Bad Advice

When it comes to domestic violence, most of us don't know the signs, yet we love to blame women for not noticing them and not getting out of the relationship fast enough. Case in point, a man writes to Cary Tennis, an advice columnist, and his letter is peppered with red flags. On Feministe, where we first saw this advice, Jill breaks them down:

I mean, we have some Classic Signs of A Controlling Man here.

1. Isolates her from her friends and family.


2. Criticizes her.


3. THREATENS SUICIDE when she tries to leave him.


4. Lies, or at least can’t keep his story straight, when he’s appealing for sympathy (see “we ended up having a screaming incident in front of our apartment” followed up with “I never threatened her or even raised my voice”).

The advice columnist, who by the way is paid to be an expert on relationships, has this to say:

It’s sad. I wish you two could patch it up.

This is the advice women are given. We are told to compromise so we won't end up alone, and then people are surprised when the violence escalates and we don't realize something is wrong until we are in too deep. To this advice columnist, the victim is the villain.

How hard would it be to tell women not to compromise, but only to commit to other people who treat them as equals and with respect? How hard would it have been for this advice columnist to tell this perfect stranger that his behavior is alarming and that his girlfriend is right to stay away? Domestic violence will not end if we tell women to put up with it and it certainly won't end until we are able to point out to men when their behavior is controlling or threatening. We need to stop ignoring the warning signs and start treating domestic and dating violence for what it is: a problem that needs to be addressed and can't be explained away.

Georgia Has 6th Highest Rate of Men Killing Women

In it's annual report on men murdering women, the Violence Policy Center found that Georgia ranks the 6th highest in the nation among women killed by men.

The national homicide rate of women killed by men in single-victim, single-offender instances was 1.25 per 100,000, the study said. There were 1,818 such female victims during 2009.

“Violence against women too often escalates to homicide. Prevention of such violence deserves serious and sustained attention from law enforcement officials and policymakers alike,” Kristen Rand, the center’s legislative director, said in a prepared statement.

The center said its study used the most recent data available from the FBI’s unpublished Supplementary Homicide Report. It is released each year as part of Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October.

The 10 states with the highest rates of women murdered by men were in descending order Nevada, Alabama, Louisiana, Arizona, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota, Hawaii and Missouri, according to the study.

Where weapons use could be determined, firearms were used in slightly more than half the homicides, and more than two-thirds of those firearms were handguns, the study said.

Ninety-three percent of the victims were killed by someone they knew, and 63 percent were wives or intimate acquaintances, the study said.

The full study is available here.

Men's TV is on the Defensive

Jezebel had a really interesting article yesterday discussing some of the backlash our culture is seeing to women's advancement. Specifically, this season on television, we're seeing a host of new shows trying to put men and women back into their gender essentialist places, where men build civilizations, kill things, and don't act gentlemanly and women are servants and/or sex objects.

In all of the aforementioned shows, men and/or masculinity is threatened by women and/or femininity. You can thank the mancession for that; the media has so hammered into men's brains that they're the real victims while women in the workforce aren't in such bad shape. Now we see television capitalizing on that. Be it consciously or otherwise, these male-targeted shows are creating blatant ties between the rise of women and the fall of the economy.

The problem with gender-essentialism is that it is limiting, and not just to women. Rigid conservative gender roles say that women don't belong in the workplace, but they also say that men don't belong in the home as caregivers to children. They may say that women must dress modestly or else they deserve to be assaulted, but they also say that men can't be trusted to see a woman in a mini-skirt and not rape her. They say that women are overly emotional and thus irrational and that men should bottle up all of their feelings and only deal with problems through violence. None of this sounds very healthy or fulfilling.

There isn't a finite pool of human rights. If I gain/claim more of my rights, that doesn't mean that there are fewer rights for you. Everyone deserves freedom to be who they are, to express their personality, to pursue their chosen career, to have involvement with their families, and to express their emotions constructively. We only forfeit those rights when we do something wrong (such as commit a crime), and even then some rights are inalienable. Everyone has the right to be safe from violence. There aren't male rights and female rights, there are human rights, and by opening all options to all people by dismantling rigid gender roles, we are expanding those rights for everyone.

Norwegian Terrorist Was Anti-Woman

In addition to being racist, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant, it appears that the Norwegian terrorist responsible for the massacres in Oslo and Utoya was also virulently anti-woman.

Hugo Schwyzer at the Good Men Project writes:

His manifesto, which largely consists of uncited work from a host of other right-wing thinkers, is now available online. 2083: A European Declaration of Independence gives us a picture of a man who is deeply troubled by multi-culturalism, by Islam, by modernity, by feminism, and by what has happened to traditional masculinity.

Breivik’s manifesto features an extended section called “Radical Feminism and Political Correctness,” cribbed uncredited from an American writer named Gerald Atkinson. The section complains “that the ‘man of today’ is expected to be a touchy-feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda.” Feminism’s aim, the manifesto continues, is to “emasculate” men, and render them “unwilling to defend traditional beliefs and values.” This rage at women in general, and at progressive feminists in particular, runs through much of the long and unwieldy 1187-page text. It’s a rhetoric familiar to anyone who reads the writing of Men’s Rights Activists.

So are anti-feminists and Men’s Rights Activists directly to blame for the actions of Anders Breivik? Of course not. Most MRAs – perhaps almost all – reject violence and mass murder as a political tactic. To suggest otherwise would be an indefensible and tasteless attempt to capitalize on a tragedy. But to pretend that there was no coherent political component to the tragedy would be almost equally indefensible.

Michelle Goldberg at The Daily Beast continues:

[Breivik] picked up the argument that selfish western women have allowed Muslims to outbreed them, and that only a restoration of patriarchy can save European culture. One of the books he references approvingly is Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West, which argues, “[T]he rise of feminism spells the death of the nation and the end of the West.”

.....

Nevertheless, the right clings to the idea that feminism is destroying Western societies from the inside, creating space for Islamism to take cover. This politics of emasculation gave shape to Breivik’s rage. Thus, while he pretends to abhor Muslim subjugation of women, he writes that the “fate of European civilisation depends on European men steadfastly resisting Politically Correct feminism.” When cultural conservatives seize control of Europe, he promises, “we will re-establish the patriarchal structures.” Eventually, women “conditioned” to this new order “will know her place in society.”

When tragedies like this happen, we like to pretend that they exist in a void. If we try too hard to understand their causes, we have to admit that they may happen again. It is easier to dismiss one person as crazy than to confront the fact that there are thousands of people in the world who feel this way about minority groups, immigrants, and women, and that Brevik is simply one who decided to take his views to the extreme. On this blog, we won't let you take the easy way out.

David Futrelle, a guest blogger at Shakesville who regularly visits men's rights and men's separatist blogs in order to discuss them at his own blog, writes about an attempted experiment. Someone posted some of the most anti-woman excerpts from Breivik's manifesto on a men's rights message board without identifying their author, to see how they were received. It should be no surprise that the posts were very popular until their author was identified.

But Reddit's Men's Rights subreddit is actually one of the most moderate and least misogynistic Men's Rights hangout online. Others in the manosphere have stepped up to defend Breivik's manifesto (if not his actions) plainly and explicitly, in full knowledge of just whose ideas they are endorsing.

On In Mala Fide, blogger Ferdinand Bardamu praises Breivik's "lucidity," and blames his murderous actions on the evils of a too-liberal society:

[A]nother madman with a sensible manifesto. Another completely rational, intelligent man driven to murderous insanity. And once again, society has zero introspection in regards to its profound ability to turn thoughtful men into lunatic butchers.

He's not being sarcastic here. He continues:

That makes HOW many rage killers in the past five years alone? And not just transparent headcases like Jared Loughner or George Sodini, but ordinary men like Pekka-Eric Auvinen or Joe Stack who simply weren't going to take it anymore. No one bothers to ask WHY all these men suddenly decide to pick up a gun and start shooting people – they're all written off as crazies. Or the rage killings are blamed on overly permissive gun laws …

Here's an idea – sick societies produce sick individuals who do sick things. Anders Breivin [sic] murdered nearly a hundred teens (not children, TEENS – they were at a summer camp for young adults) and must pay the price, but the blood of those teens is ultimately on the hands of the society that spat him forth. He is the bastard son of a masochistic, degenerate, rootless world that pisses on its traditions and heritage to elevate perversity, mindless consumerism and ethnic self-hatred to the highest of virtues.

That final reference to "ethnic self-hatred" seems to be Bardamu's euphemistic way of complaining that not enough white people are white supremacists.

Meanwhile, Chuck of Gucci Little Piggy offers what appears to be a somewhat more restrained, if ultimately more puzzling, defense of Breivik's manifesto – or at least that portion of the manifesto that Breivik borrowed from the writings of far-right blogger Fjordman.

After first complaining, incorrectly, that feminists are "try[ing] to blame Breivik on MRAs" (he cites me and Hugo Schwyzer as examples), Chuck goes on to endorse Breivik's (and Fjordman's) notion that feminism "grease[s]the wheels to allow Islam into his country," as Chuck summarizes the argument. The rest of Chuck's post elaborates on, and endorses, Breivik's/Fjordman's theories, arguing that feminism's "emasculation of Western men has taken the organic policing mechanism out of the hands of men in society" and thus rendered Western society helpless before the Islamic cultural invaders. (More on Bardamu and Gucci Little Piggy's arguments here.)

...

No, Breivik is not an MRA. No, he didn't take his marching orders from The Spearhead or In Mala Fide. But he is steeped in the same kind of hatred that is prevalent on those sites, and many of his repugnant beliefs about feminism and women in general are virtually identical to beliefs widespread in the misogynistic manosphere – a fact that a few in the manosphere are already willing to acknowledge out loud, as we saw above.

Further suggested reading: A Tale of Two Terrorists Redux

In Honor of Father's Day

This is a repost of 2008 entry. The link to our Father's Day Ad has been updated for 2011.

RH Reality Check recently posted a piece about Jackson Katz, a well-known writer and educator on the topic of gender violence prevention among men and boys. In the piece, Katz discusses why he feels that violence against women should be reframed as a men's issue. Katz argues that labeling violence against women a "women's issue" or even a "gender issue" (which he believes is automatically synonymous with "women's issue" for many people) encourages men to view the issue as irrelevant to their lives and "gives them an excuse to not pay attention".

Another reason why Katz has a problem with people using women's issues to describe violence against women is the issue of perpetration and who is responsible for perpetrating these acts. "Take rape for example," said Katz. "Over 99 percent of rape is perpetrated by men, but it's a women's issue?"

As a further example of this thinking, Katz uses commonly implemented "rape prevention" courses held at universities across the country. Katz argues that these courses are useful information for women in order to practice "risk reduction", but because they do not address men, they are not effective as prevention.

"If a woman has done everything in her power to reduce her risk, then a man who has the proclivity for abuse or need for power will just move on to another woman or target," Katz added. "It's about the guy and his need to assert his power. And it's not just individual men, it's a cultural problem. Our culture is producing violent men, and violence against women has become institutionalized. We need to take a step back and examine the institutionalized polices drafted by men that perpetuate the problem."

This is also the thinking that drives Men Stopping Violence, a locally headquartered organization dedicated to ending men's violence against women. MSV is a national leader in the violence against women's movement who works locally and nationally to dismantle belief systems, social structures, and institutional practices that oppress women and children and dehumanize men themselves. MSV has been a long-time partner of Women's Resource Center and a regular sponsor of our own Father's Day Campaign "It Takes a Man to End Domestic Violence".

In this campaign, we ask men to take a public stance against domestic violence by making a restorative financial contribution to support to women and children affected by abuse. We then include each contributor's name in an advertisement in the Father's Day Sunday edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution under the heading:

In commemoration of Father’s Day, the men of Atlanta have united to promote peace in every home. If you think that domestic violence does not affect you or that you cannot make a difference in stopping domestic violence, these men ask that you think of your mothers, sisters and daughters. Domestic violence affects us all, and you can make a difference. The men listed below proudly state that they will not tolerate domestic violence.

We hope that men will see other men whom they know and respect taking a public stance against domestic violence, and that it will influence them to examine the violent tendencies in their own lives. Please look for our ad in the AJC this Sunday, and thank you to all who participated.

Schwarzenegger and Strauss-Kahn

By now you have probably heard that Arnold Schwarzenegger has admitted to fathering a child with a household employee while he was married to Maria Shriver. You have also probably heard that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French economist and politician, has been accused of raping a housekeeper at a hotel in New York. At face value, these stories may seem unrelated, but we'd like you to look at them a little closer.

The reason that most companies have strict rules about intra-office dating, especially between a boss and a subordinate, is that, by nature, a power difference exists between a person and the person that he or she works for. The boss has the power to fire, reprimand, promote, give raises or other perks, or to make work life miserable for his or her employees. If an employee fears even for an instant that saying no to an advance made by her or his boss will result in a negative on-the-job consequence, it calls into question whether the act or relationship is truly consensual. The mother of Schwarzenegger's baby was his household employee. Because of the power he held over her merely by virtue of providing her paycheck (especially in a time when employment is harder and harder to come by), not to mention that he is a powerful man politically and because of his celebrity, we will never know if the relationship or the act that produced a child was truly consensual. We do know that Schwarzenegger has a history of being accused of violence and harassment toward women.

The woman accusing Strauss-Kahn of rape is making it clear that she did not consent.

These women are both domestic workers, and domestic workers all over the world are particularly vulnerable to violence. Just like in rapes, just like in domestic violence, assaults on domestic workers come from a place of unequal power and are able to continue because those using violence do not fear punishment. Just as scores of people, including Ben Stein in a truly abysmal article, rush to defend Strauss-Kahn against the accusations leveled by a women who, as Stein says, is "just a maid", most people in a position to stop violence against those who are vulnerable just can't bring themselves to believe "just maids" over the fine upstanding citizens who employ them. Violence against women happens to people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and income levels and is perpetrated by people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and income levels. Yet, in both of these cases, the women in question are working class women of color, where the men are wealthy and white. Yet another difference in power as afforded by our society.

We're not the only ones who have noticed that men in power sometimes abuse that power, but instead of painting it as men "behaving badly", we call it what it is - a culture that perpetuates violence against women. If any man, powerful or no, thinks that he can get away with abusing women, he is more likely to consider doing so. That doesn't mean that all men will abuse their partners, but you're more likely to consider doing anything bad if you don't think you'll get punished. If a man also thinks that a woman's purpose is to please a man, or that women aren't as smart are as valuable as men, or that being a man means that you have to be in control at all times, or that being a man means using violence, he especially will take advantage of opportunities to violate women while escaping punishment. We have to challenge those mindsets, but we also have to make sure that men who use violence against women are punished. Otherwise they'll do it again and again and again, just as these men have been accused of doing.

We Don't Hate Men

Organizations like ours often get accused of hating men. We must admit, sometimes it gets tempting to get mad at all men. After all, we've spent 25 years helping women pick up and start over after the damage that men have inflicted on them financially, emotionally, and physically. But each of us have men in our lives whom we love - fathers, brothers, husbands, friends, children, etc. We also know that the vast majority of men don't use violence.

It's the MRAs (Men's Rights Activists) that really seem to hate men. For example, men who wear this label are the type of men who feel that women are to blame for their own sexual assaults if they wear sexy clothing that sends men mixed signals. When feminists are saying that men are rational human beings who are able to make the conscious decision not to rape (because most men don't rape), MRAs say that men are animals who are ruled by their libidos and thus just can't restrain themselves if the see a thigh or a little bit of cleavage. Who sounds like they hate men?

Hugo Schwyzer is an ally to women who wrote an article for the Good Men Project claiming that MRAs have their ideas of feminism all wrong and that feminism is actually good for men, too. An excerpt:

The cause of men’s very real unhappiness isn’t a biased family court system, or feminist college professors, or the perceived injustices of Title IX athletic funding. The source of men’s anguish and uncertainty is the straitjacket of traditional American manhood. Men are suffering because their emotional, psychological, intellectual, and sexual potential is stunted by their own efforts to live up to an impossible masculine ideal.

Whether they got it from their fathers or their older brothers, whether they learned it from peers or pastors, coaches or drill instructors, almost all American boys grow up learning the “guy rules.” As Deborah David and Robert Brannon first showed in their landmark 1976 book on men, The Forty-Nine Percent Majority, the rules are crushingly simple: Big boys don’t cry. No sissy stuff. Be a “sturdy oak.” “Be a big wheel.” “Give ’em hell.”

Being a man, in other words, is defined by divesting oneself of anything remotely associated with femininity (like kindness, sensitivity, intuition, empathy). When heterosexual masculinity is defined by violent obtuseness, these “guy rules” rob boys of their chance to develop emotional skills to thrive in relationships with others. This frantic effort to shut down a whole aspect of one’s potential isn’t caused by testosterone or Y chromosomes. It’s caused by the longing to live by the “man code.”

♦◊♦

Most MRAs agree that the “man code” exists and that it does great damage to young men. But they blame women for these cruel and limiting rules. According to many MRAs I’ve spoken to, it is women’s sexual desire for the alpha male that forces boys to compete ruthlessly with one another. “Women say they want one thing but choose another: they always go for a**holes,” so many guys say. If women would broaden their sexual appetites to include “betas” and “omegas,” their reasoning goes, boys would feel less compelled to compete ruthlessly with one another. (The men’s rights activists tend to be wildly off-base about what women actually want, but that’s another topic.)

It’s a typical but tragic mistake: MRAs wildly overestimate women’s power, sexual or otherwise. Men, they insist, are helpless by comparison. But that claim ignores a long and unmistakable history of male domination in human history. And if there’s one undeniable truism about our species, it’s that the rules are made by the dominant group. The “man laws” or “guy rules” were created by and for men. Historically, winning validation from other men has mattered more than getting sex or love from women. (If you don’t believe that, think for a moment about how hard boys will work to please a demanding football coach.) Males are raised to be “homosocial,” which means they’re taught to get their primary affirmation from other men rather than from women. Working too hard for female approval just makes you a “mama’s boy” or “p***y-whipped,” and the frantic efforts young men make to ensure neither of those labels apply to them tells you all you need to know about who it is they are really trying to impress.

Amanda Marcotte on the same site breaks it down even better and with more detail. She looks at four examples of causes that MRAs take very seriously and shows how the feminist solution to all of them is better for women and for men. Those issues include:

• Men are more often the primary or even sole breadwinners of nuclear-family households.


• Men have to do all the work asking women out, and women are often hostile to men’s overtures, which hurts men’s feelings.


• Men are more likely to get killed at work.


• Ladies Night, where bars often extend a drink special to women and not to men.

Still think we're the man haters?

Sex Slavery In Atlanta

As we have mentioned before, Atlanta is an international hub for sex trafficking. Last week, the Marietta Patch ran an excellent article examining the specific problem of child sex trafficking and debunking some of the myths regarding where trafficking takes place in Atlanta and who the men are who participate in the sexual enslavement of children.

The Schapiro Group is a data‐driven strategic consulting firm based in Atlanta. They produced a study that shows the largest group of men who purchase sex with young females is found in the north metro Atlanta area, outside I-285 (42 percent). It also shows that 23 percent of buyers are from the south metro area, 26 percent are in the city’s core and only 9 percent come from the airport area.

Child sex trafficking is just as huge a problem for affluent families in Marietta as it is in the inner city of Atlanta.

When we think of sex trafficking, we often think of children from a foreign land being brought here to serve foreign men coming to Atlanta via the airport. This study shows that this is categorically not the case. Atlanta's men are creating the market for the slavery of children and Atlanta's children are often the ones enslaved.

Any young girl is at risk for being enslaved for sex. Factors such as childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence at home, poverty and running away lead to a much greater threat.

An estimated 1.6 million children run away from home each year in the United States. The average time it takes before a trafficker or a solicitor approaches a runaway is only 48 hours.

And 90 percent of runaway girls in Atlanta become part of the city’s sex trade, and 70 to 90 percent of commercially sexually exploited children have a history of childhood sexual abuse.

Girls are lured in by recruiters and pimps; other children are also used as recruiters. At times, a girl’s own family may be the sellers.

The article also includes information regarding how children are accessed by traffickers. We recommend reading the whole thing and then contacting an organization like A Future Not A Past for more information on how you can help.

You Shouldn't Laugh

As a fitting wrap-up to our discussion of rape myths for Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and especially in the light of our last post discussing rapists in particular, we refer you to this excellent post at Shakesville.

Virtually all rapists genuinely believe that all men rape, and other men just keep it hushed up better. And more, these people who really are rapists are constantly reaffirmed in their belief about the rest of mankind being rapists like them by things like rape jokes, that dismiss and normalize the idea of rape.

If one in twenty guys (or more) is a real and true rapist, and you have any amount of social activity with other guys like yourself, then it is almost a statistical certainty that one time hanging out with friends and their friends, playing Halo with a bunch of guys online, in a WoW guild, in a pick-up game of basketball, at a bar, or elsewhere, you were talking to a rapist. Not your fault. You can't tell a rapist apart any better than anyone else can. It's not like they announce themselves.

But, here's the thing. It's very likely that in some of these interactions with these guys, at some point or another, someone told a rape joke. You, decent guy that you are, understood that they didn't mean it, and it was just a joke. And so you laughed.

Or maybe you didn't laugh. Maybe it just wasn't a very funny joke. So maybe you just didn't say anything at all.

And, decent guy who would never condone rape, who would step in and stop rape if he saw it, who understands that rape is awful and wrong and bad, when you laughed? When you were silent?

That rapist who was in the group with you, that rapist thought that you were on his side. That rapist knew that you were a rapist like him. And he felt validated, and he felt he was among his comrades.

This can be true about any joke, really. It certainly applies to domestic violence. If you're hanging out with a man who batters, and he makes a joke about knocking some sense into his wife, and you laugh, you just reinforced his belief that hitting his wife is OK. It's as simple as that. So the next time you are confronted with a situation like this, and it might be awkward to speak up, think about this: who would you rather defend, the victim or the batter? The victim or the rapist? Whose side would you rather have people think you're on? As Shaker Time-Machine said in her post, "If you're doing something that is more likely to make rapists feel comfortable, then don't do it!"

Rape Myths, Part III

Welcome to the third post in our series examining rape myths for Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Click on the number to read posts 1, 2.1, 2.2, & 2.3.

In this post, we'll finally talk about that stat we've been teasing you about, because in this post we shift past the constant focus on victims and actually talk about rapists. Consider this your trigger warning.

The last myth that we talked about in our HLN interview is the myth that rape is just about sex. It's not. In any given sexual encounter, there are countless moments when one can determine whether or not one's partner is consenting. What you are looking for is enthusiastic consent. It should be clear that your partner is ready and willing and excited about where this encounter is going. If your partner is hesitant, confused, or unable to say yes, you haven't received consent. At best, you are coercing them into doing something they would rather say no to (still rape). Probably, you are moving forward explicitly without their consent.

So, in our imaginary encounter, if a person realizes they do not have enthusiastic consent, they have options. They can stop what they are doing and then go find someone else who will consent to have sex with them. They can stop what they are doing and take care of their sexual needs on their own. Though illegal, they can hire someone to consensually provide them with sex. Or, they could just give up on sex at that time, which countless people do every day.

Instead, a rapist decides to move forward anyway. Regardless of what the victim is wearing, regardless of where she has been, regardless of whether she has been drinking, regardless of a host of factors, the responsibility for the rape lies with the rapist, because he is the one making the decision in that moment to move forward.

The problem is, we don't label so much of that scenario as rape. Women come through our doors every day who have been sexually assaulted by husbands or partners, but they don't label it as such. If someone holds you down and forces you to have sex, that is rape. If someone gets you too drunk to say no and then has sex with you, that is rape. If someone talks you into having sex when you initially didn't want to, makes you feel too guilty to say no, or makes you feel too scared to say no, that is rape.

Slightly over 1 in 20 college-age men will admit to raping someone in anonymous surveys, as long as the word "rape" isn't used in the description of the act. If you ask, "have you ever raped a woman", of course they will say no. But if you describe one of the scenarios above (i.e., have you ever made a woman feel too guilty to say no to sex), 6% of men will say yes, they have. And that's a conservative estimate. Other sources double that number.

So why do 6% of men rape? Because they can. If you don't respect women, you don't care if you have their consent. If women are nothing but glorified sex toys to you, you don't care about their enthusiasm or their pleasure. You don't care if they get anything out of the encounter. You don't care if they really want to be there, so long as they are there. If society has taught you that women aren't real people whose feelings and opinions matter, then their feelings and opinions about sex don't matter.

But even with all these factors as true, fewer men would rape if they thought there would be a consequence for doing so. If they thought that it would hurt their relationships with others or their careers, if they thought the would be arrested, if they thought that some privilege or power that they value would be taken from them as punishment, they wouldn't rape. It is a choice. Men are not neanderthals who are ruled by their libidos. 94% of men make the decision not to rape. It is a choice, and if we took rape seriously and punished rapists, it wouldn't happen nearly as often.

Instead, only 6% of rapists ever see a day in jail, which leaves them right out in the world where they can rape again.

Our Investment in Gender

As a culture, we have a lot invested in gendering our citizens. Don't believe us? Then why do people freak out so much when a person of one gender acts like a person of another?

It should be no big deal. Major League Baseball offers paternity leave. It's a personal decision whether or not players want to take it. A player decides to take advantage and misses a game to attend the birth of his child. End of story, right? Not exactly.

A Dallas sports writer publishes an entire rant because he thinks a guy taking time off from work to do girly things like have babies is so weird. Funerals, he's OK with, they're unisex. But birth is strictly a woman's domain, so no men allowed.

Also, boys should never, ever paint their toenails. And if a company like J Crew happens to print an ad about a mother having some bonding time with her son by painting his toenails his favorite color, the frenzy might just reach epic proportions. Don't believe us? Google it. We'll wait.

All sarcasm aside, this gender policing has real consequences for people.

In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a Mississippi high school football player wanted to wear pink cleats. He got kicked off the team for it and might not graduate on time.

A 17-month old boy was beaten to death in New York for "acting like a girl".

"Corrective Rape", the horrible crime whereby gay men and lesbian women are raped by persons of the opposite sex in order to "fix" their being gay has its own Wikipedia entry.

So why is our society so invested in this? Why do we care if women do things that are considered masculine and men do things that are considered feminine?

Chalk it up to power. Men are more valuable in our society, and they have more power. It's why rape and domestic violence are committed. If women acted like men, maybe we could claim some of that value and some of that power. That has to be stopped. And why on Earth would a man want to act like a woman? Women are worthless. To be a woman is bad. Therefore, there must be something very wrong with a man who wants to do feminine things. That has to be stopped, too.

If we get to a point in our society where women and men are equally valued and equally respected, gender won't matter so much. Until then, gender policing will be alive and well and to step outside your narrowly defined box could be very dangerous. Literally, dangerous.

Rape Myths Part II, Part III

This is the post that just keeps going. We had intended to write about some other rape myths, and still will, but the universe keeps providing evidence of ways that believing that women lie about being raped can be incredibly damaging to rape victims (as if it weren't already obvious).

Earlier this week, Ms. Magazine told the story of a woman who reported a sexual assault and was deemed by police to be a liar. They went so far as to charge her with false reporting and fine her $500. Turns out, she wasn't lying.

Three years later, Marc O’Leary was arrested in Colorado for charges of sexual assault, kidnapping, burglary and felony menacing. He is being held on $5 million bail. When the police raided O’Leary’s home earlier this month, they found photos of his victims.

The 18-year-old woman from Washington [whom police accused of false reporting] was in those photographs.

Police have reopened her case, reimbursed her $500 and are working on getting her record expunged, but they can't undo the trauma they caused. This young woman was made to look like a liar to her entire community, she was given a criminal record, and she was retraumatized by police and the courts by making her relive her assault and then not believing her. The police also allowed O'Leary to assault two other women, women to whom he would never have had access if he had been behind bars because the police took the original report seriously.

By believing that women commonly lie about rape, we are helping rapists. We help men like O'Leary escape punishment for using violence against women, freeing them to do it again. Remember that the next time you are tempted to be skeptical.

V-Day, the Non-Harassing Way

Valentine's Day is all about love and, for singles, finding your special someone. However, our culture is rife with books and movies that teach us more about how to become a stalker than they do about how to approach someone new with respect to their personal boundaries. Comment is Free has some great tips for how to approach women without being harassing.

Perhaps you think there is no way you could be considered as harassing. Maybe you're just giving someone a compliment or trying to be friendly. Well, consider this:

In one of the first street harassment studies ever conducted, Carol Brooks Gardner, associate professor of sociology and women’s studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis, interviewed 293 women in Indianapolis, Indiana, over several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The women were from every race, age, class, and sexual orientation category of the general population in Indiana and the United States. She oversampled women of color to better represent their experiences. Gardner found that every single woman (100 percent) could cite several examples of being harassed by unknown men in public and all but nine of the women classified those experiences as “troublesome.”

In her Comment is Free article, Holly mentions that talking with young men about appropriate stranger interactions in public is especially important.

Society often suggests that in heterosexual relationships, it is men who should approach women. Men's peers, family members and the media may tell them that it is OK, and even flattering, to be aggressive or to sexually objectify women whom they encounter (no matter the men's or women's sexual orientation). I doubt most men want to be harassers, but if they take these messages to heart, they may become harassers.

The most important thing a cisgender man can do to be an ally to women and to the movement to end violence against them is to realize that intent doesn't always matter, and that the way you view a situation through a male lens is often not the same as a woman will view it. If a woman sends you clear signals that she feels harassed, or threatened, don't mock her for overreacting. You will never understand what it feels like to live under the constant threat of violence just because of your gender, so don't presume that you can tell her how she should feel. Instead, learn from her reactions to you and listen to her if she is willing to explain her feelings. After all, the quickest way to a woman's heart is to be part of the solution, not the problem.

Domestic Violence and the "Princess Problem"

You might think that there is no way in the world that princess culture amongst little girls has anything to do with violence against women as adults, but Hugo Schwyzer at the Good Men Project thinks it does.

Scwyzer, responding to an article in Redbook titled “Little Girls Gone Wild: Why Daughters Are Acting Too Sexy, Too Soon", argues that even princess culture contributes to an earlier and earlier sexualization of girls.

You may balk—what’s sexy about a little girl in a pink princess costume? But sexy, as it turns out, is not the same thing as sexualized. Sexualization is not just imposing sexuality on children before they’re ready and viewing girls as sexual objects, but also valuing a girl for her appearance over her other attributes. “Princesses are just a phase,” Orenstein writes, but they mark a girl’s “first foray into the mainstream culture. … And what was the first thing that culture told her about being a girl? Not that she was competent, strong, creative, or smart, but that every little girl wants—or should want—to be the Fairest of Them All.”

As Orenstein and others point out, little girls take their cues about what is desirable by looking at how boys and men respond to older girls and women. The father who lavishes adoration on “Daddy’s little princess” but ogles high-school cheerleaders is sending his daughter a clear message. The message is that the princess phase won’t last much longer, and if you want to grasp and hold adult male attention, you need to be sexy.

This sexiness has very little to do with sex, and everything to do with the craving for validation and attention. While all children want affirmation, princess culture teaches little girls to get that approval through their looks. Little girls learn quickly what “works” to elicit adoration from mom and dad, as well as from teachers, uncles, aunts, and other adults. Soon—much too soon—they notice that older girls and women get validation for a particular kind of dress, a particular kind of behavior. They watch their fathers’ eyes, they follow their uncles’ gaze. They listen to what these men they love say when they see “hot” young women on television or on the street. And they learn how to be from what they hear and see.

Both articles are worth a full read, because they paint a dangerous picture of how we as a society value women primarily, and in some circles exclusively, for our appearance and not for the myriad of other talents and values that women can bring to table. It is this view of women as not fully human, or not as valuable as men, that empowers men who use violence against women to do so. If a woman is not fully human, is not valuable, or is not worthy of the same respect as men, why is it wrong to treat her accordingly? As parents, we need to raise our kids to believe that men and women are equally valuable and, as peers, we need to hold others accountable for any words or actions that would suggest otherwise. Only after we change these attitudes as a society will violence against women be brought to an end.

Women Arrested for DV Murders

Two Georgia women have been arrested recently for murdering their husbands. WRC knows that women are also capable of using violence, but we also know that women are much less likely than men to murder a spouse or intimate partner. In addition, much of the violence used by women that men's groups cite to prove that men are equally as victimized happens in self-defense. When viewing these two murder cases through that lens, it is certainly interesting to note that both homicide victims had a history of domestic violence.

From WALB:

An Albany woman, who shot and killed her ex-husband Monday night says she'd long been the victim of domestic violence.

33 year old Marlina Hamilton is charged with killing 32 -year old Christopher Donaldson.

Donaldson had just gotten out of prison in March and Police say he and Hamilton, who divorced two years ago, were talking about moving back in together.

Police were called to Hamilton's home around 10:30 that night because of an argument, and officers told Donaldson to leave.

He returned a couple of hours later and was shot.

From the AJC:

A 53-year-old northwest Georgia man was shot and killed Wednesday night, and his wife has been charged with murder.

Walker County deputies were dispatched to the Flintstone home after receiving a call about a domestic dispute, the Rome News-Tribune reported. Deputies found D.C. Hollis dead on the living room floor, according to the report.

Hollis apparently died from a single .38-caliber gunshot wound to the head, Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson told the newspaper. An autopsy will be conducted at the GBI crime lab.

Hollis' wife, 53-year-old Jimmie Nell Hollis, was arrested and charged with murder, Wilson said.

The couple has a history of being arrested, according to the Walker County Messenger.

D.C. Hollis was released from state prison in 2006 following his conviction on aggravated assault charges, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections.

This is not to say that either man deserved to be killed, but you don't often see newspaper reports of female homicide victims that mention that she spent time in prison for assault or that he claims she had of a history of abuse toward him. Even if we count cases where women kill their partners in self-defense, or to end a lifetime of abuse as these cases may be, the unfortunate reality is that women are still disproportionately killed by their partners and men are disproportionately the ones who do the killing.

Jerry Lewis Advocates Violence

Comedy Icon Jerry Lewis has done his civic duty this Labor Day weekend by reminding anti-violence advocates just how much work we still have to do.

"I'd smack her in the mouth if I saw her," he offered the interviewer when asked what he'd do if he saw [Lindsay] Lohan. "I would smack her in the mouth and be arrested for abusing a woman!"

He continued, "I would say, 'You deserve this and nothing else' ... WHACK! And then, if she's not satisfied, I'd put her over my knee and spank her and then put her in rehab and that's it."

It is clear that Lewis feels that violence against women is a perfectly acceptable way to get women to change a behavior that you don't like and that it's so uncontroversial, he's willing to say it in a television interview. Look at what he says: "'You deserve this and nothing else' ... WHACK!" He sounds just like a batterer who thinks his victim deserves no respect or kindness, just violence. However you feel about a celebrity or anyone else's behavior, using physical violence against them should not be an acceptable way to get them to change.

If you need any additional proof that violence against women is cavalierly accepted, check out the poll that accompanies the linked article. At the time of posting, 89% of voters think his comments were "spot on."

Fishermen's Wives Face Post-Spill Trauma

An article today from Mother Jones describes the St. Bernard Project, a nonprofit founded in 2006 to provide rebuilding services to Katrina-ravaged St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana, as well as offer "psychological rebuilding" through a wellness and mental-health center. Since the oil spill started, the organization has been looking to vastly expand its services to meet the area's latest mental-health crisis: the unrelenting depression falling on families living and working on the Gulf Coast.

There are a myriad of things that contribute to domestic violence. One of the most common that we cite are a batterer's loss of control in others areas of his life, which causes him to seek to recapture that control where he can. People who feel out of control also often turn to alcohol use, which lowers inhibitions and might contribute to some people using violence who otherwise would not have considered it. Both of these things could be contributing factors to the rise in domestic violence seen in gulf areas since the spill.

"My husband's goin' drinkin'. My husband comes home and screams at me. The food's not good enough, the floors aren't clean enough. That's why I'm here, for him to take it out on me."

In next-door Plaquemines Parish, 11 domestic violence calls came in on one recent weekend, compared with 3 on a typical weekend. Cathy Butler, the woman who takes the calls, isn't ready to attribute the spike entirely to the oil spill; it's a hundred degrees outside, after all, and calls always increase a bit in the summer. The mayor of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, says they've had 320 percent more incidents of domestic violence since the spill. Whatever the cause, Butler is sure it's gonna get worse soon. "The more people are out of work, the more trouble we're gonna have," she says. "Plaquemines Community CARE is offering help now, but we're gonna need some more counselors. In the coming months, I'm gonna see a definite increase." She says she is also seeing an increase in child abuse calls.

Michelle tries to offer some perspective to the women by explaining that their husbands' anger is just a reaction against helplessness. He can't fix this, but he can fight.

These are not men who are accustomed to seeking therapy and, indeed, most therapy services in the area are aimed at the wives, hoping that some of the calm and coping strategies will make it back to the husbands. But when we as a culture place a man's value in how well he provides monetarily for his family, we cannot see that taken from him and expect him to know how to handle it alone. Anger, loss, depression, anxiety, and many other emotions are to be expected. That doesn't make family violence OK, but it does underscore the need for us to take men's emotional needs seriously, and to offer mental health services to them as well. If anything, they should be offering counseling to men to protect the wives, not the other way around.

Quick Links

We have two quick links for you today:

Our partner organization Men Stopping Violence tipped us off to this great article at the Huffington Post entitled "Fathers Can Stop Violence, Too". We encourage you to read the whole thing.

Also, in a moment of self-promotion, we wanted to invite you to find us on facebook. Our fan list is growing strong, and we'd like our Facebook friends to become blog readers and our blog readers to become Facebook fans. You'll receive information and updates on our local work that you can connect back to our posts. Thanks!

Where Domestic Violence Comes From

Today in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd paints a disturbing picture of the culture that produced George Huguely V, the Virginia lacrosse player who has been charged with murdering his girlfriend Yeardley Love.

It was set up like a fantasy football league draft. The height, weight and performance statistics of the draftees were offered to decide who would make the cut and who would emerge as the No. 1 pick.

But the players in this predatory game were not famous N.F.L. stars. They were unwitting girls about to start high school.

A group of soon-to-be freshmen boys at Landon, an elite private grade school and high school for boys in the wealthy Washington suburb of Montgomery County, Md., was drafting local girls.

One team was called “The Southside Slampigs,” and one boy dubbed his team with crude street slang for drug-addicted prostitutes.

The young woman who was the “top pick” was described by one of the boys in a team profile he put up online as “sweet, outgoing, friendly, willing to get down and dirty and [expletive] party. Coming in at 90 pounds, 5’2 and a bra size 34d.” She would be a special asset to the team, he noted, because her mother “is quite the cougar herself.”

Before they got caught last summer, the boys had planned an “opening day party,” complete with T-shirts, where the mission was to invite the drafted girls and, unbeknownst to them, score points by trying to rack up as many sexual encounters with the young women as possible.

“They evidently got points for first, second and third base,” said one outraged father of a drafted girl. “They were going to have parties and tally up the points, and money was going to be exchanged at the end of the season.” He said that the boys would also have earned points for “schmoozing with the parents.”

His daughter, he said, “was very upset about it. She thought these guys were her friends. This is the way we teach boys to treat women, young ladies? You have enough to worry about as a 14- or 15-year-old girl without having to worry about guys who are doing it as sport.”

Another parent was equally appalled: “I think the girls felt like they were getting targeted, that this was some big game. Talk about using people. It doesn’t get much worse than that.”

This would have been the perfect time for an intervention. If the school had taken this predatory behavior toward women seriously enough and the boys had seen a meaningful consequence for their actions, this could have been a turning point. Men can be shown how their behavior negatively impacts the women in their life, and they can be persuaded to change. However, some of the parents don't think the boys were sufficiently punished. By not punishing young men when these mindsets and behaviors are discovered, we are telling them that punishment is not warranted and that what they did wasn't all that bad.

Maybe, to some, this wasn't all that bad. But this is just the early stage of a man seeing women only as sexual objects to be obtained, not as partners with feelings of their own. If a young man continues down this road of not seeing women as full people, something much worse could happen.

A gunman who shot and killed his wife and three other women at a South Florida restaurant before committing suicide was the half-brother of former baseball star Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez.

Police said the shooter bypassed at least two men when he fired at the women inside. Three women were hospitalized in critical condition, Hialeah police Detective Eddie Rodriguez said.

"He went straight for the women," Rodriguez said.

Four women are now dead, and three others are injured in what is only the most recent in our nation's history of gender-motivated mass murders.

This time it was Gerardo Regalado, half-brother of former baseball star Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, and the crime took place in South Florida. Last year it was George Sodini in Collier County, PA, who opened fire in an all-female aerobics class in an act of misguided revenge for a sexually frustrated existence. Before that, it was Cho Seung-Hui, the mentally unstable stalker of women at Virginia Tech, who ended up being responsible for the worst school shooting in U.S. history. In 2006, it was the school shootings in Amish country and in Colorado’s Platte Canyon. And in 1998, it was the murder of four elementary school girls and their female teacher in Jonesboro, AR.

I am sick to death that I have to keep writing some version of this same article or blog post on loop. But I have to, because in all of these cases, gender-based violence lies at the heart of these crimes — and leaving this motivating factor uninvestigated not only deprives the public of the full, accurate picture of the events at hand, but leave us without the analysis and context needed to understand the violence, recognize warning signs, and take steps to prevent similar massacres in the future.

Those steps are exactly what parents of the girls targeted by the Landon boys were advocating. They wanted the predatory mindset punished early. They took it seriously because they saw the negative impact on their daughters. The family and friends of the women murdered and injured in Florida will be taking the punishment of predatory behavior seriously, because they have also seen the negative impact. We take it seriously, because we see its impact every day. Won't you take it seriously, too?

Men Who Batter Think You Do, Too!

Men who engage in domestic violence consistently overestimate how common such behavior is, and the more they overestimate, the more they engage in abusing their partner.

“Men who engage in violent behavior justify it in their mind by thinking it is more common and saying, ‘Most guys slap their women around so it is okay to engage in it.’ Or it could be that misperceptions about violence cause the behavior.”

Neighbors says these men overestimated by two to three times the actual rates of seven behaviors ranging from throwing something at a partner to rape. Details of the study will be published in the journal Violence Against Women.

“Another way of looking at this would be wearing a red shirt. If you think everyone is wearing a red shirt then it is okay for you to wear one too. Or if you wear a red shirt you might overestimate the number of other people who are wearing red shirts,” he explains.

The work is the first to document overestimation of intimate partner violence by batterers and is consistent with findings about a variety of other harmful behaviors such as substance use, gambling, and eating disorders. This line of research looks at social norms, or what is considered to be appropriate and inappropriate behavior in society.

“Social norms theory suggests that people act in a way that they believe is consistent with what the average person does,” adds Denise Walker, research professor of social work and co-director of the Innovative Programs Research Group.

The research looked at 124 men who were enrolled in a larger treatment intervention study for domestic violence. The men, all of whom had participated in violence against a partner in the previous 90 days, were asked to estimate the percentage of men who had ever engaged in seven forms of abuse.

These included throwing something at a partner that could hurt; pushing, grabbing, or shoving a partner; slapping or hitting; choking; beating up a partner; threatening a partner with a gun; and forcing a partner have sex when they did not want to.

Data on the percentage of men who actually engaged in these abusive behaviors were drawn from the National Violence Against Women Survey, funded by the National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In every case the men vastly overestimated the actual instances of abuse. For example, the participants on average thought 27.6 percent of men had thrown something with the intent of hurting a partner while the actual number is 11.9 percent. Similarly, they believed 23.6 percent of men had forced their partner to have sex involuntary compared to 7.9 percent in reality.

“With sexual assault the more a man thought it was prevalent the more likely he was to engage in such behavior. If we can correct misperceptions about the prevalence of intimate partner violence, we have a chance to change men’s behavior. If you give them factual information it is harder for them to justify their behavior,” Neighbors says

That is the major role that men can play in the movement to end violence against women: making sure that other men know that domestic violence is not OK. Men have influence over one another in a way that women don't. We need men to speak to their friends, relatives, colleagues, fellow church members, etc. and let them know that there will be a social stigma surrounding battering. If men hold other men socially and politically accountable for battering, there will be a lot less battering. We've known that for years.