Update: Julian Assange has been arrested.  Again, I must point out that if we treated rape seriously even when the accused aren’t people that are embarrassing the U.S. government, rape would probably be far smaller of a problem.

When I was in junior high school, one of my classmates got pregnant on accident.  The rumor spread quickly—-who knows if it was true—-that she was having sex with her boyfriend, the condom broke, she begged him to quit and he wouldn’t.  Even at the tender age of 13 years old, I knew that there was no way on earth that this was morally acceptable, or even close to it, and the proof was in the pregnancy that she (purportedly) begged him not to inflict on her against her will.  Again, this was a rumor.  No way of knowing if it was true.  But what I do know is that my friends and I who were horrified were 100% right.  What is amazing to me is when grown adults can’t wrap their minds around what childish virgins understand, which is that it’s wrong to fuck a woman who has withdrawn her consent, no matter when she does it.  It’s assault.  It’s rape, even if it’s not legally rape.

Interpol is using a rape accusation that resembles this one to put Julian Assange on their most-wanted list.  As Lindsay points out, this is just silly.  Sex crimes are never actually taken this seriously—-we feminists wish!—-and I’m annoyed to see rape used in this way, considering that rape apologists are already eager to suggest that rape accusations are about some evil bitch with ulterior motives.  Indeed, as Lindsay notes, the usual rape apologist tropes are being employed, this time by people who should know better.  Jill has more on why forcibly fucking a woman who has withdrawn her consent because the condom conditions weren’t met is in fact rape, and it should always be legally treated as such.  The key here is “consent”, which was withdrawn.  That means that the woman was non-consenting.  Having sex with a non-consenting person is rape. This shouldn’t be so complicated.

I don’t know if Julian Assange is guilty, of course, but I’m deeply disturbed by the people who aren’t content with suggesting that Interpol is politicizing a crime that shouldn’t be politicized, but instead slurring the victims with the usual course of rape apologist tactics, including accusing a victim of the high crime of being a “radical feminist”.  I suppose we should find this evidence against her, instead of evidence that Assange has sex with other people in the community of political radicals to which he belongs. I’m sorry, but why on earth is it so hard to believe that Assange is the kind of guy who power trips on women by promising to use a condom and then slipping it off during sex?  This is one of the most common kinds of sexual assault there is, and a favorite way for guys with power issues to get cheap thrills at the expense of women, who they often feel are contemptible and weak.  Are we to assume that someone who clearly gets a rise out of making the most powerful nation on the planet scramble around in a chickens-with-heads-cut-off manner doesn’t have a tendency to ego trip?  Are we to assume someone who risks life and limb for this isn’t the kind of guy who might get smaller kicks out of smaller, less internationally interesting power trips?  Why are we to assume that?

I’m not commenting either way on the Wikileaks documents and what they mean and how important it is that they’re released.  I’m just annoyed at people’s black-and-white thinking—-believing that because they support Assange’s actions in this one case, that means that his motivations must be pure as the driven snow and he must generally be above reproach.  It doesn’t work that way.  If anything, my experience says to me that men on the radical political fringes are quite often big assholes with power issues that they take out on women.  I’ve definitely seen with my own eyes the way that anti-war demonstrators who devote their lives to the cause often have the women in the kitchen making sandwiches while the men sit around on their asses bullshitting.  And I’ve heard more than one story about anarchist communes and how the women are, despite all the lip smacking about radical politics, relegated to very unradical gender roles, which are, in turn, justified by some high-falutin’ rhetoric.  Certainly in punk communities where there is contempt for state power, you often see women treated like shit in ways that exceed how badly they are treated in less radical spaces.  I’m not saying everyone or all the time.  Just noting that it’s completely silly to think that leftists, especially in the fringe, aren’t capable of being massive dicks about women’s right to things such as bodily autonomy.

We can be grown-ups here.  We can entertain the idea that Wikileaks is performing a valuable service while acknowledging the strong possibility that Julian Assange is himself an asshole who treats women like they’re objects he can exert his massive power issues on.  We can criticize Interpol for treating these alleged sex crimes more seriously than they ever treat sex crimes and maintain sympathy for women who reportedly were quite afraid they had been exposed to unintended pregnancy or worse.  Maybe we can even do one better than that, and accept that more than a few men who consider themselves liberals or even leftists—-or may even claim to be feminists—-still act like women’s concerns should be dismissed and our rights can be transgressed with ease.  I’m not accusing Assange of anything, but I seriously think it’s silly to think the accusations couldn’t be credible.

I will note that I said just recently that just because we’re so close to the elections doesn’t mean that we’re not going to get a steady stream of Tea Party candidates doing evil, headline-grabbing shit.  Granted, holding a woman down and stomping on her head isn’t something that Rand Paul did, but being a weasel about it (as evidenced in the video above, which also features an excellent interview with Lauren Valle, the stomping victim) is grade A wingnuttery.  I’m as annoyed as anyone by the routine calls for this to be condemned by a candidate or that, but I do make an exception when it comes to the actual followers of a candidate engaging in violence or hate speech.  In these cases, when a candidate issues a full-throated condemnation, it can go a long way towards dissuading violence.  Violent, hateful thugs believe that they have the quiet support of leaders and their community, and if you issue half-hearted condemnations, they read that as support. Which can incite more violence.

If you want a classic example, check out how the stomper himself is behaving.  Sure, he was dismissed from the campaign, but clearly he feels that his community has his back.  And that’s because they do.  Getting a solid dose of shaming early on from Paul would have probably squelched this, but now it’s out of control.  The stomper is now demanding an apology from his victim, which is the logical result of the wingnut “look what you made me do!” mentality.  Which, I would like to point out, is basically the standard issue mind fuck that wife beaters and child abusers play on their victims, issuing a beating and then demanding an apology from the victim for driving them to it.  If a group of big ass men who gang up on a much smaller woman and curb stomp her think that they’re so justified in their actions that she owes them an apology, that’s creating an environment conducive to further violence.

I’m sure everyone reading this has already seen this story about what looks like at least three Rand Paul supporters grabbing a MoveOn activist who was handing out fliers/doing political theater outside the Paul/Conway debate last night.  They grab the woman, carefully hold her down, and start to curb stomp her when someone waves at the guy doing the stomping and calls him off after he stomps her the first time.  It’s not a full-blown skinhead-style curb stomp—-the woman was able to talk to reporters before she was taken to the hospital, and she has all her teeth and everything, and I’m sure she’s okay—-but god only knows how bad it would have gotten if they weren’t called off.  They are, if you watch the video, being very deliberate about it, carefully holding her down and positioning her.

Which all makes the Paul campaign’s reaction worse:

We understand that there was an altercation outside of the debate between supporters of both sides and that is incredibly unfortunate. Violence of any kind has no place in our civil discourse and we urge supporters on all sides to be civil to one another as tensions rise heading toward this very important election.

This is sniveling, cowardly, and frankly sick.  There were no “both sides”.  There was a group of large men that support Paul that attacked a single, much smaller female MoveOn activist.  She was not being violent towards them.  Handing out fliers and doing political theater at a debate can’t even really be called “annoying”.  The word is “expected”.  I expected an immediate and routine disavowal of any responsibility for the violence, but trying to play it off like it was “both sides”?  That’s some sick shit.  It’s cowardly.  Of course, I wouldn’t expect any less of Rand Paul, who has above all other things during this election, proven himself to be a whiny crybaby, a coward who acts like he has convictions and then whines and runs the second anyone argues with him, and a childish brat who probably hasn’t grown up a day since his Aqua Buddha years.

A number of people have written in and asked me to comment on this incident at Yale where a bunch of douchebag frat boys yelled a bunch of pro-rape stuff around housing where a lot of young women live.  It’s obvious to me this is as classic as it gets when you’re talking about the homosocial support for rape.  While it’s unlikely that all, or even most, of the frat members who did this enjoy raping women, someone thought it was just a great idea to remind the women of Yale that this threat is ever-present.  You don’t have to rape to exploit the fear that rape instills in women. 

Now you’re getting the usual excuse-mongering, particularly with this editorial that was run in the student paper.  It’s tedious in its predictability—-sexist language that paints the frat boys as “boisterous” but claims the women’s center was having “histrionics”, all but saying that boys will be boys.  In addition, they pulled the same tricks of expressing surface disapproval of rape promotion while actually performing the work or a rape denialist, pretending that there’s nothing pro-rape in having a bunch of frat boys express overt support for rape to potential victims.  It’s funny, because in any other context, the notion that frat boys occasionally rape college girls isn’t taken as preposterous—-not when young women are being warned not to go to frat parties, not to drink, not to go anywhere without a bunch of people around, not to explore their sexuality for fear it could get ugly.  Just when a bunch of dudes obnoxiously own their privilege to rape without much fear of paying the price for it.  Again, most men don’t rape.  But a small percentage do, and when they’re exposed to behavior like this, it validates and emboldens them.

This isn’t just about “sensitivity” or “histrionics” or “inappropriateness”.  This is about a very ugly reality. This isn’t just about what people say, but what they do. Research shows that about 5-6% of college men have, by their own admission, raped someone.  In this survey, 63% of the rapists were repeat offenders.  The repeat rapists really enjoyed raping, with an average of 6.3 victims per rapist.  Which means that if there were 20 frat boys yelling about rape, statistically speaking, at least one has or will commit rape.  And if there was a rapist amongst them, he’s 63% likely to be the kind who rapes a lot of women before he’s stopped.  If there was a rapist or two in this group—-which is, statistically speaking, quite likely—-then he was emboldened by this activity, justified in his belief that rape is something that he enjoys social support for.  If he gets caught raping a woman during his college tenure, the fact that he and his fellows made this rape “joke” together might have the effect of increasing the likelihood—-already high—-that his frat brothers will support him instead of his victims.

And that’s just with the people who played this “joke”.  What about their targets?  We’re meant to assume that it was just words and that no one is really hurt, and the main problem is that it was inappropriate.  And that any young woman who takes an event like this to mean that she’s being threatened with rape is a hysterical baby. 

Well, the problem with that is there were almost surely survivors of sexual assault who were put in the way of this, women who know for a fact that rape is more than an abstraction, but a thing that can really happen to you.  The percentage of women who say they’ve been raped varies wildly depending on who’s asking and how they ask, but according to RAINN, 14.8% of women suffer from a completed rape in their lifetime. So, if only 6 women heard this, then they’ve added insult to injury to the trauma of rape that at least one, statistically speaking, will suffer in her life.  The women targeted by this were mostly freshmen, but that doesn’t make the picture much better, since 44% of rape victims weren’t yet 18 when it happened.  That means if only 15 young women heard this, statistically speaking, one of them is already recovering from a rape. 

Speaking as a rape survivor myself, I can say that while the emotions that victims can feel are really, truly all over the place, one of the most common reactions is to feel like the rug has been pulled out from under you.  The world starts to look like a meaner, darker place.  You really see from the inside how this sort of predatory masculinity is widely tolerated in our culture, with only half-hearted law enforcement efforts after the fact to work to check it. When you see men celebrate rape, even if they’re “joking”, that makes you feel very much like they don’t see you as a human being much at all.  In a lot of cases, you experienced what amounts to a hate crime against women. 

So of course the school is right to discipline these guys.  If they marched in support—-no matter how “jokingly”—-for gay-bashing, lynching, or any other hate crime, I would also support disciplining them.  Otherwise, you’re sending the signal to the targeted group that you allow intimidation tactics tell them they’re not welcome on campus. 

So here’s an interesting story from the docket of strange Supreme Court cases. 

The woman, Carol A. Bond of Lansdale, Pa., was at first delighted to learn that her friend was pregnant. Ms. Bond’s mood darkened, though, when it emerged that her husband was the father. “I am going to make your life a living hell,” she said, according to her now-former friend, Myrlinda Haynes.

Ms. Bond, a microbiologist, certainly tried. On about two dozen occasions, she spread lethal chemicals on her friend’s car, mailbox and doorknob.

Ms. Haynes, who managed to escape serious injury, complained to the local police. They did not respond with particular vigor. After checking to see whether the white powder on her car was cocaine, they advised her to have it cleaned.

Luckily, federal prosecutors, aided by the post office, were able to prevent Bond from killing Hayes. 

When it came time to charge Ms. Bond with a crime, federal prosecutors chose a novel theory. They indicted her not only for stealing mail, an obvious federal offense, but also for using unconventional weapons in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, a treaty aimed at terrorists and rogue states.

She got 6 years.  Her attorneys are suing under the 10th amendment, saying that the feds were outside of their jurisdiction.  This is an interesting issue insofar as it can give us insight into how the justices view the 10th amendment, and of course there’s lots of blathering about Tea Crackers and their crackpot theories.  But I want to point out that this should be interesting to feminists from the angle of looking at the continued disinterest some law enforcement has in domestic violence.

I suppose you could say that this doesn’t seem like the usual kind of domestic violence, and you’re right.  But I do think that you have to look at it through the same lens.  The victim in this case is the same boat that you often see when women suffer sexual assault or domestic violence, only to have their calls for help ignored by people who clearly think they had it coming.  It seems the victim in this case didn’t have a lot of options when it came to protecting herself. 

Cases like this point to a need for there to be another layer beyond just the local when it comes to fighting violence against women.  It’s so routinely accepted in some communities that you pretty much have to have federal legislation to help women out.  Take, for instance, federal laws regarding the safety of abortion clinics.  In really conservative areas, you could easily have law enforcement unwilling to stop harassment and violence against clinic workers, and without the federal law, people have no recourse.  It’s little ways like this where you really start to see the ugliness behind the wingnut obsession with “states rights” and the 10th amendment.  If their ideas really came into play, the basic rights of individuals who happen to belong to oppressed groups would be even less protected than they are now.

There’s a tendency on the left to praise hard line anti-choicers for their “consistency” when they oppose abortion even in the case of rape or incest.  “At least,” people say, “they’re being consistent with their claim that an embryo is a real person.” It’s not like all folks who say this disagree that said anti-choicers oppose abortion because of deep-set fears about human sexuality and misogyny, but they are trying to be fair and award some sort of karma points to people whose rationalizations are more coherent.

I’ve long maintained that opposition to abortion rights even in the case of rape or incest is indeed consistent, but with overt misogyny.  It’s an expression of belief that what goes on in a woman’s head never matters, not even in cases where more tender-hearted people might give women a break.  It’s consistent in the way that arguing that you should get to sexually abuse animals because you can eat them is consistent.  It just makes you an even uglier person.  It also is, irrevocably, mixed up with a general unwillingness to take rape seriously as a crime.  For example, Christine O’Donnell is running a new ad that exploits an already ugly situation—-where a man’s fear and anger after he fought a rapist off his sister is turned into an internet joke—-to compare being taxed to being raped, but in a jokey way that makes it clear they don’t think the original attempted rape is a real problem.*  Or, to make a long story short, I think a lot of people who say “no exceptions” for rape or incest say so because they don’t think rape is a real problem, and they believe most victims brought it on themselves.

Which brings me to the Ken Buck situation.  As new details emerge about the rape case he refused to prosecute, we’re beginning to get a firm picture of his attitudes towards women and about rape, and how they inform his stance against abortion rights, even for rape victims.  And that picture is of a man who believes that once a woman has ceased to be a virgin, she loses all rights to bodily autonomy: she can and should be forced to partner with a man against her will, have sex with a man against her will, and bear children against her will. 

Whether or not you prosecute a rape case should depend on whether or not you think an actual crime has been committed.  In this case, the victim got her attacker to admit on a recorded phone call that he raped her.  But the facts of this case—-whether or not a man forced himself on a woman—-were less important, it seems, than whether or not the victim deserved to say no.  Ken Buck was skeptical.  To make it worse, he laid blame for his attitudes on an imaginary journey, suggesting that they’d believe she just had “buyer’s remorse”.  And I guess they probably would, if even the prosecutor is a believer that women are generally evil and suddenly, after having sex with someone repeatedly, they decide that they’d enjoy spending the next year or so of their lives wrapped up in legal proceedings for the hell of it.  But more importantly, Buck was obsessed with the fact that the victim had (gasp!) been sexually active before, and with the accused rapist.  I guess once he’s stuck it in you once, you belong to him forever. 

But this is what’s really weird and telling:

The suspect in this case had claimed that the victim had at one point a year or so before this event become pregnant with his child and had an abortion, which she denies, saying she miscarried. The suspect’s claim, though, is in the police report, and Buck refers to it as a reason she may be motivated to file charges where he thinks none are warranted.

“When he talks about the abortion as the reason she wants charges filed, that has nothing to do with the law or this case,” Forseth says. “That is his personal bias coming into play. He’s bringing his own personal beliefs and judgments to bear on this case, when he should be acting as a victim’s advocate.”

A prior pregnancy and abortion/miscarriage is irrelevant, if you believe that a woman has a right to terminate a relationship with a man and a right to say no to sex, even if she’s not a virgin.  But if you see pregnancy as a symbol of a man’s conquest over a woman, then both abortion and rejecting a relationship or sex with a man who has previously impregnated you are against the rules of the patriarchy. 

But what I really want to draw attention to here is how Buck understood the relationship of abortion and rape. Even though the supposed abortion happened before the rape, Buck seemed really sure there was a relationship between the woman supposedly lying about the rape and having gotten an abortion, that she was somehow trying to justify something.  Or maybe just that she’s an out-of-control rejector of the right of men to control and dominate her.  Either way, you get a clear picture of why he’s opposed to exceptions in an abortion ban for rape and incest, and it really is consistent—-consistently misogynist.

*Or maybe her campaign only thinks rape is some big joke if it’s happening to people who live in low income housing.

This morning, I was putting the finishing touches on a post about Sharron Angle at XX when Marc messaged me to tell me that there was a shooter at the Perry-Castañeda Library.  It took me a second to register what he was saying.  The PCL is the library that is across the street from my old office at UT Austin, when I worked in the business school there.  My routine at lunch was often to go to the library to drop off/pick up books, go to Jester to grab a salad from the cafeteria for lunch, and then go back to the business school to eat at my desk while reading blogs before getting back to work.  The very picture of everyday, peaceful living.  The specter of a gunman turning loose in a crowded area is such a frequent occurrence nowadays, but picturing it actually happening in my old stomping grounds was almost unimaginable.  Some guy, reportedly in a ski mask, shooting off an AK-47 at the library.  Surreal.

Thankfully, no one was hurt but the shooter, who killed himself on the 6th floor of the library.

So I did what people do nowadays and opened up Facebook to see a stream of updates from friends back home, most of whom actually were on campus when it happened.  One friend in particular was in the shit—-he’d been trying to get breakfast and was outside at the corner where the library is, and was hustled by law enforcement inside the business school.  He frequently updated about being shuffled around.  The picture above is from another person inside the business school, and I’m using it because it’s so surreal to me since I used to walk down that hallway basically every day.  Being a classic smartass, said friend was cracking jokes about not being able to eat in peace, but over time, even his updates were more spooked than joking after awhile. The entire building was being swarmed by cops and dogs.  They were looking for a potential second shooter because they had differing descriptions from people who saw the guy walking down the street with an AK-47, but luckily there wasn’t one.

My thoughts right now are scattershot.  I’m glad everyone’s okay, and that the shooter’s wild shooting off of his gun didn’t result in any injuries. 

This all happened within a stone’s throw of the first school shooting in the nation, when Charles Whitman climbed the UT tower in 1966 and started firing.  Many of the people who died were not but a block away from this incident.  People still claim that you can find some of Whitman’s bullet holes on campus; now there are more scars from gun violence added to the landscape.  I’m not comparing the two incidents in magnitude, by any stretch, but just to note that there’s a cultural context that makes this whole thing even scarier than it already was. 

Darkly funny observation that I picked up from Twitter: Conservative groups on campus were supposed to have a speaker come tonight who wrote a book called “More Guns, Less Crime”.  Even though they no doubt flew the writer John Lott in already, I imagine his speech about how we can stop gun violence by having even more guns available will be canceled.  Not that it will stop any of the people who invited him from bullshitting today that it would have been just great if there had been civilians carrying guns around when this maniac showed up on campus, because what you really need right then is more bullets flying around. 

Like I said, I’m just mostly so relieved that no one else got hurt.  Now we’ll just wait and see what the police find out about this shooter.

Oh, Craigslist.  Why do you have go causing all this controversy about your “adult services” section? 

Actually, thank you, Craigslist, for this much: This is the first time I’ve read a discussion about sex work and sex trafficking in feminist circles where everyone is able to be calm and forthright.  Now, I haven’t seen the discussion at every blog or on every corner of Twitter, but I’ve seen a lot of discussion about this, and most of it involves neither hysterically claiming that all prostitutes that work through Craigslist are trafficked or downplaying the fact that trafficking is real.  I haven’t seen any pro-sex work people make disturbing arguments downplaying the horrors of sex slavery, or doing a bunch of hand-waving to distract from the fact that there’s a whole world of prostitutes that aren’t trafficked in the classic sense of the term, but are still being basically held as slaves by their pimps.  So far, most discussion I’ve seen admits that a) pimps are a real problem and nothing to sniff at b) trafficking is a widespread issue and a major, possibly the major source of modern day slavery in the U.S. c) Craigslist is being used by pimps to sell trapped women and minors to men who are truly the scum of the earth and d) that most of the women selling themselves on Craigslist aren’t trafficked. 

That’s a lot of agreement!  I’m really proud of people.  Now that the facts are coming into focus, I think that the solutions are becoming much more obvious.  Whatever you think of consensual prostitution, I think it’s probably important to join up with the people who are protesting the war on Craigslist.

The main reason is simple: Craigslist helps prostitutes stay away from pimps.  Not all, by any means, but for a lot of women, having to go without any intermediary at all allows them to avoid the clutches of men who are in this to exploit them for profit and the thrill of owning women.  As Danah Boyd—-who is an anti-trafficking activist—-explains:

Censoring Craigslist will also create new jobs for pimps and other corrupt intermediaries, since it’ll temporarily make it a whole lot harder for individual scumbags to find clients. This will be particularly devastating for the low-end prostitutes who were using Craigslist to escape violent pimps. Keep in mind that occasionally getting beaten up by a scary john is often a whole lot more desirable for many than the regular physical, psychological, and economic abuse they receive from their pimps. So while it’ll make it temporarily harder for clients to get access to abusive services, nothing good will come out of it in the long run.

And as Melissa Gira points out, those who actually want to help women who are trapped in prostitution would not arrest and charge those women with crimes, making it hard to impossible for them to get non-prostitution jobs if and when they feel ready to make the move out of sex work.  I don’t like the way she uses scare quotes around “bad men” when describing the at least deeply unpleasant men who get involved in the sex trade as johns and pimps, but her points are valid.  Going after Craigslist is about going after an easy target in lieu of actually doing the hard work of fighting traffickers.  As Danah Boyd points out, what this does is suggest that the main problem with trafficking, in the eyes of the law, is that it’s visible.  Which, in turn, tells pimps all they need to do is stay out of the public eye and they can create rape for pay schemes all the livelong day. 

As I’ve made it clear here before, I’m not a fan of prostitution.  Or specifically, I’m not a fan of men who think that they’re entitled to buy sex. I don’t have a problem with women who freely choose to sell it in the slightest—-a lot of them are good people, in my experience.  I don’t buy most of the apologies made for johns, however.  I’ve made it clear that I think that the myth that men buy sex because they “have” to, because no one else will fuck them or fuck them the way they want, is just that, a myth.  (And one that implies that only men have sexual needs that have to be met through commerce if no one is volunteering.  People making these excuses rarely have love for women who are hard up.)  I tend to believe people make sexual choices because that’s what they specifically want, and the act of buying sex is the turn-on and not incidental to the transaction. 

But the solution to this problem is cultural change that would make it so the demand for purchased sex dries up.  Attacking the women who do sex work—-or worse, creating situations where other men can abuse them without consequence—-sure as hell isn’t the way to bring an end to prostitution.  On the contrary, I think that the men who use prostitutes and the men who pimp them out and the men who make a big show out of making life hard for prostitutes, legally speaking, are all playing the same game, and the people who end up holding the shit bag are prostitutes themselves.  Anything that drives prostitution underground doesn’t do much for prostitutes, but it sure does help out pimps and johns by giving them a shadowy world to work in, where they don’t have to pay the price if they abuse prostitutes because no one cares and no one’s looking.  While I do think that Boyd may be overstating her case of how Craigslist can help bust traffickers, I do think she’s 100% right that the only result of driving prostitution out of clearly marked pages for it is that it goes into the shadows, where all the more evil can happen.

Further reading at Feministing and Jezebel.

Every time I hear or read an excuse for Mel Gibson or Roman Polanski, I immediately flash to this song in the movie “Run Ronnie Run”. 

Lyrics:

I thought that my home was my castle
With no one scrutinizing me
No pigs, no lyin’ bitch, no hassle
Y’all are brutalizing’ me
Can’t a man not drink his beer in silence?
Can’t a man not crudely lie and scream?
Can’t a man not control his bitch with violence?
Y’all are brutalizing me

What’s your problem, Whoopi?  I used to think you were cool.

Back January of last year, America got a look, courtesy of a cell phone camera of a rider on a BART train in Oakland, CA, at the cold-blooded murder of a handcuffed, down-on-the-ground 22-year-old named Oscar Grant on a train platform.

Yesterday, his assailant, transit officer Johannes Mehserle, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for killing the supermarket butcher with a 4-year-old daughter. (SFGate):

Involuntary manslaughter might seem an unsatisfying outcome for the killing of the unarmed Oscar Grant on Jan. 1, 2009, but it was consistent with the evidence that could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt against former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle. Anything less would have been an injustice. Anything more would have required conclusions about Mehserle’s state of mind that were not sufficiently supported in trial.

The bottom line is that the jury agreed with what any fair-minded person who saw the videotape of the shooting on the BART platform at the Fruitvale Station had to conclude: There was no reason to use fatal force on Grant, who was being physically restrained at the time.

Mehserle, 28, claimed it was an accident, that he thought he was firing a Taser instead of a handgun at the detainee. The explanation stretched the bounds of plausibility, given the difference in weight, feel - and position on his holster - between the nonlethal weapon intended to immobilize and the Sig Sauer P226 pistol that is used to kill. He clearly was negligent.

The thoughtful Adam Serwer, who now has his own feature blog at The American Prospect, reads between the lines of this verdict that captures my sentiment perfectly when I read about the verdict. It’s something you will not see in the above-cited San Francisco Chronicle report that has the ironic headline of “The right verdict in Mehserle case.” What is behind a “technically correct” verdict are also matters that have little to do with precision objectivity, and everything to do with human nature in the U.S. in 2010.

I want to focus for a moment on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. To convict on the higher charge of voluntary manslaughter, the prosecution would have had to prove that Mehserle’s fear of Grant and his friends was “unreasonable.” It decided the crime was involuntary. In other words, Mehserle’s fear? That was reasonable.

Fear is at the core of questions of justice involving the deaths of black people at the hands of the authorities in the United States of America, dating back to when Toussaint L’Overture put the fear of G-d in slaveowners by revealing that their “property” might someday rise up against them. L’Overture still has that effect on some people. Following emancipation we were the days when “justice” was meted out in the South by terrorists posing as vigilantes. Even then, when such atrocities were an accepted part of black life, people inside and outside the South found ways to sympathize with the anger and fear white Southerners felt towards their black neighbors—The New York Times editorialized in the 1890s that no “reputable or respectable negro” had ever been lynched.

Even decades after the Civil Rights era, a cop shooting an unarmed black man is barely a crime—a 2007 ColorLines investigation of police shootings in New York City found that in 12 instances when the victim was unarmed, only one officer was found criminally liable. There hasn’t been a murder conviction on a police shooting in Oakland since 1983. As Kai Wright wrote in the aftermath of the Sean Bell verdict, “American law has been sanctioning the killing of black people to mollify white fear for centuries…We scare the shit out of America. And that fear excuses just about any reaction it spawns.” Mehserle is profoundly unlucky to be punished at all.

Times change, but the radioactive fear of black people, black men in particular, has proven to have a longer half-life than any science could have discerned. This is not a fear white people possess of black people—it is a fear all Americans possess. It makes white cops kill black cops, it makes black cops kill black men, and it whispers in the ears of white and nonwhite jurors alike that fear of an unarmed black man lying face down in the ground is not “unreasonable.” All of which is to say, while it infects all of us, a few of us bear the brunt of the suffering it causes.

Thank you, Adam, for putting this out there. He also raises the very point I share with my readers time and again. That fear, embodied in the third rail of discussing race matters openly, seems to paralyze otherwise intelligent, highly-opinionated people into silence.

What’s worse is that we we don’t just fear, we fear talking about it. Our president tried once. He mentioned the fear his own grandmother felt for men who looked like he does, and we responded with the level of maturity we’ve come to expect from our political discourse. If you’ve ever had a relative of another race confess to you that they’d find you frightening if they ran into you in a dark alley, you know what he meant. But we fear what this fear says about us more than we fear letting it go.

When can we have these conversations? What will it take for those with privilege to speak openly about this fear, and for those who are minorities to hold back the desire to be defensive to engage.

For instance, why do some white people say they fear or are cautious of all black men after they were mugged by one? If they were mugged by a white guy, they wouldn’t fear all white men. And many blacks fall prey to the same fear, as Adam noted.

We have to explore that fear for what it is, rather than assign guilt for feeling it in the first place. You cannot let go of internalized racism (that is reinforced by our culture) without first owning it and peeling the layers back. And that can only occur in an environment where all concerned let their defenses down.

And that’s where we often fail. So many people just don’t want to take the time or the energy to engage in educating themselves and others in conversations that can involve painful admissions and hard questions that don’t have easy answers.

I Blame the Patriarchy recently wrapped up Art Week, but I think Twisty may have to reopen it just to discuss this insanely fucked up story about the archives of artist Larry Rivers, who I feel pretty assured was a child-abusing pervert.  NYU has acquired these archives, but Rivers’ daughter Emma Tamburlini wants them to turn over some pieces of the archive to her to be destroyed.  Pretty crazy, right?  What kind of daughter wants to destroy her father’s Important Art?  Well….. because it’s basically filmed child abuse.  Tracy Clark-Flory describes it:

Rivers, who died in 2002, filmed his daughters, starting at the age of 11, every six months for five years, asking them “about their breasts and whether boys have started noticing them.” There are “close-up shots of one daughter’s genitals and detailed commentary by Mr. Rivers on the girls’ changing bodies.” In some scenes, his wife, Clarice Rivers, “appears with her daughters, displaying her own breasts and talking about them.” The clips were edited into a 45-minute-long film. He titled it “Growing.”

In case you’re indulging the urge to say, “Hey, they’re arty-farty people, and so they don’t live the same way the rest of us do. Those girls probably think fondly of their kooky dad and his artistic interests!”, well, think again.  No matter who you’re born to, this kind of pervy shit feels like abuse. 

Ms. Tamburlini said the filming contributed to her becoming anorexic at 16. “It wrecked a lot of my life actually,” she said.

Calling something “art”, though, tends to obscure issues like, “Is it okay to torture your teenage daughters with quasi-incestuous videos about their sexuality that involve nudity?”  Which is why I respect Becky Sharper’s desire to say that this is basically not art, because it’s child pornography, and it’s stupid to confuse the two. 

Apparently a grand jury in San Diego declined to prosecute Rivers for child pornography, which strikes me as utterly ridiculous. If a stranger did this to minors, or this kind of work was found on someone’s hard drive, the police would intervene. When Rivers says that the girls “kept sort of complaining?” That means what he was doing was not consensual, and from Tamburlini’s account, he coerced them into doing it. Of course, the girls were below the age of consent for this kind of sexually-charged activity anyway, but their parents were able to get away with it because they were the parents.

I can see why this is a legal question, but as an ethical question, it tends to obscure the major issue, which is that exploiting children isn’t right no matter what you call it.  Twisty gets right to the heart of this dilemma:

I get it! Like, if you are unenthusiastic about 2008 Chicken Butt Viognier, and somebody hands you a glass at the taco-tasting party, you don’t say, “this damned Chicken Butt is too green and minerally to pair well with smoked avocado tacos.” You merely state that it isn’t wine. End of discussion. Talk to the hand. Well, perhaps you insinuate that wine is elitist first.

In other words, arguing whether or not it’s art is missing the point, which is that it’s child abuse.  And it reveals that Rivers treated his daughters like they were his personal property, fit to use how he’d like, even if it was sexually.  Even if they refuse to consent.Tracy Clark-Flory explains:

In a voice-over for the film, Rivers explains that he continued with the project despite “the raised eyebrows of society in general and specific friends and even my daughters—they kept sort of complaining.” Indeed, Tamburlini says she resisted at the time and was called “uptight and a bad daughter,” as the Times paraphrases it.

NYU is wanting to hang on to these films in order to release them after the subjects pass away. That’s not enough.  Rivers abused his children, and NYU shouldn’t cooperate in the abuse, even in the name of art.  They should let Tamburlini destroy the videos if she wants.  After all, she was part of the making of them; they belong to her as much as they do her dead father.

SCOTUS is busy with the rulings today and it has now dealt a huge blow to the protectors of child-raping priests in the Vatican as a ruling came down today that could result in Pope Benedict taking the stand. (Raw Story):

Allowing a federal appeals court ruling to stand, the decision means Vatican officials including theoretically Pope Benedict XVI could face questioning under oath related to a litany of child sex abuse cases.

The Supreme Court effectively confirmed the decision of an appellate court to lift the Vatican’s immunity in the case of an alleged pedophile priest in the northwestern state of Oregon.

More on that immunity, which has been the hoped-for trump card in the Vatican’s pocket.

The lawsuit, filed by a plaintiff identified only as John Doe, claimed he was sexually abused on several occasions in the mid-1960s when he was 15 or 16 by a Roman Catholic priest named Father Andrew Ronan.

According to court documents, Ronan molested boys in the mid-1950s as a priest in Ireland and then in Chicago before his transfer to a church in Portland, Oregon, where he allegedly abused the victim who filed the lawsuit. Ronan died in 1992.

...The Vatican claimed immunity under a U.S. law, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976, that allows foreign states to avoid being sued in court.

But the law contains exceptions. The appeals court cited one of those, ruling the lawsuit has sufficiently alleged that Ronan was an employee of the Vatican acting within the scope of his employment under Oregon law.

One of the biggest struggles in educating people about the realities of domestic violence is the question, “Why does she stay?” There’s a million ways this question is asked, but sadly most of them implicitly blame the victim and imply that the only reason someone would stay is that she’s stupid.  Women claim that they’d leave after the first punch, men assure us they’d run interference if they knew that a man they know is abusing his partner.  Many of these people are dead wrong, unfortunately.  Feminists try to make it understandable. We explain that abusers often do a great job at portraying remorse, which, coupled with a systemic stripping down of the victim’s self-esteem, can be an extremely effective tactic at getting forgiveness.  A woman who has started to believe no one could love her—-which abusers usually tell you—-is often sadly grateful when the abuser whips out the flowers, tears, and pleas after a beating.  Remember, the time leading up to the beating is often a time of escalating tension, which means that her self-esteem is lowered more than usual by a combination of reminders that no one else will love her and having that reinforced by the abuser making a show out of how he can barely bring himself to be kind to her pitiful self.  Pulling away from affection, sharp comments, that sort of thing.  Then, beating.  Then tearful apology and elaborate show of love.  Most people aren’t rocks, and this kind of manipulation is startlingly effective, even on victims with a lot of intelligence.

Feminists will often also point out external factors—-the abuser separates the victim from her support system.  Abusers are often highly charming people and may themselves have a lot of friends, so the victim will start to live in a world where everyone she encounters is through her abuser, and will side with him should she try to leave.  Some feminists try to emphasize the financial dependence issues, but while that’s important to point out as a tactic, it’s also important to realize this doesn’t mean victims that are ensnared by purely emotional methods are less deserving of our sympathy.  I think one can often grasp how it works intellectually, but still hit a wall emotionally in understanding how shameless abusers can be about emotional pandering to get their way.  Which is why Chris Brown may have done us all a favor with this performance:

When I first read about it, I actually thought his emotional manipulation of his audience would be more sophisticated—-never bet against an abuser in terms of really thinking through his performance for getting everyone to flock to his side and turn against his victim.  And by “everyone”,  I also mean the victim herself, who is often subject to the most elaborate display of “but I’m such a great guy and you’re so worthless, so clearly this is your fault and really you should be the one begging forgiveness”.  But this was pretty overt and corny.  No matter—-one thing abusers usually have on their side is the cult of masculinity.  We’re all conditioned to think that men don’t cry, so when one does, we snap to and assume it must be really serious.  You know, unlike those manipulative woman tears.  You know women—-they just want attention. 

Truth is, Brown’s display worked as intended. A whole lot of people are feeling bad for him now.  I even overheard a couple of 20-somethings debating this out in public today. The dude was skeptical of this display, but the woman ate it up.  She felt sorry for him!  He’d suffered enough! 

So I have to point out that if an abuser’s arsenal of tactics works so well on a bunch of strangers who don’t know anything about him but a few public images and some pop songs, imagine the impact these tactics have on victims and the people around the couple that have to be manipulated so they side with the abuser over his victim.  If you ever wonder why women don’t leave, just think about how shamelessly Chris Brown cried at the BET Awards, and you have a pretty good idea how this works.

It’s worth pointing out that Chris Brown has faced a lot more crap for domestic abuse than most famous abusers do, which shouldn’t make you feel sorry for him so much as outraged that this kind of incident doesn’t usually create this kind of public display of outrage.  There’s a lot of reasons for this, but one of the big ones is that Brown doesn’t have the strategies down as well as some—-he went for the face when beating Rihanna.  Practiced abusers often realize that visible marks just bring more trouble for them.

While the subject matter of this article by Matthew Mosk and Brian Ross is some dark shit, I have to admit that I chortled through the entire thing. No, not at the story.  But at the reporting, and the way that every asinine mainstream media trope about politics and violence against women made its way into the story.  Instead of telling, let’s get right into the showing!  (By the way, no one ever talks about how the copy/paste function is as critical to the explosion of blogging as blogging software itself.)

A longtime aide to Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, who has been assigned by the senator to oversee women’s issues, pleaded guilty in 2008 to charges stemming from a knife-wielding altercation with an ex-girlfriend.

The word “altercation”, especially paired with the phrase “knife-wielding” is the sort of thing that conjures up images of the aide Brent Furer fighting with his ex-girlfriend straight out of “West Side Story”.

Do not be fooled, people!  In the mainstream media, “fights”, “conflicts”, or “altercations” between men and women they’ve had relationships with are rarely fights, conflicts, or altercations.  If you read down, you find that this woman was no more engaged in an “altercation” than Wile E. Coyote is with the piano that squishes him.

A Vitter spokesman acknowledged the senator had concerns about the 2008 arrest, in which Furer was accused of holding his ex-girlfriend against her will for 90 minutes, threatening to kill her, placing his hand over her mouth, and cutting her in the hand and neck.

As a general rule, we don’t use the term “altercation”—-which implies blame on both sides—-when discussing kidnapping and assault.  But I suppose that it’s allowable when it comes to domestic violence, because women are totally to blame for not hopping in time machines to travel to the future to discover that the perfectly nice-seeming man asking us out now will actually turn out to be a monster.  Since women neglect to use the time machines we all have, then obviously, we share the blame when we’re kidnapped by former boyfriends.

Seriously, they’d call it an “altercation” if a man stabbed his ex-wife in her sleep.

If you’re still a human being crippled by common decency, you might be asking yourself this question: How is it that Furer is actually free to work for Senator Vitter, since this incident happened two years ago?  Isn’t kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon a big time fucking crime?  Then why is Furer’s guilty plea amounting to less than a guilty plea to selling some illegal drugs? 

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This post is a bit of LGBT inside baseball that has caused a bit of a stir, mostly because it has not been covered much in LGBT media to date - a major figure in the community is handling the crappy PR effort to spread BP’s propaganda and spin—and the question is whether there will be any blowback because of this association.

Hilary Rosen. The former honcho of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and now-former political director of Huff Post is knee-deep (or is it neck-deep) in this BP quagmire as part of its image clean-up effort, which surely pulls in big bucks for her.

After the spill, the company brought on crisis communicator Hilary Rosen, former Democratic congressional staffer, former chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, and a current editor-at-large for HuffingtonPost.com. Ms. Rosen heads the Washington-based office of U.K. communications firm the Brunswick Group. Public records are not yet available on the new Brunswick contract. Ms. Rosen declined to be interviewed on the record.

With the level of almost-certain criminality (the Obama DOJ is looking to press charges) and just plain brain-dead public statements by BP executives, Rosen, who has been MIA on CNN as a talking head since this development, surely has to consider the blowback because of her association with a company that is literally destroying the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people.

When HuffPost tossed her overboard, it was clear that it realized its aggressive coverage of BP was in conflict with Rosen’s new relationship with the oil giant.

“Hilary is no longer our Washington Editor at Large, a mutual decision we recently reached given her involvement with BP,” wrote Arianna Huffington in an email today, responding to a query from POLITICO. “However, we still have a great personal relationship.  And, of course, Hilary’s work with BP has had zero effect on our coverage of the company or the disaster in the gulf.  Comprehensive and hard-hitting, our coverage speaks for itself.”

And there’s reason to make that split. Rosen is not indirectly involved with BP—she’s hands-on working with the team to coach gaffe-prone BP CEO Tony Hayward.

Orchestrating the response is the Brunswick Group, whose Washington managing partner, Hilary Rosen, has connections throughout the city as the former head of the Recording Industry Association of America and from previous jobs that include working for Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat.

...The experts talk daily to plot strategy and dissect the day’s events. In prepping Hayward for his hearing, says one adviser, the basic message was: Don’t say anything you don’t know to be true.

It’s pretty hard to say that Brunswick and Rosen are succeeding in any respect. Bloomberg Businessweek bluntly said:

The bottom line: BP’s hiring binge of lawyers, lobbyists, and media experts to help it deal with angry demands from Washington may not be doing it much good.

It was also noticed by Muckety with “Hilary Rosen can’t wake up from the nightmare.”

And we thought that BP lobbyist was the worst job in America. It’s a piece of cake, compared to BP PR person.

After all the gaffes by Tony “I want my life back” Hayward, the company puts chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg in front of the mike and Svanberg talks about the “small people.”

Then BP eases Hayward out as the U.S. frontman for the emergency efforts and where does he go? To the Isle of Wight to watch his yacht, “Bob,” compete in the Round the Island Race, sponsored by JPMorgan Asset Management. (Is he flipping us off or does he really not get it?)

Hilary Rosen must be ready to take a dive into the Gulf.

The dilemma of pocketbook before principles—it’s a personal decision whether one engages in a professional relationship with a client regardless of the ethics of its practices—but it something worthy of discussion here, particularly because of the ties Hilary Rosen has to the LGBT community. Muckety, which maps out the connections of players of power and influence, shows us why this is relevant.

If The Huffington Post has seen fit to sever ties with Rosen over her relationship to BP, where does that leave HRC? Does the HRC/HRCF board have any problem with this (Rosen is on the HRCF board)? Surely some large donors might take issue.

More below the fold.

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