Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[Kobi]

NEW DELHI (AP) — A series of recent high-profile gang rape cases in India has ignited a debate: Are such crimes on the rise, or is it simply that more attention is being paid to a problem long hidden within families and villages? The answer, experts say, is both.

Modernization is fueling a crisis of sexual assault in India, with increasingly independent women now working in factories and offices and stepping beyond the subservient roles to which they had traditionally been relegated. They are also more likely than their mothers and grandmothers were to report rapes, and more likely to encounter male strangers in public.

"We never used to see so many cases of gang rape, and so many involving groups of young, unemployed men," said Supreme Court lawyer Kirti Singh, who specializes in women's issues.

While there are no reliable statistics on gang rapes, experts say the trend, along with the growing sense of insecurity it has brought for women, led to recent outbursts of public anger over the long-ignored epidemic of violence against women.

The silence broke in December, when a New Delhi student was gang-raped on a bus in a particularly vicious attack from which she died two weeks later. A juvenile court on Saturday handed down the first conviction in the case, sending a teenager to a reform home for three years for rape and murder.

The sentence, the maximum a juvenile can face, was widely denounced as too lenient, and the girl's parents vowed to appeal. The other suspects in the case are being tried as adults and could face execution if convicted.

While attacks on women occur constantly across India, often within the home, the brutality and public nature of the New Delhi case left many shocked and shamed. Thousands took to the streets in the capital to express their outrage.

The government, pledging to crack down, created fast-track courts for rape cases, doubled prison terms for rape and criminalized voyeurism, stalking, acid attacks and the trafficking of women.

The Tourism Ministry launched a nationwide "I Respect Women" campaign after a Swiss bicyclist was gang-raped in March in central India and an American woman was gang-raped two months later in the northern resort town of Manali.

Yet another high-profile gang rape last month, against a photojournalist on assignment in Mumbai, renewed public fury and sent the media into 24-7 coverage marked by daily front page headlines and talk shows debating how to make India safe for women.

"There is very clearly a class dimension" that is compounding the sudden outrage, women's rights lawyer Flavia Agnes said.

All five of the accused in the Mumbai attack had little to no education, and three had previously been arrested for theft, Mumbai police said. They lived in the slums near the abandoned textile mill where the woman was raped.

In both the Mumbai and the Delhi cases, "middle-class people identified with these young girls, aspiring professionals, trying to make their mark in a competitive world," said Sudha Sundararaman, an activist with the All India Democratic Women's Association.

Experts say the rapid growth of India's cities and the yawning gulf between rich and poor are exacerbating the problem, with young men struggling to prove their traditional dominance in a changing world.

"These are young men in the cities, without prospects, without hope. They feel rage against those who are perceived to have it," sociologist Sudhir Kakar said.

Cultural stigmas, police apathy and judicial incompetence have long made it difficult for women to even report rapes.

But if modernization is changing the risks women face, it is also giving them the ability to speak up. In the first three months after the December bus rape, the number of rapes reported in the city more than doubled to 359, from the 143 reported in January-March of 2012.

Those numbers, in a city of almost 17 million people, are still seen by experts as far below the actual number of attacks, but the jarring increase in just one year appeared to signal a significant change.

"The biggest change is that women in the middle classes are reporting crimes to police," Kakar said. They are fed up with the landscape of sexual harassment and fear, with the constant barrage of lewd comments and even groping — locally known as "eve-teasing" — and with being told they should stay indoors at night.

"Thirty years ago, even uttering the word 'rape' was almost taboo. That is changing," said Ranjana Kumari, a women's activist with the Center for Social Research. "There are so many cases, each more gruesome than the other, and people have lost patience, especially when no justice is served."

The photojournalist attacked last month stunned the nation by telling local media that "rape is not the end of life" — a groundbreaking statement given that many rape victims are still often dismissed as defiled. Many are shunned by their families, fired from jobs or driven from their home villages. As a result, most rape victims are still thought to remain silent.

"What's wrong with the system?" Supreme Court Justices R.M. Lodha and Madan B. Lokur said in a statement last week, while hearing a petition from the father of a 15-year-old girl gang-raped by three men in 2012, according to Indian media. The girl, who is a dalit, member of the outcast community once known as untouchables, has since been barred from her school in north India, and her mother was killed for refusing to withdraw a police complaint about the crime, according to Press Trust of India.

The court lambasted India's poor record of conviction in rape cases, saying "Why are 90 percent of rape cases ending in acquittals? The situation is going from bad to worse."

http://news.yahoo.com/india-fury-ove...102555774.html

[Soon]

Company in Texas Fails Hard with Tailgate Decal of Bound Woman

A marketing and advertising company in Waco, Tex. really wanted to drum up some new business, you know, make a splash. Most likely, there was a strategy meeting at which Hornet Signs’ owner, Brad Kolb, petitioned his crack creative team for some ideas. Maybe someone said tentatively, “We should all wear funny hats, like, everywhere,” but that idea was roundly rejected. Maybe some other someone then said, “Let’s use the INTERNET to, you know, make gifs of cats holding up our signs.” No, no — Hornet Signs needed to show the public how realistic its signs are, how they have depth, contour. Hornet needed to not just interest or entertain people — the company needed to alarm them, to spread panic across the Texas highways, which is how the “woman bounded in the bed of a truck” pickup truck tailgate decal was born.

The decal has attracted nothing but negative attention since local media got wind of it earlier in the week, though Kolb insisted to KWTX, “I wasn't expecting the reactions we got, nor do we condone this by any means. It was more or less something we put out there to see who noticed it.” Condone what, exactly? Violence against women? Kidnap? Rape? Wait, so you’re saying that this tailgate decal — that an employee had to slap on a truck and drive around with to “gauge how realistic [Hornet Signs’] decals are” — isn’t somehow an ad encouraging people to go forth, kidnap, and be prosperous? What you’re really saying, then, is that Kolb is just a sensationalistic asshole who mistakenly believes an image like the one on his company’s tailgate decals is provocative when, really, it’s just a graphic testament to the casual, callous misogyny that tries to assert some kind of ownership over women’s bodies.

By all accounts, Kolb has provoked exactly the reaction he no doubt was looking for: people have noticed, word is spreading, and the police have yet to get involved, although some alarmed Waco citizens have called the authorities (manufactured panic, which, notes The Frisky’s Julie Gerstein, said authorities must LOVE). The decal hit the streets a month ago, and, despite the ire on Hornet Signs’ Facebook page, Kolb claims that the bound-woman decal has done precisely what he wanted it to do, i.e. increase orders for more truck stickers.

That’s how utterly mundane this all is — quite likely, Kolb doesn’t really believe he or the people at his company did a horribly misogynistic thing. They’re just trying to grab some attention so they can peddle some stickers, even if their stunt has been done before, even if the public hates them for it. The stunt’s mundanity, though, is what makes this kind of thing so insidious. This decal is an act of visual violence, evidence of a misogyny that has blossomed like a cancer in someone’s worldview, eroding all empathy to the point where the image of a woman bound in the bed of a truck elicits only dumb snickers of, “Heh, heh — I’ll bet this’ll sell a whole mess of [insert stupid, useless thing that no one wants].”

[Kobi]

LONDON (AP) — About 1 in 10 men in some parts of Asia admitted raping a woman who was not their partner, according to the first large studies of rape and sexual violence. When their wife or girlfriend was included, that figure rose to about a quarter.

International researchers said their startling findings should change perceptions about how common violence against women is and prompt major campaigns to prevent it. Still, the results were based on a survey of only six Asian countries and the authors said it was uncertain what rates were like elsewhere in the region and beyond. They said engrained sexist attitudes contributed, but that other factors like poverty or being emotionally and physically abused as children were major risk factors for men's violent behavior.

A previous report from the World Health Organization found one-third of women worldwide say they have been victims of domestic or sexual violence.

"It's clear violence against women is far more widespread in the general population than we thought," said Rachel Jewkes of South Africa's Medical Research Council, who led the two studies. The research was paid for by several United Nations agencies and Australia, Britain, Norway and Sweden. The papers were published online Tuesday in the journal, Lancet Global Health.

In the new research, male interviewers surveyed more than 10,000 men in Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. The word "rape" was not used in the questions, but the men were asked if they had ever forced a woman to have sex when she wasn't willing or if they had ever forced sex on someone who was too drunk or drugged to consent.

In most places, scientists concluded between 6 to 8 percent of men raped a woman who wasn't their partner. When they included wives and girlfriends, the figures were mostly between 30 to 57 percent. The lowest rates were in Bangladesh and Indonesia and the highest were in Papa New Guinea. Previous studies of rape have been done in South Africa, where nearly 40 percent of men are believed to have raped a woman.

Of those who acknowledged forcing a woman to have sex, more than 70 percent of men said it was because of "sexual entitlement." Nearly 60 percent said they were bored or wanted to have fun while about 40 percent said it was because they were angry or wanted to punish the woman. Only about half of the men said they felt guilty and 23 percent had been imprisoned for a rape.

"The problem is shocking but anyplace we have looked, we see partner violence, victimization and sexual violence," said Michele Decker, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who co-wrote an accompanying commentary. "Rape doesn't just involve someone with a gun to a woman's head," she said. "People tend to think of rape as something someone else would do."

"It's not enough to focus on services for women," said Charlotte Watts, head of the Gender, Violence and Health Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was not part of the study. She said some programs in Africa based on challenging traditional ideas of masculinity are proving successful.

"It may be that the culture where they grew up condones violence, but it's not impossible to change that," she said

http://news.yahoo.com/study-1-10-men...062455382.html

[Cin]

Is This The Worst College for Women in the United States?

Rust College is under fire for re-hiring a teacher accused of raping a 16-year-old, who went on to rape multiple students on campus.

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.

Courthouse News reported a lawsuit alleging that professor Sylvester Oliver had already lost his teaching license after being accused of raping a 16-year old girl. Yet, he was re-hired by Rust College, where he went on to forcibly rape a student in his office.

The student, plaintiff Jane Doe, is suing Rust College and Oliver in federal court. Doe is arguing that the college turned a blind eye to Oliver’s sexual exploitation of students by concealing his pattern of sexual misconduct and blatantly threatened to fire anyone who assisted in the investigation into her rape.

In her lawsuit, Doe claims that Rust College allowed Oliver to resign after he was accused of having "an inappropriate sexual relationship with at least one female student." Oliver then went to work for a school in Memphis but was fired and lost his teaching license after a 16-year-old girl accused him of rape. Yet, despite the knowledge of the allegations, Rust College re-hired Oliver. Soon after, he forcibly raped Doe in his office.

Doe claims that shortly after her rape she reported it to the college and the Holly Springs Police Department but the college did not fire Oliver. Moreover, she claims that Oliver was not the only male employee of Rust College that has sexually assaulted a student at the historically black liberal arts college.

Doe is seeking compensation and punitive damages for the ordeal. Oliver is currently awaiting trial on criminal rape charged.

Doe’s lawyers from the Cochran Firm, believe there are more victims out there and last week launched a website for the lawsuit: http://www.rustcollegeabuse.com

Since the launch of the website, the lawyers say that more women have come forward to say they were raped, Local Memphis reported.

“A team of investigators have uncovered what we think is a scandalous type of approach to monitoring this type of activity,” said Cochran Firm attorney Sam Cherry to Wreg Memphis News.

http://www.alternet.org/investigatio...-united-states

[Cin]

The six ways we talk about a teenage girl’s age
The idea that a teen can be "older than her chronological age" puts young girls in danger

Last week, Montana District Judge G. Todd Baugh declared a troubled, now dead, 16-year-old girl culpable for her own rape. (The girl was just 14 when the crime occurred.) While in the process of reducing her rapist’s 15-year sentence to 30 days, he explained that the victim was “older than her chronological age,” and “as much in control of the situation” as the 49-year-old teacher found guilty of raping her. After outraged protest and demands that he be removed from the bench, Baugh apologized and has called for a new hearing. This case bears striking similarity to one in the U.K. earlier this summer in which a 13-year-old girl involved was described, including by the judge, as sexually “predatory.”

This happens with dulling regularity, and has for years. One month ago, defense lawyers in Louisiana used similar reasoning in a case involving a juvenile detention guard and a 14-year-old in his care. They argued that the girl had consented to sex with the guard, though she was three years younger than the age of consent in Louisiana.

The language used in these cases demonstrates our confused notions about girls’ ages and what they mean.

An adolescent girl isn’t allowed to be “her age.” Indeed, she doesn’t actually have one age but many that people assess and judge as she goes through her day. When it comes to sexual assault, consent and justice, an individual girl’s “age” is especially a matter of social construction. Society constructs her age in at least six different ways:

First, there’s her chronological age. This is the easiest one, based on a girl’s birthday. Simple enough.

Second, there’s the age her body looks — which, for too many people in and out of the justice system, apparently makes a difference in rape. In 2000, a South Caroline Circuit judge halved a 27-year-old youth minister’s sentence in a case involving a 14-year-old, explaining, that the girl’s body “was [at] an unusual stage of maturity.” But what does this ridiculous consideration of “physical maturation” mean for girls starting puberty at younger and younger ages? That assault of an older-looking 10-year-old is more forgivable?

Third, there’s emotional age. There are 12-year-olds capable of more easygoing conversation, passionate feeling, emotional intimacy and mature deliberation than some 30-year-olds. That does not, however, make them, in any way, the equal of a 30-year-old. These qualities are separate and apart from experience, power differentials, authority, control and consent. Judges generally don’t take emotional maturity into account when adults engage minors in other unlawful activities, and they shouldn’t in cases of sexual assault either. An emotionally and intellectually mature 15-year-old is still not allowed to vote. When a 49-year-old provides a 13-year-old alcohol, does a judge take into account how much the 13-year-old may have wanted to drink, or that the 13-year-old can hold his liquor? We cannot excuse teachers, coaches, priests and mentors from rape prosecution when they assault children in their care. We have legal ages for a reason.

Fourth, there’s commercially profitable age. This is the age at which a girl begins to be targeted for sexualizing products, often but not always based on her appearance. This age has become depressingly young. Girls are saturated with marketing messages about body enhancing products and “fun” ideas about how to look, dress, stand, speak, run, sit, eat, walk, work, sleep, starve, fix their hair, shave, bleach, cut bits off, add bits on and pose so that they are sexy. In other words, so that they are pleasing to boys and men.

Fifth, there’s media age. This is the age at which girls begin to be represented as sexual products themselves, as legitimate sexual targets and as prizes for male heroes. We regularly see 12-year-old girls in media who “look older,” and “looking older” is desirable and lauded. Movies and television portray younger and younger girls as hypersexualized, sexually predatory or somehow complicit in sexual crimes committed against them in gross disproportion to boys, who remain central to narrative, nonsexualized and productive. Girls get a great deal of social sanction for turning themselves into eye candy.

Lastly, there’s the age at which a girl is portrayed as “fair game” for older men. Mainstream movies regularly feature older male actors with much younger female ones. Older women in media virtually disappear after the age of 40, certainly in relation to younger men, but moviegoers don’t think twice about pairing aging male stars like Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Harrison Ford, George Clooney with ever younger female costars. This double standard glamorizes double-digit age gaps in romantic and sexual entanglements (not to mention perpetuates sex-based, lifetime wage discrimination in the industry).

Consider the movie “Two Mothers,” a story about two “older” women who fall in love with each other’s sons, in a “taboo sex drama.” It was the “most divisive film to screen at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.” The movie is based on a Doris Lessing story actually called, “Two Grandmothers.” Compare this to “American Beauty,” which was based on the Amy Fisher story, in which a man falls for his teenage daughter’s friend. American Beauty wasn’t “taboo” and caused no audience outrage. It was described as “poetic and humane.” The “unreliable narrator” of Nabokov’s “Lolita” infuses our media and apparently permeates parts of our judicial landscape.

When you consider the many ages of adolescent girls, it is clear that our cultural imagination encourages boys and men to think of young girls as fair game. By the time a girl is 12, she isn’t even seen as a whole human being, but regarded for her parts. She’s “forbidden fruit,” “a temptress,” “a man trap” and “asking for it.” All she has to do to be targeted sexually is go for a walk. If she wears skimpy clothes, is overly friendly with a teacher, dances with abandon, especially if she’s a girl or young woman of color, she might be blamed for her own assault. This is a male fantasy. And I haven’t even mentioned schoolgirl pornography or designer vaginas.

Not one of these many ways of measuring an adolescent girl’s age excuses predatory rapists — and yet time and time again, they’re used to do just that.

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/04/the_...age_girls_age/

[Cin]

A Case Study in Awful: The 8 Worst Parts of the Recent Naval Academy Rape Hearing
by Erin Matson, Editor at Large, RH Reality Check


Recently, 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.

At one point, the midshipman said she was too exhausted to continue testifying and the commander presiding over the hearing granted her a day off. “This is borderline abusive,” her attorney Susan Burke said upon leaving the Navy Yard that day. Abusive, yes, and sadly all too instructive in how rape culture encourages attorneys, members of the media, and others to turn sexual assault victims into the accused.

The routine process of victim blaming, as illuminated by this Article 32 hearing, serves to silence other sexual assault victims, generate sympathy for rapists, and create doubts that the definition of sexual assault includes anything beyond a stranger jumping out of an alley and raping a sweet, chaste woman wearing modest clothing.

In this case, the midshipman saw social media posts that led her to believe she was raped while drunk. All three defendants admitted sexual contact with the midshipman on the night at the center of the allegations—either to her, or prosecutors. What follows is a look at some of the horrible insinuations, statements, and questions used by defense attorneys to impugn the character of the midshipman, which offer an entry point to talk about and refute rape culture as a whole.

How do you perform oral sex?

Defense attorneys repeatedly asked the midshipman how she performs oral sex. This question is irrelevant, even though one of the defendants has said that he put his penis in her mouth that night. Here’s the deal: It doesn’t matter if a sexual assault victim has had sex, and it doesn’t matter how she (or he) prefers to have sex. People are biologically driven to have sex. Sex is part of normal life. A history or manner of having oral sex, or rough sex, or any specific style of sex, does not mean that you can’t be sexually assaulted orally, or roughly, or in that specific style. There are infinite ways to have sex, minus one: Sex without consent isn’t sex. By definition, it’s rape.

Tell us about your sex life.

Along with repeated queries about how she performs oral sex, the midshipman was asked to describe her sex life in detail. This, like the oral sex question, is also irrelevant and demeaning. Casting the spotlight on a victim’s sexual history in the context of discussing her (or his) rape serves to make others imagine the victim sexually. It serves to degrade her (or him). Sharing your sexuality with others is a personal choice. Being cast in a sexual light can be highly desired, even great, when freely chosen. But painting a sexual picture of someone when they haven’t asked you to serves to shame, silence, and sluttify.

You had sex with him before, right?

The midshipman and other witnesses were called to say that one of the defendants had a history of consensual sex with her prior to the night listed in the sexual assault charges. But this is irrelevant. There is no social role—boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, best friend, casual sex partner, community leader, religious official—that renders a person unable to rape. The only way to not be a rapist is to not rape. Further, consent is never permanent. Consenting to sex once or even 1,000 times is never consenting to future sex. Consent must be given for every single sex act, every single time. Sexual contact without consent is sexual assault.

But you were flirting!

In tandem with conflating and purposefully confusing previous consensual sex with rape charges, defense attorneys suggested that she was flirting that night. The dog whistle hangs rather obviously in the air: She’s a slut, they’re arguing, she wanted it. As nearly everyone who has attempted romantic interaction with another can say from personal experience, the interpretation that someone is flirting with you does not mean that someone has the intent to flirt with you, and vice versa. Heck, let’s even say she was flirting. Flirting is neither a crime nor an invitation to commit a crime. Flirtation never forces rape. Flirtation never excuses rape.

Did you “feel like a ho” the next morning?

This really happened: The defense attorneys asked the midshipman if she “felt like a ho” the next morning. Applying derogatory terms about sex workers to anyone, including sex workers themselves, is a tool of sexual dominance. Questions like these make it so painfully obvious why sexual assault victims can be hesitant to come forward. If you say something, they’ll trash you. They really will.

You must be hiding something.

While being compared to a “ho” and asked to describe how she performs oral sex, the midshipman said that she hadn’t always been totally forthcoming with information. For any sexual assault victim, it’s not hard to fill in the blanks and explain why. When people come forward about sexual assault, the spotlight is put on them, and it is not flattering. Giving rapists a pass and denying that victims have been victimized, or at least making them appear unreasonable, is what rape culture is all about.

“Drunk sex is not sexual assault.”

Defense attorneys said that a blackout state induced by alcohol “is a function of memory. It is not an attribute of capacity.” This argument is to say that a person saturated with alcohol can do anything, they just may not be able to remember it. That is not true physically, legally, or mentally. An extremely drunk person may be too incapacitated, physically, to walk or speak, or too incapacitated, legally, to drive or operate certain equipment. So, too, an extremely drunk person may be too incapacitated, mentally, to consent to sex. It is irrelevant how much, if any, alcohol is involved: The burden to not rape will always be on rapists, not victims. There is no free pass to rape a person unable to offer meaningful, understanding, reasonably aware consent to sexual contact.

What should we take away from this awful hearing?

Defense attorneys painted the midshipman as a “bad girl” in order to raise doubt about the rape charges against the three former Naval Academy football players charged with sexually assaulting her. In so doing, they relied upon sexism and stubborn myths that make it easy for rapists to get away with rape.

The myth that “good girls don’t get raped” is one of the cruelest lies to be found in the intersecting worlds of male dominance and rape culture. It serves to shift the focus of sexual assault conversations from perpetrators to victims. Culturally, we can understand why this happens, even when women, who are more likely to be victimized by sexual assault, participate.

If there were a checklist to follow that means we couldn’t be sexually assaulted, then we wouldn’t have to live in fear of the reality that sexual assault will almost inevitably touch our lives or the lives of people we know. We wouldn’t have to filter online dates with a wary eye, or drink apple juice at the party, or clutch our keys when we walk home at night. We could just not be sluts. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way, and the practice of victim blaming neither protects anyone nor creates a climate where women can participate freely in public life the same way men can, including taking a keg stand at a college party where football players are present.

In the context of legal proceedings, a negative focus on victims carries an additional punch. The Naval Academy rape hearing is so gut-wrenching because the woman for whom prosecutors are seeking justice was treated as much (or more) of a defendant as the three alleged rapists.

In our legal system, the burden of proof is on the state to prove that a defendant is guilty. It is a flaw in logic, to say nothing of lazy lawyering on behalf of a defense team, to insist that if a victim is proven guilty a defendant is innocent. Unfortunately, this is often the case when men are put on trial for rape allegations, and it’s happening here within the context of the military chain of command presiding over a sexual assault case.

As RH Reality Check‘s Adele Stan has written on the ongoing push to remove the military chain of command from sexual assault prosecutions in the context of this case:

Those who advocate taking the authority to prosecute such cases out of the hands of the commanding officers of those accused of sexual assault say there is little hope that the military’s rape-culture crisis will dissipate until the immediate commanders of the accused are taken out of the picture.

Certainly, rape culture is a terrible beast, and it came out on full display within this brutal rape hearing at the Navy Yard. It’s a vicious lie to insinuate that you can avoid the threat of rape by being a good girl. Good girls can get raped and bad girls can get raped, and every time, it’s rape. Women (and men) can wear miniskirts and flirt and still get raped. Drunk people can get raped. Drunk people can rape. Victims are not the problem.

A decision is forthcoming as to whether this specific case at the Naval Academy will proceed against the defendants, and it’s also up for grabs whether the U.S. Naval Academy Superintendent will be removed from the case. Given an ongoing push on Capitol Hill to better address military sexual assault, it is likely that additional legislative debates about military sexual assault prosecutions will come along on their own timelines. Whether the routine practice of victim blaming within a broader rape culture is allowed to continue, however, is up to all of us. Perhaps this case has been vomit-inducing enough to advance the conversation.

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/20...-rape-hearing/

[Kobi]

ATLANTA (Reuters) - A 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.

The Georgia Institute of Technology student newspaper published the apology on Thursday. It was signed only "Matthew" and the paper's editor did not return a call seeking comment on who wrote it.

"I am deeply sorry for the pain and embarrassment my actions and lack of judgment have caused the students at Georgia Tech and my Phi Kappa Tau brotherhood as well as those who otherwise came into contact with the email," said the letter.

The email was "written as a joke for a small audience that understood the context and that it is not my nor my fraternity's actual beliefs on the subject," the letter said.

Georgia Tech spokesman Matt Nagel said Friday he could not confirm whether the letter writer was the same student who sent the email, which offered frat members tips on how to "succeed" with women by plying them with alcohol at parties.

"If anything ever fails, go get more alcohol," said the email, which signed off with the phrase "luring the rapebait."

In a statement earlier this week, Georgia Tech said it was looking into the incident.

"The Institute does not condone this type of behavior and continues to provide resources and education designed to create a supportive campus environment for all students, even those who exercise extremely poor judgment," the statement said.

Phi Kappa Tau's national office said in a statement that it has suspended the student, pending the outcome of the investigation.

The email is "extremely inappropriate and does not reflect the values of the Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity," it said.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/georgia-tec...230219118.html