Via http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/08/discussion-thread-i-love-way-you-lie.html, I saw a discussion of Eminem’s new video “Love the Way You Lie” featuring Rhiannon. A good chunk of the discussion was talking about how this song/ video glamorizes domestic violence under the context by making first making the characters super sexy, and conflating “passion” with “violence”. And I can see that support for it- the video does come off as ambiguous, and there are lines in the song like “Maybe this is what happens when a volcano meets a tornado” suggesting that their relationship is just the result of two fiery personalities coming together.

But then, there was also discussion about the fact that this doesn’t look like a “classic” image of domestic violence, meaning that it doesn’t show an abuser as a monster and the women as a cringing victim a’ la Lifetime Original Movies, and this makes domestic violence look ambiguous in the video. Later, people challenge it saying that there was “no such thing as a perfect victim” and it made me think of two seperate things.

One was this post from No Longer Qivering where one the author talks about justifying leaving her abusive husband. The part that particularly resonated with me was:

I would attempt to explain the abuse. Often I would leave out the worst things as I had not processed them enough to verbalize them. In later years I would leave the worst things out because they were intensely humiliating. But still there were plenty of things I could say that sounded pretty awful; living under his constant rage, the threats to hurt me and kill me, the irrational behavior towards the children, the constant lying. If I managed to get that far the answer was always the same.

“If it was that bad why did you stay with him so many years? Why did you have all these children with him?”

In the blink of an eye I had gone from being condemned for leaving to being condemned for staying…..

It’s been a lesson for me though and I try and listen to people’s stories without ever asking those condemning questions. “Why did you go back to him?” “Why did you marry him?” “Why didn’t you see he was [somethingawful]”? I have to ask myself, does anyone ever ask the man “Why didn’t you love her and care for her so she wanted to stay with you?” But of course that is a fruitless question as abusers usually assert that they did love their partner and “gave her everything”.

Read the whole thing, it was an interesting can’t-win for leaving exercise.

It also reminded me of when I was a horrible little child, and I would get so MAD at my mother for, in my eyes “provoking” dad. My father was abusive, but why did she have to bother him with stuff like the bills when he was already so tired from work, and why couldn’t she just go along with him when he just wanted quiet, and why couldn’t she just LEAVE THINGS ALONE?! As an adult, I’m deeply ashamed of this mindset that I had, and realize that I was probably just one more voice keeping my mom staying with my dad. The day I saw my dad throw my mom into the coffee table, the first time that I knew he actually hit her (as opposed to “only” constantly belittling her, threatening her, and yelling at her) was the day that I did a 180-switch about who exactly was at fault here.

These three, seemingly unrelated things about domestic violence boils down to this: there is no such thing as a “perfect victim”. There is no one who looks perfect cringing, and decides to up and leave the first time she gets hit because he’s so clearly a monster and she’s just independent and not willing to take that crap (my biggest problem with “Enough”, really). Victims of domestic abuse sometimes “start” the fight by yelling, or asserting themselves in some way, and still can have their self-esteem so under-minded that they can’t leave (or any of the millions of reasons that women “don’t leave”, from money to children to no support). MRA’s frequently talk about “mutual combat” but that’s somewhat of a misnomer. Even in the video, when Megan Fox starts the fight by yelling and slapping ineffectively at the Dominic character, it is clear that she’s the victim. She can’t do a damn thing against him. He’s so much stronger than her in, and demonstrates this again and again. But, we have this idea that if women aren’t perfect, they don’t do all the right things, they don’t deserve “protection” and it’s not really domestic abuse. Victims of domestic violence can have terrible tempers, be lazy, be depressed, be any number of things that are, shall we say “human” and still be victims of domestic abuse and still need help and assistance. And abusers aren’t monsters- a lot of times it’s hard to leave an abuser because it is mixed up with love as much as fear.

We get a lot of conflicting messages from society about our interpersonal relationships that it makes it difficult to figure out normal, non-toxic relationships. And not just romantic ones- relationships in general. My father is abused my mom and is more than a little sexist. He also taught me how to throw a baseball and showed up to every single one of my baseball games. For every instance of him yelling, screaming, and basically acting like a time-bomb that we had to tip-toe around because the most random thing would set him off, there is probably another equally powerful memory of him being a loving, caring father. For every voice that says in society that we should shun batterers, there’s the conflicting message of loving your family no matter what.

I read somewhere (I thought No Longer Quivering, but I can’t find it now) a description of someone staying with an abusive husband. Paraphrased, it was something like “Yes, there were two incidents of him hitting me that month, but there were 43 times of hugging, 3 random flower deliveries, 6 nights of great sex, and hundreds of smiles and soft kisses”. I think this video, in it’s somewhat ambiguous way, tries to show that. Like, if you look at about the 1 minute mark, it shows Dominic throwing Megan Fox into a wall, and then punching it to the point that it leaves a whole. A flash later, they’re running up to that wall to have passionate sex, and it’s sort of implied that happens one right after another in it. But if you look again, you see that a) it’s a different wall, that doesn’t have a fist imprint and b) that they’re wearing different clothes. This I think says more like “we have this terrible, self-destructive fights, but we also have moments were things are wonderful together too, do they cancel each other out?”

Domestic violence isn’t about big monster against a cringing passive victim. It’s about a human victimizing another human. An abuser isn’t a monster, just a human doing something that is wrong and seriously fucked-up. An abused person isn’t some perfect snowflake in need of rescuing, but another human being in need of support because s/he is being controlled. And I think that showing that narratives surrounding domestic violence are more complicated than people assume, or opposing the idea that the victims of the simplistic narratives are the only ones worthy of help can only be a good thing.

Scholars of boys and men converged Wednesday at Wagner College, in Staten Island, N.Y., to announce the creation of the Foundation for Male Studies, which will support a conference and a journal targeted at exploring the triumphs and struggles of the XY-chromosomed of the human race — without needing to contextualize their ideas as being one half of a male-female binary or an offshoot of feminist theory.

…I read that sentence like, three times in a row and it still made no sense to me…so I hadn’t reached the giggle moment yet–

More than anything else, the event was a chance for supporters to frame men and boys as an underrepresented minority

THERE WE GO!

Lionel Tiger, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, said the field takes its cues “from the notion that male and female organisms really are different”…The culprit, said Tiger, is feminism: “a well-meaning, highly successful, very colorful denigration of maleness as a force, as a phenomenon.”

Paul Nathanson, a researcher in religious studies at McGill University and co-author of a series of books on misandry — the hatred of men and boys — conceded that “there is some critique of feminism that’s going to be involved” in male studies. “There are some fundamental features of ideological feminism over the last 30 or 40 years that we need to question.”

He also decried “the institutionalization of misandry” which, he said, is “being generated by feminists, [though] not all feminists.”

Um…so basically what this is is the creation of the Foundation for Anti-Feminist Studies…it’s not really about men at all, is it? It’s Feminism Sucks 101! Which is why, truly, these folks are not calling their bullshit Men’s Studies, because, uh. Men’s Studies (an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to topics concerning men, masculinity, gender, and politics) already exists and has existed for the past 30 years.

Male studies’ combative tone toward feminism and women’s studies programs is one reason why Robert Heasley, president of the American Men’s Studies Association, turned down an invitation to speak at the event.

Yeah, I don’t suppose he’s too crazy about the idea of his actual, real academic discipline getting associated with a hate movement.

Edward Stevens, chair of the On Step Institute for Mental Health Research, said he wants to see male studies search for ways to improve male academic performance. “What are the ethical concerns of devoting 90 percent of resources to one gender?” he asked (though without explaining exactly what he meant).

LOL, seriously! which gender is that and how can I join up? Cuz that doesn’t describe either of the genders that I’m familiar with…this is SO funny! And amazing that anybody would want to waste their one-and-only adult life on this kind of crap, either founding it or, er, “studying” it. The Westboro Baptist Church, Ann Coulter, “Male” Studies…it takes all kinds…what would a deck of cards be without the jokers? I mean, I’ve never actually played a game of cards in which the jokers were ever used but I’d have missed them if they weren’t there in the deck when I pulled it out of the box! If I even noticed they weren’t there in the first place, I would SO miss ‘em!

I have kept my mouth shut about this…til now. But this is really the outside of enough, folks. I mean, come ON!

Study: Lack of breastfeeding costs lives, billions of dollars

(CNN) — If most new moms would breastfeed their babies for the first six months of life, it would save nearly 1,000 lives and billions of dollars each year,

Let me note now that I breastfed both my children til each one was a year old and breastfed exclusively through the first four months, so my absolute disgust with this article is in no way some kinda guilt-fueled defensive huffiness. I was a good little Mommie! I saved nearly 1,000 lives and billions of dollars each year! (I could use some of that money right now too, thanks–drop me an email, whoever is holding onto that?)

Dr. Melissa Bartick, one of the new study’s co-authors, says the vast majority of extra costs incurred each year could be saved “if 80 to 90 percent of women exclusively breastfed for as little as four months and if 90 percent of women would breastfeed some times until six months.”

Bartick and her co-author Arnold Reinhold found that most of the excess costs are due to premature deaths.

Oh good. Let’s examine these babies, heartlessly slaughtered by their mothers’ psychotic refusal to breastfeed! I mean, who knew…

Nearly all, 95 percent of these deaths, are attributed to three causes: sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS); necrotizing enterocolitis, seen primarily in preterm babies and in which the lining of the intestinal wall dies; and lower respiratory infections such as pneumonia.

Breastfeeding has been shown to reduce the risk of all of these

So, basically what we have here is:

1. Breastfeeding reduces the risk of SIDS.
2. Breastfeeding reduces the risk of either having a preterm baby or of that preterm baby dying of necrotizing enterocolitis.
3. Breastfeeding reduces the risk of a baby either catching a lower respiratory infection or of dying of a lower respiratory infection.

I like no. 1, because SIDS is defined as a syndrome marked by the sudden death of an infant that is unexpected by history and remains unexplained after a thorough forensic autopsy and a detailed death scene investigation. In other words, SIDS isn’t actually a cause of death–it’s a lack of knowledge of the cause of death even after an autopsy and death scene investigation. Back to SIDS:

Risk factors that are not causes of SIDS

The cause of SIDS is unknown. Any proposed causation factor must be either necessary and sufficient to cause SIDS by itself (as the rabies virus causes rabies) or necessary and insufficient to cause SIDS by itself (as the typhus bacillus may or may not cause typhoid, a la ‘Typhoid Mary’).

Although studies have identified risk factors for SIDS, such as putting infants to bed on their stomachs, there has been little understanding of the syndrome’s biological cause or potential causes. The frequency of SIDS appears to be a strong function of the infant’s sex, age and ethnicity, and the education and socio-economic-status of the infant’s parents.

Listed below are several risk factors associated with increased probability of the syndrome based on information available prior to this recent study.

Prenatal risks

* maternal nicotine use (tobacco or nicotine patch)
* inadequate prenatal care
* inadequate prenatal nutrition
* use of heroin, cocaine and other drugs
* subsequent births less than one year apart
* alcohol use
* infant being overweight
* mother being overweight
* Teen pregnancy (if the baby has a teen mother, it has a greater risk)
* infant’s sex (60% of SIDS cases occur in males)

Post-natal risks

* mold
* low birth weight
* exposure to tobacco smoke
* prone sleep position
* not breastfeeding
* elevated or reduced room temperature
* excess bedding, clothing, soft sleep surface and stuffed animals
* Co-sleeping with parents or other siblings may increase risk for SIDS, but the mechanism remains unclear
* infant’s age (incidence rises from zero at birth, is highest from two to four months, and declines towards zero at one year)
* premature birth (increases risk of SIDS death by about 4 times. In 1995-1998 the U.S. SIDS rate for 37–39 weeks of gestation was 0.73/1000; The SIDS rate for 28–31 weeks of gestation was 2.39/1000)
* anemia

Well, NOT BREASTFEEDING is in there…along with twenty other risk factors. But why let that stop us from making massive, sweeping general statements about the hordes of babies dying from SIDS caused by lack of breastfeeding?

On to no. 2…I really don’t think we can make a case that breastfeeding has much to do with whether or not your baby is premature, given that breastfeeding can’t start prior to birth, so I’m assuming that the study authors are saying that the preterm baby specifically dying of necrotizing enterocolitis is caused by a lack of breastfeeding. So let’s look at that.

Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is a medical condition primarily seen in premature infants, where portions of the bowel undergo necrosis (tissue death).

NEC has no definitive known cause.[3] An infectious agent has been suspected, as cluster outbreaks in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) have been seen, but no common organism has been identified.

Not breasfeeding probably swept through those particular NICU wards, like a fever of anti-sisterhood!

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is suspected for causing necrotising enterocolitis in premature infants and neutropaenic cancer patients,[often secondary to gut colonisation. A combination of intestinal flora, inherent weakness in the neonatal immune system, empirical antibiotic use for 5 days or more,alterations in mesenteric blood flow and milk feeding may be factors.

Ooh, there it is!

NEC is almost never seen in infants before oral feedings are initiated.

Lest we lose our comprehension entirely of the situation in our eagerness to obsess on breastfeeding as akin to the Ten Commandments, reread that sentence. In other words, the primary risk factor, hands down, for necrotizing enterocolitis, is being born before your digestive system has finished maturing. Period. Your mother’s tits or lack thereof were not even involved. Rinse, repeat–

But, to be fair:

Formula feeding increases the risk of NEC by tenfold compared to infants who are fed breastmilk alone.

For more clarity as to why this is:

Neonatologists at the University of Iowa NICU reported on the importance of providing small amounts of trophic oral feeds of human milk starting ASAP, while the infant is being primarily fed intravenously, in order to prime the immature gut to mature and become ready to receive greater oral intake (Ziegler and Carlson, J Matern Fetal Neonatal Med. 2009 Mar;22(3):191-7.) Human milk from a milk bank or donor can be used if mother’s milk is unavailable.

This is a medical treatment, not a lifestyle choice. This has absolutely zero to do with whether or not you started supplementing Junior’s breastmilk diet with pureed pear when he was three months old, nor even if the second you got Janey out of the hospital and home you popped a bottle of Similac into her little mouth. Neither baby is at any risk anymore of necrotizing enterocolitis

Moving on to no. 3, a quick review of the medical literature out there will quickly inform you that, by far, the greatest risk factor for both catching and dying of a lower respiratory tract infection as a baby is…you guessed it…being born prematurely. Which, as we’ve already demonstrated, doesn’t have shit to do with breastfeeding as it’s hard to wiggle a nipple up your cervix while gestating and even if you are a circus-grade contortionist and can manage it, you’re not producing milk and your fetus wants and needs said milk about as much as it wants and needs a cellphone or new car. Let me repeat: neonatal mortality (occurring within 28 days of birth) accounts for the great majority of baby deaths, and the leading cause of neonatal death is prematurity. So, basically, the deaths we are talking about preventing with breastfeeding are postneonatal (between 28 days after birth and one year).

I couldn’t find a US study concentrating specifically on postneonatals, breastfeeding and lower respiratory infection, but I did find a UK study, and their breastfeeding statistics seem similar to ours, so here are the numbers:

Seventy percent of infants were breastfed (ever), 34% received breast milk for at least 4 months, and 1.2% were exclusively breastfed for at least 6 months. By 8 months of age, 3.2% of infants had been hospitalized for lower respiratory tract infection.

Wow. 98.8% of the babies weren’t exclusively breastfed and 66% of them didn’t even get breast milk for at least 4 months! And…96.8% of them did not catch a lower respiratory tract infection.

Population-attributable fractions suggest that an estimated 27% of lower respiratory tract infection hospitalizations could have been prevented each month by exclusive breastfeeding and 25% by partial breastfeeding.

So, put another way–breastfeeding wouldn’t have prevented about three-quarters of the lower respiratory tract infections from occurring at all.

FEARMONGERING AND WOMAN-BLAMING–MY FAVORITES!

In conclusion, I would like to point out that indeed, there are some benefits to the health of your child if you choose to breastfeed some or all of the time. However, if you don’t, you are not costing society billions of dollars nor are you causing any babies, including your own, to die of anything at all. And everyone who says you are is full of shit. End message!

Aww, that’s such a romantic pict–! hmm, wait. Isn’t that guy about twenty years older than that barely pubescent girl..? I mean, I can see some serious crepe-like flesh going on under that manly-man jawline there–oh, well, it’s not like even the most superficial perusal of internet porn won’t immediately inform you that “barely legal” is an overwhelmingly common male fanta–uh, wait again. Is that hairy old dude that sweet little sex kitten is being manfully embraced by HER DAD–?

Now, now, maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe this is really meant to portray the pure innocence and beauty of the father-daughter bond, and I just have a dirty, corrupt mind. I’m sure another picture from the very same photo shoot will absolutely clear up any doubt I could possibly have about the theme of this particular series of Miley and Billy Ray Cyrus publicity photos–

Yep, that definitely cleared that up.

But this is old news! The new news is that the sexualization of children shown above is apparently way, way too subtle. The message has not been gotten across, dammit! And Billy Ray Cyrus clearly ain’t gonna let that happen. You know, he has another daughter, and to eliminate the confusing nature of using the daughter that might have actually entered puberty sometime around the date of the photo shoot, this one is clearly nowhere near even the beginnings of sexual maturation.

Because 9-year-olds need a sexy line of lingerie!

..little 9-year-old Noah Cyrus is set to become a lingerie model.

She’ll be teaming up with her pint-sized best friend Emily Grace to launch a children’s lingerie collection for ‘Ohh! La, La! Couture’.

The company’s website describes The Emily Grace Collection as having a “trendy, sweet, yet edgy feel, reminiscent of Emily’s true personality.”

Emily’s collection will appeal not just to little girls – the line also has an exclusive Teen Collection available to a size 14.

Goodness, I suspect you’re right about that. This collection won’t just appeal to little girls.

(Jon does also take on ACORN, pretty hilariously, here.)

Now, last I checked, America was overseas from Belgium. And it has women in it. And sometimes those women are raped by famous movie directors who flee the country when a judge catches that person acting like an a-hole after making a plea deal that will get him off scot free.

Now, I could be completely hammer-to-the-head insane, but doesn’t it seem like “equality” is meant as a synonym for “justice,” and that justice for a woman who is raped is, at the very least, to see her attacker brought to justice? I realize Polanski’s victim just wants the case gone, but there’s also the question of the broader social implication of just letting rape go if you’re famous and rich enough to evade the law for a couple decades. That doesn’t seem like much equality to me.

Apparently Joan Z. Shore disagrees. But before we get into that, let’s be clear about something: The Swiss used to be cool.

I used to admire [The Swiss] — their clean, orderly, decorous way of life. Their stubborn independence and self-reliance. I forgave them for the years they never joined the United Nations, and even now, not joining the European Union.

I always love talking about a nation’s people like they’re identical beings popped right off the national assembly line. Who doesn’t love the Borg?

There was so much affection wafting from Shore towards the Swiss that she even waived the Wand of Dismissal o’er the Swiss collaboration with Nazi Germany:

When I learned, years ago, that they had blithely allowed German military trains to transit their country during the Second World War, while claiming Swiss “neutrality,” I was shocked, but tried to excuse them on grounds that they were protecting their country from invasion and armed warfare.

But now? This Roman Polanski extradition is, objectively, the most heinous act in the history of the multiverse.

Arresting Roman Polanski the other day in Zurich, where he was to receive an honorary award at a film festival, was disgraceful and unjustifiable. Polanski, now 76, has been living in France for over thirty years, and has been traveling and working in Europe unhindered, but the Swiss acted on an old extradition treaty with the U.S. and seized him!

So, we have understandable Nazi compliance, but “disgusting and unjustifiable” extradition of an admitted rapist escaping punishment. This seems like a clear-headed view of the situation.

Making this an even more sensitive equivocation by Ms. Shore, Polanski was a Holocaust refugee. I wonder what he’d say if you put this question to Polanski himself: is it easier to forgive a country for turning over a wanted criminal or for letting the Nazis ship troops and supplies on its railways?

I won’t answer for him, but I will say this: Switzerland may be brought to their knees by Shore’s uber-classy, enlightened call to action.

I suggest, in the finest American tradition, we protest this absurd and deplorable act by smashing our cuckoo clocks, pawning our Swiss watches, and banning Swiss cheese and chocolate.

And let them yodel all they like.

Sounds like a person totally invested in equality to me.

I had seen this post by Melissa MacEwan of Shakeville before Hugo wrote about it, but I hadn’t been aware of her follow-up post til he linked to it. Basically, her emphasis in her follow-up post and Hugo’s primary message in his own were the same–in their own words:

Melissa: Feminist men who do the right thing often do it quietly, while misogynist men spew their rubbish at incredible volumes…If, my esteemed male feminist allies, you don’t want to be part of the problem, these fights have got to be your province, too. Giving yourselves the permission to not get publicly involved, or to get publicly involved only when it’s convenient and not all that risky and not all that hard, is the ultimate expression of privilege.

Hugo: I was able to assent intellectually to the principles of feminism long before I was courageous enough to espouse them in potentially hostile settings. I had to take baby steps. Identifying as a feminist in a women’s studies class came before identifying as a feminist in an all-male environment. But I felt a sense of urgency; it is male privilege that allows feminist men to pick and choose to join battles into which women are regularly drafted against their will. If we’re serious about our feminism, we can’t just be allies when it’s safe or convenient, we can’t merely offer soothing reassurance in private to the women in our lives. We’ve got to do it as publicly as possible, remembering that our primary usefulness to the egalitarian cause lies in our willingness to model publicly a different way of living as brothers, fathers, sons, husbands, lovers, bosses, students, roommates, coworkers and friends.

(emphasis on convenient mine)

Certainly this is something I’ve thought about before–even written about, rather passionately–grounded as it is in the unavoidable knowledge that women will never achieve true equality if we can’t get more than 50% of the human race on board with that as a basic societal truth. But seeing Hugo write about it made me pause for a second, because Hugo is, after all, a man…who apparently doesn’t entirely know what he’s talking about. Not when it comes to being a man representing feminism, or even anything remotely like feminism, in an all-male environment…a hostile setting.

I used to be pretty close to someone, a man, who had spent nearly 20 years in the military by the time I knew him. When he was 19 years old, he was stationed in Korea. Now, nobody in the Army brought his family over to Korea then; the Army wouldn’t pay for it and there was no real housing available there for family, schools for the kids, etc. Few Army women were sent to Korea, as nearly all the military specialties over there were either combat arms (outright banned to women) or very closely combat arms-related, in which there weren’t too many women serving to begin with. In short, it was essentially an “all-male environment”–not just for a few hours a day every few days or so, but 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And as anyone who has either been stationed there himself or has been very close to someone who has been stationed there knows, the standard operating procedure was for all the guys to go out together at night, get hammered, and patronize prostitutes.

Now, my friend was not particularly feminist–certainly not at age 19. But he didn’t want to patronize prostitutes. He’d only had sex a few times in his life period prior to being stationed in Korea; he was, he told me, frightened and repelled by the idea of doing it with a prostitute, just like that. His stint in Korea was only a month long–it was a training exercise–so, he said, he did manage to avoid having to do it–though both he and I doubted that he would have been able to continue to successfully refuse if he’d been stationed there for the standard 12-month Army rotation.

Because I don’t think Hugo and Melissa really know what a hostile all-male setting really consists of, sometimes, especially to a five-foot-nine inch, 140 pound, 19 year old boy. Like this*:

A Youth Radio investigation has found that between 2004 and 2006, sailors in the U.S. Navy’s Bahrain Military Working Dogs Division, or “The Kennel,” were subjected to an atmosphere of sexual harassment, psychological humiliation, and physical assaults.

It was inside that Bahrain kennel in July 2005 that Petty Officer Joseph Christopher Rocha, then 19 years old, says he was being terrorized by other members of his own division. “I was hog-tied to a chair, rolled around the base, left in a dog kennel that had feces spread in it.”

Rocha says that beginning six weeks into his deployment, he was singled out for abuse by his chief master-at-arms, Michael Toussaint, and others on the base, once Rocha made it clear he was not interested in prostitutes. “I was in a very small testosterone-driven unit of men,” Rocha says. “I think that’s what began the questioning-you know-‘Why don’t you want to have sex with her? Are you a faggot?’”

Youth Radio has conducted interviews and obtained documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) showing that the hog-tying episode was not the first or only case of harassment and abuse during Rocha’s deployment. In another incident cited in the documents, Rocha was forced to appear in a twisted “training video.” A member of the Working Dogs Division, Petty Officer Shaun Hogan, recalls the scene.

“Petty Officer Rocha and another junior sailor…were instructed to go into a classroom by Chief Michael Toussaint, who orchestrated the entire training. And Chief Toussaint asked them to simulate homosexual sex on a couch,” Hogan says.

Next in the simulation, Hogan says a handler and his dog barged onto the scene, and that’s when “one person…would sit up, kind of wipe off their mouth, the other would get up, and they would be fixing their fly.”

Rocha says Toussaint bullied him, “telling me I needed to be more believable, act more queer, have a higher pitched voice, make the sounds and gestures more realistic…I didn’t think I had a choice…It made me feel that I wasn’t a human being, that I was an animal, rather.”

Youth Radio has obtained a copy of both Braden’s investigation and the Navy’s Findings of Fact, which detail what happened to Rocha, in addition to incidents involving other service members. The FOIA documents have been redacted, so names are blocked out, but the actions listed include: throwing hard balls at the groin, spraying down uniformed personnel with multiple hoses, and a dog attacking a sex worker on base to the point of hospitalization.

Youth Radio’s investigation includes interviewing four members of the Bahrain Working Dogs Division who served between 2004 and 2006. All say the tone was set by Chief Toussaint. Some sailors participated in the culture of hazing as victims, others as perpetrators, or in some cases both.

When discussing his own Korea experience with my friend, I suggested that it might have been different if he’d been sent there as a sergeant in his 30′s rather than as a scared private of 19–he laughed and agreed: “Oh my God yeah…I wish I could go back there now…and this time they’d be like, ‘What’s wrong with you, man? Are you gay?’ and I’d be like, ‘That’s right, not only am I gay…I am THE gay**!’” But that’s now…as a mature adult man who has been to war and seen terrible things, who has the full growth and strength of a male in his physical prime, who has had enough sex of his own choosing to feel comfortable and confident in his own sexuality–and also, as a man with the authority of a senior noncommissioned officer’s rank.

I was in the Army myself, at age 18, in a heavily male environment–I know exactly what that’s like. There is no way in hell you could reasonably expect any of those boys to buck the system, and no, not just because they would be called names, or ostracized–they would be at serious risk of physical and sexual assault…just like I would have been if I’d ever made waves myself. And no feminist alive would have expected me to open my mouth and speak out under those circumstances. Male privilege doesn’t exist anymore when everyone in the group is already male, does it..?

So Hugo’s and Melissa’s messages are important…but they are lacking context. Which would be the privilege of never having served in our glorious Armed Forces, I would imagine. If you really want to advance the cause of feminism, first you’re going to push to make those spaces safe for the young men inhabiting them. That must come first, or you will never accomplish anything real and lasting in terms of encouraging young men to speak up for gender equality. And for God’s sake don’t trivialize a situation you can’t or won’t understand by calling it inconvenient…haven’t we had enough of that from the anti-choicers?

*via Pam

**He’s heterosexual, I should mention–you get his point, though.

This act is both cowardly and aggressive.  Pro-forced birth proponents may not be willing to kick in a door, interrupt a medical procedure and incarcerate a woman until she gives birth against her will.  They would, however, clap with psychotic glee as the police point guns at women to ‘save unborn lives.’

How can anybody imagine that “common ground” can be found between people seeking the most basic recognition of their humanity and a throng of mystics begging and pleading for the state to enforce their preference that women bear children at all costs and against their will?  Can anyone expect a reasoned debate about the moral nature of anything when one side is willing to detain, imprison or kill the other and those that aid them?

Anti-choice’ers take cover behind the illusion of civil discourse in an attempt to hide the barbaric means that they employ.  They are given a pass because they do not pull the trigger themselves but “vote” for others to point the guns.

The spokespeople for the anti-choice movement cannot condemn outright the actions of a lunatic who murders a doctor.  That is exactly the penalty they want imposed if a doctor refuses to obey their preferences.

It took a few readings, but I finally figured out that the above statement is the thesis of Kathryn Jean Lopez’s article “What Feminism Wrought.” I’m not sure if it took me so long to figure that out because of the incoherent, disjointed way the author was trying to get that central idea across or because that central idea is so impossible to seriously assign to any reasonably well-educated, literate person. However, I finally Got It.

On the off-chance that the above masterpiece of journalistic commentary is the very first article read by an alien that crash-landed on Earth five minutes earlier and is desperately trying to assimilate enough of our history and culture to “pass” as an Earthling while he scavenges parts to repair his flying saucer, I am providing the following:

(Actual, real historical and cultural information about the frequency of men hitting women in pre-feminist western European culture and how men hitting women was actually regarded by those contemporaries.)

Enjoy.

When “feminism” first became something that anybody had ever even heard of, much less a driving sociopolitical force in the Western world:

In 1789, during the French Revolution, Olympe de Gouges published a ‘Declaration of the Rights of Woman’ to protest the revolutionists’ failure to mention women in their ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’. In ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’ (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft called for enlightenment of the female mind. (via)

The word “feminism” appeared first in France in the 1880s, Great Britain in the 1890s, and the United States in 1910.[11][12] The Oxford English Dictionary lists 1894 for “feminism”, and 1895 for “feminist”.[13] Prior to that time “Woman’s Rights” was probably the term used most commonly, hence Queen Victoria’s description of this “mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights’ “.[14] (via)

So, we want to head back in time prior to the late 1700s.

(via)

Reality. It bites.

According to an article in the Boston Globe, an informal poll taken among 200 teenagers has revealed that almost half of them blame the pop star Rihanna for her recent beating, allegedly by her boyfriend, Chris Brown.

It’s just one survey. But it’s very bad news. And feminists are to blame.—Kathryn Jean Lopez, “What Feminism Wrought”, National Review Online

The need for some return to sanity is presented pretty clearly in an article in the April issue of O, the Oprah Magazine. The article details how some women find themselves leaving men in favor of relationships with partners of their own gender.

…

This article isn’t about closeted homosexuality. It’s not making the case that there is a vast population of women who were born to be with women, who are instead trapped in unfulfilling heterosexual arrangements. No, this article, despite its celebration of unconventional lifestyles, boils down to something much more orthodox: Femininity and masculinity mix well together. And women are taking masculinity where they can get it, even if that’s in the arms of another woman.

This article? Is about that?

Feminist theorists were among the first to begin to uncouple sex from gender. In 1949 French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published her groundbreaking book The Second Sex, with the famous line, “One is not born, but becomes a woman,” suggesting that classic female characteristics—passivity, shyness, nurturing—aren’t just biological but are embedded by parents and culture. Today, after the women’s liberation movement’s crusade for equality between the sexes, thinkers like Halberstam are challenging the very definition of gender roles. And as with sexual desire, the idea of fluidity is gaining currency, as evidenced by an ever-expanding vocabulary: transgender, transsexual, transvestite, boi, heteroflexible, intersex. And many who embrace fluidity are adopting the term gender queer with pride. —Mary A. Fischer, “Why Women Are Leaving Men For Other Women (p. 6)”, O, The Oprah Magazine

I mean, the O Magazine article isn’t exactly the most transgressive piece I’ve ever read. But neither is it wholly reductive, and neither does it—for instance—actually say what Kathryn Jean Lopez wants it to say. Actually, Fischer’s piece in O does a decent job expressing the experiences of a variety of women. Some women she talks to are certainly attracted to qualities in their partners that are idealized in romantic masculinity. But other women, plainly, aren’t. Some of them find that they’re attracted to qualities typed feminine, some women find they’re attracted to qualities not generally gendered. In at least two of the couples she discusses, one partner expresses unambiguously non-binary gender identity.

Certainly though, the Fischer article isn’t without problems. Each couple she highlights appears to have least one cisgender woman with a fairly traditional westernized feminine gender presentation, and one woman with less mainstream gender presentation and, frequently, gender identity. (I say appears, because that’s how the couples are portrayed in the article; it doesn’t necessarily reflect these women’s experiences.) Also in each case, Fischer centers the narrative on the experience of the cis, feminine partner. Macarena Gomez-Barris clashed with her husband over the fact that she made more money than he did, eventually separated from him, and then met Judith Halberstam—who we learn two pages later prefers to call herself Jack and has a non-binary gender identity, and who was apparently hanging around waiting for Gomez-Barris to arrive.

And when she talks about non-binary gender identities, we get quotes like this:

In the fall of 2007, at a Buddhist gathering, she met Jian Chen, now a 36-year-old graduate student who identifies as a “boi,” a place somewhere between butch and transsexual. “I’m interested in androgyny,” DeClue says with a playful smile. “I like a masculine exterior and feminine interior.”

Which… is it terrible? No. I quite like the love and playfulness that’s shining through. But using a cis woman’s words to define the gender identity of a non-cis person? That’s problematic. And imposing a spectrum (“a place somewhere between butch and transsexual,”) is, yes, an improvement over the two boxes / no overlap model, but is hardly the best description of gender as it actually exists or as it is actually experienced. And while I appreciate the inclusion of Chen and DeClue purely from the standpoint of improving the visibility of non-cis people—and the implication that, yes, non-cis people can have loving meaningful relationships with people who don’t vomit upon seeing their genitals—I’m far from convinced that including a genderqueer person in an article titled “Why Women Are Leaving Men For Other Women” isn’t just a teensy bit, well, essentializing.

(I’m not even going to touch page 3, where we learn that J. Michael Bailey thinks that women’s sexual desire is, “more changeable over time,” which constitutes, “a fundamental difference between men’s and women’s brains.”)

All of this means the article—so close to being a genuinely-moving-if-shallow exploration of gender and sexuality—actually reads at various points more like it’s titled, “Why Women Are Leaving Men For Other Women (Who Are Actually A Lot Like Men, So Your Patriarchal Notions Of Gender Identity And Presentation Need Not Feel Overly Threatened)”.

That said, Jean Lopez’s point in referencing O‘s article is that it demonstrates how confusing and harmful all this gender theory whoziwhatsit is. Those poor girls! Having to (put on suits | turn to women wearing suits) to get their fix of masculinity! To Kathryn Jean Lopez, these profiles demonstrate with blinding clarity how much we need a “return” to traditional gender roles.

Fischer’s article does not demonstrate that.

Whatever traps she may fall into, Fischer gets one thing across very clearly: these women aren’t troubled, confused, or harmed. They’re happy. They’re in love. Whatever it is they’re doing, however difficult it may be to analyze, and however deeply it may confuse Jean Lopez, it is blindingly obvious that their lives are filled with exuberance, joy, and fulfillment.

So I don’t think their experiences support Jean Lopez’s thesis. I don’t think she gets to use their lives to prop up her cardboard longing for a return to a simpler, pre-feminist time. A time when Men were Men and Women were Women and nobody was ever confused with or unhappy in their proscribed gender roles, and husbands never beat their wives, never raped them, never killed them—and if these things happened somehow, well, they happened in bedrooms and whispers, not on the front page—and certainly, women were never, ever blamed for their own suffering, pain, and death.