Jill Filipovic on the underlying problem with sex-selective abortions in India, where the practice has been increasing across the country instead of just the more conservative Indian states.

It makes sense — wealthier families are the ones who are able to afford ultrasounds and selective abortions. Anti-choicers regularly use sex-selective abortions as an illustration of Why Abortion Is Bad, but really, the moral of the story is that this is Why Sexism Is Bad. If society was more fair to girls and women, and if girls and women had as many opportunities and privileges as men, and if girls weren’t socially required to be burdens on their families, we’d see a lot fewer sex-selective abortions. Just outlawing sex selection doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

Source: Feministe

Same, of course, for China and anywhere else that women are culturally relegated to the economic, social, legal and reproductive dependency contemporary Western anti-feminists are all nostalgic about.

And yeah, simply outlawing sex-selective abortions (which after all is only a slightly updated rendition of sex-selective infanticide) isn't going to change anything.

Funny how you don't see so much girl-child killing in places where women are permitted to contribute in more than the three ways "traditional-values" stake out for them: uncompensated housework, uncompensated child-bearing and rearing, and sex.

You want to know what I think is even funnier?  I'm... pretty sure that the more affluent, productive, and economically integrated into civil society women become the less likely they are to have abortions of their own -- sex-selective or otherwise.

What's not so funny, by the way, is that as in China, there's a perverse risk that as infanticide makes adult women artificially more scarce their potential "exchange value" as chattel will exceed their likely earnings potential to a point where their families will decrease and suppress their human potential in favor of keeping them "tender" for the families who can bid the highest for a bride for their sons.

#%*@&

ZOMG! While digging further into the convention that rape in popular media is ok when it's women raping men, as in The Wedding Crashers, I ran into a pretty cool, and awesomely level-headed website that deals directly with the issue. It's called, not quite correctly, Television Tropes and Idioms. Not quite correctly, I say, because it covers not just tropes in TV but also movies, comics, and advertising. Also, in a way even better, in anime, hentai, and fan-fic.

What's fun about the site is that while they seem pretty solidly informed about the realities of sexual assault and rape they don't treat the issues as a gender or moral failing, they treat them as the lazy, knee-jerk, graceless, and unskilled writing clichés they almost always are.

Rape Is OK When It Is Female on Male

Obviously if you're watching a scene with a woman tied to a bed while a man forces sex on her, the final act of that movie will involve said man getting shot in the face by Bruce Willis. If, on the other hand, it's a man being tied down and forced into sex by a pretty lady, well, you're watching a wacky romantic comedy. — C. Coville, 6 Romantic Movie Gestures That Can Get You Prison Time, Cracked.com

Rape is a cruel and evil act, beyond kicking the dog or many of the most villainous acts in media. Except when they fall in love with the rapist, of course.

In a number of works, however, there is one other exception: when the victim is a man, and the attacker is a woman.

This kind of rape is often treated as nil since men are stereotyped as having nothing but sex on the brain, always eager for it and cannot be traumatized by sex if it is arousing. Consequently, a man raped by an attractive woman is considered a lucky man and a man being raped by an unattractive woman is comedy gold. Because of this, most examples are from comedies.

Compare Rape Is Okay When It's Female On Female, Rape Is Funny When It Is Male On Male, Rape As Comedy, and Rape Is Okay If It's Divine On Mortal.

Source: Television Tropes and Idioms (note: click through to see myriad links and examples)

So that's pretty straightforward -- right on the money when it comes to easy dismissal of sexual assault on men. (The Wedding Crashers is referenced in the lead quote and mentioned first under "Movies" in very-long list of examples.) And good for them.

But check out the scorn they heap on the fan-fic trope they call Rape Is The New Dead Parents (emphasis in 2nd paragraph mine.)

"It turns out that Darkness, Diabolo, Crab and Goyle's dad was a vampire. He committed suicide by slitting his wrists with a razor. He had raped them and stuff before too. They all got so depressed that they became goffik and converted to Stanism [sic]. —My Immortal

"The rape was thrown in there for good measure." — Bennett The Sage on the above

A lot of amateur writers out there find the tragic backstory appealing. After all, most of the interesting characters didn't get raised in Suburbia, USA with a loving, complete family that cared for them. That's just boring. But Character Development is hard... You mean you have to explain things? But it takes so long to establish mental illness, and physical handicaps would only get in the way. Can't you just say they got raped and be done with it?

Anyway, this is the tendency for writers who are just starting out, or for very lazy writers, often of fanfiction and role playing, but it can appear just about anywhere, to just casually drop rape into their characters' story for Deus Angst Machina or Wangst. Usually found in backstory, but it's not uncommon for rape to happen "on-screen" via two sentences that wouldn't qualify as IKEA Erotica. The writers want to add some dimension of frailty to their character and give a good reason for moodiness, but it's done in such a flimsy and unexplored way that it means... nothing. It's mentioned like mentioning a casual detail on a college application. Perhaps the hallmark of the Sympathetic Sue, this trope tends to evoke kneejerk righteous anger with its use. It takes one of those horrible things which take years to get over, if ever, and turns it into a rather cheap shock.

...

The classical line for this trope is "Jane once got raped when walking home one night [optional:and her parents didn't care]."

Note that this is not merely Rape As Backstory. While it often overlaps, that has its own page and is neutral. Also note that this is not just poorly handled rape; it has to be out of the story's attention within at most a minute and never show up again.

The trope name comes from the fact that Parental Abandonment used to be the stock "tragic background" of badly created characters. Perhaps due to a combination of dead parents being considered cliche by uncaring writers (and less common in Real Life) and the fact that they think rape spares everything short of the character's virginity, it has replaced the dead parents for lazy tragedy.

Physically abusive parents are quickly becoming popular as the go to tragic backstory. Then again, rape is often still involved.

Examples of this in amateur writing are too numerous to list and too forgettable to remember. It still occasionally makes its way into the more dubious works, however. Differentiated from Rape As Drama and Rape As Comedy in that its neither of these. It's just... there.

Before adding an example, please think of whether or not the trope could be removed without impacting the rest of the story any more than 2% requiring a rewrite.

See also how rape is dismissed in Rape Is Okay When It's Female On Female

"in large part based on the idea that lesbian sex is not "real" sex. Men, penises, and penile penetration are central to sexual relations; without a penis involved, there can be no sex, and without sex, there can be no rape. Therefore, anything a woman does to another woman is "not a big deal."

And check out Rape Is Funny When It Is Male On Male

But male rape is funny... At least to the guy doing the raping. — Theory of Everything

It's not.

A subtrope of Rape As Comedy. Usually played for laughs when a known straight character is hit on by another man, especially one that's physically larger.

Even when it's not supposed to be funny, it's still considered funny. Scenes like the outright rapes shown in films such as Deliverance, Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption are obviously supposed to be horrific; however they are routinely snickered at, rather than cried over as with male-on-female rape-scenes.

Anyway, it's a cool site throughout.

Speaking of the difficulty men have being taken seriously when they're sexually assaulted, and speaking of the eternal MRA lament that feminists never take sexual assault of men seriously, let's take a good look at why men need to stop complaining about feminist "indifference" and start confronting it ourselves.

Because, you know, whereas many feminists really don't take it very seriously, guess who else doesn't!

I mentioned in the previous post that

The Wedding Crashers plot summary actually is pretty bluntly assaultive (sexually and otherwise) but it's all jolly fun because the victims are mainly guys, right?  Ugg!

So since Wedding Crashers was one of the summer blockbusters back in 2005, and since it so unambiguously played multiple instances of straight-up, named rape and attempted rape of a man, I figured there would be a heck of a lot of MRA commentary decrying the movie for the piece of shit that it is.

Awkwardly, most of the negative commentary was from authors who were either ambiguous/anonymous or, um, were feminists expressing disgust with the movie's representation of rape culture.

I did find one pretty unambiguous entry on the Reddit.com MensRights thread.  I say pretty unambiguous because the original author has been deleted, but it's pretty easy to infer the author was a man.

Watching Wedding Crashers on TV. Was anyone bothered by the scene where Jeremy is raped by a woman, which is all played for laughs? Would people be laughing if it was the other way around? (self.MensRights)

submitted 3 months ago by [deleted]

The scene I'm referring to is when Jeremy (Vince Vaughn) is tied to the bed with a rope, his mouth is duct-taped, and he's screaming for Gloria (Isla Fisher) to stop and that he doesn't want it. But she ends up having her way with him. The whole things is played for laughs.

Imagine the same scene, but with the gender roles reversed. Not so funny anymore, is it?

Double standard? Or am I thinking too much about this?

The first response was possibly the most directly critical.  He also made what I think is an understandable assumption about how it was produced (emphasis mine.)

[H]ell yes. Vince Vaughn's character even called it a rape but the guy that was supposed to be his friend didn't give a flying fuck. And then he married the bitch. Now add the movie's theme of two alpha males becoming married betas and you have a fembot fantasy masquerading as a 'guy' movie.

Again, knowing absolutely nothing about the movie except what I've read online since last night I also figured that maybe The Wedding Crashers was just another "chick flick" genre comedy, and thus that since marriage-themed summer movies tend to be a bit of a ghetto for women in Hollywood I didn't think it was unreasonable to assume women had been involved in the production.

But let's take a look at who was involved in the creation of that movie

Directed by

• David Dobkin

Writing credits

• Steve Faber
• Bob Fisher

Produced by

• Peter Abrams (producer)
• Cale Boyter (executive producer)
• Richard Brener (executive producer)
• Toby Emmerich (executive producer)
• Robert L. Levy (producer)
• Andrew Panay (producer)
• Guy Riedel (executive producer)

Hmm.  Ten men.  No women writers.  No women directors.  No women producers.  No women executive producers!  In fact aside from actresses you have to dig all the way down to casting managers and costume designers before you find any women in the credits at all!

To the extent it's a "chick flick" at all, and with or without the casual (and deeply misrepresentative!) depiction of sexual assault of men, that was a men's movie pretty much end to end.

Anyway, while I think it would be nice if more women, especially feminist women*, took greater** interest in the issue of male victims, I... well... I just think maybe it would be even nicer if men took greater interest in the issue of male victims!

1. Because it sure doesn't look like many women were involved in the production of The Wedding Crashers.
2. Because, ok, here's how I'm looking at this right now.  There's a lot of guys out there who are top-out-of-sight pissed that feminists aren't doing everything in their power to prevent and protect male victims of sexual assault.
3. Because let's say you're a feminist, and, fairly understandably, pretty focused on your own risk, and possibly experience, of sexual assault.
4. And then let's say you're a feminist who's been accused of taking male victims insufficiently seriously.
5. And then let's say you're a feminist who looks around and sees that there are relatively way fewer men taking sexual assault of men seriously than there are women taking sexual assault of women seriously.
6. And then let's say you're that feminist and you see movies about sexual assault and rape of men are played for laughs are written, produced, and directed virtually exclusively by... men.
7. Seems to me that if you were that feminist you might ask yourself why the Sam Hill all these men keep asking women to take male victims seriously.

All I can say is to the extent sexual assault against men is a problem, men need to stand up against it.  And to the extent other men are colluding and even instigating its trivialization men need to stand up against it.  And to the extent men seem to be leaving what little objections there are to offhand remarks by feminists objecting to rape culture in general, I think men need to stand up for it.  And to the extent men go around complaining that feminists aren't doing enough about it they need to look at their fingers and ask themselves "why am I waiting for women to protect men when I could lift one of these and make more of a difference than I have been?"

* Since after all feminist have  pretty much written the book on not only the politics of rape, sexual harassment, and sexual assault but also written the book on bringing the issue to public attention and also written the book on the best interventions for perpetrators and the best care for victims.

** Since women in general and feminist women in particular take at least some interest.

Image via AllMoviePortal.com

Speaking of the difficulty men have being taken seriously when they're sexually assaulted, and speaking of the eternal MRA lament that feminists never take sexual assault of men seriously, in comments to This sounds this post, the distinctly feminist Ozymandias (of Ozymandias's Crushing and Venting Engine of Doom) takes seriously the problem male victims have, well, being taken seriously.

This sounds like an opportunity to rant about Wedding Crashers!

Seriously, THAT MOVIE. A movie in which a woman was tied up, had her mouth duct-taped and was forced into sex with man, whom she then had to learn to love, would never have been greenlit and would have been subject to boycotts and protests. But because it's a man, somehow he can't be raped?

I hate our culture sometimes.

She said it here

I hadn't seen the movie (not a huge surprise) but the Wedding Crashers plot summary actually is pretty bluntly assaultive (sexually and otherwise) but it's all jolly fun because the victims are mainly guys, right?  Ugg!

Hat tip Ozy!

Kevin Drum says

Karl Smith notes a Gallup poll showing that half of all respondents think more than 20% of Americans are gay or lesbian:

"What makes this interesting to me is not that people are bad at demographics. It's that I would assume that people’s immediate experience is influencing their estimate of all of America. Yet, 52% of America can’t be experiencing anything like 1 out of every 5 people I know is gay."

...

The real number, by the way, is around 3-4%.

Source: Kevin Drum

Sheesh!

So... where do you suppose that 20% figure comes from?  My first thought was that people who actually are LGBT might be more aware of the higher densities in their circles of friends and thus might themselves think they're 20% of the population?  But that just means my first thought was dumb: first because most LGBT people I've met are actually pretty darn aware of the facts on the ground, but also because even if they did all believe it that would still be only 1.5% to 2% of the population they'd still add up to a rounding error.

So... I don't know.

Drum suggests

I think the real explanation for this is a lot simpler: gay and lesbian issues have been getting a lot of attention in the news lately, and that naturally makes people think they're more numerous than they really are. And personal experience probably has little to do with it. They themselves might know very few gays, but they just figure that's because all the gay people live in San Francisco or Seattle or New York.

Always possible.  An even simpler explanation might be that close to half the population (a.k.a. men) are sufficiently marinated in the frat-party, spring break, porn, and (more sedately) online-dating-site-profile fueled notion that enough of other half of the population (a.k.a. women*) are up for some hawt girl on girl action (if you just get them liquored up first.*)  Similarly close to half the population (a.k.a. women) are sufficiently marinated in gross "a cock has no conscience" stereotypes about men plus ravenous consumption of slash fiction to imagine that men are more opportunistic with each other then they let on in public.  And that should be enough to get that number up to 20%.

*Which has always struck me as silly.  As an anonymous contributor to 25 Things About My Sexuality put it

14. I get frustrated with men who insist all women will hook up with another woman if they're horny enough. Excuse me, I have toys for that.

Source: 25 Things About My Sexuality

Maybe because that makes sense to me I'm not surprised the correct number of LGBT Americans is probably closer to 3-4%.

Sexual assault survivor infra on why he felt unable to press charges. (And, incidentally, I think, why he's had such a hard time processing his experience.)

"And the idea that men are always and uncontrollably “up for it” promotes the possibility of rape-culture in the other direction as well. If a man always wants it, then whenever a woman wants it with him, he (logically) must also want it (even when he says he doesn’t)." – SnowdropExplodes

Thank you.

Beyond what would have been involved in the process, including my lifestyle and sexual history, this was the main reason why I didn’t press charges after the partner rape. After discussion, it was pretty clear that because of this, a conviction was unlikely. There wouldn’t have been much point in going forward with anything.

But looking back on that experience, as well as the related ones… that brought something up for me (maybe related to what Clarisse has been getting at about a possible connection between rape culture and MHW attitudes) about why we can end up believing these things

Source: Skin::filter()

Yup. That was my experience of my sexual assault (I was a pre-schooler.)  I'm sure I've mentioned the strong impression a male neighbor kind of ruefully laughing and saying "he got an early start" made on me.  And I'm sure I've also previously mentioned that I carried that assumption with me into my late 20s when the feminist head of my college town's rape-relief program expressed surprise when I said "and of course women can't rape men." Because, she said, women commit about one in ten sexual assaults.

What I haven't mentioned, or haven't mentioned enough, is just how true SnowdropExplodes' remark that if we "know" a man always wants it then we also "know" he wants it even... um... when he actually really sort of doesn't.

That's how a lot of "unenthusiastic consent" coercion happens by the way.  For boys and men, of course. ("C'mon, son, a cock has no conscience why not let me suck yours.")  But also to girls and women too. ("It's my wedding night, I know I can do this.")

And as Infra says, what we "know" about men and boys leads to a lot of dismissal of very real abuse that's befallen them.

Wowzie! Economics professor Marina Adshade has some pointed things to say about assumptions about prostitution and customers in the hotel industry that has a lot of direct bearing on the recent assault on a housekeeper at New York's Sofitel Hotel.  I'd just add that her experience and the story she recounts strongly emphasizes several toxic dynamics that, I'm convinced, would be altered if prostitution was not illegal.  The following excerpt is longer than I usually provide but it's telling.  My analysis follows the excerpt.  Here's Prof. Adshade:

Apparently, I am the only person not surprised by the alleged events that took place in Sofitel Hotel in New York City that lead to Dominique Strauss Kahn’s arrest. My lack of surprise has nothing to do with the man in question, but rather stems from my time, as a teenager, working as a chamber maid in a major Toronto hotel. During this period I gained intimate knowledge of the behavior of international travellers in hotels; especially that of powerful, and somewhat entitled, men toward the often vulnerable women working the hotel floors.

My personal experience is that those men expect hotel workers to provide sexual services.

...

A few weeks after the filmed version of [a] pimp interview was shown to my Economics of Sex and Love class a student came to me with the following story. He had recently started working at the over-night desk in a local hotel (which, by the way is part of a major hotel chain). His very first night on the job an angry hotel guest arrived at the front the desk in the early hours of the morning demanding assistance.

It turned out that the guest had asked for a prostitute to be sent to his room, presumably through the concierge, but when the girl had arrived she refused to perform the all of the services he demanded. He tried to force her to cooperate and when she managed to escape the room he pursued her down the hallway. To his chagrin, she escaped, which is what lead him to go to the front desk to complain.

What makes this a revealing story is that the reason I am able to tell you these details is not because this girl went to police and pressed charges against her attacker but because the man in question went to the front desk of the hotel and asked the clerk what he planned to do to solve HIS problem –he had paid for a service that he did not receive and clearly felt the hotel was responsible.

...

I am not suggesting that the woman who made the accusation against DSK was a sex worker, far from it. I am suggesting that some employees at hotels, such as the concierge mentioned in my pimp piece, have perpetuated an expectation among international travellers that they are entitled to sex services that are, at the minimum, illegal, and do not necessarily involve the consent of the women involved. This expectation of sexual services is putting women who work in hotels at risk and unless hotels are prepared to act to protect them, and rid themselves of the pimps on their payroll, it will only continue.

Source: Big Think

That sounds extremely, disgracefully, likely.

Now you might be wondering how, since I'm an advocate for the legalization and labor organization of prostitution, I could possibly spin this into a case for legalization.  If sex work were legal wouldn't that make it even easier for irate assholes to chase prostitutes down hotel room halls and then demand that the concierge help find them and force them to comply?

Um.  No.

First of all, hard as this might seem for slut-shamers to process, if the sex worker had a legal right to do business she could have called the cops and/or pressed their panic button the instant the customer became abusive.  As it is, since her business is illegal she would have instead been arrested had she called the police.  Oh, and extra credit?  Since the hotel doesn't have to admit any formal relationship with the prostitute, even though the concierge might have made the actual appointment the hotel can charge a recalcitrant sex worker with trespassing!

Secondly, contrary to slut-shaming expectations, prostitutes, alike all human beings have the exact same right and expectation to have their consent respected as house cleaners, concierges, or, for that matter, cab drivers or cabinet ministers!  Not to sound too picky or anything but a customer has no more right or legal standing to force a prostitute to give him a blow job she hasn't agreed to than he has a right to force a cab driver to give him one.  Not even if the prostitute has agreed to, say, intercourse.  Again, that takes a little while to soak in if you've got that "you poke it you own it" attitude, or that "she gave up all her rights to say no the first time she said yes" attitude, or especially that "what, she's just a dirty whore" attitude.

But, yeah, doesn't work that way.

Oops!  Let me rephrase that.  It shouldn't work that way.  But it does.  And why would that be?  Why is there an expectation that one can force one's self on a prostitute in a way one can't on a car mechanic?  Because you try it on a car mechanic and he or she can tell their manager.  She or he can call the cops.  He or she can pepper spray you if necessary!  And in so doing expect, you know, to be treated like a victim instead of a fucking criminal!  Prostitutes?  Not so much.

And here's where it gets really hinky: it gets to a point where customers can gain such a sense of entitlement that they imagine they actually can demand sex from unwilling housekeeping staff.  Though evidently, at least so far, not car hops or cab drivers.

In my very strong opinion legalization completely alters that dynamic.  Not only for the sex workers themselves, who could then legally check in with the concierge but could also legally inform colleagues of her whereabouts and legally call the police if she felt threatened or coerced.  That's just the most obvious change.  But more subtly it would change the in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound attitude of, um, gentlemen who imagine they can impose themselves on any hotel staff and expect to have any "misunderstandings" cleared up by the front desk.

So anyway, yeah, I think legalizing prostitution would still be a good idea even in instances like the DSK arrest where the victim clearly wasn't a sex worker at all.

 1    2    3

So today on a whim I was looking through my old "not safe for work" Half-Nekkid Thursday posts (which you now sort of have to know to look for.)  I sort of forget how much time and effort I used to put into those photos (even the nominally spontaneous ones) and I also forget that considering what I had to work with (i.e. my physique and almost zero input on non-cliche-porn depictions of hetero men) some of them came out really, really well.

Anyway, one in particular caught my eye (item #1,above) because I really, really liked the light and shadows, the lines, and my behind and just for the heck of it I installed it in place of my old gravatiar image (Item #2, above.)

But then I immediately got cold feet.

I'm not sure why.  My site's already pretty much hopelessly branded as "nsfw" even though it's been years since I've actually been that "unsafe" (again you have to know where to look for my HNT and other photos, and many of the old photos are no longer there at all.*)  And I actually think it's really important to push for more casual acceptance of erotic imagery of heterosexual men.  And in a lot of ways the old image isn't any less "erotic" than the new one.  (Also, while we don't usually think of it that way, item #3 even more directly implies heterosexual activity.)

But just for the heck of it, rather than just guess I thought I'd ask you which of the three candidate gravatars you'd rather see at the top of my page.  Feel free to chime in in comments.  Also feel free to explain why.

Thanks!

* For the record, since I stopped posting a photo a day my traffic has declined nearly 85% from its peak.  !!!  Since my posts had become mostly about politics, sociology, and gender long before I stopped posting photos I'm pretty sure not doing photos has a lot to do with the dropoff.)

So I'm walking home from the (almost) corner grocery store on our walkaround neighborhood mains street and I see this sandwich board in front of one the local art galleries.

Photo by figleaf (hey that's me!) Used under a Creative Commons license.

I didn't see who was inside (I could tell the workshop was in progress and that's about all) but I'm pretty sure Teri Ciacchi of Living Love Revolution was leading it. Who knew?

When my friends first started moving to this neighborhood fifteen or twenty years ago the area was pretty decrepit.  Not trendy decrepit, just kind of dumpy.  Now while the economy's taken its toll a lot of the much older generation (<em>my</em> parents' age) that used to keep lackadasical shops full of antique knicknack and used furniture and second-hand audio gear and pensioner's bars have moved while people basically their grandchildren's age have been taking over.  Who knew?

Dayton, OH, reporter Jamie Jarosik says

On Sunday, there was another devastating tornado outbreak. Parts of Oklahoma, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin had reported touchdowns:

Source: WDTN Channel 2

Image via WDTN.com.

I gotta say I'm not a very big fan of the tendency right-wing religious conservatives have of casting every natural and manmade disaster as punishment from God for insufficient adhering to their particular political interests.

But!

If I were so inclined, or if I was inclined to ponder such disasters as indications of the wrath of God, then I'd be asking myself what the states of Missouri, and Iowa, and Alabama, and Minnesota, and Kansas, and and Tennessee, and Georgia, and Texas have been up to, since all have recently been hammered with tornados much larger and more destructive than usual. They might want to reconsider whether, under the circumstances, God really does approve of the spate of recent hate- and oppression-filled legislative campaigns against the poor, against the brown, against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people, and of course against women.

I don't think God actually works that way*, but those people generally do. And if you did believe it, and if you added up the ways they've a) been doing a great deal of evil and b) getting walloped, then you might have a tough time justifying not repenting

* Although I do believe global warming works that way. And while the current spate of very bad weather is more a byproduct of La Nina (note, link from 1999 deliberately chosen) over the long run as the planet warms North American temperate-zone weather is going to tend to become more extreme. And but states in tornado alley haven't actually been any more egregious about climate denialism than, say, intermountain-west states which probably won't be adversely affected by the "wrath" global warming and might even come out slightly ahead.