Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[Gemme]

Due to public outcry and the threat of Anonymous, the case is being reopened. I really hope this girl gets a fair shake this time.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...6pLid%3D392513

[Wolfsong]

A military friend of mine forwarded this to me this morning. I love his conviction and wish more people felt this way.

[Cin]

http://www.alternet.org/why-naked-pi...ess?page=0%2C1

A few excepts from the article highlighting the mentality that fosters the rampant rape culture at institutions of higher learning:

a woman filed a lawsuit against Wesleyan University citing a fraternity known on campus as the “rape factory.”

At Miami University of Ohio someone thought it was a good idea hang a poster titled “Top Ten Ways to Get Away with Rape,” which closed with, “If your [sic] afraid the girl might identify you slit her throat.”

A University of Vermont fraternity surveyed members in 2011 with this question: “If you could rape someone, who would it be?”

At USC, two years ago, some boys released a Gullet Report (named for a “gullet,” defined as “a target’s mouth and throat. Most often pertains to a target’s throat capacity and it’s [sic] ability to gobble cock. If a target is known to have a good gullet, it can deep-throat dick extremely well. Good Gullet Girls (GGG) are always scooped up well before last call.”). For good measure they added some overtly racist material as well.

Yale’s Zeta Psi fraternity took photos of members holding up signs reading, “We love Yale sluts.” Another fraternity had fun running around campus singing, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” Meanwhile, the school’s recommended punishment for sexual assault violations was a written reprimand.

Wales’ Cardiff Metropolitan University hung a poster for orientation week events that featured a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the text: “I was raping a woman last night and she cried.”

More excepts: Time to fight back:

Last week at Swarthmore College a pledge posted a photograph on Instagram of his offer to join a fraternity. The picture was of a booklet cover featuring a mosaic of hundreds of naked or nearly naked women. … The fraternity has used this format for several years — but this year, a group of students led by senior Marian Firke protested the use of the photography.

Objectifying girls and women is tightly bound up with suppressing women’s speech. Consider these comments about Firke on the website Total Frat Move in response to the protest: after some throwaway “feminist cunt” ramblings, commenters described her as a “Stupid girl who stick[s] [her] opinions where they do not belong.” Mild enough. But, one commenter went on to say that “somebody needs to send their pledges over to fuck the bitch out of” her. Another, that she “deserved to be face raped so hard that she will be incapable of spewing any more of this bullshit.” The interweaving of violence, objectification and desire for her to shut up are inseparable.

But student activists aren’t shutting up. They have coalesced into a national movement and are taking matters into their own hands. Yesterday FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, whose successful faux Victoria’s Secret Consent campaign launched a series of an anti-rape activism pranks, named student recipients of its Consent Revolution Awards at four schools for their efforts to educate their peers. Recently, to great effect, the group created a fake consent-themed Playboy 2013 Top Ten Party Commandments that captured national attention. While these projects may seem trivial or funny, they are, in actuality, deadly serious. So are the efforts of Know Your IX, a student-led coalition created to educate students about their rights on campus, launched earlier this year.

Young men are going to colleges and universities way too comfortable expressing themselves in exploitative, sexist ways that denigrate their female peers and are corrosive to the academic environment. In addition, the notion that rape is a serious crime for which they can be held responsible seems not to have entered their heads.* Somehow we’ve gotten to the point where discussing a person’s “rape potential” is a thing.

*And where would they get an idea like that? Perhaps given the fact that they are not prosecuted and even the universities themselves refuse to take rape seriously calling it non consensual sex (somebody please tell me how this is not rape?) and giving written reprimands as punishment for sexual assault.

[Soon]

Originally Posted by Gemme

Due to public outcry and the threat of Anonymous, the case is being reopened. I really hope this girl gets a fair shake this time.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...6pLid%3D392513

I'M DAISY COLEMAN, THE TEENAGER AT THE CENTER OF THE MARYVILLE RAPE MEDIA STORM, AND THIS IS WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

[Soon]

This ad, created for the United Nations Women campaign (which is unfortunately shortened to the UN Women campaign), becomes more devastating when you realize that the Google search boxes are the results of genuine searches, and although the ad-crafting and Googling were all done by Christopher Hunt at Ogilvy & Mather in Dubai, Copyranter points out that some of the automatic results are the same in the U.S.

About the ads, Hunt says:

This campaign uses the world's most popular search engine (Google) to show how gender inequality is a worldwide problem. The adverts show the results of genuine searches, highlighting popular opinions across the world wide web.
The distressing thing about this is that it’s a no-copy-required ad. Or, a found-copy ad. Patriarchal culture filtered through individually misogynistic Google searches has written all the pithy copy required for the world to take a serious look at how generally far away people are from living in a world with true gender equality. So, if this work were to earn a Clio nomination, the patriarchy would be called up on stage to accept with Hunt, right? Obviously, you can’t get the whole patriarchy up onstage (it’s currently filming a new superhero movie), so Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets would have to accept on the patriarchy’s behalf before telling a story about how much they hate political correctness that began, “In my day…”

http://jezebel.com/ad-for-un-women-c...rch-1448647030

[Martina]

Black Boys Have an Easier Time Fitting In at Suburban Schools Than Black Girls
By Aboubacar Ndiaye

Though I’m sure my name was a hint, I happen to be black. My parents are West African (Mali and Senegal to be exact), and I was born and raised in France. When I was 13, my family and I moved to a suburban community outside of Atlanta. The school I attended, though relatively diverse for Georgia, was majority white. I had an easy time there. I made friends quickly, a lot of them white. To this day, more than ten years later, my friend circle is still very much white, populated by the people I met at my mostly-white high school, or at my mostly-white university, or in my mostly-white neighborhood. I have always attributed my ability to fit into both multicultural and white environments to my personality and my immigrant's need to adapt to whatever environment I'm in.

But recent research published in the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Education journal shows that my gender (male) was one of the determinative factors in the relative ease of my social integration. In an article published last year, Megan M. Holland, a professor at the University of Buffalo and a recent Harvard Ph.D., studied the social impact of a desegregation program on the minority students who were being bussed to a predominantly white high school in suburban Boston. She found that minority boys, because of stereotypes about their supposed athleticism and “coolness,” fit in better than minority girls because the school gave the boys better opportunities to interact with white students. Minority boys participated in sports and non-academic activities at much higher rates. Over the course of her study, she concluded that structural factors in the school as well as racial narratives about minority males resulted in increased social rewards for the boys, while those same factors contributed to the isolation of girls in the diversity program.

Another study looked at a similar program, called Diversify. Conducted by Simone Ispa-Landa at Northwestern University, it showed how gender politics and gender performance impacted the way the minority students were seen at the school. The study shows that “as a group, the Diversify boys were welcomed in suburban social cliques, even as they were constrained to enacting race and gender in narrow ways.” Diversify girls, on the other hand, “were stereotyped as ‘ghetto’ and ‘loud’”—behavior that, when exhibited by the boys in the program, was socially rewarded. Another finding from her study was that because of the gender dynamics present at the school—the need to conform to prevalent male dominance in the school—“neither the white suburban boys nor the black Diversify boys were interested in dating” the minority girls. The girls reported being seen by boys at their schools as “aggressive” and not having the “Barbie doll” look. The boys felt that dating the white girls was “easier” because they “can’t handle the black girls.”

The black boys in Ispa-Landa’s study found themselves in peculiar situations in which they would play into stereotypes of black males as being cool or athletic by seeming “street-smart.” At the same time, though, they would work to subvert those racial expectations by code-switching both their speech and mannerisms to put their white classmates at ease. Many of the boys reported feeling safer and freer at the suburban school, as they would not be considered “tough” at their own schools. It was only in the context of the suburban school that their blackness conferred social power. In order to maintain that social dominance, the boys engaged in racial performance, getting into show fights with each other to appear tough and using rough, street language around their friends.

In the case of the girls, the urban signifiers that gave the boys so much social acceptance, were held against them. While the boys could wear hip-hop clothing, the girls were seen as “ghetto” for doing the same. While the boys could display a certain amount of aggression, the girls felt they were penalized for doing so. Ispa-Landa, in an interview, expressed surprise at “how much of a consensus there was among the girls about their place in the school.” She also found that overall, the girls who participated in diversity programs paid a social cost because they “failed to embody characteristics of femininity” that would have valorized them in the school hierarchy. They also felt excluded from the sports and activities that gave girls in those high schools a higher social status, such as cheerleading and Model U.N., because most activities ended too late for the parents of minority girls. Holland notes that minority parents were much more protective of the girls; they expressed no worries about the boys staying late, or over at friend’s houses.

Once minority women leave high school and college, they are shown to continue to struggle with social integration, even as they achieve higher educational outcomes and, in certain locales, higher incomes than minority men. Though, as presaged by high-school sexual politics, they were still three times less likely than black men to marry outside of their race.

For the second time in as many sessions, the Supreme Court heard a case about affirmative action last Tuesday. Following last year’s Fisher v. Texas non-decision, the court will now be deciding whether states can ban the consideration of race in college admissions through ballot initiatives as the Michigan did in 2006. Based on the tenor of the oral arguments, some court watchers have predicted that the court’s conservative majority will now take the opportunity to further limit the use of affirmative action in admissions across the nation. As Garrett Epps noted last week, it is nearly impossible to have a measured conversation about affirmative action, an issue that splits even the most ardent liberals. However, there appears to be a general consensus that minority populations benefit from these programs. But very rarely do commentators stop to consider the diversity of that minority population, and even fewer consider what impact affirmative actions programs have on the disparate, intersecting groups who participate in them.

A couple of months ago, Ebony.com editor Jamilah Lemieux started the Twitter hashtag #blackpowerisforblackmen to discuss the little-talked about but deeply-felt existence of black male privilege. Tweets like “#blackpowerisforblackmen because the Black men's problems are the community's problems” and “#blackpowerisforblackmen bc although black women played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement, we're only told about MLK&other blk men” speak to a history of minimizing of the experience of black women. The hashtag, which attracted no small amount of blowback from black males, revealed the dilemma that many black women face: having to combat both racism and sexism. Like the research about the diversity programs, the conversation showed that what we sometimes instinctively think of as “the black experience” is complicated by gender. The ostensible purpose of affirmative action is to increase the presence of minorities in colleges and universities. But as the Supreme Court considers further limiting the scope of such programs, it is important to remember that unless cultural expectations about race and gender change, full educational integration will remain a pipe dream.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/education...-girls/280657/
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

[Kobi]

More grim statistics for future Sheryl Sandbergs and Marissa Mayers

After sixty years of asking a random sample of Americans which gender they prefer to work for, Gallup recently found that both men and women still prefer a male boss over a female boss — a gap that has barely budged in the last ten years.

In a survey of 2,059 Americans from a variety of work backgrounds, 35 percent said they prefer a male boss, while 23 percent said they prefer to work for a woman. 41 percent, meanwhile, volunteered that they don't care either way — the largest percent in the history of the survey.

Since 1953 the gap has narrowed: 66 percent preferred a male boss in 1953, while just five percent preferred a woman, and 25 percent saw no difference.

But, like other aspects of gender imbalance at work, the move toward equal boss preference has lost steam in the last decade. In 2002, 19 percent of Americans preferred a female boss, and 31 preferred a male boss — a similar difference to the one Gallup found today, and one that mirrors the gender wage gap. For comparison, earlier this year, the U.S. Census Bureau said women in full-time, year-round jobs still make 77 cents for every dollar men make — a zero percent change since 2002. Many have been lamenting this fact for the last half-decade, asking why a movement that once seemed unstoppable is apparently stuck in neutral.

The answer for both the wage and attitudes-about-bosses gaps are likely more complicated than run-of-the-mill sexism. One factor for the latter poses a kind of catch-22. When it comes to taking directions from superiors, people may tend to prefer what they know: 54 percent of those surveyed say they currently work for a man, while only 30 percent work for a woman. And the percentage of male bosses grows on the way up the corporate latter, says a Catalyst Census. In 2012, women held only 14.3 percent of executive officer positions at Fortune 500 companies, and just 16.6 percent of board of director positions. One quarter of these companies operated with no women executive officers at all.

This matters because Gallup found that those surveyed who currently work for a woman are more likely to prefer a female boss than those who work for a man. The preference didn't entirely fill in the blank space, but it helped. Gallup puts it like this:

Those who currently work for a woman are as likely to prefer having a female boss as a male one. This is one of the few subgroups of the population that does not tilt in the "male boss" direction. Those who currently work for a man prefer a male boss, by 35 percent to 17 percent. [Gallup]

Still, the polling company is careful to warn against reading too much into the data: "[I]t is possible that workers who initially prefer a female boss are more likely to end up in circumstances in which they have a female boss," it says. But it's not an outlandish proposition: That a world with more female bosses would also be a world with more people who like female bosses.

Clearly, we're still a ways off from such a world. As Sheryl Sandburg pointed out earlier this year in her blockbuster career book, Lean In, some of the stunted progress women are experiencing at the top level might be due to a "likability gap." Studies have suggested that the more promotions, raises, and accolades a woman earns in the workplace, the less likely she is to be liked by her peers and coworkers. Whereas likability and achievement for men are often positively correlated. This argument seems to align nicely with Gallup's findings — maybe people prefer male bosses because they don't yet see female bosses as "likable."

But Gallup's results also suggest that this could change. American workers may see a stronger link between female success and likability when more female bosses are signing more checks.

http://news.yahoo.com/latest-depress...113800543.html

[Kobi]

[Greyson]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Looks like "college men" are still boys that have not been taught the concept of "No" means no and you are not the prince the adults and society led you to believe you are.

[kittygrrl]

Originally Posted by Greyson

Looks like "college men" are still boys that have not been taught the concept of "No" means no and you are not the prince the adults and society led you to believe you are.

Greyson, it's positively scarey It wouldn't take much to shatter the veneer.

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by Kobi

You know, I'm going to ask, do you have a source on this? Not because I think you're bullshitting, but because frankly I wish this were a load of shit and want to hold onto a glimmer of false hope for a few brief moments.

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Allison W

You know, I'm going to ask, do you have a source on this? Not because I think you're bullshitting, but because frankly I wish this were a load of shit and want to hold onto a glimmer of false hope for a few brief moments.

It is from Body Wars by Margo Maine

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by Kobi

It is from Body Wars by Margo Maine

OK, that's good to know.

From the reviews of the book I found on Amazon, the studies are apparently accurate (according to a student who has access to the studies cited in the book), but an important detail that was omitted in your post is that the book was published in 1999.

This makes me feel a little better. It's still a scary-ish statistic even at fifteen years old, but at least it's describing last generation's college students and not this generation's college students. (Of course, for all I know, if the study were repeated today the results might not be any better--for all that I would hope they would be--but the age of the study is still extremely important.)

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Allison W

OK, that's good to know.

From the reviews of the book I found on Amazon, the studies are apparently accurate (according to a student who has access to the studies cited in the book), but an important detail that was omitted in your post is that the book was published in 1999.

This makes me feel a little better. It's still a scary-ish statistic even at fifteen years old, but at least it's describing last generation's college students and not this generation's college students. (Of course, for all I know, if the study were repeated today the results might not be any better--for all that I would hope they would be--but the age of the study is still extremely important.)

Agreed, the age of the study is important. I'm not sure how much of a difference there would be if it were repeated today.

Look at the other stories just on this page about current campus rapes:

- a woman filed a lawsuit against Wesleyan University citing a fraternity known on campus as the “rape factory.”

- At Miami University of Ohio someone thought it was a good idea hang a poster titled “Top Ten Ways to Get Away with Rape,” which closed with, “If your [sic] afraid the girl might identify you slit her throat.”

- A University of Vermont fraternity surveyed members in 2011 with this question: “If you could rape someone, who would it be?”

- At USC, two years ago, some boys released a Gullet Report (named for a “gullet,” defined as “a target’s mouth and throat. Most often pertains to a target’s throat capacity and it’s [sic] ability to gobble cock. If a target is known to have a good gullet, it can deep-throat dick extremely well. Good Gullet Girls (GGG) are always scooped up well before last call.”). For good measure they added some overtly racist material as well.

- Yale’s Zeta Psi fraternity took photos of members holding up signs reading, “We love Yale sluts.” Another fraternity had fun running around campus singing, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” Meanwhile, the school’s recommended punishment for sexual assault violations was a written reprimand.

- Wales’ Cardiff Metropolitan University hung a poster for orientation week events that featured a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the text: “I was raping a woman last night and she cried.”

- Georgia Tech university fraternity member has apologized for the "lack of judgment" he showed in writing an email with offensive language, including the term "rapebait," about how to pick up women at campus parties.

- A Mississippi college is under intense fire after a student was forcibly raped in the office of a professor with a long and public history of past sexual assault and rape charges.

- attorneys defending three former Naval Academy football players against allegations of sexual assault at an off-campus party spent more than 20 hours over five grueling days questioning, taunting, blaming, shaming, and what appears to be re-victimizing a 21-year-old female midshipman.

This is a link to current stats on college campuses:


http://www.campussafetymagazine.com/...and-Myths.aspx

That's from 2012. Does it sound like things have improved?

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Agreed, the age of the study is important. I'm not sure how much of a difference there would be if it were repeated today.

Look at the other stories just on this page about current campus rapes:

- a woman filed a lawsuit against Wesleyan University citing a fraternity known on campus as the “rape factory.”

- At Miami University of Ohio someone thought it was a good idea hang a poster titled “Top Ten Ways to Get Away with Rape,” which closed with, “If your [sic] afraid the girl might identify you slit her throat.”

- A University of Vermont fraternity surveyed members in 2011 with this question: “If you could rape someone, who would it be?”

- At USC, two years ago, some boys released a Gullet Report (named for a “gullet,” defined as “a target’s mouth and throat. Most often pertains to a target’s throat capacity and it’s [sic] ability to gobble cock. If a target is known to have a good gullet, it can deep-throat dick extremely well. Good Gullet Girls (GGG) are always scooped up well before last call.”). For good measure they added some overtly racist material as well.

- Yale’s Zeta Psi fraternity took photos of members holding up signs reading, “We love Yale sluts.” Another fraternity had fun running around campus singing, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” Meanwhile, the school’s recommended punishment for sexual assault violations was a written reprimand.

- Wales’ Cardiff Metropolitan University hung a poster for orientation week events that featured a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the text: “I was raping a woman last night and she cried.”

- Georgia Tech university fraternity member has apologized for the "lack of judgment" he showed in writing an email with offensive language, including the term "rapebait," about how to pick up women at campus parties.

- A Mississippi college is under intense fire after a student was forcibly raped in the office of a professor with a long and public history of past sexual assault and rape charges.

- attorneys defending three former Naval Academy football players against allegations of sexual assault at an off-campus party spent more than 20 hours over five grueling days questioning, taunting, blaming, shaming, and what appears to be re-victimizing a 21-year-old female midshipman.

This is a link to current stats on college campuses:


http://www.campussafetymagazine.com/...and-Myths.aspx

That's from 2012. Does it sound like things have improved?

No. Usually I try to stick up for my generation, but... fuck it. It's not as though any of this is actually news to me, but it's still depressing.

(However, ideal response to the University of Vermont frat survey: the asshole who wrote it. He probably wouldn't find that so amusing. I doubt many of these young men would if it were something they had to live in fear of.)

[Kobi]

Allison,

This is the mentality I saw back in the 1960's (if memory serves, that is a few decades before you were born). Rape victims back then were interrogated by law enforcement. Their sexual histories, their lifestyles, their clothing, etc were all used to blame the victim for her assault. Plus, she was subjected to describing the assault in detail with questioning as to did she enjoy it? Did she orgasm?

Male privilege and entitlement is alive and well and deeply ingrained in our culture and cultures around the world. And, it is kept alive not only by individual people (men and women) but by institutions like colleges, the military, the workplace, the media etc who cant quite seem to grasp that this isn't ok.

Internalized sexism and misogyny and the privilege and entitlement is part of our socialization from birth. Both males and females are TAUGHT their respective places and the places of their opposites. It's about control and power. It starts at birth and is an exhausting never ending battle.

Isms have been very carefully and deliberately woven into the social fabric of the world. When we have to address sexism and misogyny and the rest of the isms, internalized and externalized, here on the Planet, the insidiousness of it should hit home.

[Kobi]

The message that women are untrustworthy liars is everywhere in our culture—from TV and music, to politics and religion, says Soraya Chemaly.

Two weeks ago a man in France was arrested for raping his daughter. She’d gone to her school counselor and then the police, but they needed “hard evidence.” So, she videotaped her next assault. Her father was eventually arrested. His attorney explained, “There was a period when he was unemployed and in the middle of a divorce. He insists that these acts did not stretch back further than three or four months. His daughter says longer. But everyone should be very careful in what they say.” Because, really, even despite her seeking help, her testimony, her bravery in setting up a webcam to film her father raping her, you really can’t believe what the girl says, can you?

Everyone “knows” this. Even children.

Three years ago, in fly-on-the-wall fashion of parent drivers everywhere, I listened while a 14-year-old girl in the back seat of my car described how angry she was that her parents had stopped allowing her to walk home alone just because a girl in her neighborhood “claimed she was raped.” When I asked her if there was any reason to think the girl's story was not true, she said, “Girls lie about rape all the time.”

She didn’t know the person, she just assumed she was lying.

Fast-forward three years, again in a car. This time a 13-year-old refused to believe that when the newly appointed pope was 12 he’d written a “love letter” to the girl living next door. The child insisted stubbornly that the woman, now in the news, had to be a liar because the pope, even as a boy, would not have written a love letter.

In both cases, to my children’s bottomless pool of chagrin, I pulled the car over so I could ask the girls why they were so sure that the women’s accounts were not credible. We talked about their assumptions, about who gets to be believed, double standards regarding sex, and how culture portrays women. Fun times with Mom.

No one says, “You can’t trust women,” but distrust them we do. College students surveyed revealed that they think up to 50% of their female peers lie when they accuse someone of rape, despite wide-scale evidence and multi-country studies that show the incidence of false rape reports to be in the 2%-8% range, pretty much the same as false claims for other crimes. As late as 2003, people jokingly (wink, wink) referred to Philadelphia’s sex crimes unit as “the lying bitch unit.” If an 11-year-old girl told an adult that her father took out a Craigslist ad to find someone to beat and rape her while he watched, as recently actually occurred, what do you think the response would be? Would she need to provide a videotape after the fact?

It goes way beyond sexual assault as well. That’s just the most likely and obvious demonstration of “women are born to lie” myths. Women’s credibility is questioned in the workplace, in courts, by law enforcement, in doctors' offices, and in our political system. People don’t trust women to be bosses, or pilots, or employees. Pakistan’s controversial Hudood Ordinance still requires a female rape victim to procure four male witnesses to her rape or risk prosecution for adultery. In August, a survey of managers in the United States revealed that they overwhelmingly distrust women who request flextime.

It’s notable, of course, that women are trusted to be mothers—the largest pool of undervalued, economically crucial labor.

*****

So how exactly are we teaching children that women lie and can’t be trusted to be as competent or truthful as men? I mean, clearly, most people aren’t saying “girls and women lie, kids, that’s just the way God built them.”

First, lessons about women’s untrustworthiness are in our words, pictures, art, and memory. It’s simple enough to see how we are overwhelmingly portrayed as flawed, supplemental, ornamental, or unattainably perfect. It’s also easy to find examples of girls and women routinely, entertainingly cast as liars and schemers. For example, on TV we have Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl, Don't Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23, Devious Maids, and, because its serpent imagery is so basic to feminized evil, American Horror Story: Coven.

The lessons start early, too. Take, for example, the popular animated kids movie Shark Tale, which featured the song “Gold Digger,” a catchy tune that describes women as scheming, thieving, greedy, and materialistic. There is no shortage of music lyrics that convey the same ideas across genres. It's in movies, too. Consider, for example, the prevalence of untrustworthy mad women, or the manipulative women of Film Noire, and the failure of most films to even allow two women to be named or speak to one another about anything other than the male protagonists.

But pop culture and art are just the cherry on the top of the icing on a huge cake. The United States is among the most religious of all countries in the industrialized world. So, while some people wring their hands over hip hop, I’m more worried about how men like Rick Santorum and Ken Cuccinelli explain to their daughters why they can’t be priests. I know that there is hip hop that exceeds the bounds of taste and is sodden with misogyny. But, people seem to think that those manifestations of hatred are outside of the mainstream when, in reality, it's just more of the same set to great beats.

Sometimes, however, there’s a bonus, synchronous two-for-one! Delilah, a renowned biblical avatar of female untrustworthiness, made it into the lyrics of JT Money's “Somethin' ‘Bout Pimpin'”:

I got a problem with this punk ass bitch I know
Ol’no good skanlezz switch out ho
An untrustworthy bitch like Deliliah
Only thing she good for is puttin’ dick inside her

In other words:

"Amongst all the savage beasts none is found so harmful as woman." -- John Chrysostom

“What she cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions. One must be on one's guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil." -- St. Albertus Magnus

“Women were made either to be wives or prostitutes.” -- Martin Luther

“I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.” -- Augustine

While most religious leaders aren’t going around spouting overtly denigrating opinions about women, many, through default and tradition, casually and uncritically expose children to religious texts that are fundamentally misogynistic. I have to believe that most Sunday school lessons are not concerned with deconstructing, say, the creation story, a seminal text in our culture whether you are religious or not. Religious misogyny is tied to institutional power that ends up in children and women being impoverished and dying.

Ideas about women, credibility, legitimacy, authority and—notably—Catholic and Evangelical “priesthood” are important and have deep roots in religious thought and philosophy. And those ideas have contemporary expression (see links): Tertullian: "Women are the devil's gateway." Thomas Aquinas: "As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten." St. Clement of Alexandria: "Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman...the consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of shame." St. John Chrysostom: Women are "weak and flighty...For what is a woman but an enemy of friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a domestic danger, delectable mischief, a fault in nature, painted with beautiful colors?" St. Jerome: "Woman is the root of all evil." There’s Origen, one of Christianity’s greatest thinkers, a man who castrated himself and who considered women worse than animals. And, not to be left out, St. Augustine.

Why focus on these musty, long dead theologians and philosophers? These thoughts are alive and well and have a super long tail outside of religion—think: domestic work, pay discrimination, and sex segregation in the workplace. Every time a young girl can’t serve at an altar, or play in a game, or dress as she pleases; every time she’s assaulted and told to prove it, it’s because she cannot, in the end, be trusted. Controlling her—her clothes, her will, her physical freedom, her reputation—is a perk.

Conventional Abrahamic religious thought cannot escape the idea that we have to pay, as women, with lifelong suffering and labor and be subject to the authority of men lest our irrationality and desires result in more evil and suffering. Until religious hierarchies renounce beliefs and practices based on these theologies, these long-dead men, creatures of their time, might as well be the ones repeatedly showing up in Congress to give their massively ill-informed opinions on women’s health and lives.

Especially in our political lives.

Is it really surprising to anyone that a Santorum staffer said, in the run up to the last election, that women shouldn’t be President because it’s against God’s will? What about the “news commentator” who thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote? The Senate candidate who thinks rape is a gift from God? Or the Senator and presidential aspirant who thinks it’s just another form of conception? Or the doctor who thinks women deserve to die for having abortions? How about the nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia who thinks fetal birth defects are punishment for parents' (read: mothers’) sins? If women die bearing children, so what, that’s what we’re here for.

Even if we insist on not talking about the degree to which legislators' religious beliefs inform their political actions, it is obvious that they do. An entire political party’s “social policy” agenda is being pursued under a rubric that insists women need “permission slips” and “waiting periods.” The recent shutdown? Conservatives holding the country hostage because they want to add anti-abortion “conscience clause” language to legislation. Whose consciences are we talking about? All the morally incompetent and untrustworthy men who need abortions?

It’s no exaggeration to say that distrust of women is the driving force of the “social issues” agenda of the Republican Party. From food stamps and “legitimate rape,” to violence against women and immigration policy. “We need to target the mother. Call it sexist, but that’s the way nature made it,” explained the man who penned Arizona’s immigration law. “Men don’t drop anchor babies, illegal alien mothers do.” I could do this ad infinitum.

The pervasive message that women are untrustworthy liars is atomized in our culture. There is no one source or manifestation. It fills every nook and cranny of our lives.

I find it sad and disturbing that children learn so quickly and normatively to distrust women. Any commitment to parity means challenging the stories we tell them. It means critically assessing the comforting institutions we support out of nostalgia, habit, and tradition. It means walking out of places of worship, not buying certain movie tickets, closing some books, refusing to pay for some music, and politely disagreeing with friends and family at the dinner table. It's not easy. But, really, what's the alternative?

Soraya L. Chemaly writes about gender, feminism and culture for several online media including Role/Reboot, The Huffington Post, Fem2.0, RHReality Check, BitchFlicks, and Alternet among others. She is particularly interested in how systems of bias and oppression are transmitted to children through entertainment, media and religious cultures. She holds a History degree from Georgetown University, where she founded that schools first feminist undergraduate journal, studied post-grad at Radcliffe College.

http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-an...omen-are-liars

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by Kobi

tales of religious sexism and misogyny

And people wonder why I don't like religion.

[Kobi]

I have seen a sixteen-year-old boy weeping in distress after getting a girl’s pube stuck in his teeth, I hear he was unshaven.

I have seen boys showing each other porn on their iPhones on the train home from school, in bars and whilst strolling along the Champs-Elyséés.

I have had a boy ask me to text him screenshots of porn films because he was on a wifi-free family holiday.

One boy turned to kiss his date in the cinema but not before romantically whispering ‘don’t struggle’.

One friend drunkenly walked off into a park in the early hours of the morning and when a male friend brought her back without ‘trying anything’, he was heralded as being ‘soo nice!’ rather than ‘soo normal!’.

I have friends whose boyfriends have posted naked pictures of them all over the Internet.

I have heard consent described as ‘de-romanticizing’.

I have had a shockingly sober boy say to me ‘Why can’t I just slap my dick on your arse? Doesn’t cost you anything!’.

This just scratches the surface of my store of depressing anecdotes; the most violent of which I won’t go into out of respect for the girls involved.

2014 is not a good year to be a teenage girl. The last of the 90’s kids are growing up and we are starting to see the effects of being raised with the Internet.

For generations before us, hormonal teenage boys looking for sexy images of women had limited options; they could brave the embarrassment of going to the counter and buying Playboy, they could look through their sister’s Cosmo or they could use their imagination.

Porn today has rid itself of the embarrassment-factor by embracing the anonymity of the World Wide Web; Playboy isn’t really considered to be porn anymore, the real stuff lives in your phone, on your laptop, your tablet; it is available anywhere, anytime at the touch of a button.

In fact this very website receives a steady stream of hits that result from someone googling some combination of ‘housekeeping porn’ + ‘sex’, ‘lesbian’ and/or ‘rape’.

As you read this, somewhere there is an eleven-year-old boy curiously typing ‘porn’ into Google, probably hoping to see some big boobies. Fast forward a couple of years and he is masturbating to a video of a crying woman who is being tied down, simultaneously penetrated by three men, spanked, and being called a whore. Young boys are being de-sensitized to violence and the more they consume, the more abusive, the more graphic the porn has to be to excite them.

The most popular type of porn is called ‘Gonzo’ which is essentially wall-to-wall abusive sex. There is no foreplay or romance; it is literally hardcore sex from the first to the last frame. The sex is almost always violent; spanking, gagging, anal fisting and choking are commonplace. A very popular image is a close-up of the woman’s face with tears streaming down caused by her being choked whilst performing oral sex, directors like to make this obvious by making her wear lots of mascara; for dramatic effect.

There is no way that this could not have a profound effect on the consumer’s psyche specifically on their attitude towards women. Most boys make no secret of the fact that they watch and enjoy such porn, watching it in groups in the presence of girls or brashly and explicitly describing their fantasies.

Girls know boys watch porn and girls know what porn stars are; they are hairless, they have hourglass figures and they never say no. And so a massive amount of pressure is placed on girls to live up to this. Shaving pubic hair is painful and unsanitary (it leaves hundreds of minute cuts which increases the risk of STDs). And yet girls as young as 11 are doing it.

The porn industry is the primary source of sex ed for the boys who will grow up to be the decision-makers, thinkers, writers, husbands and fathers of tomorrow. A brief overview of what they are being taught/brainwashed to believe;

1.
That it is their birthright as males to have sex with whichever female they want when they want regardless of consent or age.

2.
That the only way to have good sex and the only way to be masculine is to be aggressive, forceful and violent

3.
That they must always be in control and always want to be in control

4.
That their pleasure comes first and foremost


It hardly needs stating what kind of pressures and expectations this puts on girls and women. They have to be living breathing sex dolls and they have to love it. The porn industry is women abuse.

http://www.bad-housekeeping.com/2014...nd-gonzo-porn/

---------------------



Very sad. And we wonder why there is a rape culture and rape mentality?

[Kobi]

The bride wears white, is handed from man to man – and then loses a major part of her identity. Why do Australian women still put up with these patriachal customs – and how come I feel too embarrassed to ask them?

It has become my Muriel moment. I find myself standing in the back pews of church watching a dear female friend led down the aisle on her father’s arm, blubbering uncontrollably through my MaxFactor. But these are not tears of joy, of nostalgia, or even envy. These are tears of despair. Of confusion.

Another comrade has fallen. Another secular, strong-minded, sexually-liberated, independent Gen-Xer is giving up her name to a man before God in an alabaster scene straight out of Bride to Be magazine and all I can think is, “all John Howard’s dreams have come true”. And why? Oh, because he wanted me to.

This week, the European Court of Human Rights overturned an archaic Italian law which prevented children from adopting their mother’s surname, deeming the rule "patriarchal", "discriminatory" and a "difference of treatment between men and women". And yet, faced with a range of choices, it seems that Australian women are overwhelmingly volunteering to maintain this patronymic practice, choosing their husband’s name not only for their children, but for themselves.

A 2013 survey found that around 82% of married Australian women still assume their husband’s surname, while around 90% of children are registered in their father’s names. Taken alongside other stock wedding practices, from white frocks to paternal giveaways, these figures reflect the resilience of patriarchal customs in marriage between Australian men and women; a consent to inequality which is baffling.

Across the country, women are getting married later and older, with more cohabiting and bearing children beforehand. We are more inclined to be university-educated, professional, property-owners. We overwhelmingly support same-sex relationships and profess a belief in the need for greater gender equality. And yet, when it comes to our weddings, most of us still appear happy to insert politically-correct clauses about the right to same-sex marriage into our ceremonies, then proceed to throw out our lifelong identities, retrofit the trappings of virginity and be handed from man to man.

It's depressing not to recognise half your Facebook friends list because their names have changed overnight. They have been cast off for the happy tags of "Mrs X", as if to proclaim “forget who I was before – I am now loved, wanted and owned by a MAN!”

So why do I feel unable to ask why? It is testament to both the strength of these norms and current weakness of feminist debate in Australia that even amongst our closest friends it feels taboo to discuss frankly customs which many of us find exclusive, offensive or regressive.

It is not that I don’t celebrate the union of loved ones. I don't think my female peers have dropped their principles or their IQs, and I don't regard their husbands as anything other than enlightened gender-egalitarians. But for all symbolic purposes, it seems that supposed allies in the struggle for female equality are drifting back half a century on a sea of Tiffany.

The choice to marry is deeply personal. But when publicly performed, it becomes a statement of implied social values and virtues. And when we are asked to participate in this ritual, to bear witness and to endorse it even in the face of our disagreement, the least we can ask for is an explanation.

When (another) Australian Prime Minister is doing his best to roll back women’s rights, to peddle exclusive family values and remove women from power and public life in exchange for an antediluvian scene where “an enormous number of women simply [do] housework”, the need for this justification is all the greater. When feminism seems increasingly to have become a dirty word, every battle counts - the symbolic ones no less.

As some in same-sex relationships seek to enter, and thereby alter, the inherently prejudicial institution of marriage, it is possible that greater scope will open to challenge and reshape its gendered norms. But in the meantime, the take-home message of marriage in Australia seems still to be very much "man and wife". So when myself and my fellow naysayers do finally pluck-up the courage to spit the figurative penis-straw and ask why we are continuing to swallow it whole, I will expect a damn good answer.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...inism-weddings