With my infrequent writing here, I’ve neglected the opportunity to previously mention over the last 18 months my obsession with and love of 1960s and 70s soul music (particularly though not exclusively Motown). And there is no such thing as 1970s soul (or 1970s style!) without the phenomenon that was Soul Train.

This morning I woke up to the devastating news that its creator and host Don Cornelius has died of a gunshot would. Preliminarily, that gunshot would looks to have been self-inflicted. He was 75 years old.

Don Cornelius was an incredibly awkward host. He was a fascinatingly terrible interviewer.

Few find it surprising that Jim Crow arose following the collapse of slavery. The development is described in history books as regrettable but predictable given the virulent racism that gripped the South and the political dynamics of the time. What is remarkable is that hardly anyone seems to imagine that similar political dynamics may have produced another caste system in the years following the collapse of Jim Crow—one that exists today.

– Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

The thesis of Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is exactly what the title implies: the U.S. criminal justice system has become a formal if unnamed means of anti-Black racial discrimination and social exclusion analogous to though distinct from Jim Crow. In the United States, Alexander argues, all aspects of this system — from policing to prosecutions to sentences to prisons to post-release restrictions — have not only a disparate impact on racial minorities, Blacks in particular, but were actively designed as a racial caste system and means of social control in the wake of Jim Crow’s collapse. And yet, because the system is officially race neutral and overt racial hostility by individual actors generally cannot be proven, the bulk of society goes around acting as though this racial caste system does not actually exist.

To make her case, Alexander turns naturally to the War on Drugs that began in the 1980s, at at time when drug use was on the decline and considered by virtually no one to be a serious social or criminal issue. Though “mass incarceration” and “the drug war” are not quite synonyms, they are fairly close. As Alexander shows, drug convictions make up a very large proportion of the enormous and unprecedented increase in incarceration rate in the past thirty years, from 300,000 in 1980, shortly before the drug war began, to over 2 million today. Alexander writes:

Drug offenses alone account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000. Approximately a half-million people are in prison or jail for a drug offense today, compared to an estimated 41,100 in 1980—an increase of 1,100 percent. Drug arrests have tripled since 1980. As a result, more than 31 million people have been arrested for drug offenses since the drug war began. Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs.

Alexander critically exposes the little understood origins of the War on Drugs. Generally, the drug war is traced to the explosion of crack cocaine in urban Black communities, when in fact crack did not become an issue until several years after the drug war was launched in 1982. The drug war has its roots in a combination of the deindustralization and globalization that resulted in mass job loss and a predictable and growing white backlash to the gains of the civil rights movement. The rate of Black unemployment quadrupled as a result of factory closings, while white unemployment increased at a far slower rate. With no new jobs appearing in communities of color, Black men were suddenly no longer needed as workers and therefore disposable. At the same time, unrest was growing among blue-collar white workers as a result of their own unemployment. Instead of creating jobs or addressing class disparities, conservatives harnessed this anger and effectively turned it on the Blacks with whom these whites actually shared exploitation and joblessness.

When crack hit in the mid-80s, years after Reagan officially launched his War on Drugs, he used it as a massive publicity campaign for his program. The media blitz dramatized and exaggerated the now infamous crack epidemic, promoted all kinds of ugly racist stereotypes about poor Black people, and spawned outrageously harsh mandatory sentences and sentencing disparities. At the same time, the sensationalistic  public relation campaign aimed at whites was backed up with enormous amounts of money and equipment being funneled to law enforcement who agreed to use it to fight this metaphorical “war” in a quite literally militarized way. As being “soft on crime” became a political career-ender, Democrats, too, got in on the act, instituting increasingly draconian and cruel punishments for the “crimes” of recreational drug use and addiction.

Before delving into The New Jim Crow, I considered myself relatively educated on the subject of the systemic racism of both the criminal justice system generally and the War on Drugs specifically. It wasn’t long after the introduction that I began to realize just how little I actually knew. Knowing that the system is racist is one thing; knowing how that racism legally and practically functions and how it has been actively protected by the highest powers is something else all together. This issue is about much more than just vastly disproportionate numbers of Black men in prisons and jails, or the fact that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. It is about housing, disenfranchisement, the right to work, and the terrorism and social control of policing, probation, and parole.

Alexander’s “New Jim Crow” metaphor does not just describe prisons themselves, but the system that sends overwhelming numbers of Black men there in the first place and then proceeds to keep them on the margins of society for the rest of their lives upon release. This new Jim Crow, like the old one, creates a parallel society to which large numbers of Black people are relegated. From stop and search procedures that are rarely used against whites, especially middle-class ones; to mandatory sentences that lock people away for years on first-time non-violent offenses; to laws designed to keep released felons jobless, homeless, and disenfranchised, this racial caste system is quite deliberately almost impossible for its targets to escape.

Alexander walks us through the workings of the racist criminal justice system step-by-step, showing us how the U.S. manages to criminalize such huge numbers of men of color. The process begins with enormous federal financial incentives given to local law enforcement in exchange for agreement to comply with the drug war by rounding up as many people as possible. As middle-class white communities would be in an uproar if the same procedures used to criminalize Black men were used in their own neighborhoods — especially since, according to drug use statistics, they would result in as many if not more arrests — police concentrate their efforts on low-income, urban communities of color. Alexander horrifyingly pieces together how the Fourth Amendment has been effectively stripped of all meaning for the individuals who are stopped, and stopped extremely regularly, in these terrorizing everyday fishing expeditions. Police are allowed to stop individuals for virtually no reason and then ask to conduct a search without making clear that one can refuse; should one actually refuse, he will normally be arrested on a bogus charge, at which point he will be searched anyway. Meanwhile, virtually all claims of racial bias in this process have been ruled null and void by the Supreme Court, with racial profiling even sanctioned, provided it is not the “sole factor” influencing a stop.

After “the roundup,” Alexander shows how defendants have their charges trumped up and are denied meaningful representation. Often, they are forced to make a decision regarding whether or not to accept a plea deal in an incredibly short period of time, without first being given access to counsel. With extraordinarily high mandatory minimum sentences, charged individuals are almost guaranteed to plead guilty to “lesser” charges that are still likely to result in years in prison — all, usually, for simple possession. In fact, legislators and prosecutors admit that this coercive power to compel guilty pleas is precisely the intent behind minimum sentencing laws. Should defendants actually go to trial, they are likely to face inadequate representation from a vastly overworked lawyer and all or heavily white juries. Alexander further demonstrates that lengthy prison sentences are not the end, as social control extends through parole, which can result in a return to detention for the most minor of infractions — including continued addiction, being unable to make a scheduled check-in, or being unable to pay exorbitant fees. In 2000, 35 percent of all prison admissions were the result of parole violations. And, Alexander exposes, all claims of racial bias during these stages of the process have also been effectively cut off.

Finally, Alexander examines the period of “invisible punishment.” Upon release, ex-offenders face a maze of legal restrictions conjured up by “get tough” politicians largely in the Clinton 90s. Most commonly recognized is the virtual inability to find meaningful employment with a felony on one’s record, despite the fact that such a huge number of convicted felonies are non-violent. Even crueler than the inability to support oneself and one’s family is the fact that failure to maintain employment is a common cause of rearrest as a parole violation. In addition to being unable to obtain or maintain employment, let alone employment that provides enough to genuinely live off, individuals with felony drug convictions are barred from receiving federally funded public assistance in most states, including food stamps. Further, drug offenders are not eligible for public housing, and housing discrimination against not only former felons but also “suspected criminals” is perfectly legal. Public housing recipients are also able to be evicted for any drug crime committed in or even near their homes, even if they themselves were not aware of it, making relatives of usually-poor released prisoners reluctant to take them in, even temporarily. Ex-felons are barred from voting at least temporarily in almost every state, and voting rights are notoriously hard to get back even when ex-offenders are eligible, resulting in enormous numbers of officially disenfranchised Black citizens, and far more unofficially. None of this is to even begin to touch on the social stigma of a criminal record. All up, Alexander convincingly shows that the intent and effect of the new Jim Crow is to punish Black men, who entered the system only because they are Black, into perpetuity.

The New Jim Crow is not without its flaws and limitations. Alexander declines to take up the issue of increasing rates of incarceration for women both cis and trans, though these women are themselves overwhelmingly non-white, instead choosing to focus on the large majority of male individuals swept into the criminal justice system. While Alexander retains a sharp focus on class, she does avoid and ignore other marginalized identities that make one more likely to be targeted by the criminal justice system, such as disability and mental illness. Further, while the system was clearly designed decades ago to target Black men specifically, the more recent and apparently seamless adaptation of mass incarceration to the growing Latino population’s threat to white supremacy — and what this adaptation means — is left for future writers to take up.

While Alexander’s strict focus on the drug war is understandable, it can be somewhat frustrating in its exclusion of all other causes of mass incarceration. Though most of her racial rhetoric is bold, even radical, in various passages toward the end of the book I found myself disagreeing with some of Alexander’s more soft-peddled stances. The economic realities of the (never-named) prison industrial complex, also a huge player in increased incarceration rates and their maintenance, only garner a couple of pages of discussion. And surely, the topic of racism within the criminal justice system is too large for any single book to cover comprehensively, which means that major issues like police violence, prison violence, lack of adequate medical care in prisons, and so on, are barely touched on, if they are broached at all.

Despite the fact that one book cannot be everything, that’s not an insignificant list. And yet, this book is still invaluable in what it does accomplish: a vital primer for how racism and white supremacy function at all levels of the criminal justice system and how they are not mere accidents or unfortunate side effects. The New Jim Crow is compelling and endlessly quotable, a necessary read for anyone whose vision of social justice hopes to actually address race as a major axis of oppression in the United States.

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.

A new study about the ongoing rape epidemic in the Congo has some rather terrifying statistics to offer. According to USA Today, 420,000 women are raped in the DRC every year.

Or, if you ask the Boston Globe, 1,152 women are raped every day. The Guardian reports that 48 women are raped every hour. And the Sydney Morning Herald ups the ante even further by putting the number at one rape every minute.

Even if all of the varying numbers did add up just so, I can’t be the only one wondering when exactly this ongoing campaign of sexual terrorism against women turned into a competition over which Western newspaper could write the most shocking headline. Nor can I refrain from asking what, exactly, is the magic number of rapes that will suddenly make us care? Would the headlines still be blaring if it were 30 rapes an hour? Is one rape every one and a half minutes just too few that the numbers needed to be fudged and made even more sensationalistic? Do we, as Western observers, care more now than we would if the number were actually one rape every five minutes?

Do we care now? Will the subject merit our true attention? Will we suddenly start listening to Congolese survivors? Are we ashamed for not having listened more closely before, for not believing the full magnitude when women were already telling us the truth? Do we feel better now that a U.S. organization has officially verified their lived experiences? Or will we remain indifferent until the numbers hit two rapes every minute? Five rapes every minute? One every second? Where precisely is the cut off point for compassion and a sense justice? How many women must be raped before we start to care enough to look at the causes? How high do the numbers have to be?

I am in no way trying to suggest that these numbers do not matter. Nor am I arguing that they are not horrific, that they do not deserve attention, or that headlines on the topic are unwarranted. What I’m condemning is the objectifying and imperialistic tendency towards disaster porn. What I’m criticizing is the refusal to engage with the issue of violence in the Congo in an in-depth and ongoing basis that puts these numbers in context, and the decision to instead resort to pearl-clutching headlines designed to shock Western readers with information we already had and will continue to ignore.

I’m also making clear that the response to this extremely extended crisis would look a lot different were it occurring somewhere other than sub-Sahara Africa. It’s not that the media takes most rape seriously, or that even the most privileged rape survivors are immune to rape apologism, victim-blaming, and indifference — this entire blog is a testament to these things not being true.

But on the one hand, that is precisely the point. These same newspapers that report these numbers with horror and very little background or analysis will tomorrow resort to shaming and casting doubt on rape victims from their own communities. Tomorrow, when it is no longer convenient to feign interest in rape, it will be back to business as usual. Tomorrow, lines will be drawn between the “date rape” that so many women needlessly whine and exaggerate about and the “real” rape that is downplayed by taking it seriously — after all, what about those women in the Congo?

Indeed, the part of this study that has been the most ignored and will continue to be pushed to the margins is the fact that this study shows higher numbers than others, in large part, because it includes rape by intimate partners instead of only rape committed as a tactic of war — a fact that makes the situation look a lot more similar to the one in countries where most don’t consider rape to be a big problem.

And, on the other hand, while the shaming and ridicule of rape victims is ubiquitous in the U.S. and other Western countries, some victims are indeed always more valued than others. We wouldn’t have to wait until the number of rapes hit “one every minute” before we started to care, if a large portion of those victims were white, cis, economically privileged women — at least, not if those rapes were in large part being committed within the context of war and with the level of violence we’re seeing against Congolese women. We wouldn’t have to wonder whether one every minute is actually going to be enough to cause real concern. We would know that there would be outrage.

But women who are black, who are poor, who are from countries labeled “third world” always fall towards the very bottom of hierarchy of rape victims who will gain Western attention. We in developed Western nations can and will ignore their plight because we have constructed them as less than women, less than human. We can simultaneously tut-tut at the atrocity and turn away from it because it is what we expect from those men we have culturally constructed as inherently barbaric, because it’s what we believe the women have come to expect, too.

And we can ignore our role — the role of industrialized nations and of consumers, especially in the U.S. We can look at the numbers and think it is “them” instead of “us.” We who aren’t living in the Congo can refuse to ask the question of why there is so much rape and assume that it has something to do with “lesser” cultures instead of so much to do with our own. We can side-step questions of rape culture and imperialism and colonialism and economic racism and consumer culture. We can forget to ask why we ignored earlier opportunities to ask hard questions and demand change.

We, we reading these headlines divorced from the context in which the news was created, can read “one rape every minute” and exclaim “those poor women!” without wondering why we didn’t care before someone made the headline sufficiently eye-grabbing, and without demanding accountability from ourselves now.

Trigger Warning for sometimes graphic descriptions of human experimentation and medical research on non-consenting individuals

There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her — a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.”

No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells — her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died.

Her real name is Henrietta Lacks.

– The opening words of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Henrietta Lacks was a poor black woman, a tobacco farmer. She knew that something was wrong when she went to seek health care at the free “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital. She was diagnosed with a highly aggressive cervical cancer, and during her treatment — without her consent or knowledge — they cut out a piece of her. The cancer cells they cut are still alive today, are growing as I write this, are growing as you read it, are being bought, being sold, and being used for so many different kinds of research, I doubt there’s anyone who could name them all.

Henrietta Lacks died an excruciatingly painful death in 1951. And her cells have helped to develop seemingly endless medical advancements since then, and continue to develop them now. But just like Henrietta Lacks was never told that they cut out a piece of her cervix, her family was never told that here cells were still alive. The Lacks family only learned through a long series of events over 20 years later. Though those cells have made billions of dollars for various companies — both directly through the selling of HeLa to researchers, and indirectly through the selling of medicines and treatments HeLa has been integral in developing — they have not made a cent for the Lacks family. Indeed, at the time the book was written, many of Henrietta’s children and grandchildren continued to struggle financially, and several did not have health insurance to access the care that only exists because their mother and grandmother died.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot and released in 2010, is about all of this.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a piece of creative non-fiction, which  means that while it is entirely fact, the author heavily relies on narrative to get those facts to the reader. As a result, unlike with most non-fiction books, some of the details contained in this review could be considered spoilers by some readers.

The narrative of the book alternates between the scientific history of the HeLa cells and the personal story of the Lacks family, particularly Henrietta’s youngest daughter Deborah, who was desperate to learn more about her mother and see her get the recognition that she deserves. The book is not a “feminist book” in the sense that it does not offer a feminist or otherwise gendered analysis of the events it describes — though some relatively small race and class analysis is included. But I imagine that few who have even a passing understanding of the ways that gender, race, and class intersect and operate in U.S. society could manage to read this book non-politically.

Indeed, what was done to Henrietta Lacks and her body is as impossible to divorce from her gender as it is to divorce from her race and her class. It’s impossible to separate the violation and violence of removing a part of a woman’s body — a part of her cervix, no less — while she is unconscious, and without even bothering to ask, from the continued sense of public ownership over women’s bodies and reproductive lives, black women’s especially. It’s impossible to divorce that violation from the ongoing history of sexual violence against women, and sexual violence against black women by white men in positions of authority specifically. It is as impossible to divorce her treatment from her gender in the same way that it is impossible to divorce it from the history of non-consensual scientific experimentation on African Americans or the history of slavery or the context of segregated hospital wards. It is as impossible to render her gender irrelevant just as it is impossible to render irrelevant the notion that doctors felt poor patients owed the “donation” of their bodies for scientific research as a form of payment for their care.

The point is not that they would not have stolen from Henrietta Lacks’ body if she had been a man, or if she had been white. The book presents evidence, in fact, that they likely would have. The point is that context matters, especially when at stake are not only individual senses of trust and safety, but lives. Violations don’t occur in a vacuum. This violation was committed against the backdrop of racism, classism, and misogyny, as did the ongoing violations committed against her family.

At no point is this made more clear than through the story of Elsie. Elsie was Henrietta’s second child and oldest daughter. Elsie had both cognitive and physical disabilities, and required a full-time caretaker. Henrietta was the only one available to act as her caretaker, but she had four other children, including two babies — so after years of resisting, she did what doctors told her was best and sent her to the Hospital for the Negro Insane. She visited Elsie every week until she got sick, and then no one visited her. Elsie died a few years after Henrietta.

Elsie’s story is not told within the context of the devastation that Henrietta felt at relinquishing her daughter, but rather what was done to Elsie after she was committed. It is eventually revealed that she not only lived in horrific conditions marked by abuse, and died a horrific death, but also that she was the subject of abhorrent, non-consensual human experimentation because of her disabilities and institutionalization. They drained the fluid surrounding her brain and pumped air into her skull. They inserted metal probes into her brain. She would have suffered extraordinarily. These things were done to her because she was black and disabled. Because no one ever thought that she or her family might have a right to say no. Because no one cared.

What was done to Elsie matters simply because it does. It matters because she matters. But it matters within the context of the Lacks story for the way it illuminates the climate of abuse and brutality that the violations against Henrietta Lacks were committed. These violations were far from isolated. And they were also far from extreme by the standards of the day. What was done to Henrietta and what was done to Elsie existed at two ends of a spectrum, but they were both a part of the same racist, dehumanizing system.

The cruel irony is that Henrietta’s cells, too, have been used to do highly unethical testing on unknowing patients, largely those with disabilities. Though paling in comparison to the literal torture committed against Elsie, HeLa cells were injected into unknowing, non-consenting individuals — mostly those with disabilities or serious illnesses — in order to see if they would develop the same cancer that Henrietta had. Henrietta was not just violated at the hands of this system; her violation was also used as a means to further its abuses.

Without being pedantic or even particularly explicit, Skloot beautifully weaves together these two “separate” historical stories. Overwhelmingly, the point of telling the stories of the Lacks family’s many misfortunes is not to show what evils HeLa cells brought on their lives. Though the Lackses did experience trauma as a result of their connection to the cells, it is not the direct cause of most of their problems. Rather, their story serves to reveal that a great deal of their problems did stem from Henrietta Lacks’ death — and to remind us that it was only because a woman got extremely sick and died that so many of us have had access to treatments and vaccinations that have kept us alive. It’s to remind us that while Henrietta did not donate her cells, they were stolen from her, she and her family did make an unchosen sacrifice. It’s to remind us that researchers didn’t just take a part of her — they took the part that killed her. And she, and her family, are real people. Real people whose lives matter, too.

But they have been treated repeatedly as if their lives mean nothing. As if Henrietta’s life was not worth anything. As though the horrors those cells have imposed on their lives do not matter in the face of the medical advancements. As if their mother and grandmother did not have a right to her own body, and they do not, as her descendants, have a right to it on her behalf. As though their bodies mean nothing, too — and they do not, with their frequent lack of health insurance, have the right to access the care that only exists because their mother or grandmother died.

It’s long past time that Henrietta Lack’s story was told, that her family’s story was told. For the fact that it accomplishes that vital justice, and for the eloquence and sincerity with which Skloot tells the story not only of Lacks by the history of ethics in biomedical research, I couldn’t recommend The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks more strongly. This is a story that needed to be told, and that needs to be read.

Sadly, it is also long past time where things could ever truly be made right. Years cannot be undone, dead family members cannot be brought back to life. But the remaining Lackses do still deserve that which has always been rightfully theirs, as well as our gratitude, though it seems that those who most owe it to them are not going to be the ones to provide it.

As promised to Deborah Lacks while she assisted in writing the book, Rebecca Skloot has set up the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, which provides funding for education and health care to the descendants of Henrietta Lacks. Again, while billions have ultimately been made from Henrietta Lacks’ stolen cells, her family has never seen a single cent from their use, and family members are often without health insurance, and without access to the funds needed to access higher education. Anyone can make a donation to the Henrietta Lacks Foundation by clicking through to their website.

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 sexual violence against children and adolescents, as well as victim-blaming and rape apologism.

A new study out of B.C., Canada (pdf) on whether age of sexual consent laws are actually doing anything to prevent the sexual abuse of young people by adults has acted as an opportunity to engage in a whole host of rape denialism and victim-blaming behavior. The language in framing contained in the report itself certainly didn’t help, and the media apparently decided to run with it:

Children in B.C. who had sex when they were 12 or under are more likely than older teenagers to have had sex first with an adult, according to a shocking new study by Vancouver researchers to be published today in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality.

University of B.C. and Simon Fraser University researchers analyzed data from the Adolescent Health Survey, which polled 29,000 students in Grades 7 to 12 over three months in 2008, the year the federal government increased the age of consent to 16 from 14.

The purpose of the study was to test the government’s reasons for changing the law after 100 years, but what the authors discovered was that the law apparently does not protect the younger kids who are most at risk of sexual abuse. [...]

They discovered a shocking 39 per cent of students who first had sex when they were 12 or under said it was with someone age 20 or older. Of those who first had sex when they were 14 or 15, only two to three per cent said it was with someone 20 or older. [...]

The numbers were similar for boys (38 per cent) and girls (39 per cent) 12 and under who said their first sex was with an adult.

“Our evidence really doesn’t support that it is the 14-and 15-year-olds who are at greatest risk of having sex with adults. It is the younger teens, and that has always been illegal,” said senior author Elizabeth Saewyc, professor of nursing and adolescent medicine at UBC.

Okay, first of all, I just have to ask: are we allergic to the word rape? Or have we been aiding and abetting rape by covering it up as “sex” for so damn long now that we don’t even know how to properly use the word anymore? Because I’m really fucking tired of pointing out the obvious over and over and over again. A child under the age of 12 — 12!!! — cannot “have sex” with an adult. But as these numbers pretty clearly show, an adult sure can rape hir.

Honestly, it seems the problem is that we don’t even understand what rape is. How can we use the word appropriately if we don’t even know what it means? And it terrifies me to know that we can’t even begin to solve this problem until we do understand what rape means and what consent looks like, within the context of how very, very far away from that point we are. Because here are the “solutions” currently being offered:

In the study report, the authors say additional strategies are needed to protect the kids who are the most vulnerable. They suggest improving education in schools to include information about healthy relationships.

That would include “talking to teens and children about dating and relationships and why older adults might want to date younger teens and why that it is not appropriate,” Miller said. “Also, what does consent mean, and how can we navigate that as teenagers in a relationship?”

Children aged 9, 10, 11, and 12 — and yes, certainly a whole lot younger, too — are being raped by adults. And the “solution” is reportedly to teach those children better about what is an is not appropriate.

It’s enough to make a person break down and cry.

Look, I support sex education, you know I do, including sex education specifically as a means of sexual assault prevention. But such strategies are about two things — firstly, preventing young people from becoming rapists, and secondly, giving young people the tools that may help them to recognize abuse and defend themselves from it.

But teaching young people about how to not rape doesn’t do anything about the adults out there preying on young children. And while giving everyone defense tools is vital, teaching potential victims how to defend themselves is hardly the place to stop. Because sometimes, those tools just aren’t enough, and being able to recognize abuse doesn’t necessarily leave you with an escape mechanism. And always, we shouldn’t have to be defending ourselves in the first place.

Young people aged 12 and under are not the bearers and promoters of rape culture. They are the victims of it. And we cannot “protect” them from it by treating them as though they’re the problem.

As for the question of whether or not the law protects those children who are most at risk of being victims of sexual abuse … no, of course it doesn’t. To the extent that laws act as deterrents to certain kinds of behavior at all, the effect is always limited. The law isn’t protecting children from sexual abuse? It never has. It hasn’t been protecting adult women from rape or intimate partner violence, either. The statistics are mind-boggling and heart-wrenching, across the board. This ineffective nature of our legal system at protecting vulnerable people from abuse is one of the reasons why I think we need to reconsider the system wholly. But the fact is that the law only seeks retribution once harm has been done, not to prevent the harm in the first place.

For that we’re going to need a change in culture, and no, I’m not sure that legislative acts and legal penalties are going to play a large role. A very basic start would be to stop blaming victims by framing the problem as an issue of their “questionable decisions”:

The study found that teenagers aged 14 and 15 do not make more questionable decisions about sex than older adolescents. For instance, very few 14- and 15-year-olds had sex with people outside the “close in age” exemptions.

Dear god, the point of the laws — at least as I understand them, and certainly as they should be — is not to convince young people to not engage in “questionable” behavior, it’s to try to scare off the predators who wish to exploit and harm and abuse them. As I said, laws aren’t hugely effective deterrents to begin with, but no wonder it’s not working here. We can’t even seem to manage to work out who, exactly, the laws are aimed at, what kind of behavior we’re trying to deter (Raping or being raped? Clearly, these questions are difficult!), and who is really to blame.

But I’m telling you, as long as we keep acting like young people, including those who haven’t even yet reached their teenage years, are equal co-conspirators in their own abuse, we’re certainly not going to get anywhere, either within or outside the judicial system.

Image via Lauredhel, through a Creative Commons-Noncommercial-Attribution License

Trigger Warning for discussions of suicide, sexual violence, rape apologism, victim-blaming, and bullying.

Near Detroit, rape charges have been dropped against 18-year-old Joseph Tarnopolski, following the suicide of his 14-year-old alleged victim Samantha Kelly.

A 34th District Court judge dismissed a rape case against an 18-year-old man who was charged with having sex with a 14-year-old girl who killed herself Monday.

Judge Brian Oakley dismissed the case following a brief argument after the hearing that the prosecutor’s office did not have sufficient evidence to proceed.

“Under the law we did not have sufficient evidence to prove that a crime had occurred without the testimony of the victim. As a result, we had to move to dismiss the case. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victim’s family at this difficult time,” the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.

Samantha Kelly killed herself Monday after family members said students at Huron High School harassed her after learning of the charges against Joseph Tarnopolski, also a student at Huron High.

While the decision to drop prosecution efforts adds another layer of tragedy to one that is already of unbearable proportions, my scorn here is not actually directed at the prosecutors. Most rape cases rely heavily on victim testimony. And unfortunately, they no longer have it. If it were to emerge that the prosecution has access to significant other evidence that a rape occurred and are still declining to prosecute, I’d revise my opinion. But with what we know now, it’s unlikely that they are to blame.

My scorn is reserved for rapists, and just as much for those who support rapists with apologism, victim-blaming, and harassment. My scorn is reserved for those who not only fail to protect and support victims of assault, but who actively bully them. My scorn is reserved for those who decided that Samantha Kelly was a liar, chose to shout that belief from the rooftops, and actively opted to make her life a living hell.

The case itself is a particularly complicated one. The charges themselves were for statutory rape, and originally both Kelly and Tarnopolski said that the decision to “have sex” was “mutual.” Later, however, Kelly publicly recanted her earlier statements and claimed that Tarnopolski had coerced her, and that she did not consent. Kelly is dead now, and so it’s impossible to do more than speculate about why she first told one story and then changed it to another, or to know which version of the events was true. What’s relevant is that before she made her second set of allegations, the harassment was “limited” to Tarnopoloski — who fanned the flames on Twitter with statements like “All girls are, are liars and backstabbers! I hate you all. Way to ruin my life. Seriously, now this will be on my record for life!” — and his friends. After she made the second set of allegations — on local television — it was widespread among the entire school.

It seems that for once, school officials actually tried to support the accuser and discipline the bullies. But they were unable to halt the violence and harassment:

Factions soon developed. The day of his arraignment, a number of students at school wore shirts supporting him and others wrote “Joe’s Innocent” on their hands until school officials intervened.

Two kids were suspended for 10 days, Huron School District Superintendent Richard Naughton said.

Another student was disciplined for hitting Samantha with a clump of mud he pulled off his shoe.

Samantha tried to commit suicide Oct. 25 by taking pills, her mother said. She underwent treatment, and did not return to school until Monday.

The principal said he met with Samantha’s mom several times, including Monday morning. Justice talked about changing her daughter’s school, but Samantha said she wanted to stay, Rowe said.

Samantha was given a principal’s pass, which allowed her to get out of class with no questions asked if anything happened, and she was asked to report concerns about behavior to the school, Rowe said. She reported two incidents, which the school investigated, and one student was suspended.

I don’t know whether or not the school could have done more after the violence and verbal bullying started, but I do know that all of us need to a do a lot more before it starts. Few of us, adult and adolescent alike, know how to deal with rape allegation in our communities. Few of us know how to adequately support alleged victims. Few of us know just how few rape allegations are false, and that the narrative that women regularly lie about rape to get themselves out of trouble is a myth. Few of us know the reasons why a rape victim might actually lie to protect hir rapist, why sie might recant an allegation after it has been made, or why sie might originally claim that a rape was a consensual experience. Few of us understand the impact that sexual violence has on one’s mental and emotional health, and just how much rape apologism and victim-blaming tend to exacerbate it.

It is my experience both from my personal life and from talking with countless other rape survivors that the most important thing to a person who has been raped is simply to be believed. But far too rape victims currently get that. Samantha Kelly certainly didn’t get that. She got the exact opposite.

I can’t say if that’s what made Kelly decide to take her own life. None of us can say what did. But I do feel absolutely confident that whatever her reasons, the lack of support and the active bullying did not help. And it is long past time that we start preparing everyone for these kinds of situations before they occur. It is long past time that we publicly educate about how to respond to rape accusers, and the importance of treating them with dignity. It is long past time that we learn to combat bullying, and create strategies for denouncing it on a community, peer-to-peer level. It’s long past time that we make sure our communities don’t let misogyny have this kind of all-encompassing power over women’s lives.

Compounding this tragedy yet again, Samantha Kelly’s family does not have the money to pay for her funeral. Donations to defray costs for her family can be made to Michigan Memorial Funeral Home, 30895 W. Huron River Drive, Flat Rock, MI 48134. Please consider giving if you can.

h/t Sally Mercedes

Trigger Warning for descriptions of sexual violence, rape apologism, and homophobia

David King, the Republican candidate for Wisconsin Secretary of State, has been accused of raping an unconscious woman and impregnating her, days before Tuesday’s election. It’s no big surprise that the media has run with such a story in a salacious and gossipy manner, seeing how much they love political “controversies.” It is, however, quite the inexcusable shame that they’ve chosen to turn it into a tabloid-style sex scandal, with headlines like MSNBC’s Candidate accused of getting lesbian pregnant. There is, of course, no mention of rape whatsoever in that headline, and you’ll probably be unsurprised to see that the body of the story itself isn’t any better:

A 31-year-old woman has filed a lawsuit accusing the Republican candidate for secretary of state of getting her so drunk she passed out, having sex with her and getting her pregnant.

Charlette Harris, 31, made the allegations about candidate David King just days before the election, NBC station WTMJ-TV reported Thursday.

Harris claims King took her to lunch in August, got her drunk, she passed out and he had sex with her at his apartment, the Milwaukee Journal reported.

“Now, I’m pregnant,” Harris told TODAY’S TMJ4 reporter Tom Murray. “Everything’s not OK.”

A doctor’s note filed with the lawsuit appears to verify the pregnancy. Harris insists there are no other possible fathers.

“I’m a lesbian,” she said. “I’m gay. I’ve been with the same woman for four years.”

TODAY TMJ4 does slightly better by actually quoting Harris as using the word rape — showing that MSNBC purposely edited her quote so as to exclude it — but certainly not with the headline, which reads Candidate Accused of Getting Drunk Lesbian Pregnant.

Now those are what I call high journalistic standards.

The “reporting” displayed here is straight up misogynistic, racist, homophobic bigotry. A black, lesbian woman claims to have been raped while unconscious, and all the media can do is talk about “sex” and prominently refer to her as “drunk.” Apparently hateful old stereotypes about the promiscuity and social deviance of black women and lesbians are just too appealing to ever avoid promoting, even when discussing a rape victim.

The failure to use the word rape is seemingly deliberate, and makes the case simply look like salacious, personal gossip — an angle which Harris’ sexual orientation is crudely used to play up. Her sexuality is almost entirely irrelevant to this case — it’s certainly not more relevant than, say, her profession, seeing as how the rape allegedly took place after King found Harris employment. She’s known as “Lesbian” — or even better, “Drunk Lesbian” — in headlines not because her identity as a lesbian matters for the purpose of this story, but because the identity of lesbian is still seen as depraved and salacious in a homophobic, heterosexist, misogynistic culture.

No matter how many times MSNBC wants to rephrase it as such, there is no such thing as “sex” with an unconscious person. As Harris herself points out in the part of the quote they chose to omit, “That’s rape. That’s sexual assault.” And while the pregnancy is both a product and evidence of the alleged rape, it is not the crime or the real story. The failure to properly name the nature of her allegations is nothing less than rape apologism, and any news organization that has engaged in this erasure should be downright ashamed of itself.

As a final note, I’d like to point out that while I don’t know any more than you do whether the allegations are true or false, the alleged victim’s decision to file civil rather than criminal charges should not be taken as an indication of her credibility. While many commentators like to portray such a decision as being evidence of a false claim and simple motivation of a monetary reward, there are in fact a whole host of reasons why a victim of sexual violence may prefer to go the civil rather than criminal route. While not providing the victim with the same anonymity that is afforded in criminal cases, civil suits do have other benefits — Jaclyn manages to list 10 of them. A lack of criminal charges is not indicative of credibility of the claim; cases that prosecutors fail to pursue show us that all the time. All the decision means is that the victim found a civil case more attractive than a criminal one. Attempts to infer anything else from that decision are pure speculation, and rather ugly, rape apologist speculation at that.

Thanks to Jill for the link.