Trigger Warning on post and links for graphic descriptions of sexual violence against sex workers, including sexual torture; rape apologism

This past April, a woman who was doing sex work was picked up by one John Hauff and driven to his home to engage in a pre-negotiated sexual encounter. Hauff requested some bondage elements in that encounter — to which the woman agreed, while setting strong limits.

John Hauff allegedly violated those limits wildly. Instead of loosely tying her to the bedpost and stimulating her with a vibrator, as she says she agreed, he allegedly chained her to the ceiling and forced painful sexual acts on her involving extreme bondage, paddles, electrical shocks, speculums, and catheters.

The first page of this article in the Seattle Weekly offers a lengthy, extremely explicit description of the allegations in question.

The second page goes on to begin (technically in the second paragraph down):

But is John Hauff a monster? Or is there, as some in the bondage community suggest, another way to interpret what happened between John Hauff and the woman he picked up on Aurora Avenue on April 2—one that makes Hauff less a cruel and sadistic rapist than a participant in a bondage session gone haywire?

Rape is not BDSM¹ gone wrong. And what has been alleged is not “BDSM” or “bondage” but rape and sexual torture. Anyone in bondage/BDSM communities making the argument that there is only a thin line between BDSM and rape is doing themselves an incredible disservice. They serve not to speak for the rights of those who wish to engage in consensual, non-mainstream sexual behavior, but for rapists. To conflate BDSM enthusiasts with rapists is to wrongly vilify BDSM and its participants, the vast majority of whom don’t rape people. And it is to suggest that anyone who agrees to any BDSM elements in a sexual situation is more or less requesting to be raped.

As it turns out, though, this article ends up splitting very neatly among gender lines. All of the women consulted in the piece — one who previously engaged in consensual BDSM scenes with Hauff, and the executive director of the Center for Sex Positive Culture — absolutely agree that the allegations as described constitute sexual violence and are utterly unacceptable.

The men who weigh in on the subject are, shockingly, a little bit less sure. One of them is Master Ray, a man who makes his living doing BDSM trainings, and who seems to have rather antiquated views on gender roles.

The other is Jonathan Kaminsky, the author of the piece himself, who sets up this absurd, rape apologist framing on the basis of nothing more than the word of one BDSM practitioner (against the word of two others), and seemingly his own gut instinct about how rape allegations just can’t be trusted. This is despite the fact that Hauff admitted to police that he did not stop the first two times the woman told him to.

The article is supposedly intended to interrogate whether or not Hauff’s “fetish will set him free.” It’s a real possibility, with both rape culture and mainstream views and misunderstandings regarding BDSM being what they are. But Kaminsky doesn’t explore the prejudices of the average public. He doesn’t consult lawyers regarding defense tactics, or speculate on what “expert” witnesses may be called to the stand to act as apologists. He just asks some people who also engage in BDSM what they think of the case. Most of them say “this sounds like rape.” One reads from a rape apologist script. And suddenly, we’re supposed to believe that there is meaningful “controversy” here and reason to entertain the possibility of a gray area.

We’re not supposed to notice that this angle was manufactured by the author, who turned “one guy I talked to” into “some in the bondage community” and closed his article like this:

Only two people know what happened the night of April 2, what boundaries were drawn, what deals were struck, and how, when, and to what degree they were breached. It is possible that their understanding of what happened on that night differs. It’s possible we’ll never know the truth.

…

What we do know is that no bodies were found in his yard, and no other women have come forward with terrible stories of kidnap and rape. We also know this: The events of April 2 have marked a dark chapter in the lives of prostitute and client alike.

Indeed.

Of course, anyone with the slightest familiarity with rape culture will know that “only two people know what happened” is the classic way of saying that we better take the alleged rapist’s word for it. And anyone who knows anything about alt-weeklies that do their damnedest to seem street-smart will also know that the Seattle Weekly editors have absolutely no excuse to not know the term “sex worker” or how the unnecessarily repeated references to the victim in this case as a “prostitute” (instead of a rape victim) are incredibly stigmatizing towards her in the current U.S. cultural climate. And anyone who knows anything about life will know that not having decaying corpses on your property or a long line of highly marginalized victims who are willing to step forward and involve themselves in a very public case hardly means that you didn’t rape that one woman who says you raped her.

But surely we can all agree that this sucks as much for the rapist as it does for the rape victim, can’t we?

Frankly, if this is what passes for objectivity and journalistic ethics these days, I don’t want it.

But back to Master Ray. Well, some of his own views are as terrifying as they are long-winded:

When the subject turns to John Hauff, Master Ray’s face hardens. He’s never met the man, he says, pausing to sip from his glass of milk. He knows only what he’s seen on TV and heard on the radio. Because he doesn’t have all the details, Master Ray cautions that making a judgment “would be improper and foolish.” Still, he says, there’s something about the young woman’s story that troubles him. She acknowledges negotiating up front for a certain amount of bondage, Master Ray points out. She got in his car willingly, and they drove to his place. There was no threat of brutality in the car.

“It wasn’t a kidnapping,” Master Ray says. “It was a negotiated sex scene between a hooker and her client. And somewhere along the line, she crossed her own panic line and cried ‘Help!’ ”

As for her texting of Hauff’s license-plate number, Master Ray points out that this is standard operating procedure in the fetish community, and doesn’t necessarily mean the young woman was unusually leery of Hauff. “We call that a ‘safe call.’ It’s perfectly legitimate and normal,” he says. Once she’d revealed the text message to Hauff, Ray continues, “What happened next? She got dressed. He took her back where she belonged. He dropped her off. There was no threat. No murder. No ‘Keep quiet or I’ll come get you.’ ”

During a bondage session in which the rules have already been agreed upon, a dominant partner’s saying something to arouse a submissive partner is as common as flirting, Master Ray says. If, during a bondage scene, Master Ray were asked by a submissive he didn’t know if he planned to kill her, he would read it as a sign that this type of talk turned her on. “So I’m going to smirk and say something like ‘We’ll see,’ or ‘Maybe later,’ or ‘Only if you’re not pleasing to me, only if you don’t satisfy me,’ ” explains Master Ray. “Call me a smart-ass, but I’m going to say something that is going to elicit a response from her.”

When the prostitute asked Hauff if he was going to kill her, Master Ray says, “We don’t know what tone of voice she used.” Her question, he says, could have been understood as a clue that this form of “danger” was a turn-on for her. “And the worst part of it is that between the time it happened and when she finally decided to report it, her feelings, her thoughts, can change,” Master Ray says. “Shame can set in. And then he gets punished because now she’s feeling bad about it.”

Still, Master Ray acknowledges, Hauff’s alleged use of such techniques as bladder manipulation and electric shock, which are at the outer edges of the bondage-play repertoire, give him pause. “If he did spring this on her, then he crossed a line,” Master Ray says. “That would not be tolerated in the [fetish] community.”

There’s something about the woman’s story that bothers him: namely, that he doesn’t seem to think a woman (let alone “a hooker”) who agrees to any kind of sexual contact can then be raped. The fact that she admittedly cried “Help!” doesn’t count. After all, her rapist didn’t kill her. (Master Ray is wrong about her not being told to keep quiet; Hauff allegedly told the woman to not involve the cops, easily understood as a threat in itself.)

His argument seems to be “this would have been completely consensual, if both parties consented.” Which, obviously. The very point is that one party explicitly says she did not consent. But Master Ray asserts that we don’t know the tone of voice she used when asking if Hauff was going to kill her, so the consent was probably implied.

Personally, I’d say that Master Ray sounds like an incredibly irresponsible and dangerous dom, if his portrayal of how he treats partners he does not know and has not negotiated said elements with in advance is accurate. And yet, we are supposed to respect him as an expert not only in BDSM, but also in consent as it relates to BDSM. As if BDSM communities are somehow uniquely immune to rape culture.

According to Master Ray “the worst part of it” is not that a woman was allegedly raped and tortured, but that she might be lying about it. Which alone should tell us all we need to know about him. The myth that women quickly become “ashamed” of their sexual activity and then falsely claim rape in order to protect their patriarchally-approved virtue is a pervasive if widely debunked one. The fact that said myth is able to be twisted and applied to sex workers — the same women who are routinely portrayed as having no virtue left in a world that judge’s women’s virtue on the basis of their chastity — is nothing more than evidence of how far misogynists are willing to contort their own logic to support men’s right to rape (at least certain) women with impunity.

Indeed, one of the truly remarkable things about this case is that the police care at all. One could indeed speculate that the particular amount of violence used and the non-mainstream sexual acts allegedly forced are likely the reason. In a culture where consensual kinky sex is vilified, rape involving elements that would be considered kinky in a consensual setting will always be more severely demonized. In a culture where sex workers are routinely raped by police, where sex workers are almost always too afraid to report their rapes to police, where judges call the rape of sex workers “theft of services,” it’s not a stretch to imagine that we wouldn’t be seeing the same amount of resources or outrage applied had the woman consented to one kind of sex and then forced into another, with no BDSM elements present. We’d be hearing choruses of “what did she expect?”

Clearly some commenters aren’t content to entirely avoid those choruses now. Some people can’t get past the idea that a woman who agrees to any kind of sex deserves whatever violence might be inflicted on her. This is far more so when the woman in question is a sex worker.

But no matter what the Seattle Weekly or Master Ray sees fit to either imply or outright say, there is no such thing as blanket consent. Every person has the right to say no, to set limits, and to have those limits respected. When those limits are violated, it is assault. No matter what other acts they may have agreed to. No matter who they are.

Thanks to Una Feral for the link.

When I began listening to Yoko Ono’s music and learned that it wasn’t at all what I’d been led to believe, one of the first songs I was strongly drawn to was a track from the second side of her landmark 1973 double album Approximately Infinite Universe, titled What A Bastard The World Is. Her later 1973 album Feeling The Space would contain so many songs explicitly dealing with the lives and rights of women — from Woman Power to Men, Men, Men, from Angry Young Woman to Yellow Girl, from She Hits Back to Woman of Salem — that it is regularly referred to as a feminist concept album. (Intriguingly, despite being remarkably quiet for a Yoko Ono album and also rather even-tempered, one male reviewer — who was apparently so intimidated that he misplaced a couple of stars — could barely think of any adjective to describe it other than “angry.”)

Yet, I’ve always found What A Bastard The World Is, a sparse, furious, and melancholy ballad about a woman being treated poorly by her partner and a relationship falling apart, to be not only one of Yoko’s most moving compositions, but also one of her most complex and insightful feminist songs. Not coincidentally, it also comes across as one of her most personal and honest.

Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band – What A Bastard The World Is by YokoOno

(What A Bastard The World Is Lyrics)

What A Bastard The World Is seems to be a personal story, but there’s a reason the lyric becomes “what a bastard the world is” from the original “what a bastard you are.” The story is personal, but it is also a political examination of male-female romantic/sexual relationships and has much larger implications outside a single woman’s life. (For that reason, I will leave aside in this post the more personal and less relevant question of whether John Lennon is the “you” being addressed in the lyrics.) In the end, it’s not her partner alone who is the problem, but the society both he and the narrator have been raised in.

The song begins as a sad and then angry lament about a male partner who didn’t come home the night before. The situation is so common, it verges on stereotypical. Without so much as a phone call, the man has casually shed his responsibilities and commitments to his partner for the night, leaving her alone to uphold her end of the relationship. A certain sexist disregard for her experiences, reasonable expectations, and the ways in which she may have been depending on him is necessary here. (One might also argue that while he makes himself free to do as she pleases, she is confined. One might even call her dependent, or lacking in her own life.)

The man’s inability to see his female partner as a full person with an inner life and needs of her own rather than an obligation he must answer to is stifling and dehumanizing. And most importantly of all, along with his greater social standing, it gives him the upper hand in the relationship and the quarrel. Upon his eventual return, the woman provokes an argument, expressing her often-heard feelings of resentment and neglect. This has, after all, happened before. “I’m sick and tired of listening to the same old crap.”

But he merely has to argue his case — she has to argue for her humanity. Left otherwise powerless, she is reduced — as women so often are in heterosexual relationships, only to then be mocked for it — to screaming a litany of frustrations at her partner, who still does not seem to bother to hear them.

But during this tirade, something unexpected happens:

You know half the world is occupied with you pigs;
I can always get another pig like you

You’ve heard of Female Liberation,
Well that’s for me
You’ll see me walk out one day
And then where will you be?

Here, Yoko/the narrator unexpectedly makes the explicit connection between her partner’s poor behavior towards her and gender oppression. Dreamily, she sings of what her life will be like outside of the relationship — relaxed, and in community with those who truly respect and understand her. But while contrasting this feminist fantasy with her restricted and stifled sense of self within the relationship, it suddenly becomes clear that she is at least in part using theory of liberation as something of a performance intended to score points — something many of us will admit to doing if we are honest with ourselves — when she bursts into a screaming, heart-wrenching rage at the realization that her partner might not be taking her words to heart:

Are you listening, you jerk, you pig, you bastard,
You scum of the earth, you good for nothing

Are you listening?

But just as quickly as the anger erupted, the pounding of the piano immediately quiets as the man turns to leave. The narrator swiftly crumples under the weight of emotional need she feels towards her partner, half sobbing, half whispering, and fully self-effacing:

Oh, don’t go
Don’t go
Please, don’t go
I didn’t mean it, I’m just in pain
I’m sorry, I’m sorry

The narrator finds herself forced to make a choice. On one side are theory, respect, and self-confidence. On the other side is the man she loves, the person she has built a life with, who is nonetheless treating her with a certain sexist indifference and derision.

But does that necessarily make it as simple as a choice between feminism and patriarchy? Or is it a choice between what one ideally wants and what ones knows they can realistically have? A choice between something one desperately needs and something else one desperately needs just as badly? Or a complicated choice, involving pieces of each?

Almost all would agree that it is possible for women to love men while also strongly opposing sexism and the domination of women by men. But What A Bastard The World Is asks: what happens when these two acts collide? Can’t it at certain points become impossible to do both at once? And what, then, when it does?

The song uneasily leaves these questions unanswered, while making it clear that the dilemma is systemic:

What a bastards the world is
Taking my man away from me
Taking the world away from me

While one could easily read these lines as a passing of blame, I read them as a structural critique as much as they are a means of lashing out. What a bastard the world is, confining male-female romantic relationships within the inescapable structure of patriarchy. What a bastard the world is, teaching us nothing but oppression and subjugation. What a bastard the world is, not teaching men and women to see each other as more than objects of power, not teaching men and women to love each other wholly as equals.

She closes:

Female Lib is nice for Joan of Arc
But it’s a long, long way for Terry and Jill
Most of us were taught not to shout our will
Few of us were encouraged to get a job for skill
And all of us live under the mercy of male society
Thinking that their want is our need

Those last bolded lines are, in my view, some of the best lyrics Yoko has ever written. Such a succinct, poetic, and cutting description of how women are socialized to engage with men in romantic and sexual relationships, how men are socialized to believe that women should engage. Thinking that their want is our need. It is devastating, and it is true. Within this framework, how can male-female relationships not be destined to fail? Indeed, even women who do not partner with men are taught these same messages and often act them out in other relationships. So how can women not be destined to fail?

But as these lyrics somewhat bitterly note, the feminism of the classroom and the rally is a long way from the feminism of our everyday, home lives. Sure, we need liberation — but too often we don’t know where to begin. And too often, feminism has failed to take the daily choices that women must make into account. Choices centered on survival, and yes, choices centered on love. When feminist liberation is pitted against love, not by right-wing columnists out to say that feminists hate men, but by the unfortunate realities of the lives this world has given us, the choice is not in any way simple.

How can men and women form loving relationships when they are not equal? How can these relationships be created outside of gendered power dynamics when those dynamics are so socially pervasive? When women are taught to believe that men’s wants are actually our needs, how can women who partner with men manage to separate love from obligation and duty, to love in ways that are healthy and self-affirming? With men taught to expect the same from women, how can men who partner with women separate love from expectation and dominance and learn to love in ways that are not oppressive?

What does it mean for men and women to need each other when men cannot fully respect and women cannot wholly trust? What does it mean for women to love those who were never taught to see them as fully human? And what does it mean, too, for women who are oriented towards partnering with men to leave them behind, when these dynamics keep perpetuating themselves? Is that liberation? What can liberation mean in this context? Can there be true liberation if it is absent of love? Can there be true love if it is absent of liberation?

These are questions that women who partner with men certainly did not leave behind in the 70s, that feminists still struggle to answer and must clumsily, imperfectly continue to work through. I certainly cannot prescribe the solutions any better than Yoko could. But for raising these issues with such emotional authenticity, passion, skill, and nuance, for acknowledging that finding the right questions is just as important as finding the right answers, and for refusing to concede or degrade either her need for romantic companionship with men or her political vision of gender liberation, Yoko Ono’s What A Bastard The World Is should be considered a feminist masterpiece.

Trigger Warning for descriptions of sexual violence and abuses against sex workers

Last week, Jordan Flaherty wrote an article at Colorlines about how sex workers are being punished under an archaic and punitive law that specifically targets those who are convicted of selling oral or anal sex (as opposed to vaginal sex). The law makes these sex workers open to being labeled as felons by police and prosecutors, and worst of all, forces them to register as sex offenders.

Last month, a coalition of advocates, including Women With A Vision and the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the statue:

Eve, who asked that we not reveal her real name or age, spent two years in prison. During her time behind bars she was raped and contracted HIV. Upon release, she was forced to register in the state’s sex offender database. The words “sex offender” now appear on her driver’s license. “I have tried desperately to change my life,” she says, but her status as a sex offender stands in the way of housing and other programs. “When I present my ID for anything,” she says, “the assumption is that you’re a child molester or a rapist. The discrimination is just ongoing and ongoing.”

Eve was penalized under Louisiana’s 205-year-old Crime Against Nature statute, a blatantly discriminatory law that legislators have maneuvered to keep on the state’s books for the purpose of turning sex workers into felons. As enforced, the law specifically singles out oral and anal sex for greater punishment for those arrested for prostitution, including requiring those convicted to register as sex offenders in a public database. Advocates say the law has further isolated poor women of color in particular, including those who are forced to trade sex for food or a place to sleep at night.

In 2003, the Supreme Court outlawed sodomy laws with its decision in Lawrence v. Texas. That ruling should have invalidated Louisiana’s law entirely. Instead, the state has chosen to only enforce the portion of the law that concerns “solicitation” of a crime against nature. The decision on whether to charge accused sex workers with a felony instead of Louisiana’s misdemeanor prostitution law is left entirely in the hands of police and prosecutors.

Prior to the lawsuit, Colorlines was covering the issue over a year ago. Melissa Gira Grant wrote about the suit at Third Wave right after it was filed last month, and the INCITE! Blog was on it both last year and earlier this month. You should definitely go check those articles out, as there’s no doubt that I’m behind. But I still think the issue is worth writing about and getting further attention.

As noted by Flaherty, Louisiana is the only U.S. state that requires people who have been convicted of crimes that do not involve minors or violence outside the sexual violence itself to register as sex offenders. Meghan’s Law, which created sex offender registries, was clearly intended to target rapists. Louisiana has actively made the choice to abuse the registry to further shame, punish, and vilify sex workers who have not committed any violence. Women are by far the primary target of these efforts, though gay and bisexual men are also incredibly vulnerable. Of the women targeted by the state, women who are non-white, trans, and/or poor are most open to attack.

People convicted under the Louisiana law must carry a state ID with the words “sex offender” printed below their name. If they have to evacuate because of a hurricane, they must stay in a special shelter for sex offenders that has no separate facilities for men and women. They have to pay a $60 annual registration fee, in addition to $250 to $750 to print and mail postcards to their neighbors every time they move. The post cards must show their names and addresses, and often they are required to include a photo. Failing to register and pay the fees, a separate crime, can carry penalties of up to 10 years in prison.

Women and men on the registry will also find their names, addresses, and convictions printed in the newspaper and published in an online sex offender database. The same information is also displayed at public sites like schools and community centers. Women—including one mother of three—have complained that because of their appearance on the registry, they have had men come to their homes demanding sex. A plaintiff in the suit had rocks thrown at her by neighbors. “This has forced me to live in poverty, be on food stamps and welfare,” explains a man who was on the list. “I’ve never done that before.”

In Orleans Parish, 292 people are on the registry for selling sex, versus 85 people convicted of forcible rape and 78 convicted of “indecent behavior with juveniles.” Almost 40 percent of those registered in Orleans Parish are there solely because they were accused of offering anal or oral sex for money. Seventy-five percent of those on the database for Crime Against Nature are women, and 80 percent are African American. Evidence gathered by advocates suggests a majority are poor or indigent.

There are several broad critiques to be made of sex offender registry programs. In addition to the racial profiling and discriminatory enforcement noted in the Colorlines article, there are also further questions regarding whether sex offender registries actually keep communities safer and/or lower recidivism rates. Support for sex offender registry programs generally, however, should not be viewed as in any way incompatible with thinking that the Louisiana system is being used as a means of violence and oppression against sex workers and must immediately be overturned.

This is not in any way about keeping communities safer. It is about further punishing and portraying as deviant those who have failed to comply with societal rules regarding sexuality, class, and womanhood. It’s not about making communities safer, it’s about specifically ensuring that these particular community members are as unsafe as possible. And in that sense, it’s certainly working.

Because of the way that sex workers are generally made vulnerable to violence, as well as the ways that prisoners face frequent sexual assault, the most callous part of this practice may be the fact that such large numbers of those forced to register as sex offenders for non-violent offenses are victims of sexual violence themselves. Most of the women and men profiled in these articles talk about having been raped, whether as adults or children, whether by clients or family members, by prison guards or fellow prisoners. They must register as sex offenders, be unable to find employment or residences, face harassment and assault, and bear scarlet letters on their identification while at the same time, probably all of their actual rapists do not have to do the same. They have not only been raped, but been given their rapists’ punishments. They have not only been raped, but told that they are like, or perhaps worse than, their actual rapists.

And while this form of punishment for an act that should not be illegal in the first place is not even remotely acceptable for those who do engage in sex work because it is their preferred profession, it is also worth noting that there are many sex workers who do sex work as a form of survival or have otherwise been coerced. These workers are already more likely to be in street-based economies, and therefore are more likely to be targeted by law enforcement and more likely to be singled out for felony instead of misdemeanor punishment as a result of judicial prejudice.

In other words, punishing people for what they choose to do with their own bodies, when those actions do not harm any other person, is unconscionable — as is punishing them specifically for selling forms of sex perceived as less acceptable by a cissexist, heterosexist, anti-sex society. But quite a few of those women and men who have been forced to register as sex offenders didn’t even necessarily have a choice. And for that, they have been branded by a racist, anti-trans, classist, anti-gay system.

It will be interesting to see how this case plays out, and whether the court will decide with power and oppression as usual, or with the people and justice.

Trigger Warning on posts and links for very explicit descriptions of gang rape against an intoxicated person, severe victim-blaming and rape apologism, and ableism.

Four years ago, a 17-year-old girl was allegedly gang raped at an alcohol fueled party by 9 young men, almost all De Anza College baseball players. The girl was found by three female soccer team players, who are said to have forced their way into the room to break up the ongoing assault, finding the victim semi-conscious and covered in vomit while men performed various sexual acts on her.  The victim went to police; the three women were all very clear in their statements about how the encounter was not and could not have been consensual. A huge media frenzy ensued. And then, no charges were ever filed against the accused players.

Back in spring 2007, very soon after I first began blogging, the De Anza rape case was one of the very first instance of sexual violence I ever wrote about, so long ago that it was before I had come to terms with the fact that I was a rape survivor myself. For that reason among many others, it is a case that I have written about very extensively and that has always remained very strongly with me. Almost four years later, the case is still not over, justice has not been done, and the victim is still actively seeking accountability for what was done to her that night.

Three years after the DA decided to not pursue the case for “insufficient evidence” — despite the three witnesses to the rape never having been sought for grand jury testimony, and despite much forensic evidence never being tested — the victim has taken her case to civil court in a final attempt at legal recognition of the crimes against her. Lauren Chief Elk, Lauren Bryeans, and April Grolle — who have become such passionate advocates both for this victim and rape survivors in general — have, for the first time, been able to say what they witnessed that night in court. The details are more distressing than even the earlier reports indicated.

Bryeans testified that she and the other two soccer girls knocked on the white French doors leading to the 84-square foot bedroom. The door was opened twice by angry young men including Scott Righetti, who told her “she wants to be in here,” she said. The third time, it was opened by Stephen Rebagliati, who told her there was nothing going on and to go away. One time, she said, she saw a cell phone being held up in what she thought was camera mode.

After being rebuffed a third time, Bryeans said she and Chief Elk bent down and peeked through the door largely covered inside with a black sheet.

“Chief saw the light first, she ducked down and peeked in and said ‘Oh, my God,’ and pulled me down,” Bryeans said.

She said she saw a man in the missionary position on top of the teen and another man whom she identified as defendant Luis Cardenas pulling her head as if to get her to orally copulate him.

“She looked like she was in danger,” Bryeans said, adding the teen’s eyes were closed and legs spread, and she was moving her head away from Cardenas’ genitals.

Bryeans and the other soccer players began pounding on the door and were finally admitted after the men filed out.

When Bryeans viewed the teen up close, Bryeans said, the girl was lying on a futon, with her top hanging off, her pants wrapped around one ankle and vomit on her face and hair.

“I recall her saying, ‘help me,’ ” Bryeans told the jury of six men and six women. She also testified she and the other women had to carry the barely breathing teen to a car.

“I thought she was out for the count,” she said. Another soccer girl kept checking her pulse.

The cross-examination, however, leaves me firm in my belief that some defense attorneys simply are evil:

One defense attorney asked Bryeans whether she thought about calling 911, if she was so worried about the teen’s condition. No, she admitted. One pointed out the teen also said, “Sorry.”

Left with little valid defense, it would seem, these are apparently the defense’s attempts at inconsistencies. Presumably, the one defense attorney thinks it likely that a young woman would apologize for consensual sex, but unlikely that a rape victim would apologize for her own assault. Clearly, the way that sex defiles each and every woman who engages in it is legitimate reason for apology, yet the idea that women “want” their rapes and “get themselves into situations” where such assaults can occur would never cause an incapacitated rape victim to express remorse.

Many incredibly distressing assertions regarding consent, when it is possible, and when a rape can be agreed to have occurred, have been made throughout the process of this trial. Here’s a lovely beginning plethora:

In contrast, in her opening statements to the jury, an attorney for defendant Christopher Knopf claimed the that girl’s blood alcohol level hadn’t reached three times the legal limit until well after the incident. She pointed out that the girl’s lap dance was coordinated and lasted for several songs. Also, just before the alleged attack, one of the soccer players chatted with the young woman and admitted that the teen didn’t appear drunk then at all.

The attorney, Alison M. Crane, shocked the jury by beginning her statement with a powerful opener — by uttering an expletive-loaded sexual invitation she said the teenager gave to her client and many of the other men, “leading any reasonable person to believe she was capable of consent and indeed desirous of contact.”

In Knopf’s case, the teenager “approached him in the kitchen, rubbed up against him, grabbed his genitals, told him he was ‘so hot,’ backed him into the bedroom and then sued him,” Crane said.

Crane also argued that the girl doesn’t suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and has a long history of academic and interpersonal problems, including a personality disorder that essentially causes her to blame others for her mistakes.

“Her conduct was the sole and exclusive cause of everything that happened that day,” Crane told the jury. She “doesn’t want to face the truth of what she did that night.”

Because performing a lap dance or two is the same as consenting to sex. And expressing sexual interest indicates not only ability to consent, but willingness to consent to 9 men “having sex” with you while you drift in and out of consciousness. Further, you can’t be a rape victim if you don’t have PTSD — as properly diagnosed by a lawyer,  not your own doctor — women with troubled lives are never raped, and neither are women with disabilities. Also, lying bitches lie in order to get nice guys in trouble. It’s their fault they got raped, anyway. They just don’t want to face up to what sluts they are. Who would? Sex is so icky.

“Risque” photos of the victim have also been shown in court by this same lawyer as attempt to discredit her, since sexual women can presumably not be raped. While showing a photo in which the woman makes a sexual gesture, Crane jeered, “Did you have PTSD when you did the acts shown in these pictures?”

We learned more about proper and improper reactions to having just been sexually assaulted from witness Anthony Lovaglia:

He also acknowledged that he said previously, to detectives, prosecutors or lawyers in a deposition, that when the teen left the room after allegedly being raped, she had “the weirdest smile, like she liked it.”

Rape survivors’ reactions must always be policed. We’ve learned in past cases that smiling in weeks or months after an assault can be seen as evidence that it didn’t really occur. Not contacting police or going to the hospital quickly enough is seen as proof that it didn’t really happen. And a “weird smile” is apparently only to be interpreted as “she liked it,” and not potentially as an expression of a state of shock or attempt to hold oneself together through trauma.

Rape victims should also not be allowed to escape from the event with recreational activities, and people with disabilities should not be allowed to have fun:

O’Malley also testifies the teen was able to return to playing competitive softball, despite her back pain. Yet the teen also asked her physician to fill out a disability form for work, even though she was well enough to play softball. The doctor signed the form.

(The victim later stated, “I said I wasn’t going to let them take away the one thing I’ve been doing since I was 4 years old.”)

One of the most repulsive moves by a defense attorney yet proves that there may be a bit of desperation on their part:

Defense attorney Crane points out on cross that the nurse told a sheriff’s investigator she was able to say her name (barely), implying the teen wasn’t as far gone as she told the jury. The nurse also told the investigator that the teen was able to respond when her mother arrived at the emergency room and that she recognized her name, that is, responded to “considerable verbal stimuli” and therefore wasn’t unconscious.

One has to wonder how strong your case is, if being able to barely say your name is a form of evidence that consent could be given. At the same time, it’s difficult to know what the reactions of the jury, steeped in rape culture themselves, will be.

Much of the reporting on the trial has also been disturbing. Attempts at fairness and balance — when, it should be noted, the same presumption of innocence does not apply as it would if this were a criminal instead of civil trial — have resulted in shockingly appalling headlines like “De Anza trial begins with question: Was woman gang-raped or a seductress?” Here’s a sensitive and careful lede for you:

Did a group of De Anza College baseball players gang-rape a teenager whose blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit while she lay motionless in a pool of vomit?

Or are the men being unfairly blamed by a troubled young woman who wasn’t that drunk and explicitly invited them to have sex with her?

Nearly four years after the alleged assault at a San Jose house party triggered widespread controversy, those questions are finally being publicly aired before a San Jose jury.

Something tells me this article could have been written a little less problematically. I also feel like perhaps the modesty of her clothing choices was not relevant for commentary. And this opinion piece — in which Scott Herhold writes, immediately after concluding that the victim was raped, “Did she contribute to her plight? Yes. By doing a lap dance atop one boy and allegedly grabbing the crotches of others, she helped things along.” — is perhaps the grossest thing I’ve ever read.

But what do I know? Being anti-rape creates an automatic bias.

This is a huge amount of information, and there is so much more contained in the many links throughout this post that I did not have the space to include. But in addition to all that has already been listed, the alleged victim has been dealt a strong set of blows throughout the trial. The fact that police strongly believe that she was raped was not allowed to be expressed before the jury, and the photos taken by the defendants during the alleged assault were also declared inadmissible. Multiple defendants have also been dropped from the case. And, because this is a civil case — and therefore a jury must determine precisely which percentage of “fault” all parties in this case bear — it has been all but outright stated that as a result of her drinking, the victim is to blame for being raped.

She has at least finally had the chance to speak for herself:

She still has no memory of being sexually assaulted by De Anza College baseball players at a party when she was 17 and extremely drunk — not what happened in the tiny room where she was allegedly discovered in a pool of vomit, nor being rushed to the hospital.

But alternating between shouts, sobs and near-whispers, the young woman — known in the courtroom as Jane Doe — told a rapt civil jury Monday that the alleged gang rape ruined every aspect of her life, from pursuing a career to parenting.

Even the birth of her son two years ago was tainted by the memory of being intimately examined in March 2007 by a specially trained nurse looking for signs of rape.

“It’s supposed to be one of the happier days of a parent’s life,” she wailed while breaking down in tears, “and I felt violated. I mean, it was a cesarean and I felt violated.”

She also stated:

“I’ll never be embarrassed because I’m standing up for what’s right. I don’t care what anyone says, I know what’s right and I will never be embarrassed.”

Her testimony makes clear to me that she is a strong and resilient person. I wish her the love and strength to get through this trial, which continues, as well as the awful things that have been and will be said about her. I hope she knows that she is not alone, and that despite the barrage of attacks she is under, there are many of us out here who support her.

So there’s a fascinating new study out about how women perceive their weight, with the results being that a significant proportion of women who were deemed “overweight” by the BMI did not view themselves as such. Cue the body-shaming, junk reporting, and photographs of fat¹ people with their heads cut off.

In the most neutral reporting of the new research, Web MD states:

Nearly one in four women who is overweight perceives her weight as normal, according to a new study.

The study also shows 16% of the normal-weight women studied had weight misperceptions, considering themselves overweight, says researcher Mahbubur Rahman, PhD, MBBS, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology and a senior fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Women’s Health at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston. [...]

“The fact that people misperceive their body weight was already known,” says Rahman, so the new research echoes some previous information. But in his study, he also wanted to see if the body weight misperceptions influenced health behavior.

Rahman obtained height and weight information from the medical charts of 2,224 women, ages 18 to 25.

The women answered questions about healthy weight-related practices in the 30 days prior — including eating less, eating differently, or exercising. They also answered questions about unhealthy behaviors, such as the use of diet pills, use of diuretics, vomiting, laxative use for weight control, cigarette smoking, or skipping meals.

For the study, Rahman used the standard definitions for normal, overweight, and obese, with BMIs below 25 termed normal, those 25-29 overweight, and 30 and higher obese.

The women also answered questions about education, ethnicity, marital status, household income, employment, and Internet use.

The women were divided into four categories:

• Overweight women who thought they were normal or underweight
• Overweight women who knew they were overweight
• Normal-weight women who thought they were overweight
• Normal-weight women who thought they were normal or underweight

Interestingly, they didn’t have a category for “Women who knew their bodies were fine just the way they were and thought we should go fuck ourselves.”

Less sarcastically, I think it’s incredibly damaging to have a universal weight category defined as “normal” when for a whole lot of “overweight” people, being “overweight” is normal. The same goes for those who are described as “underweight” (notably a group that was seemingly not studied here). “Normal” is relative. Trying to define and impose your definition of normal on other people — whether it be in relation to gender, sexuality, physical ability, neurological workings, weight, or some other category entirely, is alienating, damaging, and oppressive. There’s no way that defining people in opposition to “normal” and telling them that they must become normal for their own good is not harmful.

But, of course, this is the very basis of the entire BMI — to build a neat little box, tell everyone that they need to fit into it, and then shame and admonish those who don’t, usually through the even more abusive practice of telling them that it’s in their best interest. And that’s also precisely what this study is about. This research was explicitly done to see how self-perception affects behavior. When the results came in, the question became how to better inform those poor fat people that they’re fat. As if fat people don’t generally get enough of that.

Mistaken notions of one’s weight status can have implications for behavior, and perhaps health, the researchers noted. For example, women who were overweight but thought they were normal size were less likely to try to lose any excess weight by dieting or other means. On the other hand, women who saw themselves as fatter than they were, were more likely to use diet pills or diuretics, to induce vomiting or to smoke cigarettes, often as ways to control or lessen their weight.

“Unfortunately, women can’t do anything to lose weight if they don’t perceive themselves as overweight. It does start there,” said Keri Gans, a registered dietician based in New York City and a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. “If they don’t perceive themselves as overweight, they’re not going to adopt healthy behaviors to lose weight and prevent disease. Meanwhile, the normal-weight people who don’t recognize they’re at normal weight are engaging in behaviors that put them at risk for illness.”

Here’s the thing: in a society where fat is almost universally vilified, a woman proclaiming that she does not view herself as overweight may indeed be doing nothing more than making a statement of self-confidence. On the one hand, I find this really sad — one should not find fat and bodily pride to be mutually exclusive, and “overweight” should not be synonymous with “bad” or “unattractive.” At the same time, I’m also unwilling to outright reject women’s expressions of satisfaction with their bodies, wherever I can find them. Such expressions are much too rare for us to have the luxury to pick and choose which ones we celebrate, even if we should critique some means of celebration.

Further, the fact is that some of these women who don’t “realize” they’re fat might not be fat at all. Fat is socially a pretty subjective concept to begin with, but it’s not as scientifically concrete as we might think, either. The BMI has all kinds of problems and lots of people are amazed to see how simultaneously rigid and inconsistent its standards are, yet the metric is used in this study. Indeed, the study authors and most of the articles make a big deal out of the fact that Black and Latina women were a lot more likely than white women to say they were not overweight in spite of falling into the BMI’s “overweight” category. These women are treated like they are sadly and pathetically ignorant, without it ever being considered that they might be right. What do women of color know about their own damn bodies in the face of white-biased scientific institutions? Clearly nothing, so it’s best to just forget the fact that there have been critiques of the BMI system as racist for years, and the studies showing that these claims very well might have a lot of merit.

And lastly, as someone who was once blissfully unaware that she was fat and that her body was therefore socially perceived as gross and unacceptable, I say that whether someone already “knows” they’re fat or not, there’s absolutely no good reason besides shaming to tell them. As I once wrote elsewhere about my experience of being lectured on my weight for the first time by my doctor during a yearly physical:

“You’ve put on weight,” she said. “You’re getting kind of big. Here’s a BMI chart. See, you’re here, just hovering on the overweight category. You know that if you keep putting on weight, the other kids are going to start making fun of you.”

I remember sitting up on the table in my hospital gown and looking at the floor, unable to look anywhere else. I remember thinking that if the kids did make fun of me, it couldn’t possible be any worse than this. I remember feeling ashamed. Not just because I’d just been told that I was too fat. But because I hadn’t even noticed. I didn’t even realize. I was fat? And I was just going to keep getting fatter? How could I not have known?

Now, I think the much better question is what would have possessed anyone to look at my 10-year-old self and decide to tell me.

I concluded, “I don’t think I’ve been unaware of my body and its size, my fat and its shape, how big I am and what other people are going to think of it, ever since.”

Now, I don’t claim my experience is universal among those who are fat yet still possess enough thin privilege to not be told about it on a daily basis. It’s just mine. Personally, I’d prefer to live in a world where being told that you’re fat is not an awful thing, because fat is not an awful thing. I’d greatly prefer to live in a world where fat just is. But since we don’t currently live there, I say for the love of god — let those who have gone relatively un-shamed stay that way. Chances are that even most fat women who don’t view themselves as “overweight” still have tons of body issues, anyway.

Of course, lots and lots of people — they’re not difficult to find — would argue that it’s important for fat people to know they’re fat, because fat is so unhealthy. The problem is that, well, not really. And even if fat were universally unhealthy, dieting is, too. Not to mention, it doesn’t work.

Further, while scientists might ostensibly care most about health, most social fat-shamers use “but I’m just concerned for your health!” as a cover up for their moralizing and attempted enforcement of their own aesthetic preferences. And though scientists are supposed to care most about health, the fact that there are a whole lot more quotes from the researchers about the failure of fat people to diet — again, even though diets don’t work — than the fact that many thin people are engaging in really unhealthy activities in order to be thinner is pretty telling.

The findings have serious consequences for obesity prevention, the researchers said, as many women do not recognise they are overweight and so will not join programmes.[...]

Lead author Prof Abbey Berenson, said: “Weight misperception is a threat to the success of obesity prevention programs.

“Overweight individuals who do not recognise that they are overweight are far less likely to eat healthfully and exercise.

“These patients are at risk for cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and other serious problems.

“This is especially important for reproductive-age women because they are more likely to be obese than similarly aged men, often because they’ve had at least one child and have not lost pregnancy weight and find that their schedules make it difficult to exercise and eat healthfully.”

Of course, no one is also talking about the fact that lots of fat people are also engaging in dangerous practices like smoking, taking laxatives, or throwing up to try to be thin. Because, I mean, who cares — they’re still fat. And no one is talking about thin people who eat foods high in fat and don’t exercise, because who cares — they’re thin.

The point is, this clearly isn’t about health, or we’d be talking about unhealthy habits across the board. And if we want to talk about the unhealthy habits of those thin people who are trying to be even thinner, the problem isn’t that they don’t know just how thin they are. The problem is that thanks to this fatphobic culture we’re living in, they’re so terrified of being fat that they’d rather put their health at risk than be perceived as “unhealthy” and unattractive.

Which is to say that I’m extremely concerned about women’s health, probably a lot more so than most people. I just think that studies like this, and the kind of rhetoric and behaviors they inspire are making women’s health a whole hell of a lot worse.

Trigger Warning for discussions of rape apologism, specifically related to birth rape and other medical rape, and graphic descriptions of rape, including birth rape.

This post has been slowly brewing over the past week, as I was sincerely hoping to not feel ultimately compelled to write it. I note this simply because in the meantime, there have been many conversations taking place elsewhere on the same subject — conversations which I have read or participated in, and which have helped to shape my own visceral reactions and thoughts. Several of the posts which have influenced the ideas in this one are linked in this one, leaving the words in their original contexts. Some of those conversations were private, which I note with a very special acknowledgment to bfp. And some writers have asked not to be linked. But I strongly encourage you to click through on everything that is present, with a note that the above trigger warning applies, and a reminder that just because other writers have influenced my thoughts, that doesn’t mean they necessarily agree with all that I have written.

In this post, I’m just going to be entirely honest about what I think and feel.

For the past month and a half, I’ve largely been away from the internet for personal reasons. As life began to settle down and I started to make my return to the web at the end of last week, I slowly started coming across several posts written in my absence that made me wish I’d just stayed away. The first I encountered was “Bad Birth Experiences Aren’t Rape” by Amanda Marcotte over at Double X. The second was “When Giving Birth is a Traumatic Violation, Is It Rape?” by Brittany Shoot over at Change. And the last was “The Push to Recognize ‘Birth Rape’” by Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet. There are almost certainly other similar posts; I didn’t seek them out, as I don’t wish to read them.

All of these posts were inspired by one at Jezebel that introduced the concept of birth rape to its readers with a highly noncommittal tone (ETA: Jezebel itself has a history of mocking medical assault). For those new to the concept, a decent basic primer can be found here (and links to others in the comments are welcome). Birth rape describes the experience of women and pregnant people of other genders having their bodies violated and penetrated without their consent in the process of giving birth, usually though not always through the forcible insertion of hands or medical tools into the vagina or anus without consent, and frequently with explicit non-consent. Victims are often physically held down, told to shut up, ignored when they scream or cry or plead, threatened, and/or called names as their bodies are violated. Just as survivors of other forms of rape, birth rape survivors experience physical and emotional trauma, often rising to the level of PTSD — only compounded by the general lack of recognition that birth rape is real, and the frequent guilt at having such trauma associated with their new child coming into the world.

In other words, birth rape is a term used to describe a specific form of rape that is committed in a birthing context, without the use of a penis.

But as in the posts linked above, this concept is extraordinarily challenging for some people, including feminists, who have taken to outright denouncing the use of the term — though, to her credit, Shoot’s post is by far the most ambivalent on the subject. Marcotte argues that birth rape should not be called rape because unlike supposedly real rape, it is not sadistic in intent. The definition of rape, she argues, should be based on the rapist’s motivation, not the victim’s experience, or we otherwise have lost our tools to combat rape effectively. Clark-Flory argues that birth rape shouldn’t be called rape, on the other hand, because rape is a special word, and using it to describe these experiences is “a violation in its own right”:

We have a special word for forced sexual intercourse, because it deserves a special word. Rape is used as a tool of terror, torture, intimidation and war (as we’re seeing right now in Congo). Sometimes it is about violence, sometimes it is about sex, and sometimes it is about both. It is a special kind of crime not only because of what it is, but also because of what it does to the victim (in her own mind and others’).

I’m used to seeing this sort of thing — discussions about whether or not an event that is admittedly horrible really deserves to have the title “rape” attached to it, accompanied by convoluted reasons as to why calling it rape would just mess everything up for real rape victims. What I’m not quite as used to is seeing it being done in the name of feminism and/or anti-rape activism.

To see rape defined by the perpetrator’s intention rather than the victim’s experience is particularly devastating for me — personally, I thought that a big part of anti-rape activism was getting people to realize that it doesn’t matter what the rapist supposedly meant, what matters is that sie raped someone. I thought that anti-rape activism was about centering victims’ voices. And I never thought that all rape had one solution, anyway, so to suggest that we can’t incorporate birth rape experiences for practical reasons of activism is absurd to me, and dismissive of the nuances inherent in our actual cause. And when we dismiss nuance, marginalized lives and bodies are always the first to get tossed out.

I also thought that a big part of anti-rape activism was about broadening our definition of rape, not narrowing it — throwing out the stranger jumping from the bushes with a knife as the only model of rape, and recreating a model that encompasses a wide variety violent experiences and promotes affirmative, enthusiastic, meaningful consent as minimum standard of decency rather than a nice bonus if you can get it. I thought that anti-rape activism was about acknowledging that rape is not just one thing, that there is more than one way to violate a person and to be violated, and that whether consent was given was more important than how much force was used. Especially in this context, the posts in question come off as nothing more than language policing, against particularly marginalized populations, no less.

But even questions of technical definitions and what exactly it is that we wish to eradicate in fighting this thing called “rape” aside, I do know one thing for sure. When women come forward and start saying “I was raped,” when they find the power to use that word to describe their own experiences and open up to share their trauma with the world, responding with “no you weren’t” — with whole blog posts about the subject, in fact — is about the worst possible way that a person can do feminism.

And doing feminism this way has consequences, just like using feminism oppressively always has. As far as consequences go, I don’t care whether or not it “turns people away” from the “movement,” frankly — after all, if this is what they hope to encounter upon sticking around, I think that they deserve fair warning, and I can’t exactly blame them for wanting no part. What I care about is the pain and the harm that it causes. What I care about is the fact that if, after years of struggling to finally claim the word “rape” for my own experiences, someone had immediately responded to me in this way with something about how calling myself a rape survivor was insulting to real survivors or harming their activism, I just might have died. Literally.

What I care about is the fact that I am a woman who was raped, and my rape did not consist of what most people think of when the word “rape” is uttered. It certainly wouldn’t fit under Clark-Flory’s narrow definition of “forced sexual intercourse,” the most common understanding of which would be limited to only involving a penis inside a vagina. I care that as a survivor who already doesn’t “count” under a lot of people’s definitions, these posts have all personally hurt me deeply.

I care because I am not a survivor of birth rape. And if these posts have cut me as deeply as they have, I cannot even begin to imagine the effect they’ve had on many victims who have experienced birth rape, or on victims who have experienced other forms of medical rape. I care because none of them deserve that. No survivor does. I care because they’re being told how to name their traumatic experiences by those who mostly have never been faced with those same experiences themselves. And I care because they are being harmed in the false name of anti-rape activism.

The theme has come up several times that calling birth rape “rape” is somehow insulting or even violating to survivors of real rape, because real rape victims are special, and their trauma is more real.

And I’m here as a survivor of rapes that are supposedly at least somewhat real to say that the only insulting and violating thing going on in this “conversation” is women being told that their rapes don’t count because they were committed by doctors instead of dates, in hospital rooms instead of the back seats of cars, with forceps and gloved hands instead of penises and ungloved fingers. I’m writing this because it’s patently arrogant and repulsive to insinuate through such language policing that those survivors who have experienced one of these violations haven’t also experienced the other.

Telling other survivors that their experiences of violation aren’t real enough, and just weren’t sexual enough of all things, to use our special fancy word is wrong. And if this is how the word “rape” is going to be used against other survivors of abuses of power and abuses of bodily autonomy and violations of self — as a weapon, like it is right now — then I don’t want it. If the word rape doesn’t include all of those victims of violence that it needs to include, we need a better word. If the word rape is so fragile that we must minimize the horrific experiences of some survivors, the violence they lived through, and the violations they felt in order to protect it, we need a better word. And when the major response to a somewhat mainstream conversation about birth rape is quibbles about words rather than compassion and organizing, we need a much, much better feminism to become the dominant one.

Last Friday, Titania Kumeh wrote an excellent blog post at Mother Jones about the International AIDS Conference in Vienna, and the over 100 sex workers and advocates who protested outside. The protest was about how U.S. funding to fight HIV transmission explicitly and deliberately excludes sex workers, even though they are one of the groups most vulnerable to becoming infected and transmitting the virus to others.

The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) requires that funds do not go to sex workers or those who work with sex workers, and has done so for years. In fact, it recently came up in a post that I wrote about police abuse against sex workers in Cambodia. But while the situation is nothing new, it is discussed far too little, and needs to be highlighted whenever an opportunity presents itself. Because it’s killing people.

Back in 2003, Congress mandated that in order for any group or organization to get US global HIV/AIDS funds, it must have “a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.” (See: Sex, American Style). The 2008 PEPFAR fact sheet states “prostitution and sex trafficking are abusive and dehumanizing to women, and they fuel the spread of HIV.” It’s not clear whether former-President Bush—who implemented PEPFAR and its anti-prostitution pledge—recognized the difference between sex trafficking and prostitution, spoke to any sex worker-run organizations that combat exploitation, or spoke to groups that seek HIV preventative care and battle sex trafficking. The anti-sex worker, anti-trafficking pledge left sex worker organizations—which incidentally work with one of the most at-risk populations for HIV (PDF)—out in the cold.

“We need HIV treatment but we don’t need the mandate that sex workers are excluded,” says Pisey Ly of Cambodia’s Women’s Network for Unity (WNU), a sex worker advocate organization. When WNU applied for US HIV prevention funds, it was denied and told to drop its sex worker status, Ly says. It refused. “The original idea behind WNU was to be an independent sex worker organization, to provide sex workers with ownership and leadership to speak about the issues that effect their lives,” Ly says. Because of PEPFAR’s anti-prostitution policy, Ly says, many donors and NGOs that once worked with Cambodian sex workers have abandoned them for fear of losing their US funding.

Meanwhile, unprotected intercourse between sex workers and clients is the main cause of new HIV infections in Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Really, you should go read the whole post. I wholeheartedly mean that — quoting as much of Kumeh’s text as I would like to would genuinely constitute copyright infringement.

What it comes down to though, is this: U.S. policy is not only failing to help sex workers, it’s actively harming them. Through requiring that any group oppose sex work in order to receiving funding, we’re not just failing to provide funding to those who already didn’t have it and leaving them where they started — though when the situation is so dire, that would be unconscionable on its own. No, we’re ensuring that organizations that previously worked with sex workers and trafficking victims, providing them with information, resources, and care that they needed, no longer will. Because they can’t keep working with sex workers and trafficking victims and afford to stay open.

It’s very similar to the Global Gag Rule. It’s probably just as deadly, if not more so. And it deserves every damn bit as much attention from feminists and other people who care about women’s rights and welfare.

The PEPFAR policy is blatantly misogynistic and sex worker-phobic. It makes sense that organizations should be anti-trafficking in order to receive funds — kidnappers and rapists don’t need anymore money than they already have — but it certainly doesn’t make sense to say that organizations can’t even assist trafficking victims as a part of their work, as such victims are usually among those who most need assistance. To further extend anti-trafficking sentiment to anti-sex worker sentiment is to conflate two issues, and obscure them both. And to deny funding and services to sex workers because they are at particular risk for contracting and transmitting HIV is more than counter-intuitive, it’s downright nonsensical. No — it’s malicious.

I would go so far as to say (and do not doubt that I am not the first) that such a denial of funds constitutes a direct act of violence. With a vast majority of sex workers being women, it constitutes an act of misogynistic, gender-based violence. With sex workers also being disproportionately women of color, trans*, and/or non-straight men,  it further constitutes an act of racist, transphobic, and homophobic violence. And when the U.S. has such great financial power over those who are most vulnerable to it, the label of colonialist violence also applies. We know that when sex workers don’t have access to condoms and information about how HIV is transmitted and prevented, they die. And yet, we continue as though we’re not killing them, or as though their deaths do not matter.

I greatly resent the notion that PEPFAR’s anti-sex work rule has anything to do with “protecting” women. The paternalistic notion that sex work is inherently “dehumanizing to women” isn’t based on a concern for women’s health and well-being. If anyone was concerned about that, the rule wouldn’t exist. The rule is about shaming and punishing those women who step outside of society’s bounds, whether through choice or coercion or force, of what a proper woman acts like. The rule is about appeasing the concerns of religious groups and middle-class moralists and generally taking out society’s hateful, misogynistic disgust at sex workers at those who can be harmed the most. It’s about taking power and abusing it in the worst way possible, just because we can.

Just because we can, and because we can simultaneously tell ourselves that by doing so, we’re doing something good.

And until the rules regarding access to U.S. anti-HIV funding are changed, it’s just yet more blood on the nation’s hands.

h/t @audaciaray

Trigger Warning for descriptions of sexual assault and explicit victim-blaming and sexual assault apologism.

Earlier this week, a jury ruled against a woman who sued the Girls Gone Wild franchise on the grounds that they damaged her reputation when they included footage of her being forcibly disrobed in one of their DVDs (h/t). The woman, identified in the case as Jane Doe, never gave consent for her breasts to be showed on film, audibly refused to lift up her top for cameras, and never signed a consent form. Nevertheless, when another woman came up from behind Doe and suddenly pulled her tank top down — sexually assaulted her — her breasts were exposed and the footage was used.

A St. Louis Circuit Court jury deliberated 90 minutes before ruling against the woman, 26, on the third day of the trial. Lawyers on both sides argued the key issue was consent, with her side saying she absolutely refused to give it and the defense claiming she silently approved by taking part in the party.

The woman, identified in court files as Jane Doe, was 20 when she went to the former Rum Jungle bar in May 2004 and was filmed by a “Girls Gone Wild” video photographer. Now married, the mother of two girls and living in the St. Charles area, Doe sued in 2008 after a friend of her husband’s reported that she was in one of the videos.

“I am stunned that this company can get away with this,” Doe said after the verdict. “Justice has not been served. I just don’t understand. I gave no consent.”

But Patrick O’Brien, the jury foreman, told a reporter later that an 11-member majority decided that Doe had in effect consented by being in the bar and dancing for the photographer. In a trial such as this one, agreement by nine of 12 jurors is enough for a verdict.

“Through her actions, she gave implied consent,” O’Brien said. “She was really playing to the camera. She knew what she was doing.”

There is something gravely, gravely wrong in the U.S. court system when a jury foreman can say that a sexual assault victim “knew what she was doing” and therefore deserved what she got, as a means for deciding how he did in the case.

There is a long, well-documented history of coercion in the making of the Girls Gone Wild films. The women who are featured in the videos are not paid, but rather compensated with tee-shirts. They are plied with drinks by the crews, and then incessantly cajoled and egged on until they do what the cameramen want. Oh, and the company’s sleazy founder Joe Francis has been informally accused of rape. There’s no doubt that some women do actually want and choose to be featured in the films. But their agency and choices don’t erase or excuse Girls Gone Wild’s long track record of gaining “consent” that is not informed, meaningful, or enthusiastic, from women who are known and desired to be in no state of mind to make a decision that very well may stick with them for the rest of their lives.

But that’s not even what we’re talking about here. Girls Gone Wild’s history is relevant, as this case is a part of a long line of purposefully coercive, non-consensual, and potentially illegal behavior. But the issue in Jane Doe’s lawsuit wasn’t the more complex one of whether her consent was meaningful and adequate under the terms it was obtained. The issue is that there was no consent. And Girls Gone Wild knew that, and just didn’t give a shit.

I don’t know the law well enough to know whether or not the jury made the technically correct decision. But I do know that something is seriously wrong here when a woman’s sexual assault is used by a company for profit, without her permission. I do know that something is seriously wrong when “implied consent” — in spite of explicit non-consent, no less — is taken as a valid legal defense. And I do know that something is seriously wrong when a jury decides that a woman who is in public has no legal right to how her body is used by other people.

It’s rare that classic victim-blaming memes are used quite so blatantly and explicitly in court. Usually, lawyers try to be a bit more covert about exactly what kind of prejudices they’re playing into. I feel as though this example is so clear that it hardly needs my parsing, but I’ve been known to overestimate other people’s understanding of rape culture.

When O’Brien despicably said, “She was really playing to the camera. She knew what she was doing,” what he was saying was, “She was being a tease. She totally wanted it. And if she didn’t actually plan to give it up, she deserved to have it taken from her against her will.” What he was saying was, “Look what a slut she was being, dancing in front of our cameras.” What he was saying was, “She’s a slut, and sluts deserve what they get.”

One has to wonder how he sleeps at night. But what went ignored in his argument, and apparently by the rest of the jury, was the simple fact put forth by Doe’s lawyer:

“Other girls said it was OK. Not one other one said, ‘No, no,’” Evans said. “She is entitled to go out with friends and have a good time and not have her top pulled down and get that in a video.”

This truth, that women have a right to be in public without being assaulted and then having their assaults distributed for profit, seems irrefutable to everyone who views women as human beings. But clearly it’s an easy thing to dismiss for Girls Gone Wild and the jury who sided with them. In their eyes, women who leave their homes, who have the audacity to dance for cameras, who “know what they’re doing,” simply cannot be violated, because they have no right to consent or non-consent at all.

Trigger Warning for discussions of sexual violence and police violence, specifically including violence against sex workers and transphobic violence.

Earlier this year, I wrote about an Amnesty International report about sexual violence against women in Cambodia, and the judicial response (or more accurately, lack of judicial response) to sexual violence. A section of that report dealt with sexual violence against sex workers, and the fact that good portion of such violence is actually committed by law enforcement officials.

Now Human Rights Watch has released a more detailed report specifically about police abuses against sex workers in Cambodia, including but not limited to sexual violence. You can view and download the full report here. The Human Rights Watch press release states:

Police arrest sex workers in regular sweeps on the streets and parks of Phnom Penh. Some of the violence is opportunistic, while other abuses commonly occur in periodic crackdowns and raids by police and district authorities, at times targeting sex workers specifically  and other times picking up sex workers along with other groups of marginalized people on the streets.

Police abuse sex workers with impunity. Sex workers told Human Rights Watch that police officers beat them with their fists, sticks, wooden handles, and electric shock batons. In several instances, police officers raped sex workers while they were in police detention. Every sex worker that Human Rights Watch spoke to had to pay bribes or had money stolen from them by police officers.

A 2008 Cambodian law on trafficking and sexual exploitation criminalized all forms of trafficking, including forced labor. Human Rights Watch found that police officers at times can use those sections of the law that criminalize “solicitation” and “procurement” of commercial sex to justify harassment of sex workers. The provisions are also broad enough that they can be used to criminalize advocacy and outreach activities by sex worker groups and those who support them.

Human Rights Watch urged the Cambodian government to consult with sex worker groups, United Nations agencies, and organizations working on human rights, trafficking, and health to review and address the impact on the human rights of those engaged in sex work of provisions in the 2008 law on trafficking and sexual exploitation, before implementing those provisions.

In Phnom Penh, police refer sex workers to the municipal Office of Social Affairs and from there to NGOs or the government Social Affairs center, Prey Speu. Conditions in Prey Speu are abysmal. Sex workers, beggars, drug users, street children, and homeless people held at Prey Speu have reported how staff members at the center have beaten, raped, and mistreated detainees, including children. Local human rights workers, citing eyewitness accounts, allege that at least three people, and possibly more, were beaten to death by guards at Prey Speu between 2006 and 2008.

This is sadly the problem with far too many efforts that purport to be anti-trafficking: they actually don’t work to prevent or address trafficking, but merely serve as a cover to abuse all sex workers and trafficking victims. The stigma, revulsion, and misogyny (combined with many other prejudices) directed at sex workers is enormous. And verbal taunts and harassment easily lead to physical and sexual violence. Dehumanization of sex workers through slut-shaming, classism, transphobia, etc., enforces a culture that turns the other way to such abuses, or actively affirms them. And while not the only perpetrators, law enforcement is always first in line.

That’s why it’s absolutely vital that anti-trafficking efforts actually involve groups made up of trafficking victims and sex workers, to ensure that the law will truly be used to assist those who are victims and not work to create new ones. And it’s also why, as the report addresses (starting on page 60), the U.S.’s inability to do its job as a member of the international community without imposing moralization and anti-sex mandates on other governments is so problematic:

The US is one of Cambodia’s largest bilateral donors, and a major donor supporting antitrafficking efforts in Cambodia. Under the Bush administration, the US government maintained that in order to combat trafficking, countries should take steps against prostitution. National Security Presidential Directive 22 stated that, “Our policy is based on an abolitionist approach to trafficking…. In this regard, the United Statesgovernment opposes prostitution and any related activities including pimping, pandering, and/or maintaining brothels as contributing to the phenomenon of trafficking in persons.”

Since 2003, US legislation dealing with HIV/AIDS and human trafficking has required recipients of international anti-AIDS funding to have a policy “opposing prostitution and sex trafficking” as a condition of receiving funding. The legislation bars the use of funds, to “promote, support, or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution.” This provision was retained when the law was reauthorized in 2008 and remains in force. In May 2010, the US government issued implementing regulations that largely mirror those imposed by the Bush Administration.

This anti-prostitution stance combined with the impact of the annual US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons report seemed to show US support for the Cambodian government’s efforts to criminalize voluntary sex work.

…

While there is no language concerning criminalizing sex work as a means to combat trafficking in the MOU, US policy on sex work under the Bush administration was quite clear. In supporting these efforts in Cambodia, the US failed to consider the context of a police force long known for its problems with corruption and for committing abuses against sex workers with impunity, when it pushed for the 2008 law [that authorized brothel raids and street sweeps].

Nice job, U.S., nice job.

One critique I had about the Amnesty International report was a failure to take a look at experiences by trans* individuals. The HRW report specifically interviewed multiple trans women sex workers. While the information provided about trans experiences is hardly comprehensive, and while it’s highly unfortunate that HRW seems to take pains to separate out trans women sex workers from “female” sex workers and uses other problematic language, some level of inclusion is both positive and illuminating. In the press release, a woman identified as Neary recounts:

“Three police officers beat me up seriously at Wat Phnom commune police station after I was taken from the park. One of the police officers pointed his gun at my head and pulled the trigger, but the bullet did not fire. They kicked my neck, my waist, and hit my head and my body with a broom stick. It lasted about half an hour. I begged them not to beat me. The police officers were cruel and they did not tell me any reason why they did this to me. “

And in the full report (page 33), she also states:

Sometimes the police say, “A-khtoey [a disparaging word for a transgender person] you fuck up the ass. You have HIV/AIDS and you infect other people. You deserve to be shot.”

Unsurprisingly, wherever there is misogynistic violence, there will also be specifically transmisogynistic violence, and it will always be magnified.

At over 70 pages, the report contains a whole lot more than I’ve highlighted in this brief overview, including many more personal testimonies from sex workers who have experienced abuse by police. I strongly urge you to take some time to browse through it, or at the very least read the full press release, and pass it along.

Trigger Warning for descriptions of sexual violence, specifically sexual violence against sex workers.

Continuing in an unfortunately long line of stories about police officers using their state power as a means to commit sexual violence against women, comes this one out of Oregon. An officer named Joshua Jensen (left) was alleged to have forced two women, both sex workers, to perform oral sex on him while he was on duty.

When Joshua Jensen twice arranged to meet a prostitute in a Beaverton parking lot for sex, neither woman knew he was a cop until he showed up in uniform and ordered them behind a garbage container, investigative reports show.

Both women said they were upset and felt they had to go with the officer.  

“When he first took me back behind the Dumpster … my hands were shaking,” one of the victims told The Oregonian Wednesday.

“I was scared – his whole demeanor was very intimidating,” she said. “I really didn’t know what to expect or what would happen.”

In the first incident, Jensen told the woman what she was doing as a prostitute was wrong. Then he asked for oral sex. She asked if she had to, and he said she didn’t. Afterward, he paid her $40.

But with the second woman, Jensen asked her why he shouldn’t arrest her. She replied that she wouldn’t do it anymore.

He said, “Well, if there’s something I want out of it,” then unzipped his pants, reports show.

The woman told investigators and The Oregonian that Jensen then “grabbed me by the back of the head and forced my head down, and I really didn’t have a choice.”

The good news is that Jensen has pleaded guilty. The bad news is that what he pleaded to doesn’t quite add up with the details presented above:

Jensen, 25, pleaded guilty Monday to two counts of prostitution, two counts of official misconduct and one count of coercion, and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. He was not charged with a sex crime and will not have to report as a sex offender when he is released.

Um, what? I’m sorry, how exactly is this not a sex crime?

Detectives who investigated the case were considering first-degree sodomy and first-degree sexual abuse, both Measure 11 crimes, police reports show. Those charges require evidence of “forcible compulsion,” said prosecutor Roger Hanlon. Based on the evidence, he said, “he didn’t commit those crimes.”

Forcible compulsion requires an expressed or implied physical threat, Hanlon said. Coercion occurred because of his implied threat to arrest the victim if she didn’t perform the sex act, he said.

“He didn’t force them, but he certainly coerced them,” Hanlon said. “He didn’t threaten to kill them or hurt them, but there was this element of coercion.”

Look, I’m ambivalent right now about categorizing sexual violence via forcible compulsion and sexual violence via coercion as two different levels of criminal offense, though I think the often blurry line between coercion and force creates a strong argument against. What I don’t see any argument whatsoever for, though, is not even classifying sexual violence via coercion as a sex crime.

Because coercion is not consent. And sex without consent is rape. So this, as described, and as Jensen apparently confessed to, is rape. It is rape. Further going back to that often blurry line between force and coercion — again, neither of which count as consent — I think there’s a strong argument to be made that a man ordering you to perform a sex act on him while he has a gun strapped to his hip and a badge saying that he can arrest you anytime he likes very much crosses it. And while I don’t exactly expect prosecutors to recognize as much, contrary to what Hanlon expresses up above, the threat of arrest is a threat of force and violence, especially when the threat is made against someone marginalized and particularly at risk for police violence, like a sex worker.

There are, it seems, at least two things going on here.¹

The first is the often special treatment that police officers who commit crimes receive at the hands of the judicial system. Sadly, with all of the victim-blaming and rape apologism in the legal system, it’d be absurd to suggest that “anyone else” who committed such a crime would receive harsher treatment. But it is probably safe to say that most people who committed such a crime,  saw their case progress to the point of charges being pressed, and then confessed, would in fact probably receive harsher treatment, and would have been charged with a sex crime and been given a longer sentence. This is in spite the fact that law enforcement officials who commit acts of violence while on the job should be held to much higher standards than the average civilian, what with their positions of enormous power and role in representing the government. And yet, the legal system cares a lot more about protecting its own than it does with ensuring that the state doesn’t represent fear and violence.

Just as important and influential in these cases is that unique brand of misogyny reserved specifically for female sex workers. While the victim-blaming doesn’t seem explicit in this case, from what’s being reported, a lot of victim-blaming tropes are poking their heads out. The two most notable among them are the myth that a victim who has had consensual sex with her attacker previously cannot be raped by him at a later date, and that a sex worker cannot be raped at all. While it doesn’t seem that either the prosecution or defense has directly made either of these arguments — and thank god for small favors — it’s difficult to believe that in spite of their exceedingly common nature, they’re not playing a role here.

It’s next to impossible to honestly look at a case in which all evidence suggests that two women who do sex work were raped by a man who had previous paid them for sex, and think that these misogynistic, victim-blaming, sex worker phobic myths had nothing to do with the decision to not charge the perpetrator with a sex crime. All women are at some risk of this level of atrocity, but some of us more than others — and it’s difficult to think that there is an equal likelihood of this happening to a woman who does different work. It’s hard to believe that for most other women, the standard for force would just as readily be placed so high.

One of the two known victims told the Oregonian that she is upset with how the case was handled, and says that she continues to fear for her safety. And why shouldn’t she, when prosecutors have devalued her safety so much that they won’t admit it was ever at risk to begin with?

via Woman Undefined, h/t SAFER