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.

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.

Clarissa says

I thought I heard every pseudo-feminist piece of insanity under the sun but, never fear, there are always new and inventive ways to make feminism sound completely ridiculous. A pseudo-feminist blogger recently announced that her blog will be a male-free zone. Men will not be allowed to post comments if they insist on identifying as male:

Source: Clarissa's Blog

The blogger who's closed her comments to men is Jill, a.k.a. Twisty Faster. She's neither the first nor the last to do so. This is a two part post, first on the idea of my-team-only spaces, the other on the idea of labeling this or that faction as "pseudo-feminists."

First: I think it's fine to create people-where-you-are spaces, even when I'm not one of the people where you are. For instance there are quite a few "pickup-artist" forums that are actually quite closed to outsiders. There are feminist and womanist spaces, obviously. There's some tremendously angry guy in Portland who runs a closed anti-porn site. Glenn Beck types have their spaces. Trans people have theirs. Gay conservatives have theirs. Angry divorced men have theirs. And so on.

In each case, for better or worse, having a space where you can stand down from your belief that you must present your "unified public face" and actually talk about stuff you feel really vulnerable about. (The friend who told me about the PUA sites said, for instance, that it provides a critical space for men who are really worried about masculinity to safely *question* their masculinity.

So the question for me isn't so much that people have themselves-only spaces, or even that they brag about it. What matters is whether they *stay* in it. You sort of get to see what happens in, say, the whole Fox News "epistemic closure" phenomenon, and that sort of echo-chamber/amen-chorus effect shows up in places like IBTP.

But hey, there's a point in almost any consciousness-raising processes where frustration and impatience with the status quo boils up. And while it happens to be, I think, a huge mistake to stay angry, I think it's also problematic if you never get angry at all.

(Case in point that only seems completely off the wall: kid I was in high-school with maybe 40 years ago now still walks with a limp from the injury he got putting his whole heart, soul, and body into not losing the homecoming game in his senior year. Playing with unreported broken bones can evidently do that. At the moment, though, school spirit and winning that game was that important to him. Would he do that today? No, almost certainly not: he's gotten perspective. It's not that community isn't important to him -- I'm sure it is. It's that he, like numerous teammates who weren't crippled by zeal, were, well, so full of zeal they were willing to cripple themselves. And not to put too fine a point on it, if he hadn't felt the future of his team, his school, and his life were about to be lost to an opposing team he might not have hurled himself so thoroughly into harms way. My point is that people experience zealous feelings, and thrive on opposition. Particularly when they feel they're in an easily extinguished minority. When they can find a safe place to spread out their thoughts without opposition nearly all of them are eventually able to move on. Without feeling obliged to virtually set themselves on fire.)

So there. That's my pitch for tolerating and even encouraging safe-space venues for people to air out their demons. First, it's actually good for most people. Second, the more outsiders push, the more zealously they risk irreparably windmill-tilting themselves. When someone's in that space all the reasonable chiding in the world won't help.

Next: About the pseudo-feminist thing. I'd just point out that feminism is a very big tent -- big enough to hold the almost diametrically opposite Twisty Faster and Sarah Palin, not to mention everyone else in between. Where "in between" isn't even a single file but wide field. Considering the breadth of the field almost everyone on it can be branded a pseduo-feminist by one or more others on the field. Nor is it the case that the field slopes upward from, say, a least-feminist Palin to an ultimate-feminist Mary Daly.

sInstead I think the way to look at feminism, as with most other fields, is to look at their impact on the rest of the field rather than their authenticity. By that metric the Palin and the Daly factions are both noisy and noticable, but for all that they're neither terribly influential and thus, for all their visibility, not very significant. (Even though, referencing the "angry" stage, above, many or even most feminists may at one point or another go through a transitional Palin or Daly phase.)

Anyway, that's why I'm less inclined to call one group pseudo-feministst: it reinforces the idea that there's one single "authentic" feminism one could belong to instead; it allows us to imagine that the definition we're using to judge others is, in fact, the most authentic. Both of those require more authority than pretty much anyone has -- not me, not you, not Palin, not Twisty, not bell hooks, not Shulamuth Firestone, not Caitlin Flannagan, etc.

Ampersand, raising a giant whopping WTF, says that under Federal crime-reporting standards men legally can't be raped.  Turns out that in the 1920s, when the reporting standards were generated, weren't exactly a bastion of progressive, feminist-influenced gender neutrality.

For [Uniform Crime] reporting purposes, can a male be raped?

No. The UCR Program defines forcible rape as “The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will” (p. 19). In addition, “By definition, sexual attacks on males are excluded from the rape category and must be classified as assaults or other sex offenses depending on the nature of the crime and the extent of injury”

Source: Alas, a blog

Lest Men's Rights Activists cry conspiracy about how it's all a femininisister plot to exclude male victims entirely, under more recent guidelines from the 1980s rape of men by women is legally recognized but...

[I]n the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) ... at least one offender must be of a different sex than the victim for the event to be classified as a forcible rape. For example, a female can rape a male, or in the case of multiple offenders, a female and male can rape a male. However, a male cannot rape another male, or in the case of multiple offenders, two males cannot rape a male.

To complete the FBI's gender-bound definitions, men can rape women, women can rape men, but men can't rape other men and women can't rape women.

But let's stop for a moment and reflect on the pace of progress: in the 1920s the law in the U.S. was almost entirely based on already centuries-old English Common Law adopted wholesale during Colonial times.  That not only defined rape as something that could happen exclusively to women, it was also defined as a property crime.  Where the legal victim was considered to be the woman's father, husband, or other custodial male who's "property" was "damaged!"

Fast forward 50 years to the 1980s when the NIBRS was established.  Society vaguely recognized that in order "to be fair" language had to be less narrowly gender specific.  Thus the inclusion of the possibility that women can rape men.  But based on my own recollection of the culture of the day I'm pretty sure that was a mere formality.  In the early 1980s they were just getting around to registering gay people as statistically relevant.  They were just getting around to recognizing the idea that there was more kinds of rape than jumping out of the bushes.  They were just barely getting around to accepting the idea that husbands could rape their wives.  Heck, they'd only barely just stated noticing all the "drop the soap" jokes about prison rape!

Fast forward 30 more years and... well... there's still quite a way to go but at least...

Advocates question the rape statistics because, they note, the federal government is using a 1929 definition of the crime that excludes male victims, statutory rapes and those committed without force.

Using such an antiquated, narrow definition is a harmful disservice to countless victims, according to Carol Tracy, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Women’s Law Project. Specter agreed, saying the definition is not “inclusive like it should be.”

Men account for roughly 10 percent of victims in the United States, said Scott Berkowitz, head of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

The adoption of broader rape statistics is critical to the recovery process for male victims, added Dr. Richard Gartner, a spokesman for the group Male Survivor.

Interestingly, the FBI’s man in charge of the UCR is quoted saying he’s open to changing the definitions.

Compared to the 1189 A.D. English Common Law, or the 1920s UCR, or the 1980s NIBRS, and you can actually detect some progress.

And, at least compared to 1189 A.D. it seems to be accelerating!

If they're not able to acknowledge that anybody can be raped, just as much as anybody can be a rapist, though, they're still stuck in the middle ages.

Something else to agitate for (and be agitated about.)