The New York Times has a tragic story about a woman who was raped by a man who “thought it was invited” because of an ad on Craigslist. The woman’s ex-boyfriend, Jebidiah Stipe, apparently fabricated an advertisement that read “Need a real aggressive man with no concern for women” and then continued to have e-mail correspondence with the perpetrator in which he claimed that the woman had “a rape fantasy and wanted to be assaulted.” The advertisement was reported by the victim to the Sheriff’s Department, and it was eventually taken down—but it was too late. It had already caught the (perverse) attention of Ty McDowell, who contacted the e-mail address that was given in the ad. He showed up at the woman’s house, raped her at knifepoint, and left her bound on the floor afterwards.
This case, as perverse and strange and horrendous as it is, isn’t unique. The rise of Craigslist and the availability of anonymity in general that the Internet provides has created new problems with regard to sexual assault. Not only is it easier for rapists to find victims—their personal information may be published online, their Facebook status may give away their whereabouts—it is also more difficult to assign blame. In this case, for instance, the actual rapist is claiming that he thought he was invited, and since in his mind he was fulfilling a “rape fantasy,” he is not actually at fault for raping the woman. On the other hand it becomes difficult to assign blame to the ex-boyfriend, who can simply deny that he fabricated the advertisement and maintained correspondence with the rapist.
On January 28, FOXnews.com chose to tackle the “war against terror” and sexual identity in one fell swoop. Great.
The article is chock-full of lines like:
“If U.S. troops and diplomats didn’t have enough to worry about in trying to understand Afghan culture, a new report suggests an entire region in the country is coping with a sexual identity crisis.”
“Though U.S. troops are commonly taught in training for Afghanistan that the ‘effeminate characteristics’ of Pashtun men are ‘normal’ and not an indicator of homosexuality…”
“…U.S. forces should not dismiss the unique version of homosexuality that is actually practiced in the region out of desire to avoid western discomfort.”
So the story is this: A military research unit in Southern Afghanistan reports that homosexual behavior, and subsequent denial of homosexual behavior, is common to men of the Pashtun ethnic group. While Islam forbids homosexuality, extant homosexual behavior is justified by its exclusively sexual nature. As long as men aren’t having “feelings” for each other, they can pursue sexual gratification.
Super Bowl Sunday always features some of the most extravagantly produced TV commercials of the year. It is also an event whose audience is predominantly male—these high-budget commercials are therefore targeted squarely at men. Knowing as we do that advertisers are the savviest mass-psychologists in the world, what can we learn from this year’s Super Bowl commercials about the state of the collective male psyche in 2010?
This much is clear: all is not well in man-dom. Nearly every commercial, in some way or another, screamed emasculation. This theme was probably expressed most directly in last night’s addition to the infamous Dockers “WEAR THE PANTS” ad campaign.
While the Dockers manifesto urged men to resist the wave of “metro” effeminacy that, “latte by foamy non-fat latte,” was eroding our manliness, last night’s Dockers commercial revealed the true threat to masculinity today: not effeminacy but pathetic emasculation. Instead of lattes and salad bars we had a pack of flabby, sweaty, unkempt men, wearing tighty-whities—one of our society’s most powerful icons of male buffoonery—jogging through a field singing some sort of sea shanty about how they “wear no pants.” The closing admonition to “wear the pants” was an afterthought. The point was just to laugh at a bunch of pathetic-looking guys running around with no pants on, the irony being that ones laughing—the guys watching the Super Bowl—were the very ones being made into buffoons. One wonders how many of us recognized ourselves on the screen. Other similarly blunt representations of emasculation included a skinny guy getting tackled by a sumo wrestler and a suitor getting smacked by his potential stepson.
At halftime, after being riled by indulgently misogynistic ads for Dodge, Dockers, Budweiser, and Dove, I was ready to give up and go back to homework. Perhaps I am particularly sensitive to these commercials because they follow a week of unpleasant encounters with sexism, which seemed to pop up every time I turned on a television. The week started when I saw that clip of Rush Limbaugh “talking ladies” on Fox, (it’s a few posts down if you haven’t seen it yet), smugly quipping that the only kind of women’s movement he supports is the sort he watches while walking behind it.
By this point, it is a given that Rush’s statements are riddled with fallacies (a particularly irking one in this statement is his connection of liberalism to feminism; a broad concept such as feminism is not inherently ‘liberal’). It is an outworn truism that Limbaugh is a troll; instead of proving a point, his hate speech aims to antagonize the other side as much as possible. It is also old news that the promotion of Limbaugh’s gleeful anti-intellectualism, racism, and sexism tarnishes the images of the institutions that support him. However, it still hurt to see Fox label Rush’s interview as a “reaffirmation” of his “support” for women.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the United States Department of Defense will make emergency contraception (EC) – also known as the “morning-after pill” – available at all of its clinics and hospitals worldwide. Approved for adult OTC use by the FDA in 2006, Plan B (along with its generic, Next Choice) contains concentrated doses of the hormones found in birth control pills and decreases one’s chance of becoming pregnant. However, given that its efficacy is greatest when administered within 24 hours, access to the drug over-the-counter is imperative; until now, uniformed women abroad have not been guaranteed this availability.
The recommendation comes from an independent advisory body, the Pentagon’s Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee, which voted 13-2 in favor of the decision. While the board arrived at a similar decision in 2002, its counsel remained unimplemented under the Bush Administration. This time around, it is certain to reopen the debate over the moral status of EC. Often split across pro-choice/pro-life lines, it is true that EC cannot destroy an existing embryo, but rather only prevent pregnancy in the event of the failure of conventional birth control methods. However, opponents argue that, even if not directly destructive, it prevents otherwise healthy embryos from implanting.
There comes a time when many of us succumb to the lure of relationship self-help books. Ever heard of He’s Just Not That Into You? Or Steve Harvey’s Act like a Lady, Think like a Man? Out of this happy tradition comes Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough by Lori Gottlieb.
Described as a “diet book for your love life” by Jezebel, Marry Him focuses on the idea that women should, well, settle. There is no prince charming out there, Gottlieb claims, and certainly no knight-in-shining armor. Given this state of affairs, women are advised to marry while they still can – or else they’ll presumably end up like her, middle-aged and writing bitter relationship guides.
The Washington Post recently published an article about an abstinence-only education study that had a not so shocking conclusion. Abstinence only education reduces the number of kids having sex. While no study has conclusively determined this fact previously, I feel like this was not something very groundbreaking. The purpose of abstinence only education is to stop kids from having sex. Sometimes it succeeds.
However, I think the bigger question, and the question critics of this time of sex-ed ask if this: what about the times when it doesn’t succeed? If students do end up having sex but don’t know about things like condom use, the potential consequences are widespread. As much as we may not morally want our kids to have sex, logically, if it is safe, monogamous sex the risks are very low. If kids, on the other hand, have sex with multiple partners, without knowing how to use condoms, basically without comprehensive sex-ed, this raises the chances that these kids will end up pregnant or with a sexually-transmitted disease.
The article gives an interesting counterpoint to this argument. It says, “The abstinence program had no negative effects on condom use”. Why? This abstinence program talked about condoms. Or more specifically, “it did not disparage condoms”. So, yes, the 33% of students who received the abstinence program but still had sex (compared to 52% in the comprehensive program) used condoms. Whether they used them correctly and whether a higher rate of STDs and pregnancies came out of this group is absent from the article.
Rush Limbaugh comported himself charmingly on Fox News, saying, “I love women. I don’t know where all this got started.” (Perhaps because you’ve said things like “women really want sexual harassment” or constantly referred to feminists as “femi-Nazis” – small things like that.) He then proceeded to prove himself completely wrong, saying, “I love the women’s movement. Especially when walking behind it.”
This week’s edition of The New Yorker has an intriguing albeit somewhat mystifying article on Nadia François, a woman who has been struggling to feed three hundred residents of her Delmas 75 neighborhood in the wake of Haiti’s devastating earthquake. The piece follows the writer and François as they attempt to get A and aid for the survivors. The collected anecdotes regarding François’ desperate search for her family and boyfriend, the uneven and chaotic distribution of food, and the virtually anything-goes rule regarding looters (whom even survivors have supposedly been told to kill) paint a picture in which François is a rare beacon of calm in a tremendously turbulent time.
Despite her elite status amongst her neighbors in post-earthquake Haiti (largely, she explains, due to her ability to speak English), François’ own autobiography is not so clean-cut. She illegally immigrated to Miami when she was 6 years old, graduating from high school and studying cosmetology and “human resource services” after graduation. In 1992, however, she was arrested and jailed for five years for forging a Treasury check and for armed robbery. She was then deported, but returned to the U.S. in 1999 in an effort to see her daughter, whom she had heard was being abused in foster care. She was picked up by the police for entering the country illegally and was jailed for seven years in Tallahassee, after which she was once again deported.
The juxtaposition of her complicated life story and current position as a representative for her neighborhood as it struggles to regain its footing after the annihilating earthquake places François in an interesting position, and helps illuminate the ways in which people have risen to help each other in devastated Haiti. Moreover, it inspires all to look beyond basic facts (jail time, deportation) to see the value and vigor of people like François. She may not be perfect, but she’s doing her best for her neighbors and for herself, a small but noble act that deserves to be celebrated.
There’s been a lot of talk about men being more adversely affected by the economic recession than women, presumably because the kinds of jobs that are being cut are those in fields that are dominated by men (construction, for instance). The NY Times ran an interesting article this week about one field where the opposite has happened—on Wall Street. Women have always been extremely underrepresented in the financial world, but in the fifteen years before the economic meltdown they had made great strides. Then the crisis hit, and it seems to have affected women more negatively than men. According to finance executives, the shrinking number of women may be related to the industry’s increased reliance on trading, “a part of business that has been especially difficult for women to penetrate.”
Certainly, in the case of banking, there appears to be an interest gap between men and women; more women than ever are going to business school, for instance, but fewer are pursuing jobs in finance or accounting afterwards. It’s possible that this “interest gap” has less to do with women’s interest in the actual job—the work itself—and more to do with the apparently intimidating “macho culture” that is so inextricably linked to jobs in sales and trading. In this case and in so many cases, (for instance, the lack of women in leadership positions in the USG at Princeton) it’s difficult and perhaps impossible to tell where “cause” ends and “effect” begins. Are women just less interested in jobs in finance, or are they less interested because they’ve been historically shut out of the industry? Do they not enjoy the work as much as men, or are they intimidated by a culture that relies on stereotypically “male” attributes?
I think sometimes it’s less productive to talk about things like this than it is to act on them. I might not know why there are so few women on Wall Street, (and apparently neither does the NY Times), but I know a lot of women who are pursuing careers in finance. I doubt that they’ve ever given a second thought to the fact that it’s mostly considered a “man’s game.” And maybe they shouldn’t. They’re capable, hard-working, sociable, brilliant women who have ambition. What more could a feminist ask for?
Equal Writes is a writing project that hopes to start a dialogue about feminism and gender issues on and off campus. Co-Editors Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux '11 and Thúy-Lan Võ Lite '12 and Assistant Editor Josh Franklin '11 aim to give a voice to young feminist writers with a diverse range of perspectives on some of the most important issues students face here, and in the world at large. We believe in equal rights and opportunities for women. We believe in powerful, passionate women. We believe that men can be excellent feminists too. And we believe that "feminism" is not a dirty word.
Want to write for us? Have questions, comments or opinions you'd like to share with the editors? Email us at equalwrites@gmail.com
by Kelly Roache
by Beth Zak-Cohen
