Shorts

As we gear up for a nice long weekend, some short little comments.

1. Have y'all been following the "grey rape" discussion? I've tried to avoid really engaging because I don't think some things really warrant a discussion (i.e. the question of whether or not someone was raped if she was passed out and woke up to find a man having sex with, umm, raping, her). But I do want to throw out a brief position stolen from a button I got my freshman year of college: "If she says no, it's rape." And, oh yeah, if she's passed out, it's also rape.

2. Larry Craig's 15 minutes have lasted 15 minutes too long.

3. Unrelated to all our relevant issues, but how tragic is that many of the dogs that Michael Vick tortured and turned into monsters will likely now have to be put down because many are unrehabilitatable (word?)?

Online mapping higlights/lowlights

So I'm the one who spends a large percentage of her time thinking about online tools. But every once in a while, a website really sticks out.

Vision 20/20: is a website that mostly sells you GPS tools to track your children's movements (you can set an alarm to call you when your child roams "out of bounds" or outside the neighborhood):

“...without it there is no way that I would have known that my
daughter was on her way to the beach after hours.”

So, pretty creepy to begin with, sure, but their new free service takes it just one step further. A tool to map where people who have been convicted of sexual assault live. Then, once you do a search, you can call up individual mug shot/criminal record/address. I understand that all of this information is, in fact, public, but making criminal records immediately available and having your criminal record follow you for the rest of your life seems extreme to me. I understand the thinking behind it (protect your kids by scanning your neighbors for criminal records), and I don't support sexual assault, but it seems like we lose something important in a society where every past action becomes visible. And these things always start with the crimes related to sex (scarlet letter to now), because we're quicker to judge. Maybe I should start looking for some google map mash up of white collar crime?

I guess it boils down to: Which do I find more disturbing--the fact that this tool exists, or the fact the I tried it and was a little wowed by the beauty and sophistication of their maps?

Thanks for freaking me out, techcrunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/25/sex-offenders-in-your-neighborhood/

Where in the world is South Carolina?

Seems the latest item making the rounds is this video (thanks YouTube) of Miss South Carolina sputtering out an inarticulate response to a question about map-reading. Great. A questions though.

1. Must we get our jollies by making fun of a teenage girl who really has done nothing wrong (i.e. cruel, immoral, illegal) except apparently be less educated (or articulate) than the "rest of us?"

2. Why are we surprised that a girl who has been clearly valued largely for her appearance may not have been encouraged to excel academically?

3. Why do we, in 2007, still live in a society where (some? many? most? all?) women are valued largely for their appearance and then tormented for living up to that imperative?

Cincinnati Court Upholds Right to Privacy

Good Morning - I was born and raised in Cincinnati and left right after college, never to return. One of the reasons being that Cincinnati was so archly conservative that I felt I was suffocating under all that repressive history. And trying to curtail constitutional freedoms is part of that historical baggage. Who can ever forget one of Cincinnati's most shameful hours when Robert Mapplethorp's The Perfect Moment exhibit in 1990 resulted in the unsuccessful prosecution of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and its director Dennis Barrie on charges of "pandering obscenity"?

But something wonderful happened recently that makes me think that there is hope for our constitutional guarantees in my birthplace.

A three-judge panel of the 1st Ohio District Court of Appeals on Friday unanimously ruled that a Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region clinic does not have to provide all records of abortions given to women under 18 to lawyers of a family who is suing the clinic.

Seeing courts uphold the right to privacy, especially in places like Cincinnati, Ohio, give me reason to believe that we will prevail in our long struggle to uphold a woman's right to self-determination.

As Becki Brenner, president and CEO for PPSOR, said, "This [ruling] is a victory for patients and their right to medical privacy" (AP/Cincinnati Post, 8/24).

And it is, big time!

For more on this story, go here...

Say it ain't so

Oh God. I just read on Broadsheet that a a security camera caught a 26-year-old woman in Minnesota being beaten and raped for over an hour in the hallway of an apartment building. But what really saddens me is that the security footage shows at least 10 neighbors peeking out of their apartments and venturing down the hallway to investigate the commotion -- but no one intervened. The police were finally called nearly 90 minutes into the attack, reports the Star Tribune.

Yes, there is a phenomenon called "bystander syndrome" or the bystander effect where someone is less likely to help out in an emergency situation when other people are present. Presumably because everyone thinks that someone else is going to help. (An infamous examples isthe 1964 Genovese case where a woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in 1964 by a serial rapist and murderer on the streets of Queens.)

I dunno -- admittedly never having been in that situation, I can't say for certain that I wouldn't fall prey to the syndrome, but I still have a hard time believing that anyone could witness a woman being raped without at MINIMUM calling 911. Maybe next time, since tragically there will no doubt be a next time, everyone should assume that nobody is calling for help and therefore be the one to do it.

Imagine that poor woman just waiting for help that didn't come. I can't get it out of my head. Neither should the people who let her wait.

What's the matter with Missouri?

Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri (PPKM) has filed a lawsuit challenging a recently enacted Missouri law that requires PPKM's two clinics that provide abortion services in Missouri to be licensed as "surgi-centers."

Interestingly enough, one of the two clinics does not even provide surgical abortions (or any other surgeries for that matter.) But the state is taking the position that the medication abortion that the clinic does provides somehow triggers the surgi-center licensing requirement.

The other clinic, in Columbia, Missouri, has been providing first trimester "surgical" abortions for many years. And, while the regulations for surgi-center licensing provides modified requirements for existing facilities -- requirements that the Columbia Center could meet -- Missouri is insisting that those "grandfathering" provisions are not available here, and that both clinics must comply with the specific and elaborate requirements applicable to new facilities.

Ugh.

As the PPKM CEO Peter Brownlie said “Forcing Planned Parenthood clinics in Columbia and Kansas City to close would not stop women in Missouri from getting abortions...Women would travel farther and spend more money at greater risk to their health to get abortions."

He adds that the the new law "should be declared unconstitutional because it is unreasonable, burdensome and discriminates against abortion providers."

I would agree and add that it also puts an undue burden on the women seeking an abortion who would face much greater obstacles in accessing care if the centers were forced to close due to an onerous, illogical and biased law.

Let's define consensual

Today, Lynn Harris over at Broadsheet calls our attention to a website called Christian Domestic Discipline/Loving Wife Spanking in a Christian Marriage. She points out that the site is designed for "married couples who practice safe and consensual Christian Domestic Discipline, or for those who would like to learn more about it."

Umm. Ok. I guess.

But the part that I find troubling is that the site sets up the relationships in power dynamics that appear frighteningly exploitable, explaining that a domestic discipline marriage is one in which one partner in the marriage is given authority over the other and has the means to back the authority, usually by spanking. But it's not one partner as in, umm, either partner.

It's partner as in the husband: "A Christian Domestic Discipline marriage is one that is set up according to Biblical standards; that is, the husband is the authority in the household. The wife is submissive to her husband as is fit in the Lord and her husband loves her as himself... It is the husband loving the wife enough to guide and teach her, and the wife loving the husband enough to follow his leadership."

In case any of this remained unclear, the non-debatable rules are succintly repeated: "The wife is to submit to her husband, and the husband is to love the wife... the husband has authority to spank the wife. The wife does not have authority to spank her husband."

Well, call me crazy, but while entering into the agreement may (may) be consensual, it doesn't sound all that easy to extricate oneself if one ultimately decides that subservience and discipline isn't quite what she fancies after all. I wonder if my concern is borne out by some of the womens' blogs, which include commentary about needing/deserving a spanking, trusting one's husband to know when they've been disobedient (and therefore need a spanking), listing household rules they may not break as well as general self-esteem issues pre-dating the relationship.

Again, what goes on in the privacy of a consensual bedroom is none of mine or anyone else's business, but... this just doesn't sound like consent to me. (Especially since the site also includes a disclaimer saying that: "Though we believe the Bible gives a husband the authority to use spanking as one tool in enforcing his authority in the home with or without his wife's permission, in today's world we recognize the legality that mandates that all CDD must be consensual....")

But, I dunno, maybe I'm just not the submissive type.

***

And thanks to Cara over at The Curvature for blogging about the absolutely horrific rape and assault of a woman and her 12 year old son in the Dunbar Village housing project in West Palm Beach, Florida last month. Both the woman and her 12-year-old son were attacked and beaten. The woman was repeatedly raped and sodomized by up to 10 men. At gun point, she was forced to perform oral sex on her son. Then both were doused in household cleaners. The attack lasted for 3 hours, and nobody came to their aid during or after.

I had not previously seen media coverage of this, seems there hasn't been much. MSNBC did write about the crime, including the neighbors' tragic "this is what it's like here" response.

For more, click here or here.

And you call yourself a feminist....

Well, yes, I do. And it's therefore a bit surprising, even to me, that my current guilty pleasure is... America's Next Top Model.

I know that the modeling industry imposes arbitrary (and impossible) standards of beauty upon women and upon the models themselves. And in a climate of rampant eating disorders and financing for plastic surgery, it can be refreshing to see moves that ideally would encourage healthier eating, such as the one by Spain officials to ban models with a body-mass index of under 18 from the city's Fashion Week. And it's next to impossible to support the rampant sexualization of young girls. And we all know that the models's pictures are retouched, sometimes heavily, making the impossible standard of beauty even MORE impossible.

The list goes on and on. So why did I watch three hours of America's Next Top Model last night? Maybe because it was raining. Maybe because there's still something appealing and, dare I say, rewarding about watching young women gain an opportunity they otherwise wouldn't have received -- it is, after all, their lives and while I have issues with the industry per se, who am I to judge what other women want for themeselves?

And finally, I can't help but admire host Tyra Banks who, in addition to motivating the young women by encouraging them to be self-confident and believe in themselves, has herself challenged the standards imposed by the industry by refusing to be adhere to them! She gained some weight, she wore a bikini anyway, she was photographed galore and, in that moment, she actually inspired women to embrace themselves for who they are. Tough thing to do her line of work -- in any line of work, really -- but if she helps young women make a career, trust in themselves and maybe challenge external standards, that sounds like something darn close to feminism to me.

What do you all think?

Greenie, we hardly knew ya

We say a sad good-bye today to Greenstone Media, Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda's love child radio network, which went off the airwaves (and the internet) this past Friday. This radio station by women for women promised "good news, smart personalities, and important topics to help balance your work, family, and life." Despite the many calls for more women's voices in the media, the station just didn't take off in many locations.

I don't, however, think this failure speaks to the death of women's radio as some right-wing rags have claimed or to a lack of women listeners. I think, rather, it suggests that the solution to increasing women's voices isn't to carve out a "room of one's own" -- comforting an idea as that may be -- but rather to demand and claim the stronger place we deserve in mass-market media.

Wha?

Our friends over at Salon's broadsheet today highlight a disturbing -- and thought-provoking -- online quiz. Seems Radar created an online quiz (titled "Bitch Slap") aimed at comparing public comments about sport superstars accused of rape or domestic abuse with the spleen spewed at Michael Vick over allegations that he killed and tortured dogs.

The quiz author writes that :

“Vick's critics have been so unforgiving that a reporter in Pittsburgh went so far as to say that the player would have been "better off raping a woman." The reporter later apologized for his remarks but, based on people's vitriolic reactions, he may not have been so far off the mark.

It seems that Americans will tolerate certain things from their athletes—a sexual assault charge, stalking, the occasional domestic dispute—but they draw the line when it comes to their pooches. Does the public really value a pit bull over a woman? Radar has compiled a list of quotes to help you decide.”

Ugh.


The quotes included in the quiz generally support the author's thesis. Relatively forgiving quotes were directed at alleged rapists and abusers. After learning that the wife of alleged obsessive husband and Tampa Bay Devil Rays outfielder Elijah Dukes had sought a restraining order, the team manager said "In visiting with him, I can see he's pretty much upset. I anticipated that, so I thought the wise thing to do would be to not start him tonight and more than likely play him tomorrow."


Meanwhile, vitriol was directed at the dog abuser -- Senator Robert Byrd took to the Senate floor in July and shook with fury as he denounced the fights as "barbaric" and "sadistic," and advocated death for its practitioners, saying that "I have seen one individual in my lifetime electrocuted in the electric chair. ... It is not a beautiful spectacle. So I can say I could witness another one if it involves this [business] ..."


Just, y’know, as examples.


While it’s obviously tricky to use handpicked quotes and reader votes as the be-all and end-all of social commentary, I do think it at minimum raises a point about still existing biases against women: her skirt was too short, she asked for it, why didn’t she leave (see Monday’s post).


Sadly and disturbingly, there are all sorts of excuses people use to justify why a woman was abused. It’s a lot harder to blame the victim when it’s a dog.