Dinah that she consider the “good” her rapist was doing for the cause. “He’s helping so many”, she was told, “and he hurt you. Isn’t it better to just avoid him? We’ll warn him to shape up, but we can’t go further than that. He’s too valuable.”

Anyone who knows the history of sexual politics in liberation movements will recognize an old and familiar story. From digital history:

Women within (Sixties-era) organizations for social change often found themselves treated as “second-class citizens,” responsible for kitchen work, typing, and serving “as a sexual supply for their male comrades after hours.” “We were the movement secretaries and the shit-workers,” one woman recalled. “We were the earth mothers and the sex-objects for the movement’s men.” In 1964, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson presented an indignant assault on the treatment of women civil rights workers in a paper entitled “The Position of Women in SNCC,” to a SNCC staff meeting. Stokely Carmichael reputedly responded, “The only position for women in SNCC is prone.”

Forty years on, Stokely Carmichael’s view of female activists in the social justice movement remains astonishingly — infuriatingly — common. Dinah, who was born in 1991, isn’t the first young woman I’ve known to be raped or abused or harassed by a male compatriot in an ostensibly progressive organization. These assaults happen in ethnic organizations like MEChA, in animal liberation/welfarist groups like the ALF or PETA, in anti-war coalitions like ANSWER. That’s not a comprehensive list, mind you. But what all these groups have in common is an ideological conviction that women’s liberation needs to take a back seat to something “more important.” It doesn’t matter whether that “more important” thing is fighting for farm workers, or stopping the war in Afghanistan, or liberating lab animals. In each instance, young women activists are warned that reporting sexually abusive behavior by a male fellow activist jeopardizes the movement and does irreparable harm to the cause — a cause, that the young victimized woman is always reminded, is so much bigger than her. Continue reading →

Nannies, adultery, class and consent: some thoughts on Pal Sarkozy

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Briefly back in the office with a non-April Fool’s post.

Christine caught my attention with this post about something I’d managed to miss: French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s father, Pal, and his story of having sex with his nanny when he was eleven. The anecdote appears in the new autobiography from the elder Sarkozy.

Christine is struck by the circumstances of the encounter that Pal relates. Though only eleven, the father of the French president recalls himself as the initiator, and the nanny as silently acquiescent. Lots of power dynamics are at play. She is older, but he is male. She is his nanny, but he is the son of her employers. She is an adult, he a child — but he is the aggressor. Christine notes that today, we might charge the nanny with a crime for failing to stop Pal’s overtures. But the story raises the troubling reminder that aggressive sexual behavior, and a disdain for consent, is not limited to adolescents or adults.

It is not hard to imagine that Pal’s nanny weighed the cost of resisting the boy’s advances. He wasn’t an infant; if he made his displeasure known in one way or another, she might well have feared for her job. His capacity to consent was vitiated by his age, but hers was no less vitiated by her subordinate economic status. Given that all we have now are the recollections of a man describing an event that took place before the Second World War, there’s little more we can say definitively.

There is one thing that we do need to point out, and that is that even pre-pubescent boys can be sexual aggressors. Their targets are usually those who are, for reasons of age or status, vulnerable. An eleven year-old boy who is sexually assaulted by his thirty year-old female teacher is in a very different position than an eleven year-old boy who initiates sex with his thirty year-old nanny. Age compromises the capacity to consent, as we all know. But we must also acknowledge that class, status, and fear compromise consent as well.

There is also this much-reported related nonsense: Do Nannies Really Turn Boys into Future Adulterers? Based on a thoroughly unproven theory by an English psychiatrist, the discussion centers around the hypothesis that a little boy, “abandoned” by his mother for his nanny, develops the idea that multiple women are required to meet his needs. His mother’s “infidelity” to him (by having a life or a job of her own) leads to his own future infidelities years later. It’s a clever notion, nasty enough to add an extra frisson of guilt and anxiety into the lives of working mothers.

I didn’t have nannies growing up, but I spent a great deal of time with an au pair or two. I can vaguely remember that when I was five or six, I had a young woman named Sue (who must have been college-aged), whose job it was to take care of me one summer we spent on the family ranch. I am quite clear on the memory of the time she tried to teach me origami. It didn’t end in tears, but very nearly.

I had a great many women taking care of me when I was small: mother, aunts, babysitters, au pairs, grandmothers, and so forth. I am quite confident that I would have ended up a rotten husband (which I was in my first two marriages) no matter who it was who had raised me. One thing that I did bring out of my childhood, however, was a genuine liking for women as people. Women weren’t just my caregivers, they were my first friends and my best interlocutors. And my feminism, as imperfect as it was for so many years, was in no small way rooted in those early experiences.