At the NRA’s national convention in Houston this weekend, a company was being promoted which sell’s ‘ex-girlfriend targets’. These are targets which look like women. And bleed when you shoot them. Policymic has the full story here. Warning: photos in the linked article may be highly triggering (which is why I didn’t repost them here).
Perhaps the title for this post is a but uncharitable; this post entitled “Toxic Masculinity” discusses Steubenville, but it is really picking out a larger phenomena as its topic.
For instance,
”as former NFL quarterback and newly-minted feminist Don McPherson recently put it, ”We don’t raise boys to be men. We raise them not to be women, or gay men.”"
“Toxic masculinity is damaging to men, too, positing them as stoic sex-and-violence machines with allergies to tenderness, playfulness, and vulnerability. A reinvented masculinity will surely give men more room to express and explore themselves without shame or fear. (It will also, not incidentally, reduce rape against men as well, because many rapes of men are committed by other men with the intention of “feminizing”—that is, humiliating through dominance—their victim.)”
I’m willing to bet feminist philosophers have already taken up similar arguments in regards to masculinity. Does anyone know of any work in particular?
(trigger warning)
Zerlina Maxwell, a media pundit and activist, went on Hannity to talk about gun control and sexual assault. (Specifically whether making it easier for women to be armed can lower the rates of sexual assault and rape.)
Maxwell said,
“I think that the entire conversation is wrong. I don’t want anybody to be telling women anything. I don’t want men to be telling me what to wear and how to act, not to drink. And I don’t, honestly, want you to tell me that I needed a gun in order to prevent my rape. In my case, don’t tell me if I’d only had a gun, I wouldn’t have been raped. Don’t put it on me to prevent the rape.”
People are reporting that Maxwell has received a huge backlash on the internet, filled with of course, rape threats and racism. Talking Points Memo discusses the backlash here.
But Maxwell went on to restate her argument on Feministing. And there is now a twitter hashtag #tyzerlina for people to support her.
As for the content of the discussion, there are reasons to think that focusing on the perpetrators works.
And as messed up as the backlash is, it’s actually doing a decent job of demonstrating what people mean when they talk about “rape culture.” (Here’s a link to the tweet below.)
“Got a rape threat for tweeting about @ZerlinaMaxwell getting rape threat. #Rapeculture is a thing, y’all. #TYZerlina
As readers will no doubt be aware, rape is used as a weapon of war in the DRC. Denis Mukwege is a surgeon there who has helped thousands of women, developing expertise in dealing with serious sexual injuries. The war that has been raging for several years in DRC is about resources. A good way to force people off their land is to publicly rape and torture all the women, forcing everyone else to watch. In this way, a whole community is made to flee, leaving behind their homes, belongings, and land.
After being attacked by armed men at his home, Denis Mukwege moved with his family to Sweden, but the women of DRC begged him to return, even saving money to pay for his plane ticket. He couldn’t refuse, and has gone back to carry on his work.
You can read more on the BBC website.
One of the current hashtags trending on twitter is #LiberalTips2AvoidRape. It started off as conservatives mocking liberals (based on something a Democratic Colorado legislator said), but I recently checked the hastag and there seem to be as many (if not more) progressives using it to mock the hashtag itself.
For instance, there’s this one:
#liberaltips2avoidrape: Don’t rape someone. Oh, I’m sorry, are these supposed to be sarcastic?
But there are still some originalist tweets out there, too, like this one:
#Liberaltips2AvoidRape Don’t carry a gun. Just call 911 and enjoy the next 10 minutes while you wait.
I understand that Republicans and conservatives suddenly acting like *they* are the ones who really care about sexual assault prevention is kind of laughable. But there is an actual argument going on here that is sort of substantive; it’s an offshoot of the general gun debate in the US. I myself probably support banning concealed weapons on campuses, because I believe that statistics show that having more people carrying around concealed weapons is likely to increase the prevalence of violence, not decrease it. But there are (at least) two actual arguments to engage in here: (1) Is that actually what the statistics say? and (2) Even if those statistics are correct, is any other compelling reason why we should still permit people to have concealed weapons on campus? There’s also a parallel argument to be had about whether a woman owning a gun tends to increase or decrease her chances of being harmed, specifically in the context of the threat of assault. (Again, I think the statistics heavily suggest that guns don’t actually help keep women safe in this way.)
But honestly, I find myself a little miffed at the liberal hordes out there who are suddenly acting like *they* are all hardcore feminists every time conservatives do something misogynistic. Conservatives are not the only ones to score cheap political points on women; they have valid points to make about Palin and Bachmann, for instance.
Then again, I’m sure that some people are legitimately outraged at conservatives using rape to score political points against straw Democrats, so I won’t suggest that all the mocking of the hashtag is in bad faith. And I am seeing some actually helpful information about sexual assault and guns being disseminated through the hashtag, so bully for that.
I guess I’m just tired of the trench warfare surrounding the gun control debate in the US, where people scream that their opponents are either unthinking pawns of the gun lobby or unthinking pansies who are putting their fellow citizens in danger through incompetence. What gets ignored in this newest context is that the whole country has done a terrible job at preventing rape and sexual assault. When it comes to preventing violence and specifically violence against women, none of us really have the moral high ground to scoff at the other side because the whole country has largely ignored the epidemic of rape culture.
It’s not just conservatives who have terribly wrong misconceptions about rape and sexual assault. It’s not just conservatives who think it’s okay to make rape jokes (and it’s a stretch to say this hashtag was originally a kind of rape joke–the butt of the joke was the supposedly clueless democratic legislators, not people who get sexually assaulted). So while it’s good that people are hijacking the hashtag, I can’t help but roll my eyes at the notion that liberals are TOTALLY AGHAST that anyone would use sexual assault for cheap political points or cheap laughs.
Welcome to America, home of the pervasive rape culture.
Steenkamp was shot several times on Thursday, allegedly by her boyfriend Oscar Pistorius, with the incident swiftly and widely declared a tragedy for South Africa, for sport, and for disability rights. And – presumably to a lesser extent, because it was scarcely suggested in the scramble to get hold of bikini shots – for her family and friends.
The killing has yet to be described as a tragedy for women, probably because in the continual clustertragedy that constitutes female representation in the media, Steenkamp is just another casualty, who obligingly happened to be hot. That the story leading the news for the entire day of the One Billion Rising global action opposing violence against women concerned a woman being allegedly murdered by her partner was unfortunate. That the death was covered in the way it has been begins to look like something else. But nothing new, obviously.
For more, go here.
Rebecca Solnit’s smart, trenchant, thorough and distressing Al Jazeera piece on rape is, alas, as important now as when she wrote the first two iterations of it in the 1980s and 2000.
Here’s an excerpt:
There is… a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a case involving a celebrity or lurid details in a particular case get a lot of attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this country, in other countries, on every continent, including Antarctica, constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.
[Trigger warning: explicit discussion throughout about rape, rape threat, assault and murder.]
Thanks, EM.
Yes, everyone poops. But discovering that reality could be even more traumatizing than discovering the reality of the violence of war. Or so Ryan Smith, who authored this piece at the Wall Street Journal (titled “The Reality that Awaits Women in Combat”), seems to imply.
Yes, a woman is as capable as a man of pulling a trigger. But the goal of our nation’s military is to fight and win wars. Before taking the drastic step of allowing women to serve in combat units, has the government considered whether introducing women into the above-described situation would have made my unit more or less combat effective?
Societal norms are a reality, and their maintenance is important to most members of a society. It is humiliating enough to relieve yourself in front of your male comrades; one can only imagine the humiliation of being forced to relieve yourself in front of the opposite sex.
Indian Rape Victim’s Death Stirs Outrage and Resolve
“The gang rape and death of a young Indian woman has sparked an outpouring of national grief and outrage, and a question: Will the tragedy prompt change, in laws and attitudes toward women, in the world’s largest democracy?”
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Rape victim’s death sparks lockdown in India
“…Outrage and protest about the assault escalated violently last week when police used batons, water cannon and tear gas in clashes with hundreds of demonstrators; one policeman died in the protests. Indian authorities, fearing a new wave of demonstrations yesterday, deployed hundreds of policemen to seal off the President’s palace, the Prime Minister’s office and key ministries, which have been the scene of battles between police and civilians. They closed 10 metro stations and banned vehicles from some main roads in the centre of the capital.
Although more than 1,000 people gathered at two locations, the demonstrations were peaceful. In one spot, a wreath studded with white flowers was laid on the road, a candle lit and a silent tribute held for the young woman. Near by, members of a theatre group played small tambourines and sang songs urging society to wake up and end discrimination against women…”
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Indian Rape Sparks Gender-Inequality Debate (WSJ video: 3 minutes, 14 seconds)
“The death of the victim of a gang rape in India has set off a fresh wave of national grief and outrage. The WSJ’s Nisha Gopalan [and Deborah Kan] conside[r] whether it could also lead to legal changes to protect women’s rights.”
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Indian Women March: ‘That Girl Could Have Been Any One of Us’
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For what it reveals, explicitly or implicitly, see here for India’s government on gender statistics and gender (in)equality
Edited by George Yancy and Janine Jones.
On February 26, 2012, 17-year-old African American male Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old biracial (Caucasian and Peruvian) male in Sanford, Florida. Martin was shot and killed within a gated community, where he was visiting his father, Tracy Martin, and the latter’s fiancé. Martin, returning from a store where he had purchased a bag of Skittles and a bottle of Ice Tea, was unarmed. The encounter between Martin and Zimmerman proved fatal for Martin. As for Zimmerman, 45 days passed before he was charged with any crime. Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics attempts to capture what we, a critical cadre of scholars, think about this potentially volatile situation in the moment. The text addresses issues across various thematic domains, as we have delineated various concerns that are broad and yet relevant. Some of these themes include: how Trayvon Martin’s killing might be depicted within the specifically historical context of racism, especially as some have compared Martin’s situation to that of Emmett Till and Rodney King; how contemporary conceptions/perceptions and treatment of Black bodies and/or black embodiment from the historical perspective of white supremacy in the United States continue to function or not function in our contemporary moment; how we ought to think about the political and legal implications of the Trayvon Martin case within the context of the politics and laws that have historically informed and shaped black people’s lives; how we should think critically about the historical exclusion of black bodies/embodiment in public space and the ramifications for the ways in which black people must navigate public space today; and, finally, how we should think about the ways in which the historical negative gendering of black girls and boys/black men and women, with respect to their white counterparts, in a white supremacist society, have impacted various intersections of race and gender in our contemporary setting.
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