gender: violence

As you are most likely aware, last week director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on an outstanding warrant for his arrest in the U.S. He fled to Europe in the 1970s after being charged with giving prescription drugs and liquor to a 13-year-old girl, then raping her. He plead guilty to a lesser charge of improper sexual conduct with a minor (and said he wasn’t aware she was 13 Reader Lucy pointed out that while he at times claimed not to have known her age, he later acknowledged that he did), then left the country and generally avoided countries with an extradition agreement with the U.S. (and skipped the Academy Awards when “The Pianist” was nominated).

Anyway, the reaction from Hollywood has been generally supportive of Polanski. Many film industry notables signed petitions last week opposing his extradition and asking that the charges be dropped. Melissa at Women & Hollywood suggests that this might be, in part, because:

…the issue touches close to home for many a director who has probably employed the “casting couch” and may have committed an action similar to Polanski’s sometime in his career. Plus, I’m sure there is pressure being applied to people to get on board and support the artist.

In an example of how many in Hollywood are defending Polanski, Whoopi Goldberg explained on The View that it wasn’t “‘rape’ rape”:

Notice that part of her defense (about about 0:30) is that they’d had sex before, which seems to preclude the possibility that he could have raped her (and assumes that those previous times were consensual and that sex with a 13-year-old is okay as long as it was consensual).

At about 2:05 she appears to make a sort of cultural relativist argument, saying that we’re a “different kind of society,” while in other places, including “the rest of Europe,” 13- and 14-year-olds are sexualized. That is, of course, entirely true (that girls at 13/14 have been treated as marriageable/sexual, not that this is specifically true “in the rest of Europe”), both historically and now (my great-grandma married a 22-year-old man when she’d just barely turned 15). There are a lot of interesting points there, but Goldberg doesn’t seem to be making a complex argument–she seems to be saying “in some places this would be okay, so we shouldn’t punish him.”

At 3:15 they discuss the responsibility of the mother, asking what kind of mom would let a young girl go alone with an older man. It’s a very appropriate question to ask. And my guess is: lots of parents in Hollywood, if the older man was an influential director who said he had set up a photo shoot for a major fashion magazine for your daughter. That, of course, is horrid; at the very least it’s extreme denial (“oh, he’s so nice, he just wants to help her get her big chance because he sees something special in her”), at worst it’s actively offering sexual access to your child for a chance at stardom.

I can’t see, however, that it in any way changes the situation regarding Polanski. And the use of excuses like “they’d had sex before, so it couldn’t be rape” is stunning to me.

Melissa at Women & Hollywood adds:

The thing about the Polanski case and why it is resonating across the country and the world is that lots of people don’t like the double standard that Hollywood is showing here. Hollywood is liberal when it feels like it like with the environment, but not when it comes to women.

Also check out Jillian York’s discussion of Hollywood’s support of Polanski.

Jezebel has a video of Chris Rock on the Jay Leno show criticizing the support for Polanski, one of the few celebrities to very openly do so.

UPDATE: Here’s the ever-awesome Jay Smooth on the topic:

In a random tangent, when I was searching for the video clip from The View I saw another version posted to YouTube with this description: “Disgusting Obama-type of Morals/Values—Whoopi Goldberg DEFENDS Roman Polanski: It Wasn’t Rape-Rape.” It reminded me of my recent post about Rush Limbaugh’s description of “Obama’s America,” in which Obama has become the symbol moral decay.

Max shoes advertises its sturdy laces with sexualized and racialized violence in this Swiss ad:

tumblr_kq99filXUo1qa2j4ro1_400

NEW! Penny R. sent in these ads for Bisazza tiles.  They were banned in England, but she saw them in a waiting room in the U.S. in a magazine called Wallpaper:Bisazza1Bisazza2Both via Copyranter (here and here).

—————————

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

Caroline J. sent in a link to an anti-rape campaign in Scotland title This Is Not an Invitation to Rape Me. The campaign includes various posters with commentary on the myths associated with them. Some examples of the posters (the second one might not be safe for work, so after the jump):

more...

Ever since it occurred to me a few years ago, I’ve been deeply disturbed the two meanings that the word “fuck” has in U.S. culture.  We use the word when we want to hurt someone really, really bad; and we use it to describe what may be the most physically intimate thing two people can do together.  The fact that the word has that double meaning, I think, speaks volumes about our fucked up relationship with sex.

Illustrating this, Caroline H. pointed me to a June 2009 Playboy slideshow of politically conservative women that readers want to “hate fuck.”  After protests, Playboy took the slideshow down, but RedState captured screen shots. You can see them all here. I post a selection below.

The first slide:

playboy-1

 

Megyn Kelly:

playboy-3-500

Amanda Carpenter:

playboy-5-500

Elisabeth Hasselbeck:

playboy-6

Dana Perino:

playboy-7-500

—————————

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

Teresa C. sent in this image created using UNICEF data to show what percent of women surveyed in various countries said it was acceptable for their husbands to hit them:

international-womens-attitudes-towards-domestic-v-28079-1250786064-13

(Found at BuzzFeed.)

You can find the data and a breakdown of UNICEF data collection methods here. The data for many more countries are available there too. I can’t quite figure out why these particular countries were used in the image; they aren’t all of the countries with the highest percentages. As far as I can tell, the UNICEF data table only includes numbers for the “developing” nations and some countries from eastern Europe, which is UNICEF’s focus. But I do wonder what the numbers would be if you asked women in the U.S. a question along the lines of “is it ever acceptable for a man to hit a woman?” or “can you think of any situation where it might be understandable that a man would hit his wife or girlfriend?” You might get higher “support” for violence against women than you’d think. The UNICEF page doesn’t provide the wording of this question, which would be interesting to know.

That’s not to downplay the issue of women justifying or accepting violence against women, just that those of us in the “developed” nations need to be sure not to pat ourselves on the back too much about how enlightened we are about domestic violence.

And I can’t help but dislike the image, in that at first glance it would appear to be a pie chart in which all of the sections add up to 100%; really a bar graph would be a better way to illustrate this. But then, I had a dissertation advisor with a 5-page single-spaced document outlining his standards for data presentation.

UPDATE: Reader P. makes the point I was getting at above (that the wording might greatly impact how much “support” you find for violence against women) much better than I did:

What they were actually asked, in the MICS and the DHS (the two primary sources for the data), was this question:

“Sometimes a husband is annoyed or angered by things that his wife does.  In your opinion, is a husband justified in hitting or beating his wife in the following situations:

– If she goes out with out telling him?
– If she neglects the children?
– If she argues with him?
– If she refuses sex with him?
– If she burns the food?”

I bet you get very different rates for different “justifications,” which is important both for data-gathering/presentation and for anti-domestic violence campaigns. And, again, I bet if you broke down various “reasons” for hitting a woman, I bet you’d get higher-than-expected acceptance of them in countries in the “developed” countries that weren’t presented in the table.

Sociologists who study social movements note that the tactics available to activists are shaped by the activism that has proceeded them. We call this a “repertoire of contention,” or a set of tools available to any activist that most people in a society would recognize as “protest.” In most industrialized countries today, this repertoire includes things such as sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, and marches.

Repertoires of contention are shared and they pass from one social movement to another.   The sit-in, for example, was invented by civil rights U.S. labor activists, but all types of activists use sit-ins today (perhaps most memorably by the civil rights movement). Sidney Tarrow calls this kind of tactic “modular.” It can be borrowed from one kind of activism and applied to many different causes.  Similarly, protest tactics can in one country can be borrowed and applied in another, so long as the conditions for activism are similar.

I was reminded of this theory of modular protest tactics when fds and Mordicai K. sent us this link to photographs from a protest by the Alliance for Animal Rights in Russia. Like the protests PETA in the U.S. and Animals Awake in the Netherlands, this Russian protest personifies animals as (mostly) women and then displays them brutally murdered.  I think the trio (Russia, the Netherlands, and the U.S.), together, is an interesting example of the way that a social movement tactic can travel transnationally.

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.

Cross-posted at Anglofille.

20301811_640x480

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
Capture

The Telegraph U.K.
times

Associated Press (via Yahoo News)
ap

The Times
Capture1

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Capture2

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.

—————————

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.

These displays, featuring mannequins posed as if they are being attacked by an invisible assailant, could be seen in the windows at Barneys New York this week:

barneys1__oPt

barneys2__oPt

They were disassembled when shoppers complained.

Daily News, via.

—————————

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