The Frisky: "Being drunk is a feminist issue"

Thanks to the wonderful work of the women at Shakesville, I had the glorious pleasure of reading this article over at The Frisky, the pseudo-feminist online entertainment magazine: "Girl Talk: Why Being Drunk is a Feminist Issue". Now, as a woman who likes to imbibe, ahem, now and again, I was intruiged. Why is being drunk a feminist issue? The Frisky's Kate Torgovnik gives us an answer: it's because it makes us more likely to get raped.

Wait, what?

According to Torgovnik, she's just saying what many of us out here in femiblogoland are too afraid to say: "what if [a rape victim] had recognized she was getting drunk, slowed down, and had a few glasses of water before leaving that bar in that cab?" Well, what if? Sure, she could have not been raped. Or she could have. She could also have been blackout drunk and not been raped. The only difference in any of these scenarios is the presence of a rapist.

The problem here, as with most mainstream coverage of sexual assault, is that the question of why rape occurs is answered by looking at the woman's behaviour. She was drunk; she wasn't dressed properly; she was alone; she was out at night. The thing is, plenty of women are simultaneously all of these things every day, and they aren't victims of sexual assault. The difference isn't in the behaviour of the women -- the difference is that there is a man around who sees a girl who is completely hammered and thinks that she's an appropriate sexual conquest.

On top of all of this, Torgovnik makes what could generously be called interesting use of rape statistics to make her point. From the article:

In 47% of reported rapes (and I’m talking in this essay about heterosexual rape with female victims, though of course many other types exist), both the victim and the perpetrator had been drinking. In an additional 17%, the perpetrator only was intoxicated and in 7% of cases on top of that the victim only was tipsy.

After starting the article out with an anecdote where she makes the assumption that two dressed up drunk girls on the subway are likely to be assaulted before the night is out, the inclusion of these statistics makes it seem like those 47% of reported rapes are happening when women leave parties and then drunk rapists, I don't know, jump out of the bushes or drag them down an alleyway or something of the sort. This is simply not the case. As Melissa McEwan of Shakesville notes:

1. Asserting that women can avoid rape via sobriety only makes sense if the victim is drunk in the vast majority of rapes. That is not the case. 

2. Asserting that women can avoid rape via sobriety only makes sense if the vast majority of women who drink are raped as a consequence. That is not the case. 

3. Asserting that women can avoid rape via sobriety only makes sense if every rape that happens to a woman who's been drinking is committed by an opportunistic rapist who would not have otherwise raped her. That is not the case.

As she concludes: "The ultimate value of this advice to potential rape victims is thus negligible, given that, in practical terms, it boils down to: 'If you don't drink, it may or may not protect you from getting raped in some situations'."

Articles like this, while putting on a feminist face of about "becoming empowered" by restricting our leisure activities, contribute to a culture of violence where women's security of the person is considered violable if she doesn't act the right way or do the right things. In order to develop a truly feminist discourse about rape prevention, we need to direct our attention and advice to the group of people who are responsible for sexual violence: the rapists (or potential rapists) themselves. Articles like the one at The Frisky -- or almost every article published on the subject of sexual violence, in the abstract or the particular -- need to take responsibility for placing the focus on the perpetrator, rather than the victim. Handy feminist pro-tip: if you're publishing an article about rape that talks about the "injustices perpetrated against women" or about how women who do certain things are more likely to "get raped", take a look at whether or not you're asking yourself the question -- by whom? Who is perpetrating the injustices? Who is committing the sexual assault? If your article doesn't answer that question, it might be time to take another look.

Quick Hits: the GOP hates women edition

The following bills have recently been put on the table (and then occasionally shelved, hallelujah) by various state and federal Republican representatives:

• The proposed GOP budget cuts for fiscal year 2011 mean a drastic decrease in funding for domestic violence prevention programs; this includes the elimination of the Violence Against Women Health Initiative and the Engaging Men and Youth in Prevention programs, as well as a $7 million cut to Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, which funds domestic violence shelters and the national hotline for domestic violence victims. 
• The "Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act", introduced by Representative Mike Pence (R-IN) would amend the Public Health Services act to prevent any organization that provides abortions--except in cases of incest, rape, or when the woman's life is endangered--from receiving family planning grants. Under the existing Act, Title X funds are not used on abortion services, but on family planning and preventative health initiatives. The change to this act would effectively defund Planned Parenthood. The House has voted in favour of the act.
• H.R.3 and H.R.358 are both on the table in the House. H.R.3, the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act", originally sought to redefine rape (this has since been removed from the bill), and strong arms insurance companies into not covering abortion services, as well as imposing a tax burden on small businesses that purchase plans that cover abortion. H.R.358, the "Protect Life Act", carries a provision that would allow health care providers to deny live-saving abortion care to women with dangerous pregnancies. It also bans insurance coverage of abortion in the new health care system.
• The Ohio State Legislature recently tabled a "Heartbeat Bill", which would ban abortion after a heartbeat is detected in the fetus. The heart is one of the first organs to develop in a fetus, and heartbeats are detectable between eighteen days and six weeks into the pregnancy. The presence of a heartbeat does not indicate viability. If passed, the bill would likely provide an avenue for a Supreme Court challenge of Roe v. Wade.
• Meanwhile, the South Dakota Legislature has (thankfully) shelved a bill that would have rendered as "justifiable homicide" those murders in service of protecting an unborn child. In a country that has seen the murder of abortion providers and the bombing of abortion clinics, this is clearly a concern. From the NYTimes article: "Dave Leach, an Iowa anti-abortion activist, praised the bill, saying it could end abortions in South Dakota by scaring away doctors or by establishing grounds for someone to kill those who stay.'There may be something I’m overlooking, but from all appearances, this bill would certainly justify an individual taking the life of an abortionist in order to save human lives,' he said."
• Melissa McEwan, on the bullshit that is the anti-choice position: "No one can argue, with any honesty or credibility, that they give a fuck about the sanctity of life if they would force a woman to carry to term an unwanted or unviable pregnancy against her will. That is the opposite of a respect for life, if the definition of "life" is to have any meaning at all."

Assholes threaten rape on the Internet

(Trigger warning for abhorrent threats of rape and sexual violence; also for terrible language on my part)

Dear Internet men,

I think it's time we had a chat. You know I love all y'all to pieces -- where would I be without the glory of 4chan generated Xzibit memes, epic co-op games of Diablo II, and yes, even off-color Penny Arcade comics. But this recent re-tread of the whole "dickwolves" debacle has forced me to do the thing that I least like doing in the world: reading internet comments that call for "feminist bitches" to be raped for their supposed lack of a sense of humor.

I know you think it's the epitome of fucking hilarious to call for the rape of "dyke cunts" or to debate amongst yourselves (in public) whether or not "fat whores" can truly be raped in light of their eternal unattractiveness. The thing is, though, it's not funny. It's not clever. It certainly isn't new. And here are some reasons why:

Fugitivus: A woman walks into a rape, uh, bar:

For those of you who wonder why rape victims get all super sensitive about rape jokes ‘n shit, well, this is why. Before you’re raped, rape jokes might be uncomfortable, or they might be funny, or they might be any given thing. But after you’re raped, they are a trigger. They make you remember what was done to you. And if the joke was about something that wasn’t done to you, not in quite that way, you can really easily imagine how it would feel, because you know how something exactly like that felt. Rape jokes stop being about a thing that happens out there, somewhere, to people who don’t really exist, and if they do they probably deserved it, and they start being about you. Rape jokes are about you. Jokes about women liking it or deserving it are about how much you liked it and deserved it. And they are also jokes about how, in all likelihood, it’s going to happen to you again.

Melissa McEwan: Rape Culture 101:

Rape culture is rape jokes. Rape culture is rape jokes on t-shirts, rape jokes in college newspapers, rape jokes in soldiers' home videos, rape jokes on the radio, rape jokes on news broadcasts, rape jokes in magazines, rape jokes in viral videos, rape jokes in promotions for children's movies, rape jokes on Page Six (and again!), rape jokes on the funny pages, rape jokes on TV shows, rape jokes on the campaign trail, rape jokes on Halloween, rape jokes in online content by famouspeople, rape jokes in online content by non-famous people, rape jokes in headlines, rape jokes onstage at clubs, rape jokes in politics, rape jokes in one-woman shows, rape jokes in print campaigns, rape jokes in movies, rape jokes in cartoons, rape jokes in nightclubs, rape jokes on MTV, rape jokes on late-night chat shows, rape jokes in tattoos, rape jokes in stand-up comedy, rape jokes on websites, rape jokes at awards shows, rape jokes in online contests, rape jokes in movie trailers, rape jokes on the sides of buses, rape jokes on cultural institutions… 

Rape culture is people objecting to the detritus of the rape culture being called oversensitive, rather than people who perpetuate the rape culture being regarded as not sensitive enough.

From Melissa McEwan again: Off-Limits Humor:

But here’s the main reason I object to the use of “politically incorrect” humor at this blog: There’s awhole fucking world out there where women and gay men and trans wo/men and racial minorities and the disabled and the overweight and people who are intrinsically and inescapably “different” for any reason are made fun of, marginalized, turned into punchlines. There’s a whole fucking world out there which expects us all to be perfect according to some arbitrary definition and seeks to punish us if we’re not. There’s a whole fucking world out there where people who don’t conform to that standard are not only ridiculed and made to feel not good enough, but can also find themselves at real risk of physical harm. Where they’re denied rights, job opportunities, friendships, votes, equality. If you want to use “politically incorrect” humor that targets those people, you have the entire rest of the bloody world to do it, but you can’t do it here.

And again: Survivors are So Sensitive:

Quite honestly, my objection to rape jokes is not even because I particularly find the jokes personally triggering anymore; I generally just find them pathetic and inexplicable. And while I'm bothered by the fact that the jokes normalize and effectively minimize the severity of rape and thus perpetuate the rape culture, I'm more bothered by the thought of a woman who's recently been raped, who's just experienced what may be the worst thing that will ever happen to her, and goes to the site of her favorite webcomic, or turns on the telly, or goes to the cinema, or a comedy club, to have a much-needed laugh—only to see that horrible, life-changing thing used as the butt of a joke.

Here's the thing. I have a stupid, dark sense of humor. I actually enjoyed the original Penny Arcade comic. But if someone told me that I said something shitty that made them relive a terrible episode in their life? I'd shut the fuck up and apologize, and probably re-examine why I thought that thing was funny in the first place.

What I absolutely would not do is troll their blogs (and enlist my friends to do the same) to threaten them with one of the most heinous acts that can be committed by one person upon another. The idea of doing that is absolutely disgusting to contemplate, and the idea of receiving such comments is an absolutely terrifying prospect. And yet, it's not a "few bad apples" who do this online. It happens. All. The. Fucking. Time.

In case you're wondering what comments look like on feminist blogs, by the way, Melissa also has a few examples:

Comment on Rape is Hilarious: The only tragedy is that a bullet didn’t rip through your brainstem after you were used for your one and only purpose in this world. You should consider yourself lucky that some man finds a hideous troll like yourself rape-able.

Three comments down on the same post: These fat whores would be lucky to even get raped by someone. I hope you whiny cunts find your way on top of a pinball machine in the near future.

Feministe holds a Next Top Troll competition that's been going on for several "seasons" now. Exemplars of the commenters up for the award:

What man would want to date an egotistical, finger-wagging bitch like you, other than to fuck you and then leave right afterward because you’re an insufferable nag. 

You “ladies” have obviously had too many “dickbags” in your lives. You all should just relax, shut up, get on your knees, and do the only thing you are good for.

Or just check out FatUglyorSlutty.com to get your fix of how retrofucks treat women on the Internet.

See, the thing is, I don't think most Internet men make comments like this. But a hell of a lot of them do. And they very rarely get told that it's not acceptable, and very often get told that it's hilarious. And part of the purpose of the link-frenzy above is to say you know what? This happens. It happens a fucking lot.

So this is my plea to dudes on the Internet. Go forth. Engage. Get angry. Be assholes, if you absolutely must. But stop fucking threatening women with rape. It's abhorrent. It's disgusting. It's borderline (if not over the line) criminal. But most of all, it's terrifying. And if what you want is for women (and feminist girl geeks in particular) to stop thinking that geek circles are full of anti-feminist, retrofuck, juvenile, misogynist dickbags, the first step is to stop being one.

What is terror for women?

Last year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, fifteen thousand women were raped.

On October 17 of this year, almost two thousand women joined together to march against the sexual terrorism that has been perpetrated against them almost fifteen years.

Two years ago, I had the privilege of attending a talk given by Stephen Lewis and Dr. Denis Mukwege of the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu at the University of Toronto. Over the last twelve years, Mukwege has treated 21,000 women, some of them more than once, for the damage that results when the women are raped -- often with foreign objects such as sticks, broken bottles, bayonets, and machine guns -- as a tactic of war. Lewis calls these acts the berserk lunatic predatory sexual behaviour of men, and that phrase only begins to describe the horror visited upon Congolese women by militias and soldiers engaged in civil war.

I wish that I had something eloquent to say about the unimaginable strength and bravery of these women, who marched against violence and terror. I wish I had words of enough virulence to describe my anger at the fact that, when we talk about terrorism in the Western press, we only ever talk about dirty bombs and airports, and never about the daily terror purposely inflicted by sexual violence -- sometimes by soldiers and contractors representing the so called enlightened West. But I don't think I have the words to represent my outrage as fully as Lewis did in his speech at SRI in the Rockies in 2008. His discussion of sexual violence against women begins around the 20-minute mark, and I have transcribed it at length here, but I encourage you to listen to the mp3 of the speech, because to hear a man talk about women's rights the way Lewis does is a rare and heartening thing:

I live in a feminist family, I love it. I believe to the end of my days that the feminist analysis of the exercise of male power is probably the most insightful analysis to explain much of what is wrong with much of this difficult world. And I must say that the more I’ve had the privilege of working in the international community, the more I have come to the conclusion that the struggle for gender equality is the single most important struggle on the planet. You cannot continue to marginalize 52% of the world’s population and ever expect to achieve a degree of social justice and equity: it’s just not possible.

And when you look at the damage that is done to the women, particularly of the developing world, through so many perverse realities whether it’s international sexual trafficking or female genital mutilation or child brides or honor killings or an absence of inheritance rights or an absence of property rights or an absence or laws against rape and sexual violence or an absence of microcredit to give women some sense of economic autonomy or a lack of political representation – whatever the panoply of injustice, discrimination and stigma visited on women it seems to have no end, and it so profoundly compromises their existence.

And what has happened through the developing world latterly in many parts and which is so unsettling, unnerving, so profoundly compromising are the patterns of physical and sexual violence. The World Health Organization just did a quite astonishing study. It interviewed twenty-five thousand women in fourteen countries about physical and sexual violence. It found that the lowest levels of violence were in Japan at 14%, and the highest levels were in rural Ethiopia at 71%. And when they looked at the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada they found interim levels of 30-35%. So they saw that this was a pattern so deeply entrenched, whether it’s marital rape or sexual violence from intimate partners or domestic abuse, these patterns are overwhelmingly entrenched.

And then when you get destabilization in countries they are further accelerated. A country like South Africa is a good example, where you have 5,700,000 people living with HIV and AIDS in a population of somewhat over 40 million. Incredibly enough, South Africa is a country where eight hundred to a thousand people die every day of AIDS-related illnesses. And in the most recent year for which statistics are available, which is 2006, there were 52,000 reported rapes. And everyone knows that reflects only 5-10% of the actual number because women are so reluctant, for a whole range of reasons, to actually, formally, to report the rape and begin to engage in a police and judicial process.

And it gets worse still when there is conflict. When there is conflict it goes right out of control. I don’t understand what these berserk lunatic predatory male sexual behavior – how it happens under conflict – but it happens and it never seems to end. And it’s not merely on the continent of Africa which I admit is a continent I love, but throw your minds back to the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The President of Indonesia just apologized to East Timor for the sexual violence that was unleashed by his forces when they tried to prevent the independence of East Timor. In the Balkans, I remind you a white, Western country, or countries, in the Balkans you have several military commanders who have come before the International Criminal Court charged with crimes against humanity rooted in sexual violence. The same is true for Colombia. There seems to be no part of the world which is exempt.

But in parts of Africa it really is astounding what is taking place. In the post-election violence in Kenya, suddenly more and more women were turning up at the hospitals, raped and subject to the most grotesque sexual violence. In Zimbabwe, an organization which I am involved with and to which I will refer at the end, AIDS-Free World, that Lisa mentioned in the introduction, I can’t go into details, which you will understand, but we have been over the last few weeks in an unnamed country in Africa, interviewing and taking affidavits under formal legal terms from the women who have been raped by Mugabe’s Youth Corps as Zimbabwe has ground down over the last several months. And Terror Camps were created --that’s what they’re called – to subject women associated in any way with the political opposition to insensate sexual violence.

And I was recently in Liberia, meeting with the President of Liberia and the Minister of Gender and the Unicef representative and they were telling me that the majority of rapes now in Liberia – after the civil war is over but the raping continues – the majority of rapes are committed against young girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. And everybody knows what’s happening in Darfur, that need not be explicated at length. For five years now the entire world has agreed that there is a genocide taking place and for whatever unconscionable reason we’ve never been able to bring it to an end. I mean, forgive me but this is not the Taliban in Darfur. These are Janjaweed militia commanders on horseback! And it is entirely possible to have subdued that and brought it to an end if the world cared a tinker’s dam for what was happening in that country.

And in the case of the Congo, you have a war on women. You know, if I may make a somewhat more intellectual observation, rape is no longer a weapon of war. Rape has become a strategy of war. You rape women in such numbers, so savagely that you humiliate entire communities through the women. The women hold the communities together. On the continent of Africa, nothing happens without the engagement of the women, particularly at the grassroots, particularly on the ground. And what happens is that the entire community is subdued, oppressed, overcome by these roving bands of marauding militias, who rape the women, move the community off the extractive resources, which is what they want, or turn the women into sex slaves and the men into the laborers who do extract the resources. And it’s hideous, the consequences, and it’s been going on since 1996. More than a quarter of a million women have been raped. And what is so unfathomable about it is everyone in a position of power knows, and it continues. I’ll never never comprehend.

In August of last year, Eve Ensler, the magnificent dramatist and writer of the Vagina Monologues went off to the Congo to see for herself what was happening and she spent a month or more and she came back and wrote an immensely powerful essay, the first words of which were, “I have just returned from Hell.” And I do not have the emotional equanimity to read to you the case histories that Eve set out. But after she came back suddenly the Undersecretary General of the United Nations, John Holmes, goes off to the Congo, comes back, writes an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times and calls it the worst place in the world for women. The Undersecretary General of the United Nations, who appears before the Security Counsel on a regular basis, and then suddenly there’s a front-page piece in the New York Times, and a front-page piece in the Washington Post, and a front-page piece in the Los Angeles Times, and Anderson Cooper of CNN does a twenty-minute segment on 60 Minutes, and everybody is caught up in the anxiety and urgency of what is being done to the women – it’s impossible to say in a way that can be absorbed what is happening to the women.

In the city of Bukavu in the Eastern region of the Congo there’s a little hospital called the Panzi Hospital where a lovely group of surgeons attempt desperately to repair the reproductive tracts of the women. This is rape that isn’t merely the gang-raping of eighty-year-olds and eight year olds, although that takes place. It’s rape with mutilation and amputation and guns and knives. Guns shot into the vaginas of women. I’m speaking to a sophisticated audience that cares about human issues – there is a medical term in the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu which I never in my adult life expected to encounter: it’s called “vaginal destruction.” And Eve Ensler has appeared before the Security Counsel, and we had an ostensible peace agreement, part of which peace agreement provided an amnesty for the militias that were doing the raping. And the war never ended. And the raping continues. And the war is now resuscitated. And so bad have things become that Condoleeza Rice, on June 19th, at the Security Council, introduced a resolution branding sexual violence as a matter of international peace and security. That had never happened before. And we have seventeen thousand United Nations peacekeepers in the Congo, the biggest peacekeeping mission in the world, and we cannot protect the women. And everyone knows its happening. And everybody knows that if we increase the numbers of peacekeepers, or the United Nations agencies did their job on the ground, or we confronted the government of the Congo in a way that no-one has had the courage to confront, we could perhaps abate the violence. But I have to tell you it’s so monstrous, and it’s so rooted in gender inequality, that it makes one feel not just tormented but dismal about the prospects for human behavior.

For more reading: Eve Ensler's piece that begins "I have just returned from hell".

To take action:
Donate to The Stephen Lewis Foundation
Donate to the Panzi Hospital
Amnesty International's Campaign to Stop Violence Against Women