Long before I first posted anything about sex and even longer before became an outright sex blogger my first experiences with online participation came in the pages of the old Usenet usergroups on pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care. My partner had terrible insomnia when she was pregnant and so I’d spend hours sometimes, late at night, on an old dial-up account, reading voraciously and nervously chiming in.

I was nervous in part because I’m a man (albeit a well-informed one who’s maternal grandparents had themselves been well-regarded authors in the field) but also because passions ran intensely high… or more accurately ideologically so… on certain topics such as vaccination, circumcision, breast feeding, episiotomies, and c-sections.

And because I was nervous I relied very heavily on a handful of texts and magazine articles, written mostly by well-regarded midwives, doctors, and other caregivers who trended heavily (but non-obsessively) towards natural childbirth, nursing, and childcare.

While on balance I’d rather have been in bed asleep most of those nights, became reasonably well-regarded, became very well informed, and generally had a very good time. (One of my last posts described the birth of our first child and I still treasure the kind words and best wishes we received from online friends and adversaries literally all over the world.)

Well, as my children have moved on to middle school those days are long behind me. And I’m still a man. And I’m still a little nervous getting into this. But remembering the intense rhetoric of those (still-ongoing, incidentally) debates I’d like to chime in alongside Amanda Marcotte and, just now, Linday Beyerstein of Big Think as being strongly in support of respect for women’s childbirth preferences and decisions but even more strongly opposed to calling it “birth rape” when their decisions are not respected.

Some factions within the natural childbirth movement are attempting to popularize the concept of “birth rape.” The idea is that women who are handled roughly, verbally abused, or bullied into unwelcome interventions during labor are literally being raped by their health care providers.

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Some of what [UK-based reproductive-rights activist Amity] Reed is describing here _[link to the F-Word]_sounds like plain old assault and battery or verbal abuse. She also implies that some instances of so-called birth rape are medical procedures performed against the patient’s will. If a doctor performs a procedure on a competent adult patient against her will, that’s assault. Women in labor should have the right to refuse treatment if they’re mentally competent to do so.

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“Birth rape” is an emotionally manipulative metaphor that encourages women to re-frame  traumatic experiences in a way that makes them seem even more traumatic. It’s difficult enough to come to terms with a disappointing, painful, or terrifying birth. To encourage women to recast that experience as a sexual violation, even when everyone agrees that the doctor did nothing sexually inappropriate, is cruel, not liberating.

She said it here.

I ought to add that I absolutely agree with the outrage Amity Reed and many other activists feel at the sometimes appalling treatment they receive, especially at the hands of “mainstream” industrial medicine. My first introduction to how bad that treatment can get came from a student-nurse friend who told me that where she was interning one of the Ob/Gyns was very up front with her staff about how she hated conscious patients (this was back in the day when anesthesia was common for deliveries) and how forceps were great when she was in a hurry for a cigarette! And by all accounts (such as Reed’s) that attitude is still alive and well. And disgraceful. And demeaning. And dehumanizing. And can be encountered not just among surgeons but right down the line to receptionists*. And most of all unnecessary and wrong.

In other words I recognize the reality of medical malpractice. But I also agree with Beyerstein and Marcotte that the treatment described amounts to legal definitions of answerable malpractice, and (one would hope) even assault and battery. But I also agree with them that it’s counterproductive on dozens of layers to call it rape.

In their respective pieces Marcotte and Beyerstein articulate why. I’d like to add two more:

First, all too often the callous mistreatment women receive in the delivery room is reflected in the emergency rooms, operating rooms, geriatric wings, psychiatric care wings, cardiac- and intensive-care suites, and neonatal wards of many of the same facilities. One can note that routine childbirth is not a medical event — as many natural childbirth advocates argue and as I’m inclined to agree. But to the extent childbirth happens in multi-purpose medical facilities it’s infuriating but not surprising that laboring mothers would be treated little different from other patients.

Second, and it’s a point related to the first, what in the Sam Hill has happened to us that we’re unable to recognize, let alone acknowledge, the emotional and psychological impact of “mere” assault and battery? When a merely inconvenient or uncooperative but non-violent geriatric or psychiatric patient is strapped to a bed and forcibly catheterized we call that highly traumatic and dehumanizing treatment assault and battery, not rape. And when a nurse slaps or quietly slips sedatives into the IV of a wailing teenager not because he needs it but because he’s disturbing other patients we call that instrumental abuse of a human being assault, not rape. Amplifying effectively-identical behavior in delivery rooms denies the severity, and the impact, of that behavior elsewhere in medical care.

Conversely, calling it medical assault and battery in the delivery room just as we call it assault when it happens anywhere else highlights what’s really going on rather than allowing mistreatment to be divided and conquered, sequestered, partitioned and, I think, gendered into one thing that happens to women in the maternity ward vs… something less significant should it instead happen (perhaps to the very same patients under other circumstances!) in, say, the burn unit, recovery room, or ICU.

As Beyerstein says, to call it “birth rape” is to invoke a grossly manipulative metaphor that we correctly don’t tolerate when it’s invoked by others consumed past reason by their own agendas. We shouldn’t tolerate from advocates of causes we support, no matter how strongly we support them. Update: Speaking of causes we support, we shouldn’t tolerate metaphor in the rhetoric of environmentalism either, where it’s entirely too common… and entirely not called out often enough. (Hat tip to Chingona.)

Note: I don’t think I should have to say this but I will: almost all direct providers of all forms of healthcare, from radiologists to reflexologists, from naturopaths to neurologists, and from cardiac surgeons all the way down to candystripers are skilled, diligent, effective, and compassionate towards their patients needs. The few who aren’t — the ones who sometimes seem determined to tar the whole enterprise with their own sordid and abusive antics — should be dealt with appropriately, not hyperbolically.

* Even midwives are not immune to mistreatment of their patients. While waxing enthusiastically about my partner’s experience with our midwife (a nurse practioner with admitting privileges at all area hospitals) a friend from the east coast told us her midwife had rarely looked at her, talked on the phone, stepped out for cigarettes, or just sat rubbing her forehead saying “oh my god, oh my god” during most of her very long but otherwise completely routine labor!

Via Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper here’s a cool discussion about alcohol and consent from an organization called SAFERCampus. There’s a lot of good stuff in a single paragraph so I’m slightly reformatting it for clarity.

[T]here is so much defensiveness about alcohol and consent, as though it’s a really really complicated thing. And ya know, I think that for people who are aren’t raised to think about sex as a shared experience in which two people are actively, positively participating, it can actually seem that complicated.

But the reality is that it doesn’t have to be. Having sex with an incapacitated person should be widely understand as rape.

Two drunk people having sex should be aware enough of the other person to have a sense of what is or isn’t consent because they’ve been raised to respect other people, and it’s second nature to them to check and make sure their partner is involved.

I understand this is reductive; that it’s real nice to think about this sexual utopia where things are simple, but perhaps not a realistic picture of how things are now so what’s the point. But I think that we overcomplicate consent; people say that defining consent is making something natural more complicated than it needs to be, but really isn’t something only complicated when it’s unclear?

Wouldn’t the actions themselves be less complicated if we had the complicated conversations beforehand?

Read the quote in context here.

It kills me that it’s not obvious that sex is a shared experience between active participants! For all the talk about heartfelt-edness and intimacy and ultimate-icy our actual expectations of sex are barkingly unilateral. And it doesn’t just go one way — not only does institutional thinking from the original Code of Hammurabi to, say, Details Magazine encourages men to be insecurely selfish in their expectations about heterosexual sex, institutional thinking represented by, say, Cosmopolitan Magazine encourages women to be… insecurely selfless about their expectations! No hilarity ensues.

Once you get it that that’s the status quo, though, a heck of a lot of other stuff about “date rape” and “gray area” rape starts to make sense. Particularly the parts about “too unconscious to say no means yes.”

Harriet J of Fugitivus says of 3rd-person rape apologies of the form “I mean, the victim forgave XYZ, didn’t she? She doesn’t even want XYZ to go to trial.”

I am sure that in this wide, wide world of people, there are rape victims out there who truly want nothing more than for their rapists to go free without punishment, without retribution, without justice. That’s their right. But I don’t think I’ve actually heard any of them. Instead, what I hear is, “I just want this whole thing dropped. I don’t want it prosecuted. Every time this gets brought up I get harassed.” Or, “I don’t want this prosecuted. I don’t want to be called a slut in court.” Or, “I don’t want this prosecuted. I could never win, I don’t have the money, and nobody would believe me.” Or, “I don’t want this prosecuted. He would kill me. His friends would come after me.” Or, “I don’t want this prosecuted. I can’t stand to see him every day in court.”

None of those statements can be reasonably boiled down to, “Rape victim doesn’t want her rapist to come to justice.” They can be reasonably boiled down to, “Rape victim suspects pursuit of justice will feel worse than getting raped did.” But only one of those boiled-down statements makes us, as a society, look like we’re decent and human and deserve to live. The other might point the finger squarely at you — listen, are you the reason justice is worse than rape? Is it because you are going to call her a liar, call her a whore, make her life hell, threaten her, harass her, treat her like a pariah, tell her she liked it, tell her she deserved it? Are you one of the people who lined up to stone the victim into silence, only to smarmily say later, “Well, the victim isn’t asking for justice, is she?”

She said it here.

As is often the case with her really great posts this one’s about 10 browser pages long and in the process of answering the original question* she made a number of intelligent, insightful, and highly usable points like this one.

I really like how clearly she distinguishes between “I don’t think I can win” and “I don’t think my assailant should be prosecuted.” Not in the sense that there would otherwise be no difference, but in the sense that it a) clearly communicates one’s point to someone who might not yet have thought through all the details of what they’re saying while also b) clearly putting the responsibility for defending one’s position on the person doing the rape apology.

Saying “Are you one of the people who lined up to stone the victim into silence, only to smarmily say later, ‘Well, the victim isn’t asking for justice, is she?’” definitely shifts the dynamics of the conversation. In a way that’s no more rude than telling you they want you to give an unrepentant rapist slack. Or asking you to give them slack for giving an unrepentant rapist slack.

* The original question was “A reader recently emailed me asking for some advice. She’s having her feminist ‘click’ moment, and now finds that she is incompatible with almost everybody around her. Suddenly, the presence of rape apologism, racist jokes, sexist sneering, and other such Socialization Aids is inescapably fucking gross instead of invisibly malforming. She finds she can’t talk to anybody without finding out they believe something that is offensive, oppressive, and/or horrifyingly inhumane. She asked me, to briefly summarize: What the fuck do I do now?” Her answer is pretty awesome. —fl

The editors of the big-media blog Big Think interviewed Robert Perkinson, author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire,” about the social and moral consequences of the 500% increase in the American prison population over the last 20-30 years.

One point stood out, about how our attitudes about prison have affected our attitudes about prison rape, are illustrative in a couple of interesting ways.

Perkinson also talks about the fact that the issue of prison rape is starting to be taken more seriously. “There’s so many people in prison that sexual victimization in prison now has come to constitute a significant portion of the sexual victimizations in the society as a whole,” he says . Aside from the injustice of these in-prison crimes, Perkinson notes that prison rape now constitutes a growing public health risk, as facilities have become incubators of hepatitis B, HIV and antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. “All of that has consequences beyond prison walls,” he says. “It’s yet another reason to try to use incarceration as a penalty of last resort than a penalty of first resort, as we have started doing in recent years.”

They said it here.

The first point about the statistics of prison rape is a big deal: between the (relative but obviously not absolute) effectiveness of rape prevention among free people and the increase in prisoner populations this is no longer your father’s or mother’s culture of rape. And just to be extremely clear about what I mean that the same things that are true about rape in free culture are true in prison culture: the majority of rapes isn’t just violent attacks referenced in those “hilarious” B-movie/sitcom drop the soap situations, it’s also sexual intimidation, corralling, grooming, “date rape,” “gray area” rape, harassment, deal-offering, calculated seduction, and all the same forms of leveraged, transactional acquiescences we have learned to recognize outside of prison. Rape isn’t just “rape rape” in Whoopie Goldberg’s infamous phrasing, it’s also, y’know, rape. It just happens in prison. And, as Perkinson says, there’s now a lot of it, enough so that it ought to be dominating some of the discourse about rape culture.

I happen to think its not, in part, because the vast majority of prisoners, and thus imprisoned victims, are men and because of the inconceivable clause of bogus Rules of Desire #2: it’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. In this case the inconceivable part, along with the intentionally (and, as Perkinson notes, increasingly) punitive context trumps its intolerability.

Notice also how Perkinson, probably accurately, understands he needs to recruit other social tropes in an effort to get the problem taken seriously. Check out the wording in the middle of the quote above: “Aside from the injustice of these in-prison crimes, Perkinson notes that prison rape now constitutes a growing public health risk…”

A society that wasn’t dominated by the same paradigm responsible for the Two Rules of Desire, there would be no need to say “Aside from the injustice…” Our society is dominated by it, though, and dominated by rape culture in general.

Seriously,! Among other things if people think prison rape is just one more thing makes people want to avoid prison and thus to avoid committing crimes then what does that say about our attitude towards rape as social control in the rest of society?!? Consider further that to the extent society condones prison rape as part of social control it must also to the same extent condone prison rapists. Which to a startling degree it does. And consider what that says about our attitude towards rapists in non-prison society? And dear sweet mother of pearl what do we imagine happens when such prisoners — victims or assailants alike — finally leave prison. As most of them eventually do, even these days. Hmm? But I digress.

Getting back to the point, our attitudes towards prison rape, including both tolerance and denial, appear to be so ingrained that Perkins must appeal not to our sense of morality, ethics, or respect for human rights but our sense of self preservation. “Aside from the injustice…” the conditions that permit prison rape also incubate those incurable diseases “nice” people like you are petrified of.

In a decent society Perkins would instead be able to say “Aside from the incubation of diseases that could spread to the general population, prison rape now constitutes growing injustice.” And, I’d add, a growing reservoir of tolerance for that could reemerge, despite marvelous inroads since the days in the early 1970s when the local press handled a campus fad for raping student nurses with the same bemused “kids these days” bafflement that they had for streaking. And back when some people thought a man coming home drunk and pinning his sleeping, fed-up wife was just really bad at “foreplay.”

Part of making sure that doesn’t come back involves making sure it’s not being preserved in prison. But… see… I’m doing it too — appealing to social self preservation when the real issue remains, front and center, that rape is rape and that to ignore it, anywhere, is not only to condone it but to condone injustice.