stereotypes

Pretty Cool Insights From a Mormon Man on Attitudes About Rape -- Another Opportunity to Question Stereotypes

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2012-01-24 23:49

 

Guest-blogger Ziff of Feminist Mormon Housewives wonders

Number of times pornography has been mentioned in General Conference in the past 20 years: 128

Number of times rape has been mentioned: 4

I’ve been wondering recently why General Authorities spend so much time condemning porn use and so little time condemning rape. Porn use and rape seem like related problems: they’re sexual wrongs that men do to women. (I realize they aren’t exclusively done by men or exclusively done to women, but this is their most common variety, and that’s what I’ll talk about.) So why in the Church is there so much focus on one and so little on the other?

Source: Feminist Mormon Housewives

Ziff says he has basically no experience with either rape or porn, and says therefore most of what he says should be considered speculation. And based on some of his speculation you can sort of tell. That said he also drills in very nicely.  From his list of why the church might choose to focus on rape.

6. GAs may blame women for rape, at least to some degree. I think this is evident in the excessive rhetoric on modesty they direct at young women with the rationale that women control men’s thoughts. It’s a short step from blaming women for men’s thoughts to blaming women for men’s actions. Their attitude probably shouldn’t be surprising considering the ages of the most senior GAs: they were raised in a time when blaming women for rape was probably typical.

7. GAs may not realize that most rape victims are raped by men they know. This is pretty speculative on my part, but if GAs are hanging on to the old belief that rapists are mostly strangers lurking in dark allies, they may feel like it’s hopeless to preach to such psychopaths. Again, given their ages, it wouldn’t be surprising if they believed this.

And from his reasons why his church should address rape more directly than it has been.

A. Mormon women are particularly vulnerable to being raped. They are taught to be deferential and submissive.

...

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being tender, kind, and refined. But resisting rape requires toughness, and probably also coarseness and rudeness. Women who are taught that toughness is worldly and therefore wrong are women who are less likely to stand up and say no when their boyfriends or husbands are pushing them sexually in ways they don’t want to go.

B. Mormon women are particularly likely to blame themselves for being raped. As I’ve already mentioned, there’s not much Church teaching out there on the topic of rape. A woman who is raped is likely to find only the old line of thinking popularized by President Kimball that a woman is better of dying than ‘allowing’ herself to be raped. She may also connect the dots as I did in reason #6 above, and figure that she must be to blame for being raped because of what she wore (or if she doesn’t do this, people around her may do it for her).

Both of these teachings are incredibly destructive. Women are not responsible to sacrifice their lives if attacked by a rapist. Women’s clothing choices are not to blame for rape. The last thing women who are raped need is a heaping pile of guilt to add to their pain. GAs’ choice to leave these teachings out there unrepudiated is a choice to let women suffer more.

It's good stuff.  And while he, as a Mormon, is specifically referencing the teachings of his particular church it's really, seriously important not to get caught saying "oh yeah, those whacky, out-of-touch Mormon elders."  Because, duh, the same dynamics affect a heck of a lot of other denominations.

For that matter, as has been much observed lately, the same dynamics affect <em>atheists!</em>  Who may not rail about porn as much but sure as heck ruminate on rape in their own communities.

Speaking of impacts on communities, another of Ziff's speculations ought to make every self-interested heterosexual male take note.  (Emphasis mine.)

Rape is far more evil than porn use is. This is the obvious response to #1. A man who rapes a woman not only hurts her in the moment of the act, he also likely causes her to suffer for a long time afterward. Her experience of sex, which should be such a wonderful way to connect with her partner, becomes laden with horrifying associations. Her ability to trust other people will likely be harmed, making all kinds of social interaction more difficult. Her feeling of personal safety may also be reduced, restricting her ability to go to particular places or to go out at particular times. I can’t see that porn use is anything like as bad as this.

You know, the funny thing about stereotypes is that even nominally "inoffensive" ones like, say, things we "know" must be true about Mormon men given their church's history, can be damagingly off the mark.

Almost by definition allies aren't soul mates.  (For instance the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were allies in world war two!)  And so almost by definition we're going to have differences with allies that we might not have (or that we at least overlook) in soul-mate affinity groups.  But we can find allies in the most unexpected places.  And we overlook or, worse, alienate allies at our peril.

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This Three Year Old Girl Has No Problem Getting It -- So What's Wrong With Grown-ups?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2012-01-02 12:54

Lisa Wade says

Her Dad corrects her, saying “Boys, well, boys want both…”

But her Dad is wrong.  Boys in the U.S. are taught from a very early age to avoid everything associated with girls.  Being called a “girl” is, in itself, an insult to boys.  And the slurs “sissy” and “fag” are reserved for men who act feminine.  So, no, boys (who have learned the rules of how to be a boy) generally reject anything girly.  (Indeed, this was one of the themes of Jimmy Kimmel “bad present” prank played by parents on their kids.)

The girl’s Dad, however, articulates a symmetrical analysis. The idea is that there are gender stereotypes — ones that apply to boys and ones that apply to girls — and that both are inaccurate, unfair, and constraining.  His mistake is in missing the asymmetrical value placed on masculinity and femininity.  Boys and girls are simply not positioned equally in relationship to stereotypes of femininity and masculinity.

Source: Sociological Images

 

What I sort of want to know is... given how totally full of awesome this kid is at, what, age three or maybe early four, why on this big blue marble would anyone mind being associated with girls, being a girl, being mistaken for a girl, admiring the dickens out of girls, and so on. And why would anyone waste an average of .5 liters of tidal volume wishing they had more sons instead of daughters, or selectively fucking aborting daughters, etc.?

You know what's really great about that video? She could have been my daughter at that age, who certainly made observations that astute. And you know what's great about that? Neither the girl in the video nor my daughter are curve-bending prodigies -- they're perfectly normal, perfectly sensible human beings who are special as possible to their loved ones but nothing like unique. Which is good because if they were prodigies there might be some excuse for excepting them but still grubbing every other human with XX pairing at the 23rd chromosome.*

Instead girls rock because people rock. Sure, some rock more than others... because some people rock more than others. Still no cause for culturally drowning girls... and only girls, naturally... in a deep pink sea.

* For starters. There are plenty of other ways of designating "girls" for the purpose of discriminating. But XX chromosomes are pretty representative so let's start there.

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When You've Got 64,000 Flavors a Few of Them Are Going to Be Bad -- No Reason to Throw Out the Whole Category

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2011-06-12 14:57

Deep in comments over at Ozymandias's place frequent commenter Kaija has an excellent point about understanding feminism... and consequently about making accusations of it.

As for feminism, I think it's like Christianity...a generally good idea that comes in about 64,000 flavors and some of them really suck (I'm nonreligious myself). However, the fact that Fred Phelps and the Westboro Bible Church exists doesn't make me discount the many Christians I know who are actually doing good works and taking loving action to walk the talk. When you hear that someone is a feminist or a Christian, a good place to start is to ask them what they believe instead of assuming the worst. Judge not lest ye be judged and love your neighbor and do unto others as you would have them do to you seems like pretty good advice to me. There are assholes in every group of people...no ONE has a monopoly on that one. I prefer to gravitate towards the proactive and questioning rather than the reactionary and dismissive. Thanks to those who contributed constructively here...let's keep the conversation going.

She said it here.

I think that's about right. Yeah, there are a couple of Fred Phelps in Christianity, and something like them in feminism too. Same, obviously, with men's rights activists too. That doesn't mean the Phelps's of the world shouldn't be challenged -- quite the opposite! But Kaija's right that you can't point at him and his smug little coven and say "Christianity's bad."

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NCBI Study on Jurors' Perception of Criminals and Facial Hair: Might it Reveal an Appearance-Based "Absolve the Accused" Bias?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-05-13 12:39

Note: This post started out as a fairly light-hearted entry on the myriad assumptions we make about other people's body hair, but the more I thought about it the more I started wondering if there might be an appearance-based "absolve the accused" reflex similar to the better known "blame the victim" one.

According to the NCBI ROFL curators at Discoblogs

Mock jurors’ perceptions of facial hair on criminal offenders.

“Two studies were conducted to measure whether mock jurors would stereotype criminal offenders as having facial hair. In Study 1, participants were asked which photograph belonged to a defendant in a rape case and which photograph belonged to a plaintiff in a head-injury case after they were “accidentally” dropped. The photographs were similar in appearance except one had facial hair. 78% of 63 participants (or 49) identified the photograph with facial hair as being involved in the rape case. In Study 2, 371 participants were asked to sketch the face of a criminal offender. 82% of the sketches (or 249) contained some form of facial hair. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that criminal defendants are perceived as having facial hair.”

Source: Discover Blogs

I know I keep bringing up stuff like this but the anthropology of body and facial hair is totally fascinating. We just have so many assumptions, prohibitions, mandates, biases, fetishes, and stereotypes related to class, race, religion, sexuality, and, evidently, criminality. All of which, of course, vary from country to country and sometimes year to year.

To be honest, though, this one surprised me. Poorly-shaven faces have been a stock icon for criminality in America for decades, of course, and that in turn has derived from ethnic and class stereotypes. E.g. "the poor" have always been assumed to look shabby and to be criminal; 19th Century WASPs believed Mediterranean immigrants had a propensity for five o'clock shadows and criminal violence; 20th Century America was deeply suspicious of communists, beatniks, and hippies, all of whom were believed to have beards and, once again, to be inclined towards both crime and violence; and here in the 21st Century pop-culture America seems to associate beards with both Islamic and American-loonie violence. So that's not the surprising part.

What is surprising about the study's results, at least to me, is that bearded men would be associated not just with crime in general, or even violent crime in general but violent sexual crime.  (Remember, the research subjects were asked to guess which violent crimes were committed based on photos of men they believed had all been accused of crimes of violence.

Meanwhile if you look at the demographics of the people who really are most likely to commit rape they have a decided tendency to blend in very smoothly with the rest of the male population.

Hmm... You know, as always, that studies, and especially small-scale ones, are best taken with grains of salt at least until corroborated with further, more substantial studies.  But to the extent this study suggests implicit but substantially incorrect assumptions about rapists I wonder if there there might be a social "perpetrator absolving" reflex very similar to the "she must have asked for it somehow" victim-blaming reflex where not only are victims judged on their superficial appearance but so are the accused.

It's not at all cool to assume that a victim "deserved" sexual assault based on something she wore.  It would be equally uncool if it turned out that similar assumptions were made based on the appearance of the accused.

Might be a good question to ask Constable Michael Sanguinetti

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It Would Be a Bad Idea But What If We Held Early MRAs to the Same Standards MRAs Use Against Early Feminists?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2011-05-10 04:04

Photo by Flickr user vilseskogen. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user vilseskogen. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So yesterday Ozymandias joined several other bloggers in exhaustive farking the canonical list of "feminists are all nazis" quotes that's been forwarded repeatedly and without alteration since at least the early 1990s.  In response an anxious MRA begged

"Name me one well-known feminist spokesperson from the 1970's who wasn't [a "hate-filled" radical feminist], who praised men for their accomplishments instead of blaming them for imaginary crimes, who loved & campaigned for the rights of all, not just women. I don't know of any."

He only wanted one but I'd probably start with

  • Wendy Kaminer
  • Nancy Friday
  • Wendy Wasserstein
  • Erica Jong
  • bell hooks

Problem is the 1970s were a very long time ago.  So I don't remember everyone by name.  It's so long ago demographics make it unlikely that the commenter was even born yet... and might not even have been born since the list itself was first circulated!

In fact it was so long ago I mostly remember Dworkin, MacKinnon, the other MRA boogey-men women from that list because Rush Limbaugh and all his little dittoheads and dittohead wannabes keep forwarding it around.  Not so much because contemporary feminists tattoo the nearly 50-year-old S.C.U.M. Manifesto on their biceps.

The main thing MRAs and other anti-feminists need to ask themselves, though, isn't where are the "good feminists" who pass their "disregards actual women's issues in deference to men" test.

It's "who were people like Dworkin and MacKinnon standing in opposition to in the 1970s that they went so batshit crazy to begin with?"

Would MRAs like me to start quoting some of the men who sponsored or endorsed the early Men's Rights Movement? Because if women should be embarrassed by their batshit crazy aunts, then men should be so humiliated by our own antecedent uncles we'd have to put bags over our heads.

Fortunately most MRAs aren't held responsible for batshit-crazy assertions by men in the 1970s such as "a woman is most powerful when she's on her knees," or "the place for women in 'the revolution' is on their backs," or "women will never make good corporate executives -- they'll spend all their time picking out wallpaper and flowers for the front office." Oh, or "the best advice I can give a woman who's about to be raped is to lie back and enjoy it." Oh, and "The movie [Deep Throat] says it’s perfectly normal to have a clitoral orgasm and THAT IS WRONG."  Or how about "Women exist in the main solely for the propagation of the species?"  "Direct thought is not an attribute of feminity. In this, women are now centuries behind man" anyone?  "Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote?" "Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, I have not yet been able to answer the great question that has never been answered: What does a woman want?"

I think the commenter would have to agree that anyone who tried to hold one of us men responsible for anything that proto-MRAs from the 1970s said would be such a seeping, festering, shit-eating asshole that they'd leave a wet brown trail wherever they walked. I mean, right? Prety much everyone back then was batshit crazy. Plus that was nearly 40 years ago! And only a real pencil-peckered, syphilitic, 3rd-generation inbred-idiot dickwad would hold an MRA responsible for something anyone said two whole fucking generations ago. Right? Only a real rectal tear would claim that all MRA thought today was invalid just because it was derived from some of the real misogynist bullshit some old dead guys spewed out of their asses, right? And I'm sure he'd agree that anyone who compared contemporary MRAs to descendents of the Ku Klux Klan was a jerk, a dick, and a complete fuckup. Right? Of course he would! I sure would! I can still stand up for men's rights even though I'd kick some of those original assholes down the stairs today.

Which is why, of course, I... disagree with the commenter that he can hold, say, Ozymandias responsible for something Mary Fucking Daly really did say, let alone something someone just pulled out of their ass and attributed to Andrea Fucking Dworkin.

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The Only Way to Tell A Virgin From a Whore Just By Looking

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2011-04-30 23:02

Riffing off of Uzza's clever "What a Slut Looks Like" here's the only reliable way to tell a virgin from a whore by looking.

Virgin
Difference Between Virgin and Whore Part 1 - Virgin
Difference Between Virgin and Whore Part 1 - Virgin. Posted under a Creative Commons license.

Whore
Difference Between Virgin and Whore Part 2 - Whore
Difference Between Virgin and Whore Part 2 - Whore. Posted under a Creative Commons license.

Note: I generated the sonagrams with the Praat linguistic analysis software package, which I selected at random after Googling "sonagram software macintosh."

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Historianne, Again, On the Consequences of the Myth of Boring Adulthood on College Scores

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2011-04-12 21:45

Historiann, reporting on a surprising-to-me finding that (when taken with the usual grains of salt) suggests that the best predictor of college grade point average is... time spent drinking.

Does anyone look back on their college years and wish they had engaged in more drinking?  For more than a decade, I’ve heard from current college students that the reason they “party hard” now is that they think that after graduation, their access to friendship and alcohol will suddenly dry up, and they’ll never have fun again.  (I’ve written here about what an impoverished view of adulthood this is, and how it saddens me.  Is it just the narcissism of youth and the students’ inability to more creatively imagine what they might be like as adults, or is evidence of the absence of meaningful inner lives among most American adults?)

Source: Historiann

She's mentioned this before, and for that matter I've linked to her when she's mentioned it. But that's because it's a really, really important point! For the record I don't think it's narcissism as much as simply growing up without a lot of good modeling of what adulthood is really like. And not to put too fine a point on it but having once been a child and now being a parent of children I think it's as bad an idea to get your ideas about adulthood from watching your parents' behavior around you as it would be to get your sex-ed instruction from watching your parents. For better or worse our behavior when our parents were interacting with us, or our behavior when we interact with our children, is not really representative of real adult behavior either whether that's outside the home, at parties or gatherings of friends, or in the bedroom.

That's not so say we just keep driving the porcelain bus after the kids are down. But neither do we just sit around and snip at each other about money or snip at our children, and each other, about chores and homework.

That's even presupposing that we marry, settle down, buy houses, and have children immediately after college.  Which, increasingly, we don't.

In retrospect I've noticed we also don't immediately die of arthritis and wrinkles either. I was not immediately clear about this when I was the age most people go to college, and I'm pretty sure I was not the only young person who's ever made that mistake.

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But Momma, the Emperor Isn't Wearing Any Data! Do Statistics Show That "Dressing Like a Slut" Actually Increases Assault Risk?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-04-01 16:28

Image via SpareCandy.com. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Image via SpareCandy.com.

Speaking of "the way she was dressed she must have deserved it," this time it's the Toronto police.

According to The Toronto Sun

"I've been told I'm not supposed to say this," said Constable Michael Sanguinetti during a sexual assault seminar at York University on January 24, 2011. "However, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized."

Source: Toronto Sun

I know I'm supposed to be the big hot sex blogger and all that, based in no small part on occasional volunteer experience with sex information and referral services going back to my teens. So I'm embarrassed to say this in the face of what everybody else seems to "know," but...

but...

I'm not aware of any evidence that women who actually dress like "sluts" or "streetwalkers" are attacked at rates any higher than victims who are dressed like schoolmarms!

That doesn't mean there's no such thing. Just that if there is I haven't really heard of it.

If you think you've got some authoritative data -- data that's related to attire and not one of the three major criteria I'm aware of (opportunity, isolation, a perception that the victim can be overpowered or intimidated) I'd love to hear about it.

Really love to hear about it.

Because considering how often it's repeated, or used as after-the-fact justification (by third parties though, oddly, rarely as often by assailants themselves) it sure as shit would be nice to hear about even a little bit hard data to back it up. Although really for all the dead certainty expressed by Constable Sanguinetti and the hundreds of thousands other knee-squeezing twits just like him I'd think there's actually be quite a lot.

What am I missing here?

Update: Actually thing I appear to have missed --

via Sex and the 405 April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

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Item #1578399 From the "It's Not What We Don't Know That'll Hurt You, It's What We Know That Just Ain't True" File

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-03-11 09:56

Photo by Flickr user Janet isn't Real. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo "V - 'Crying Like A Man' Series"by Flickr user Janet Isn't Real.
Used under a Creative Commons license.

So, how often have you read something a little silly-sounding about gender, often along the lines of this anonymous guest poster at 25 Things About My Sexuality (emphasis mine)

"I guess I'm a very visual person (despite being female, I guess this is why I'm going to art school)."

She said it here.

How harmful can little gender assumptions of the form "women are X, unlike men who are Y" really be anyway?

Diane Kholos Wysocki says of a form of hemophila that went undiagnosed for 31 years!

I can’t even begin to say how many times I have heard the statement “you must be a mutant, only men can have a bleeding disorder….not women!” And I believed those individuals because they were doctors and nurses and other medical professionals. I believed them because I didn’t know better and because I had been socialized to trust people, especially males, who had both the education and some kind of authority over me and my health.

Source: Discover Blogs

I say: It's kind of awesome (in the "vengeful God" rather than "slacker dude" sense) how much we "know" about gender can kill people compared to how often it can help them.

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Early Sex Blogger Bacchus Explains Why He Doesn't Do More Science-of-Sex Blogging

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2011-03-06 14:46

Bacchus says (emphasis mine)

Way back in 2002 when I started this sex blog, I imagined that many of my posts might point to online news stories about sex. There weren’t so many sex blogs back then, and online writing about sex from “mainstream” journalists was still rare enough to be notable.

What I quickly discovered, though, was that these stories were generally crap, especially when they pretended, badly, to be based on “the latest research”. Scientists usually don’t do sex well, and reporters usually don’t do science well, so a reporter’s view of sex research usually turns out to be hideous insulting nonsense and tripe. (Exceptions do happen. But man, you gotta dig for ‘em.)

Source: ErosBlog

I think that's about right.

My personal ax to grind would be the egregious fees charged by "science journals" (actually a handful of closely held private republishers) to read usually-taxpayer-funded research results.  Reporters rarely have the $30-$50 per article to read anything more than the (usually hopelessly vague) abstract.  Which gives them even more opportunity to Rorschach and Rashomon the results to suit their own (and their editor's and their reader's) agendas, hangups, and predilections, not to mention their social expectations of what the "right" interpretation ought to be.  With sex even more than other matters.

Very frustrating.

Bacchus says see also How To Spot an Internet Sex Research Hoax by Jessi Fischer and Men: New Guest Contrib Thomas Roche Warns of Web Porn Induced Impotence at Tiny Nibbles. Good call.

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