Search results for rape culture

A recent CBS/New York Times poll reveals how words matter. They asked 500 respondents how they felt about permitting “homosexuals” to serve in the military; then they asked a different 500 how they felt about “gays/lesbians” serving in the military.  It turns out, people like gays and lesbians more than they like homosexuals:

Also in words: frankenfoods, atomic, soda vs. pop, tradition, hispanic, feminism, woman, average, nurse, George Lakoff on metaphor, professional, Jon Steward on re-branding, development, organic, the third world, man vs. girl, natural, honorifics, Africa, dithering, terrorism, the rape and other violent metaphors, and flesh-colored.

And also see our post on the war against “gay.”  (Poll discovered via Montclair SocioBlog.)

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

When American figure skater Evan Lysacek won the gold medal at the 2010 Olympics, he was the only man on the podium who had not attempted a quadruple jump in either of his two skating programs. The silver medalist, 2006 Olympic Champion Evgeni Plushenko of Russia, was quick to point out that “a quad is a quad. If an Olympic champion doesn’t do a quad, well I don’t know… Now it’s not men’s figure skating, it’s dancing.” Plushenko’s website later proclaimed (though the claim was soon redacted) that his superior performance had earned him a “platinum” medal. Figure skaters and others who heard his comment understood this wasn’t just sour grapes; by questioning Lysacek’s jumping ability, Plushenko was also questioning his manhood.

As Daniel, a former singles and pairs skater, knows from personal experience, when you look below the surface of figure skating, a coded gendering of the sport emerges. Figure skating has both athletic and artistic components, and traditionally these have been apportioned to men and women, respectively. Men are expected to be able to land enormous jumps. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to grab one of their feet and pull it up behind their heads, sometimes while spinning fast enough to set off a nose-bleed, as Mirai Nagasu did in Vancouver. Women’s programs also emphasize a great deal of emotion when they skate, while men are expected to display their athletic strength and power.

This is not to say that women are not expected to jump or that men can be soulless automata, but there are lower expectations for each in the other gender’s territory. A male skater who doesn’t emote passionately can be forgiven if he has a fantastic triple axel, and a woman can even win the Olympics with jumps that aren’t fully rotated. Artistry and flexibility are where women are expected to excel, while boys strive to jump higher and rotate more. To this day, only one woman (Japan’s Miki Ando) has landed a clean quadruple jump in competition, while it has become a mainstay of men’s event. This video shows Ando’s jump, at a 2002 competition:

In the aftermath of his silver platinum silver medal finish in Vancouver, Plushenko questioned the qualifications of Evan Lysacek to win gold without a quad. Aside from being poor sportsmanship, his approach highlighted the deep association of jumps with male figure skating. Though, in the women’s event, Mao Asada completed the technically difficult triple axel on three separate occasions, no fuss was made over her second-place finish behind the ethereal Kim Yu-Na. Kim has strong jumps, to be sure, but what sets her apart from her competitors is that she skates in a way that is graceful, balletic and undeniably feminine.

Ironically, one of the most promising things about a young Evgeni Plushenko when he arrived on the international skating scene in 1997 was his blending of artistry and athleticism. His style was avant-garde and overwrought, and his jumps were magnificent; he had, in skating parlance,”the whole package.” It might seem excessive to map gender onto his performances, but he is famous for being one of the only men to perform the Biellmann spin, in which the skater grabs the blade of one skate and pulls it up behind the top of his or her head.

This was a clear and unabashed case of gender-bending, as the spin had previously been the province of women. The figure skating world, after being sufficiently impressed by the flexibility of his hips, shrugged and moved on. No one thought any less of him for doing a “girly” spin.

Compare this to the skating world’s reaction to two-time Olympic gold medalist Katarina Witt, who was often said to skate “like a man.” Witt had big jumps (and big thighs to go with them), and skated to the soundtracks of epic movies, a practice that was usually reserved for men, while other women tended to skate to classical ballet suites. Witt’s artistic style was also not typical of women skaters: while her competitors demonstrated flowing, balletic arm movements to match their floaty chiffon skating dresses, Witt opted for stronger, cleaner arm movements and famously skated in leggings and a tunic in a program set to music from Robin Hood. She also skated with a stoic bearing that was similar to that of Canadian Elvis Stojko, who won the silver medal in Lillehammer in 1994.

Despite the popular perception of figure skating as a uniformly “girly” sport, there exists within the figure skating world a unique and nuanced code for constructing and understanding gender. In the figure skating world, as in the rest of our culture, that code changes over time, with different representations of masculinity and femininity being rewarded, marked down, or phased out entirely as the sport evolves. And as Plushenko’s comments about Lysacek demonstrated, figure skating’s coding of gender can be invoked by skaters trash-talking their rivals in subtle, but complicated, ways. As yet, Plushenko has made no comment on Lysacek’s upcoming appearance on “Dancing with the Stars,” but it’s not hard to imagine what he might have to say.

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Chloe Angyal is a Contributor at Feministing.com, where she writes about gender in popular culture. She is also a failed figure skater. Daniel Eison is a former nationally-ranked pairs and singles skater who retired in 2005. He is not a failed feminist.

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Gender differences in figure skating are also institutionalized in the form of costume requirements. Women are required to wear dresses, while men are not allowed to wear leggings or sleeveless outfits.

UPDATE: Reader Jeff says,

This isn’t true anymore; “this rule was repealed in 2004, allowing women to wear tights, trousers, or unitards” [1] ([1] http://www.frogsonice.com/skateweb/faq/rules.shtml)

Thanks for the correction!

Related posts: Johnny Weir and Canadian skating gets tough.

Last night some friends and I were on the Strip here in Vegas and wandered over to look at City Center, the new casino/very high-end shopping center/”walkable city within a city” that was such a big deal when it opened recently that national news outlets, including NPR, talked about it. Anyway, we were wandering around and came upon a lingerie store with this mannequin in the window:

She’s blindfolded, handcuffed, on her knees. Another mannequin was also blindfolded, with ties around her ankles, and a third had a long pearl necklace wrapped around her neck and then tied around each wrist.

Our reaction was, basically, “Agh! Agh! WTF? Why?!?” We all, men and women alike, interpreted it as an icky depiction of sexual domination of women, perhaps even violence.

But of course, there’s another way to interpret it, particularly given that it’s a lingerie store: as consensual participation in S&M/bondage or sexual role-playing.

I still can’t shake off my initial feeling. We often see implied, or obvious, violence toward or sexual harassment of women as marketing or entertainment (see the trailer for the movie Bounty Hunter, vintage Betty Crocker ad, PSA for labeling cleaning products, violence against women in prime time, ad for CSI, t-shirt to show team spirit, ad for shoelaces, Lanvin ads, trailer for Dead Girl, Barney’s window display showing splattered blood and mannequins under attack, is stalking romantic?, trailer for Observe and Report, Rene Russo photo shoot, ha ha! She wasn’t being beaten!, “going in for the kill has never been so satisfying”, oops, I strangled a woman, and…oh, there are many more, but I don’t have time to link to them all). It seems naive to think that people can see mannequins posed like this and completely disconnect them from other portrayals of women bound, gagged, dead, sexually assaulted, etc., that are meant to be funny or sexy.

But it also seems problematic to dismiss the idea that in at some situations, such as this one, the situation could be consensual S&M. Allusions to at least light bondage has become more common in pop culture, particularly handcuffs as a sexy prop (sometimes used for laughs if one partner ends up handcuffing the other to something and then robbing them, stealing their clothes, etc.). Yet those who participate in S&M are also often stigmatized as sexual deviants.

But then, how do we think about S&M/bondage given that the sexual norms common in the U.S. include the idea of female sexual passivity and submission? Is this mannequin problematic in any way even if the store meant to invoke the idea of sexual role-playing?

I am confounded by this. The mannequin creeps me out. I don’t like it. But I’m sure many people can make eloquent arguments against my reaction, or how we approach the various issues involved. So what to make of this mannequin, readers? Help me out.

NEW! (Mar. ’10): SOM sent in this photo of the display in the window of the shoe store Sole Experience in Edmonton, Alberta, that shows a woman in high heels with her feet bound. This image, to me, seems to more clearly imply violence than the one above, possibly because of the use of rope rather than handcuffs, which are associated with sex role-playing:

In earlier posts, we’ve highlighted instances in which contradictions in U.S. culture become glaringly clear.  In one, suggestive advertising accompanies an article critiquing a video game in which the player rapes a woman.  In another, CNN asks whether Jon and Kate Gosselin are getting too much media coverage, and then tempts you to read more media coverage about Jon and Kate Gosselin.  In a third, neighbor billboards carry hilariously contradictory messages.

I found another example that left me shaking my head.  Via Racialicious, I found myself reading a Time magazine article reporting on recent research that shows that, even when black and whites are portrayed as equal on television, viewers come away with subconscious anti-black bias that actually translates into bias in real life.  The findings are pretty dismal.

Two paragraphs into the article, there was a promotional link… for television (see the bolded, red parenthetical sentence):

So, yeah, television is likely inculcating you with racist views; “the transmission of race bias appears to occur subconsciously, unbeknownst to the viewer”… but don’t let that stop you from enjoying awesome TV!

The second promotional link, halfway through the article, was just salt in the wound:

And, of course, they couldn’t let your thoughts linger on social justice issues when there are great TV series out there to see!

The final paragraphs:

Maybe they are hoping that we’ll watch the top 10 TV ads and episodes more critically?

These promotional inserts may very well be automatically generated, but the article is dated Dec. 17th, so clearly no one at Time has been alerted to, or cares about, the possibility that they may trivialize the message of the article, or even draw people away from it as early as two paragraphs in.  What Timewants is for you to waste as much time on their website as possible.  Apparently any ideological commitment to fighting racism is secondary at best.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Parents Television Council just released their new data comparing the incidence of violence against women and girls by CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX during prime time sweeps in 2004 and 2009 (report here).  They found a 120% increase in depictions of violence against women and girls amidst a steady rate of overall frequency of violence.

They write:

Cumulatively, across all study periods and all networks, the most frequent type of violence was beating (29%), followed by credible threats of violence (18%), shooting (11%), rape (8%), stabbing (6%), and torture (2%).  Violence against women resulted in death 19% of the time.

Violence towards women or the graphic consequences of violence tends overwhelmingly to be depicted (92%) rather than implied (5%) or described (3%).

So those’re the numbers, how about some examples of the normalization of violence against women: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, forty-two, and forty-three.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Cross-posted at Anglofille.

The Reclusive Leftist wonders why George Sodini’s mass murder of women in an aerobics class in Pennsylvania last week is not receiving more news coverage.  And also, why is the crime not being referred to as a hate crime?

If I want to read about the Pennsylvania shooting, I have to search for it. This evening I typed “George Sodini” (the murderer’s name) into the Google News search box. The stories that came up told me that Sodini was lonely; that he felt rejected by women; that he led a sad, bitter life; that he hadn’t had sex in years; that he longed for women to notice him. Well, isn’t that special.

I looked for the words “hate crime,” but only Ms. Magazine is referring to it that way. Good for them…But Ms. Magazine appears to be alone in its assessment. I can’t find any other media outlets calling the massacre a hate crime. If spraying bullets into a group of female strangers because you hate women isn’t a hate crime, what is?

Her conclusion, which I agree with, is that hatred of women is considered “natural and universal” and so we don’t even give it a thought.

In his NYT column, Bob Herbert nails it.  He refers to another mass murder of females in Pennsylvania, when in the autumn of 2006 a man went into an Amish school, separated the girls from the boys, then shot all the girls.  Herbert writes:

I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar…We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected. We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment. The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.

Sadly, Bob Herbert is in the extreme minority with his coverage of the Sodini story.  Instead, for most of the media, Sodini himself is the real victim – a victim of women.  This Boston Globe editorial is a perfect example.  According to the Globe, Sodini fits the “typical profile of an American psychopath: He was a loner who lamented his failure with women. His online diary was filled with fury over his sexual frustrations – claiming at one point to have been rejected by ‘30 million’ women. There are, of course, millions of frustrated men who don’t open fire on innocent civilians, so there’s a danger in making too much of his loser profile.”

Sodini is first described as a “psychopath” by the Globe but then by the end of the passage he’s just one of “millions of frustrated men” who are rejected by women.  What is implied here is that while most rejected men don’t commit mass murder, it’s understandable why George Sodini – or any man – could snap.  He was lonely!  Them bitches rejected him! Sodini, a psychopathic multiple murderer, is merely a victim of selfish, shallow females.

Imagine that instead of hating women, George Sodini hated and murdered Jews.  Imagine the Boston Globe writing this: “George Sodini tried to befriend many of the Jews in his town, but they rejected him.  Last week, he went down to the local synagogue and sprayed bullets everywhere.  There are, of course, millions of people around the world who are frustrated by Jews, but most of them don’t actually go out and kill, so there’s a danger of making too much of the fact that Jewish people had rejected Sodini in the past.”

This would be outrageous, of course.  Any attempt to rationalize murderous behavior and hatred like this is indefensible.  Yet female victims, when targeted because of their femaleness, aren’t accorded this kind of dignity and respect.  Instead, women are blamed.

I should point out that the main focus of the Globe’s editorial on Sodini is his racist blog posts against Obama.  A lot of other media have also made this the focus of the story, making racist blog posts against Obama equal in significance to mass murder of females. Because, you know, the Obama angle is more interesting and, let’s face it, more important.

The coverage of this case is, across the board, sickening.  Here are a few headlines:

The Huffington Post

The Telegraph U.K.

Associated Press (via Yahoo News)

The Times

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

And the list goes on.  In each case, we see that Sodini is the victim.  Nowhere do we see a headline like this: Misogynist Commits Mass Murder or Three Women Murdered in Hate Crime. The articles are clear that Sodini hated women, which of course he did, but for the media, if Sodini hated women, then there must be a reason for it.  A good reason. If George Sodini, a proven racist, had murdered African-Americans simply because of their race, would we be asking why George Sodini hated African-Americans?  No, because what possible legitimate reason could he have?  There isn’t one.  He’s a racist asshole and that’s the end of it.  But apparently, there are legitimate reasons to hate all women.  The articles try to explain, in rational terms, why Sodini hated women, thus making his rampage seem like the next logical step given his mental instability.  If women hadn’t deprived him of sex, none of this would have happened.

Here’s the opening of the story from the last headline above, from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

“George Sodini couldn’t find love. He tanned, worked out at the gym, held a steady job and still went nearly two decades without the loving touch of a woman, according to his online blog begun in November. He wrote that he felt totally alone — isolated — and estimated that 30 million desirable women rejected him in the last 30 years. Enraged, he hatched a heinous plan to make some of those pretty young women pay for his misery. The price would be their lives.”

This is just sick.  It’s beyond sick.  It reaches new levels of vileness.  You’ll notice that this, like a lot of the other coverage, is not written as a news report, but almost as entertainment.  Whoever wrote this seems to be taking some vicarious pleasure in the actions of Sodini.

Sodini worked out “and still went nearly two decades without the loving touch of a woman” [italics mine].  Poor George.  He did everything right, yet these cruel women rejected him.  What’s wrong with women?   When confronted with a vicious, hate-filled psychopath, they just ran in the other direction, without even considering his good qualities at all.  Typical!

For a moment, just imagine if George Sodini had had a girlfriend.  There can be virtually no doubt that she would have been physically and emotionally abused during the relationship, because George Sodini hated women.  If the woman had tried to escape from him, she would have been stalked and likely murdered.  And after he killed her, he would have probably committed a mass murder of women anyway.  The headline: Heartbroken Man Goes on Rampage After Being Dumped.

The real story here is not lonely men (there are plenty of lonely women as well), but instead, the real story is male violence against women and girls, which occurs every second of every day in the form of domestic abuse, molestation, harassment, rape and murder. There is no rational, legitimate reason for this hatred of women, yet it is widespread in our culture and everyday, women die as a result. Writes Herbert:

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female. A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem. We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.

This is the conversation we should be having.  Instead, the media is legitimizing Sodini’s misogyny and giving him the exact platform he craved – he’s gone out in a blaze of glory, with everyone dissecting his blog posts and commenting on his mistreatment and loneliness.

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Anglofille is the nom de blog of an American ex-pat living in London.  She is finishing up a PhD in English and writing a novel with feminist themes.   She has previously written for Our Bodies, Ourselves, as well as numerous consumer magazines.

Months ago Ryan emailed us about a video game called Katawa Shouju (sometimes translated as Disabled Girls or Crippled Heart). From the website:

Hisao Nakai, a normal boy living a normal life, has his life turned upside down when a congenital heart defect forces him to move to a new school after a long hospitalization. Despite his difficulties, Hisao is able to find friends—and perhaps love, if he plays his cards right.

A design sketch of the girls:

An article at GameSetWatch refers to the game having a “perverse and contemptible premise.”

Ryan says,

A lot of the discussion about this game seems to be about the disabilities of the girls and how disgusting it is. I don’t really share that opinion personally…I don’t really see what’s wrong with casting a girl with burn scars on her face as a love interest within a game. Or for that matter , what’s wrong with casting a girl with no legs or deformed arms as a love interest? I mean, it’s one thing to fetishize…but on the other hand it might be good for someone who has similar disabilities to feel like they can be desirable.

It’s an interesting point. I suspect there are things about the video game I would find disturbing, and if the girls are portrayed in a ridiculing way, that’s problematic. But some of the reactions to it seem to assume that having a person with a disability as a potential love interest is automatically ridiculing them. But why would that be? Why would it be more “contemptible” to portray these women as romantic/sexual interests any more than other women in similar games? Some of the objections to the game are based on the idea that you must be laughing at people with disabilities if you show them as sexy or romantically interesting. But that’s based on the idea that of course they can’t really be sexy, so it’s mean to portray them that way…which points out some interesting assumptions about people with disabilities and their romantic and sexual lives.

Thoughts?

UPDATE: Reader Magnetic Crow says,

I think what bothers me about this is the premise of a “school for disabled kids only”, the fact that the girls are ‘othered’ from the get-go by this isolation, and the fact that this is probably being made to play to an exploitative fetish. Were it any other dating sim, and one of the girls available for dating just happened to have been born with no arms, or had lost her legs in a traffic accident, I would feel a lot more comfortable.

Other posts about video games: Evony’s boob ads, gender and race in RuneScape, Border Patrol game, Miss Bimbo and Sexy Beach 3, Rape Simulator, My Life, Medal of Honor’s all-White military, a game called Battle Raper that is exactly what it sounds like, blaming moms for video game addiction, sales of Grand Theft Auto, and “military entertainment.”

We also have a posts of a girl with a limp as an ugly friend, Goodyear ad featuring a sad kid in a wheelchair, nude calendar of Paralympic athletes, dolls with Down’s Syndrome, models with disabilities in a British Top Model show, representing people with disabilities, what is an “alt model”?, and amputee model Viktoria.

Animals Awake, a Dutch organization for animals akin to PETA in the U.S., “takes a page from [their] playbook,” according to David at Adfreak.   This commercial, in which a stripper is brutally murdered in front of a live audience, is so shocking that my first I thought was that it was a parody. It’s not.

Major major major trigger warning:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/5323112[/vimeo]

The critique, of course, is that Animals Awake is contributing to an atmosphere in which violence against women is ubiquitous (see Jezebel, for example).  But I actually think that this commercial works in that we are (I hope) genuinely horrified by the murder at the end.  I don’t think it normalizes violence against women like so many other ads/media/products do (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for examples).

BUT it does normalize the connection between violence and sex.  There is absolutely no reason why the person murdered in this ad had to a stripper.  There is no reason to spend the first half of the commercial titillating us, only to have it suddenly turned into a horror show.  There’s absolutely no connection.  But because sex and violence are so frequently linked in the American imagination, it actually took me a few minutes of thinking about it to remember that.  And I’m kind of horrified that, in my mind, sex and violence go together like peas and carrots.  This ad only reinforces that connection.

Sorry I made you watch it.

More images of sexualized violence here, here, here, here, here, here, here here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Here’s another PSA, this one from the U.K., with exactly the same idea.

UPDATE: In the comments, jeffliveshere points out that the commercial is based on a pun:

I agree that the sex and violence connection is unnecessary–but, to be clear, there is wordplay involved–“stripping fish” is apparently a technical term for removing the guts of fish…

Okay, so maybe there isn’t “absolutely no connection.” Even so?

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.