This morning I made a reference to the fact that men are often assumed to be potential rapists as an example of how sexism negatively affects men as well as women. The argument, commonly referred to as “Schroedinger’s Rapist”, goes something like this: because you can’t know for sure if the stranger approaching you in a dark alley or other unsafe place is a rapist or not, it is generally a good idea to be on your guard. Men can enhance their interactions with women by being aware of this mindset, and adjusting their own behaviour accordingly.

I have often heard from people making an anti-feminist argument that Schroedinger’s Rapist is profoundly sexist and unfair. After all, most men do not rape – why should every man be treated like a rapist? Isn’t that discrimination? How can you claim to be opposed to sexism, yet promote a fundamentally sexually prejudicial idea? The next step is often to draw parallels to racism – is it fair to treat all black people as potential criminals simply because, statistically speaking, there are more black criminals than white ones? Isn’t that racist?

As much as I hate it when white people use anti-black racism as a cudgel with which to beat other people, I can understand the conundrum as it is expressed. The problem with it (and the reason why it’s so bothersome to hear white people talk about anti-black racism) is that it fails to address the question in a meaningful way…

Read more here.

The Obama administration on Friday expanded the FBI’s more than eight-decade-old definition of rape to count men as victims for the first time and to drop the requirement that victims must have physically resisted their attackers.

The new definition will increase the number of people counted as rape victims in FBI statistics, but it will not change federal or state laws or alter charges or prosecutions. It’s an important shift because lawmakers and policymakers use crime statistics to allocate money and other resources for prevention and victim assistance.

The White House said the change was not motivated by the recent Penn State child sex-abuse scandal. Indeed, the expanded definition has been long awaited as many states and research groups made similar changes in their definitions of rape over recent decades.

Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett called the change a “very, very important step.” The issue got top-level White House attention starting last July, when Vice President Joe Biden raised it at a Cabinet meeting.

Biden, author of the Violence Against Women Act when he was in the Senate, said the new definition is a victory for women and men “whose suffering has gone unaccounted for over 80 years.” Calling rape a “devastating crime,” the vice president said, “We can’t solve it unless we know the full extent of it.”…

Nearly 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men in the U.S. have been raped at some time in their lives, according to a 2010 survey by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which used a broader definition.

Those figures were what framed much of the discussion, said Lynn Rosenthal, the White House adviser on violence against women.

1 in 71?  Somehow I suspect that’s inaccurate.  Read more here.

SlutWalk protest in Toronto, 3 April 2011. Photo: Anton Bielousov (CC).

Violet Blue explains why the new SlutWalk protests are “a significant tipping point in cultural evolution” — and she’s serious. “Yes: I think scantily clad girls marching in the streets around the world are agents of change for our species.”

It started in April when a Toronto cop said that to stay safe from rape, women “should avoid dressing like sluts”. Soon “my clothes are not my consent” protests erupted, and the event “had an international identity within a few months,” representing “a huge reclamation and restatement about boundaries and women’s bodies.”

Now sex workers, young exhibitionists, high-heel feminists and random pissed-off women are marching “for the right to dress as they like while having their boundaries respected,” and Violet calls them the true punk rockers — the disruptors. “They’re the ones with the brass ovaries enough to dress like sluts and tell the world to STFU about what they should, or shouldn’t do, with their sexiness.”

“Maybe that’s why its critics are panicking and handwringing as if Invaders From Mars have come out of a time machine from the future in heels and hose, reminding everyone that their face is up here!”

Photo: Ehsan Iran (CC)

“If the inmate is not powerful enough or guards would not take care of him, he will be certainly raped. Prison guards ignore those who are seen with condoms simply because they were given out to them by the guards at first place” … Saeed Kamali Dehghan reports in the Guardian:

Prison guards in Iran are giving condoms to criminals and encouraging them to systematically rape young opposition activists locked up with them, according to accounts from inside the country’s jail system.

A series of dramatic letters written by prisoners and families of imprisoned activists allege that authorities are intentionally facilitating mass rape and using it as a form of punishment.

Mehdi Mahmoudian, an outspoken member of Iran’s Participation Front, a reformist political party, is among those prisoners who have succeeded in smuggling out letters revealing the extent of rape inside some of the most notorious prisons.

Mahmoudian was arrested in the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 disputed presidential election for speaking to the press about the regime’s suppression of the movement and is currently in Rajaeeshahr prison in Karaj, a city 12 miles (20km) to the west of the capital, Tehran.

“In various cells inside the prison, rape has become a common act and acceptable,” he wrote in a letter published on Kaleme.com, the official website of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.

According to Mahmoudian and letters published on various opposition websites, political prisoners are locked up with some of the most dangerous criminals – murderers and ex-members of armed gangs.

Meanwhile, 26 prominent political activists who have been in jail since the 2009 election have written to an official prison monitoring body accusing the government’s intelligence ministry and the revolutionary guards of harassing inmates with unlawful tactics that included sexual assaults.

Mohsen Aminzadeh, a senior deputy foreign minister, Mohsen Mirdamadi, a leader of a reformist party and Behzad Nabavi, a veteran activist are among those who put their signatures on the letter.

Speaking to Jaras, a website run by opposition activists, families of political prisoners have alleged that prison guards are failing to protect them from rape or sexual assault.

“During exercise periods, the strong ask for sex without any consideration. Criminals are repeatedly seen with condoms in hand, hunting for their victims,” an unnamed family member told Jaras.

“If the inmate is not powerful enough or guards would not take care of him, he will be certainly raped. Prison guards ignore those who are seen with condoms simply because they were given out to them by the guards at first place,” the family member said.

I guess that’s why Ahmadinejad claims there are no homosexuals in Iran.  (Meanwhile, in the USA, prison rape is generally considered fertile ground for comedy.)  Read more here.

A group of former volunteers who were raped while working with the Peace Corps told Congress Wednesday that serious changes need to be made to the organization.

The victims explained that in many cases, the way they were treated by the Peace Corps after reporting the assault was more traumatic than the rape itself.

“These women are alone in many cases, and they’re in rough parts of the world,” Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) told The New York Times prior to the hearing.

Jessica Smochek told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that she was raped in 2004, at the age of 23, after being deployed to Bangladesh.

“The Peace Corps said that we might experience harassment during our posting, but that it just took some getting used to,” she explained.

[Continues at The Raw Story]

A representative Daily Mail headline.

Britain’s Daily Mail tabloid newspaper has long been known for pushing stories of dubious provenance to appeal to the conservative outrage of its largely middle class readership. It has really outdone itself today, however, with this story about Libyan soldiers taking Viagra and raping small children (not that I doubt some atrocities are taking place – but the ‘Viagra-Fueled’ part?):

Children as young as eight are being raped in front of their families by Gaddafi’s forces in Libya, according to a leading charity.

Aid workers described horrific stories of widespread sexual abuse, including one incident in which a group of girls was abducted and held hostage for four days. When they were finally released, they were too traumatised to speak.

Other children have described being forced to watch as their fathers were murdered and their mothers raped. They told Save The Children that they themselves were then brually beaten before being released.

Harrowing stories of sexual assaults against women and children have emerged from those who have fled the besieged cities of Misrata, Ajdabia and Rus-Lanuf…

There have been numerous reports of Gaddafi’s troops – some fuelled by Viagra – using rape as a weapon of war.

In the most notorious example, 28-year-old Iman al-Obeidi claimed she was assaulted for two days by 15 men after being abducted at a checkpoint. She was arrested after trying to tell her story to foreign journalists and has subsequently been charged with slander.

Doctors in Misrata have also treated patients who have been sexually assaulted…

[continues in the Daily Mail]

Photo: Ted (CC)

The Daily Mail reports:

The Libyan woman who was arrested after telling foreign journalists she had been gang-raped by Gaddafi’s troops has been charged, a government spokesman said today.

In a chaotic press conference, the official said Iman Al-Obeidi was being questioned by police – despite a promise that she had been returned to her family.

‘The accuser has now become the accused,’ he added, accusing her of a ‘grave offence’.

The spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, said the men accused by Iman al-Obeidi are now suing her. A son of a high ranking Libyan official was among those she claimed had raped her, he said.

‘The boys she accused are bringing a case against her because it’s a very grave offence to accuse someone of a sexual crime,’ he told reporters in the Libyan capital.

Miss Al-Obeidi was taken into custody after bursting into the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli in a dishevelled and desperate state.

[Continues at The Daily Mail]

Sexual assault within the ranks of the military is not a new problem. It is a systemic problem that has necessitated that the military conduct its own annual reporting on the crisis.

A 2003 Air Force Academy sexual assault scandal prompted the department of defense to include a provision in the 2004 National Defense Authorization Act that required investigations and reports of sexual harassment and assaults within US military academies to be filed. The personal toll is, nevertheless, devastating.

Military sexual trauma (MST) survivor Susan Avila-Smith is director of the veteran’s advocacy group Women Organizing Women. She has been serving female and scores of male clients in various stages of recovery from MST for 15 years and knows of its devastating effects up close.

“People cannot conceive how badly wounded these people are,” she told Al Jazeera, “Of the 3,000 I’ve worked with, only one is employed. Combat trauma is bad enough, but with MST it’s not the enemy, it’s our guys who are doing it. You’re fighting your friends, your peers, people you’ve been told have your back. That betrayal, then the betrayal from the command is, they say, worse than the sexual assault itself.”

On December 13, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other groups filed a federal lawsuit seeking Pentagon records in order to get the real facts about the incidence of sexual assault in the ranks.

The Pentagon has consistently refused to release records that fully document the problem and how it is handled. Sexual assaults on women in the US military have claimed some degree of visibility, but about male victims there is absolute silence.

Pack Parachute, a non-profit in Seattle, assists veterans who are sexual assault survivors. Its founder Kira Mountjoy-Pepka, was raped as a cadet at the Air Force Academy. In July 2003 she was member of a team of female cadets handpicked by Donald Rumsfeld, at the time the secretary of defense, to tell their stories of having been sexually assaulted. The ensuing media coverage and a Pentagon investigation forced the academy to make the aforementioned major policy changes.

Some would argue that the U.S. military isn’t at all unique in this regard, but that every army in the world has such a problem.  To which I’d reply that’s proof militarism is not ennobling.  Read more here.

Anna Ardin

An interesting ‘coincidence’ in the still unfolding honey pot trap that has ensnared Julian Assange. From Kirk Murphy at Firedoglake.com:

Yesterday Alexander Cockburn reminded us of the news Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett broke at Counterpunch in September. Julian Assange’s chief accuser in Sweden has a significant history of work with anti-Castro groups, at least one of which is US funded and openly supported by a former CIA agent convicted in the mass murder of seventy three Cubans on an airliner he was involved in blowing up.

Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed here.

Quelle surprise, no? Shamir and Bennett went on to write about Ardin’s history in Cuba with a US funded group openly supported by a real terrorist: Luis Posada Carriles.

In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter. Wikipedia quotes Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo as saying that “the so-called Ladies in White defend the terrorism of the United States.”

Who is Luis Posada Carriles? He’s a mass murderer, and former CIA agent…

[continues at at Firedoglake.com]

Feminists, do not focus upon male rape generally, or male prison rape in particular. This is unsurprising, and not, in itself, particularly problematic.

What is problematic with feminist discourse about male rape is not that they don’t discuss it at all – clearly they do – or that they don’t discuss it enough. The problem is that they anomalise it, that is to say, they treat it as some kind of anomalous variant of rape which, according to them, is something which normally happens to women. The latter is simply “rape”. Rape that happens to men in prison is “prison rape”. Rape that happens to men outside of prison is “male rape”. The word “female” is sometimes used as an adjective with “rape” to contrast it with male rape, but “female rape” is not used by feminists as a category designation in and of itself. It’s just “rape”. “Male rape” and “prison rape” sometimes get their own threads, effectively discoursive ghettos. But they are often excluded from threads about “rape”.

If rape that happens to women is “rape”, it follow that “rape” is something which happens to women. This equivalence is reinforced by the interchangeability in feminist (and, due to its influence, in mainstream) discourse between the ostensibly gender-neutral (but implicitly gendered) functional category “rape” and the explicit gender category “violence against women”. The overall effect is to render male rape invisible outside of the ghetto.

What the ghetto threads do is give the appearance of addressing these issues positively, while ensuring that male sexual victimisation remains a marginalised topic. Since male victims are already marginalised to the point of invisibility within mainstream society, the effect is to preserve and extend gender inequality contrary to feminism’s stated aim.

Read more here.

JOHANNESBURG— A new survey says more than one in three South African men admit to having committed rape.

A 2010 study led by the government-funded Medical Research Foundation says that in Gauteng province, home to South Africa’s most populous city of Johannesburg, more than 37 percent of men said they had raped a woman. Nearly 7 percent of the 487 men surveyed said they had participated in a gang rape.

More than 51 percent of the 511 women interviewed said they’d experienced violence from men, and 78 percent of men said they’d committed violence against women.

A quarter of the women interviewed said they’d been raped, but the study says only one in 25 rapes are reported to police.

A survey by the same organization in 2008 found that 28 percent of men in Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces said they had raped a woman or girl. Of the men who had committed rape, one third did not feel guilty, said Rachel Jewkes, a lead researcher on both studies.

Read More on the AP via Yahoo News

Frequently, I receive requests to provide a definition of the term “rape culture”…

Rape culture is rape being used as a weapon, a tool of war and genocide and oppression. Rape culture is rape being used as a corrective to “cure” queer women. Rape culture is a militarized culture and “the natural product of all wars, everywhere, at all times, in all forms.”

Rape culture is 1 in 33 men being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Rape culture is encouraging men to use the language of rape to establish dominance over one another (”I’ll make you my bitch”). Rape culture is making rape a ubiquitous part of male-exclusive bonding. Rape culture is ignoring the cavernous need for men’s prison reform in part because the threat of being raped in prison is considered an acceptable deterrent to committing crime, and the threat only works if actual men are actually being raped.

Rape culture is 1 in 6 women being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Rape culture is not even talking about the reality that many women are sexually assaulted multiple times in their lives. Rape culture is the way in which the constant threat of sexual assault affects women’s daily movements. Rape culture is telling girls and women to be careful about what you wear, how you wear it, how you carry yourself, where you walk, when you walk there, with whom you walk, whom you trust, what you do, where you do it, with whom you do it, what you drink, how much you drink, whether you make eye contact, if you’re alone, if you’re with a stranger, if you’re in a group, if you’re in a group of strangers, if it’s dark, if the area is unfamiliar, if you’re carrying something, how you carry it, what kind of shoes you’re wearing in case you have to run, what kind of purse you carry, what jewelry you wear, what time it is, what street it is, what environment it is, how many people you sleep with, what kind of people you sleep with, who your friends are, to whom you give your number, who’s around when the delivery guy comes, to get an apartment where you can see who’s at the door before they can see you, to check before you open the door to the delivery guy, to own a dog or a dog-sound-making machine, to get a roommate, to take self-defense, to always be alert always pay attention always watch your back always be aware of your surroundings and never let your guard down for a moment lest you be sexually assaulted and if you are and didn’t follow all the rules it’s your fault.

Rape culture is victim-blaming. Rape culture is a judge blaming a child for her own rape. Rape culture is a minister blaming his child victims. Rape culture is accusing a child of enjoying being held hostage, raped, and tortured. Rape culture is spending enormous amounts of time finding any reason at all that a victim can be blamed for hir own rape.

Read more here.

Note the scare quotes.

Two members apparently got into an argument–the page has only two posts by the members, but they contain multiple edits and refer to each others’ arguments.  This is how I think it went down:

Lol sup:

If a man claims to have been raped by a women, he’s trivializing rape. End of story.

Alpha Scorpii:

It is misandristic in that you are trivializing the feelings of men. I was watching a CNN show about a robbery/rape/multiple murder committed by 2 black men in Kansas. Five friends were at one of their condos when the men held them at gunpoint and forced them all to strip. They first made the women perform cunnilingus on each other while the men were kept in a closet, then they forced the men to have sex with the women. From what the lone survivor said the men weren’t all too pleased about the situation at all. I’d say that would be psychologically harmful to those men, and of course the women too. They don’t have to worry about it though since they are all dead except on woman whose hair clip deflected the bullet to her head.
Women can rape men with foreign objects you know. I’ve heard of that happening on more than one occasion. That is probably very harmful to them. If you mean teens and younger, as happens with teachers, and in child pornography, I would have to say that it’s not healthy, and in porn it can be very damaging .

Lol sup:

Rape isn’t about “getting off”. Rape is about establishing dominance and forcing someone to do something that they don’t want to do. Saying women rape men with objects is ******* ridiculous and it trivializes the brutality that many women face every day.

A woman that shoves a dildo up a guy’s *** is sexual harassment, sure. But saying it’s rape is a stretch of the imagination. It demeans the horror that victims of REAL rape lived through. The ones that were murdered after being raped, well. It’s like pissing on their grave.

Alpha Scorpii:

well that proves the point about trivializing the plight of men. OK, another example, I saw some interviews of crack whores. One liked to tie the johns up then sodomize them against their wills with foreign objects. That would be extremely traumatizing for a man. IT IS RAPE, even by the feminist legal definition. If a man puts a foreign object in a woman that’s rape, but if it’s done to a man it’s not? That is what you have said.
Also, many men are raped in prisons every day. These are brutal, violent gang rapes many times, and the victims have nowhere to run to, no one helps them, and they are stuck very often as sexual slaves being loaned out to rival gangs or traded and sold like an animal. This is a very big civil rights violation, and men are raped then killed in prison. The spread of AIDS is also high there, as is tuberculosis and hepatitis C. By some estimates more men are raped in prison each year than the total of all women raped. Even if the number is not quite as high as the number of women raped it is still an evil thing to send men to be homosexually raped in prison, especially if they are falsely convicted of rape.

Lol sup:

We aren’t talking about man on man rape. We’re talking about woman on man sexual harassment.

The ratio of innocent men in prison compared to guilty men is along the lines of 0.5:10. If a guilty man is put in prison, and is raped, it’s his fault and his fault alone. Women who are raped are innocent. Saying that more men are raped than women is mindbogglingly stupid.

I’m not convinced that you were serious just now. This must be a joke, a put-on. Even the physically and mentally handicapped people that work as greeters at Walmart are not as pathetic as what you said. I’m calling shenanigans, mostly because I believe it is a legit attempt a shaking my faith in humanity to it’s very core. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it. It’s the most mind-numbingly inane bullshit I’ve ever read. I’m sure that if you told anyone else what you just said, they’d gouge their eyes out because of the fact that they wouldn’t be able to comprehend the utter mental retardation that encompasses what you said. You sir have brought a new meaning to fail. This fail is the kind of fail that will go down in history. The kind of fail that I won’t be the least bit proud of admitting that I was there for. I hope I never meet you in real life because I’m afraid that your level of stupid can be transferred via verbal contact. You are a prime example of a worthless blight.

But assuming this isn’t a joke and you really are plagued by this much idiocy, I feel that it is my duty, for all intents and purposes, to blatantly tell you how confoundingly stupid you are. I feel that it is the kindness, most responsible thing I can do for your lost, mentally questionable soul.

Okay, I’m just going to go out on a limb and say it. I one time saw two guys having sex in the park. That was the gayest thing I’ve ever seen until I read what you said. You should just quit life. I’m sure you’re getting a lot of hate from your peers and everyone that ever loved you right now. I can understand your stupidity. I myself was once a stupid little kid with no knowledge of the world. You made me despise not only that but everything about my childhood. Thank you.

But what I want to know is why. Why, why why? What was your plan? You were going to come to ME and expect real feedback? I can’t even think of a rational argument to give you that I think you’d be able to understand. I suggest you go in a corner, sit down, and think about your life for at least a week. After that week, if the sheer amount of ridiculousness hasn’t crushed your will to live, come back and apologize.

Source(s):

Common sense

Some 1,200 elementary school children in Anyang City, south of Seoul, will receive the beepers in a test run from October.

Authorities will then consider adopting the system nationwide, the Ministry of Public Administration and Security said.

Each child will be able to use their matchbox-sized beeper, fitted with GPS (global positioning device) technology, to activate any nearby cameras and alert parents and police via mobile phone.

The government has strengthened monitoring of elementary schools after several crimes against children.

Police last month arrested a 44-year-old habitual sex offender for kidnapping an eight-year-old girl at her school in southern Seoul and raping her.

The National Police Agency has announced a plan to launch investigative units nationwide to tackle such crimes and declared “war” on child molesters.

I spent most of this past spring and summer rolling my eyes every time I heard a news story about the swine flu. Almost every day local reporters got hysterical about 5 or 10 or 20 confirmed cases. Entire schools closed in response to a handful of kids with fevers, and as if there were no war in Afghanistan, no economic crisis, and no other epidemics claiming ten times as many lives, newscasters talked about H1N1 (the proper name for swine flu) for hours.

I have a degree in public health and my work focuses on preventing rape and other acts of violence and supporting survivors in healing from abuse. When I see all the attention swine flu is getting, I’m jealous. Other than intermittent news stories about sex offenders on the loose or why women who accuse professional athletes of rape are lying, sexual violence rarely gets any widespread coverage. Certainly no state of emergency declared by the President of the United States.

Now, I don’t want to diminish the grief of those who have lost loved ones to H1N1. I don’t even want to question the scientific validity of the Center for Disease Control’s decision to declare it a pandemic. But the fact remains that the impact of H1N1 is far less than that of other public health crises that receive a fraction of the attention and resources. The CDC reported just over 43,000 cases of H1N1 between April and July of this year and estimates that it will affect a million people, or 0.3% of the total population of the United States. Compare this to the 2.5% of women and 0.9% of men who reported being raped or sexually assaulted in the past year. The most recent statistics about rape available from the CDC are from last year. Swine flu? Last week.

What would our media, our public discourse, and our institutional responses look like if people cared as much about rape as they do about H1N1?

Full article at Bitch Magazine Online

At the Cannes International Film Festival in May, in the loud, chaotic bar at the Martinez Hotel, Lee Daniels seemed, as he often does, both ecstatic and nervous. He jumped, he slumped, his mood changing from giddy to anxious. He was the only black man in the crowded bar, a fact that he mentioned and then brushed away. He was dressed unremarkably in a loose, untucked shirt and slouchy khaki pants, but his hair, an electric corona of six-inch fusilli-like spirals, demanded notice. Although Daniels will be 50 this year, he has the bouncy, mercurial energy of a child. The previous night, at the gala screening of his movie “Precious,” which he directed and helped produce, he greeted the audience by saying, “I’m a little homo, I’m a little Euro and I’m a little ghetto.” The crowd cheered.

Daniels knows what he’s selling: his films combine street-smart bravado with an art-house sensibility. “Precious,” the harrowing story of a 350-pound illiterate teenage girl who is pregnant for the second time by her father and horribly abused by her mother, is shot in an almost-documentary style interspersed with fantasy sequences. (It opens Nov. 6.) Like most independent films, it is character-driven, and at its heart is a spirit of understanding. When Precious’s plight lands her in a special school, she blossoms: the audience’s initial rejection of Precious, even repulsion at the sight of her, slowly gives way to a kind of identification.

At Cannes, the film received a 15-minute standing ovation. “They wouldn’t stop clapping,” Daniels told me as he gulped a vodka. “I’m a director — after six minutes, I’m saying, please sit down. But I’m also a producer, so I’m thinking, what’s the record? Can we break the record for the longest standing ovation at the festival?”…