power

Three Penn State Paradoxes

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2011-11-10 18:36

Just how weird is it that nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, those boys had to have done something to get themselves raped." Nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, after so much teasing you can't really expect a horny man to control himself. Nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, they only 'cried rape' the day after because they regretted what they'd agreed to do the night before." And you sure don't seem to be hearing anyone brassing on about the need for awareness classes or self-defense classes or what-not-to-wear classes or 'don't walk alone' classes for boys. Not where the expectation is on boys to be on the defensive, to be perpetually vigilant, to be sure not to go around "asking for it."

You don't hear anyone opining that "sure, they're a little young, but since they'd have been 'giving it away' for nothing before too long anyway there's no real harm done."

Seems kind of funny to me, you know?

Kind of a paradox, really.

Of course there's a reason you don't hear any of that in the Penn State case.

It's because all that crap is an unreasonable expectation to impose on victims of sexual predation.

This evidently doesn't become clear when victims are women or girls. 

So however horrifying the Penn State case might be, or the Boy Scouts cases, or the Catholic Church cases, or the Republican congressman cases, it seems like there's some kind of teachable moment there.

Know what I mean?

---

I gotta back up here and repeat something I mentioned only in passing above.

Nobody seems to be giving this guy Jerry Sandusky a pass for "doing what comes naturally."  Nobody's tisk-tisking about how he was just "thinking with his 'little head.'"  Nobody's going "well what can you expect, a man can only handle so much temptation!"

Not the way they'd typically give him a shrug if it had been the more typical "coach treat:" cheerleaders.

Another kind of paradox, eh?

Of course there's a reason you don't hear any of that about this guy Jerry Sandusky.

It's because all that crap is an unreasonable pass to grant perpetrators of sexual predation.

This evidently doens't become clear when a perpetrator's victims are women or girls.

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And I gotta touch on one more thing I almost completely glossed over above.

Nobody seems to be saying "those boys have had their precious jewel flowers taken from them."  They're not saying "nobody will want them now."

Which is kind of odd because, you know, when <em>people</em> are sexually assaulted and raped it generally has kind of a negative impact.

Another one of those paradoxes, only this one lands harder on boys and men in the sense that we have approximately zero social scripting for helping them work through that kind of violence.

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"Nature" Vs. Natural Opportunity: Powerful Women As Attracted to Adultery as Powerful Men

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-06-03 15:55

Back in April Echidne said of the incontrovertible biological "fact" that women's interest in men is exclusively related to men's wealth, status, or power

As long as women are, on average, poorer than men we are going to observe more female hypergamy than male hypergamy.

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

That's even empirically true. But guess what else is true? For some mad, zany, bogus Rules of Desire-defying reason, the vast, vast majority of women still want relationships with men.  Why you'd think it might have something to do with... something besides "golddigging."  Maybe it even has something to do with, you know, heterosexual desire.  Just like, you know, heterosexual men!

And guess what?

Crazy I know but there you have it.

But! In the face of that "fact" of female "hypergamy" have you ever wondered women are inclined to behave when they themselves achieve personal wealth, status, and/or power?

Turns out a Dutch sociologist, Joris Lammers of Tilburg University, has spent a lot of time researching the effects of personal power on individuals' morality, legitimacy, hypocrisy, depersonalization. And it turns out he's just applied the question of how personal power affects women's relationships to fidelity and adultery in a survey of business women with 1,500 respondents.

The upshot? I'm not crazy about the source publication (the Daily Mail) but while their prose and photography is heavily larded with lurid stereotypical examples the gist seems consistent with the sort of things Lammers has said in prior articles. (His current paper is not yet available on line.)

[H]igh-earning, successful women are every bit as willing as men to use their power to attract younger lovers for quick flings.

...

However, a new academic study suggests women are inherently no more virtuous than men. It’s just that, in the past, they have lacked the confidence or opportunity to stray.

...

Like men, women are finding that power is a potent aphrodisiac. And just like men, they are giving in to the thrill of illicit lunchtime assignations and the sheer excitement that accompanies their transgression.

Nor do they feel any more guilty or ashamed about it than a man would — if anything, less so.

Source: The Daily Mail

That tends to bear out Echidne's point. Much of what we "know" about women's "nature" comes from history and tradition. And for most of history, and by near-universal tradition, women have had doodly-squat personal power, status, or wealth. And when one is in a dependent situation one makes other trade-offs in exchange. And when it comes to sexual relationships, especially possibly reproductive ones, the tradeoff evidently is less sexual fulfillment and self-expression in favor of maintaining the trust and interest of the person one depends on.

But!

That means many of the qualities tradition and history assigns to women are artifacts of power, status, and wealth imbalances rather "natural" ones. In other words the behavior we're used to is a product of socially-constructed gender not innate biological sex.

And incidentally I'd just add that whereas one might be tempted to say that power, status, or wealth makes women behave "just like men" that that too is gender construction. For that matter it's also class construction. Because to say "women of independent means are as likely as independent men to be unfaithful" isn't to say that if all women of means aren't unfaithful then the assertion falls apart. And that would be because the assertion also means that non-dependent men are no more likely to commit adultery than comparable women. And in fact, over all, men and women are approximately as inclined to fidelity and monogamy as they're inclined towards adultery and polyfidelity.

There are observed differences but the Daily Mail's reporter, Ruth Sunderland (who unlike many of her colleagues, must not have been drunk or horny), interviewed a Financial Times columnist and novelist, Lucy Kellaway and came away with a likely reason that's also far more social than "natural."

‘There is a double standard,’ she says. ‘A man having an affair might be seen as a bit of a lad, whereas a woman like Stella in my book is likely to be seen as pathetic, or a bitch and a slapper.

‘Because there are so few women executives, the ones that do succeed are put on a pedestal — and they have a lot farther to fall. The message of my book is that affairs end badly for everyone.’

And, while the figures demonstrate very clearly that increasing numbers of successful women are being tempted to stray, can women really divorce sex from commitment in the same way as a man?

Well, no, not if you put it that way. But the reason isn't that women are different from men, it's that society judges women differently from men.

That's not the same thing at all, at all: "held to a different, double-standard" simply isn't a heritable biological trait.

Via Emily Tan and Em and Lo.

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Echos From Abroad: An Englishman's Observation About Gonzo Porn and Displaced, Self-Defeating Male Resentment

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2010-10-23 05:36

I just stumbled across a post about porn from a long-dormant blog called The London Exhibitionist. It’s old but wow does he have a great take on the state of American-originated porn! I’ve been digging into the intimate link between male insecurity and “empowerment“lately. This guy illustrates the point nicely. (Emphasis mine.)

Gonzo type porn, seems to regard the women as the enemy and the act of sex is punishment (for what?). When you see the idiot with the camcorder talking the woman into bed, their ham-fisted, mono-syllabic sledgehammer approach usually has the women rolling her eyes, even when it’s fake and the woman is a pornstar guaranteed lay.

The men in these pornos always externalise their arousal: (This bitch has turned me on). In doing so they put the woman on a pedestal and then resent them for being there (now she’s gonna get it). It seems to me that sexual attraction isn’t about how a woman looks, but is more about how we look at a woman. Women don’t turn us on, we turn ourselves on.

My take on all this crap is this: Inadequate men who know they cannot exist as equals to women then validate themselves through dominating them and belittling them.

Source: The London Exhibitionist

Ka-sheesh is there gold in there!

The biggest part being about the way men end up indoctrinated to believe that arousal comes from somewhere else. That’s an idea, by the way, that goes waaaay back. It’s roots break the surface back with the myth of Eve as temptress and they’ve been buckling pavement on and off ever since. For instance the nominally saintly Leo Tolstoy bitterly blamed his wife for his repeated failures to practice celibacy. (Her anguished, fearful diaries suggest a… different reason.) And while “women as temptress” has largely gone back underground in favor of the “men as remorseless horndogs,” London Exhibitionist reminds us the earlier notion is obviously still there.

The problem with imagining the source of our lust is someone else’s responsibility is that it leaves us thinking it’s a problem we’re helpless to deal with.

I also really appreciate his point about the two-fold injustice of first elevating women to etherial objects of worship… and then resenting them for that too. It’s kind of a pattern in the dominant paradigm. See also “women see us only as providers,” “men just need a place to have sex, women need a reason,” etc.

The ugly problem in each case is that we’re creating our own powerlessness. That we’re the ones giving it up doesn’t make us any less powerless. But, dudes, you can “get back” at women as much as you like, be as angry at women as you wish, write whole epic Tolstoy novels about how evil women are if you’ve got the patience for it, but at the end of the day if we don’t get that we’re responsible for sense of powerlessness no amount of fuming women females in general or feminists in particular is going to get it back.

When you’re drowning in knee-deep water panicky thrashing and yelling won’t save you nearly as well as standing up.

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Why the Standard "Women In Prisons" Story Needs a New Script

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2010-03-02 10:46

Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors expresses uncharacteristic suprise at findings about women in a recent report on sexual abuse in the criminal justice system.

The statistics are staggering.  Kaiser and Sannow explain the importance and implication of the studies, as well as their deficiencies and strengths.  In describing one of the findings of the Bureau of Justice Statistics report (available here) the authors note:

Nearly 62 percent of all reported incidents of staff sexual misconduct involved female staff and male inmates. Female staff were involved in 48 percent of staff-on-inmate abuse in which the inmates were unwilling participants. The rates at which female staff seem to abuse male inmates, in jails and in juvenile detention, clearly warrant further study. Of the women in jail, 3.7 percent reported inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse; 1.3 percent of men did. Does this mean that women are more likely to abuse each other behind bars than men, or that they’re more willing to admit abuse? We don’t know—but if they’re simply more willing to admit abuse, then the BJS findings on men may have to be multiplied dramatically.

I was astounded at the rate of reported sexual abuse of male inmates by female staff members.  It illustrates that in some circumstances, women use sexual violence as a form of domination and power over men in a way that is not so different from what men do to women.  The authors point out that it is difficult to know why female inmates are more likely than their male counterparts to be sexually abused by another inmate of the same sex.  It may be that women are more abusive of each other than men are. 

She said it here.

I’m not at all sure why anyone should be surprised. Here are three reasons that skip off the top of my head:

1) Sexual abuse and sexual assault are excitations of power, not of sex… or gender. Yes, historically we see far, far more sexual abuse and assault by men but I believe historically power has been also see far, far more likely to accrue to men. As we make progress towards parity of power it’s inevitable that we’re going to see more parity in its abuse.

2) The standard gender assumptions about women as vaguely and passively “sugar and spice and everything nice” make the standard gendered scripts for behavior for women in dominant, potentially sexual situations, let alone scripts for men in sexually dominated-by-women ones, are inadequate. Both narrative and scripting need to adjust to the reality of women as autonomous human beings who’s moral compasses are neither more nor less flawed than anyone else’s. (I ought to add that because we do have a lot of scripting about men and abuse of sexual power there may also be better developed policies for managing or deterring it.)

3) Both of the bogus Two Rules of Desire make it more difficult to confront or transcend our (mis)understanding of sexual (mis)use of power. When society believes to its core that it’s not only intolerable and inconceivable for women to manifest sexual desire, and equally intolerable and inconceivable for men to be sexually desired, you’re just going to find women poorly prepared to forgo opportunities to exploit sexual vulnerability, you’re going to find men, and women, poorly prepared to resist such exploitation, and you’re going to find social and prison policies ill equipped to police it.

So. You wanna know just how entrenched our gender narratives about sexual abuse really are? All this seems to be seriously old news, at least among rape-crisis community professionals. I’ve mentioned several times in this blog an interview I had back in the very early 1980s with the director of a rape-relief and domestic violence shelter. I mentioned my ignorant impression that men can’t be raped, not by women, and she said no, that it was actually relatively common. The common denominator, she told me nearly 30 years ago, was that perpetrators were very likely to have custodial power over their smaller (i.e. children), or weaker (i.e. elderly, disabled) victims. Given that prisoners, and particularly juvenile ones, are in custodial power and there should be no surprise nor shock at all that they would be just as subject to sexual abuse by women as by men.

That it wouldn’t have soaked in to general awareness even 30 years after I first heard about it is the only really shocking thing about the whole story.

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