So I'm a bit tired this morning after spending six or seven hours baking in the sun yesterday watching a whole lot of other people run 26 miles. Considering that I wasn't running, I sure forgot how much effort it is to stand around, clap a bunch, eat hot dogs, and wander up and down Beacon Street. My feet were killing me.

So, with that being the case, here are a couple of other interesting things rolling around the world of the internets that I think folks should check out:

Over at the Curvature, Cara has a post about rape apologism in Australia.

Thomas at the Yes Means Yes blog has a bunch of great posts up: first, some thoughts on the Big Ben case. Also, an awesome and lengthy post on essentialism.

Cara at Feministe has some thoughts on sexual assault in Native communities.

At Sociological Images: an idea of what male objectification might look like.

An older post, but I just discovered this site a couple of days ago. Purtek wrote at the Hathor Legacy the post I tried to write last week. Why rape is different from other types of violence. Also, Jennifer Kesler at the same site has a great post on how to prevent rape.

Finally, to make the day a little more fun than a non-stop miseryfest, the Boston Breakers had their first home game of the 2010 season this Sunday (a 1-1 tie with Philadelphia). The next game is April 25th at 6 pm, and you can catch it on the Fox Soccer Channel if you've got it. Go Breakers!

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This Saturday, a particularly ominous topic starting trending on Twitter - #itaintrape. “Comedian” Lil Duval kicked it off by tweeting “#itaintrape if u naked of Yo Twitter profile pic”, “#itaintrape if I’m paying child support”, “Lmao RT @MrCashFanatic: @lilduval #itaintrape if she doesn’t remember it.”. And went from there. His followers picked it up and started their own party, some lowlights of which can be found here.

And then some of my friends saw this going on, and they started speaking their minds.

@popelizbet:
#itaintrape when everyone is giving full free consent & enthusiastic participation.

When you say #itaintrape for any other reason than full uncompromised consent you are or sound like #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes.

#itaintrape when someone beats you in a video game or you get overcharged. Stop trivializing rape as shorthand for unpleasantness.

If you need a set of elaborate justifications other than full & free consent as to why #itaintrape you are #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes.

Saying that #itaintrape when describing nonconsensual sex acts is morally bankrupt & the act of #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes.

Saying #itaintrape when an adult rapes a child is a disgusting act of betrayal. Regardless of the genders of predator & victim, #itsrape.

@karnythia
The only way #itaintrape is if everyone’s consenting. Otherwise it is rape. And you’re #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes

#itaintrape when you’re not a rapist. That means consent,no drugs, no booze, & no coercion. Otherwise you’re #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes

It is rape when someone’s impaired or frightened into cooperating. You’re #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes by claiming #itaintrape.

People that think #itaintrape is no big deal because it’s on Twitter? Try being someone who was raped and seeing people mock your pain.

#itaintrape isn’t funny when you have a soul or a conscience. Being a sociopathic little shit isn’t funny or something to celebrate.

#ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes is the only one likely to claim that consent isn’t required in order to claim #itaintrape

You say #itaintrape to the crying girl cowering in the corner. You’re #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes & you know it so stop lying.

Blaming the victim by claiming #itaintrape is always the default when you’re #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes. #BlameTheRapistForOnce.

Saying #itaintrape to victims that have to live with the nightmares? Makes you #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes.

When you “loosen them up” with booze or drugs and then claim #itaintrape ? You’re #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes

When you use violence or the implied threat of violence to coerce someone into sex & claim #itaintrape ? You’re #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes

The “it ain’t rape” idea, as PopeLizbet and Karnythia know, is very pernicious. It plays heavily into victim blaming - as Amanda Hess says here, “This is the general script for rape apologists:

1. Isolate a detail about the rape victim - it could be her appearance, her attire, her level of intoxication, her upbringing, her sexual history, or her presence at a particular party - really, anything will do.
2. Decide that that particular detail designates her as a less-than-perfect rape victim.
3. Assert that this rape doesn’t matter because the victim was asking for it / wasn’t taking charge of her own safety / is lying / doesn’t deserve any of the limited amount of the sympathy we extend to “real” victims of rape.

This troll has reversed that script. First, decide that you don’t care about the rape. Then, assume that the rape victim must conform to one of the accepted cultural markers of an “imperfect” victim (short skirt / stiletto heels / sexually promiscuous / had been drinking / has a piercing / in a bad neighborhood / has a tattoo - on the lower back! / wears make-up / and good luck if you’re transgender).”

People are looking to excuse other people for being rapists all the time. Just look at any celebrity rape case. And there’s always a list of things that gets brought up, whether the rapist is a celebrity or not - she danced with him. She had a drink. She wore a short skirt. She didn’t fight back.

One of the #itaintrape tweets in particular illustrated how awful this can get: @Chrissy_Paris: #itaintrape if she orgasam is it?

Many survivors apply some self-blame. It’s hard to get to “this is the rapist’s fault, and nothing I did made it okay for him to rape me”; people tend to look for what they did wrong, even if there’s nothing there. It can be a monumentally difficult thing to sit there with yourself and say “that was rape. I was raped.” Many people try to shove it to the back of their mind, not deal with it as what it is.

Especially if their bodies reacted.

And they can. Your body reacts to physical stimulation. Your brain doesn’t always have anything to do with that. It is perfectly possible to orgasm during rape, just because hey, your nerve endings are being stimulated. That does not make it not rape. It does not make it consensual. If you said no, it is rape. Doesn’t matter whether you had a physical reaction. But the fact is that that physical reaction is usually very tied to sexual pleasure, so it’s difficult to accept that that can happen during rape, and it’s a lot for the survivor to get past - and when the message the survivor is getting is “if you got wet/hard/off, it wasn’t rape”, it can be tremendously difficult to process. So this is a message that’s especially important to combat.

Saying “it ain’t rape” if the survivor was drunk, if they were on a date with the perpetrator, if they express their sexuality in any way is a way to silence survivors. Because the truth is that most survivors *do* know their rapists. If you were raped by someone you thought was your friend - yeah, probably you did hug them at some point, or let them treat you to coffee, or danced with them.

But that doesn’t mean you consented to having sex with them. And if there’s no consent, it’s rape. No matter what.

@popelizbet:
Saying #itaintrape because of how someone dresses means you believe rape can be justified. Sounds like you’re #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes.

Justifying why#itaintrape on Twitter tonight? Wonder what your mama thinks about that. Does she know you’re #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes?

If you say #itaintrape when victim is a prisoner you are endorsing rape as a tool of punishment. Could you be #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes?

Some of y’all gonna be lucky if your #itaintrape tweets aren’t used as evidence against you eventually. #mamasaidwatchwhatcomesoutyourmouth

Keep telling us when #itaintrape so we know never to be near you, cause you sound like #ARapistJustifyingYourCrimes

I’m almost sorry I missed this whole episode, just because I’d've loved to rain down some fiery doom. But Karnythia and PopeLizbet did a fantastic job, and illustrate a great point. I know some readers may be curious about what to do when you see victim-blaming, survivor-shaming stuff like this.

Well. This is what you do.

PopeLizbet and Karnythia, among others, hijacked that thread with *their* tweets. And got retweeted. And slowly it got to the point where every “#itaintrape if you pay child support” was followed by one of their tweets.

Haul ‘em off course. Make it clear that you disagree, and you won’t stand for it. Stand up and speak. This is something anyone can do - don’t just let that conversation happen, step in and say “Hey, that is not okay, and here’s why.”

PopeLizbet’s ending tirade is brilliant, so I’m reproducing it in its entirety below.

I’ll lighten up about #itaintrape when we as a society don’t treat rape lightly as a matter of policy. I’ll lighten up about #itaintrape when we don’t tacitly or overtly condone it as a tool of censure, punishment & control. I’ll lighten up about #itaintrape when rape becomes shockingly rare & universally reviled no matter who is victimized. I’ll lighten up about #itaintrape when prosecutors quit declining to prosecute to keep their success rates up for reelection. I’ll lighten up about #itaintrape when we don’t nominate Presidential candidates who make rape jokes on the campaign trail. I’ll lighten up about #itaintrape when people stop endorsing it as an appropriate consequence for crimes, drinking, or being alive. Basically? I’m not going to lighten up about #itaintrape because #yallaresick & reflect a sick culture.

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Happy Monday! To those readers who came out to support the Walk for Change yesterday, thank you! The walk was great - we got a ton of people and BARCC raised a lot of money. The weather was appropriately deferential to the occasion, and I got a sweet sunburn. The BARCC development team did a fine, fine job on this event; +10 social justice XP for them.

I was proud of my team - we got almost 30 walkers and we beat our fundraising goal by almost 30%. The most encouraging part for me, though, was that my team wasn't at the top of the fundraising pile. A lot of other volunteers and teams raised more money, brought more people to the event, and got a lot of exposure for the issue. Good jobs all.

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I first got involved in feminism because I was bored. I was unemployed in the fall of 2006, and after my daily job hunting activities, I needed something to interest me to keep me from all-consuming boredom. My roommate was a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan at the time, so I started reading every article of his I could find. It was through his website that I found Ariel Levy's book Female Chauvinist Pigs. I liked her book, and especially the critical parts of it - the parts that analyzed the big picture of culture and what it was telling each of us about our gender and identity. Her book led me to start investigating as many other feminist thinkers as I could find (at least, find for free in the library). It wasn't unusual in this period of my life for me to bring my laptop the BPL in Copley at 9 a.m., apply to jobs until 2 p.m., and only get home at 9 at night because I just sat on the second floor in the sociology section, burning through all of the books on gender theory they had.

Sexual violence was a topic that came up over and over again, especially in the writing of second-wave thinkers. I had a pretty mainstream idea of what sexual violence was at the time, meaning I didn't understand the concept of rape culture or patriarchy, but I thought that rape was a bad thing and we should probably arrest or at least sanction more rapists than we seemed to, as a culture.

As I read more feminist literature and theory, my view of where sexual violence fits into the world changed. A lot of the original impetus to contact BARCC and volunteer with them came from Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Wills, her landmark 1975 treatise on sexual assault. This was a foundational text for me in my understanding of systems of oppression:

From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.

Rape is a different kind of crime than theft or arson or even murder - rape has a political context that these other actions do not (murder is probably the big exception, especially in a racial justice arena). For most women, fear of rape and sexual assault is standard operating procedure - it is something the rest of culture tells them is a basic, inherent threat because of their physiology.

Fear is incredibly powerful. Fear is a tool of social control. Fear changes the way people act in real, basic, day-to-day ways. From my perspective, when I came into the sexual violence prevention world, rape was primarily a social construct to enforce gender-based oppression. This was one of the major reasons that I got involved with my men's group NOMAS-Boston - I felt that, not only do male-identified people have a role to play in ending sexual violence because we are half the population, we have more responsibility to end this because we were the ones who were causing it. It was my belief that the existence of patriarchy and its requirement that female bodies are oppressed was the root cause of rape. If we could strike back at the patriarchy, if we could break its social hold on our culture (which would mean making a new culture, too) then we would get rid of rape, or so I believed.

I still believe all of that, but coming to BARCC showed me how limited my perspective on sexual violence could be at times. Patriarchy isn't the only form of oppression in the world, and the ways that society elevates or diminishes people for their gender, ethnicity, or bodies all interact in complicated ways. Learning about the problems in the lesbian community with sexual assault confused me, because in my incredibly macro-level view of sexual violence, women weren't ever talked about as aggressors. I didn't understand their place in the "conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." It took me some serious time and digging and having good conversations and listening a lot to start to see a common thread from the super-big-picture theory that led me to BARCC, and the actual ways that I saw rape and sexual assault happening in the world. The common thread was power: who had it, who wanted to keep it, and how it was protected.

In general, society provides more easy access to power for men than for women, but if we find any one individual man and individual woman, the differences in power between the two might be very different than between the bigger and de-personalized constructs of "man" and "woman." The way I had conceptualized rape and sexual assault was great for trying to tackle sexual violence as something that affects millions of people, but it was a really bad way of understanding the actual lived lives of individual people. Working at BARCC gave me the opportunity to speak with a number of survivors, and each one of them has their own relationship to the wider culture and the ways power was distributed to them (or not distributed to them). In many cases, though, those big, social concerns took a necessary backseat to much more practical concerns: did they have a place to sleep? Were they safe? Did they want to go to the hospital, and did they have a way to get there? Worrying about the patriarchy could wait for tomorrow; people need to eat today.

Working on high-level social change is vital, but if I spend all of my time up in the clouds, I'm ignoring the people who are being affected by sexual violence every day. And coming full circle now, that's why things like the Walk are so important for me as a volunteer. The Walk is an opportunity for people like me who spend a lot of time in the clouds to make sure our work is always grounded in helping survivors, and in this case, that means giving BARCC dollars. Ensuring the staff is making a livable wage, making sure BARCC has the necessary facilities to work with survivors, making sure we have enough counselors on staff to actually support the living, breathing survivors who come to us for support - these things all cost money, and if my cash and the cash of my friends can help make sure those services exist, that's action that is supporting people in the real world, right now.

Likewise, for those folks who spend all of their time dealing with the heavy trauma of working with survivors to make sure they aren't suicidal, helping them get to the hospitals if they want to go, validating their experiences and listening to them, the walk is a place where those folks can see the commitment the rest of us have to fixing the system.

My efforts to change the world and the system, if they aren't grounded in the way people actually live their lives, will never actually fix anything.

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“My name is Shira,” I say. “And sixteen years ago, when I was twenty years old, I was raped.”

The audience is a high school class, an auditorium of college students at a Take Back the Night event, a police department, a group of BARCC volunteers in training. The speech changes with every audience - obviously, the cops get a different version than the teenagers! But that’s how I always start, how most of the survivor speakers start. Hi, this is who I am. This is what happened.

And then we stand up there and we tell you all about it.

Why do we do this?

Rape is regarded as something unspeakable. There is this tremendous, awful *silence* around the topic of rape and sexual assault, and it’s a silence that is tremendously damaging to survivors - because if you can’t talk about it, you can’t seek justice. You can’t call your rapist out. You can’t start to heal.

And you need to be able to do these things.

Sixteen years ago, I was raped.

Fourteen years ago, I started talking about it.

Eight years ago, I wrote about it on my blog.

And that post exploded.

Because once I started talking about it? Other people did, too. Once people see that silence is not mandatory, that you can talk about what happened and lightning will not strike you down - they start talking, too. The comments on that post unfolded, people from all over the world talking about what happened to them and knowing they weren’t alone.

It’s eight years later, and it’s rare that a month goes by that I don’t get a new comment on that post, or an e-mail from someone who read it. It’s still getting passed around to friends of friends of friends. It helps people. Just these words on a page and their message that you are not alone and that, if you speak, you will be heard.

I moved to Boston three and a half years ago. One of the first things I did when I got here was look up the local rape crisis center and apply to volunteer. The staffer who interviewed me mentioned the Survivor Speakers Bureau, and oh, I was in.

And I was terrified.

Public speaking is scary! Public speaking about personal trauma? Not any less scary, I promise you. Really. In addition… I’d written about the rape several times since the original blog post, but I’d never actually told the whole story aloud. Bits and pieces, to my husband and friends. But never a *speech*.

The survivor speech is five to ten minutes long.

That’s a lot to condense into five to ten minutes. Take one of the largest and most terrible things that ever happened to me and condense it into five minutes, with a beginning, middle, and end? Would you like me to do that backward and in heels?

But it’s that brief for a reason, and that reason is one of my big reasons to do this: after the speech, we take questions.

Which I think is fantastic.

Because, for the most part, the people we’re delivering this speech to have a lot of questions - and have never actually had an opportunity to ask them. Because how do you do that? How can you go up to someone and say “So, about your rape - I was wondering…” It’s not a thing that’s done.

But as part of a survivor speech, it is. This is the one place and time where it is perfectly acceptable to ask a rape survivor any question you need to ask. We have heard it all. If we don’t feel comfortable answering, we can defer to the volunteer accompanying us - but we answer just about everything.

Because we are all ambasssadors. Not just the survivor speakers. Not just the volunteers. Every single one of you is an ambassador. Every single one of you has the power to support survivors and effect social change, even if it’s just by being visible as someone who understands and will listen.

And to do your best at that, you need the tools. To get the tools, you need to ask your questions.

So I go to schools and workplaces and rallies, and I tell my story, and I stand before the audience as a person who has survived and thrived; I am proof of concept right here. And I answer questions, and I guide, and I listen.

I see the effects ripple outward.

I am so glad that I do this.

I am so glad that you listen.

Ask me anything.

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Every morning I commute to work on a bus going to a hospital, and this morning, I was reading when I tuned in to a couple of the guys sitting in the back. They looked like they might be students. I didn't quite get the whole conversation, but I did hear a couple of lines. One of the guys was asking the other two guys in a sort of joking way about how he could ask out a girl he liked. There was context here - it sounded like the woman in question was a fellow student, because the guy made references to exams once or twice. These guys were wearing what looked like doctor's coats, so I assumed they were medical students of some sort. If this woman was a classmate of theirs, she was probably a medical or dental student, too. The guy was asking a lot of questions - he wanted to ask this girl out and was afraid of doing so.

One of the other guys had some decent advice about waiting until the exam was over, and then asking if she wanted to grab coffee or a drink to celebrate being done with the semester. Sounded fair to me. The guy asking what to do looked relieved - he now had a plan of action he could follow. Nice - go young love! And on a bus, no less.

And then my morning was soured with a daily dose of rape culture. The third guy, who had thrown out a couple of ideas too, said something along the lines of: "yeah, once you guys get to a bar or something, roofie her drink! Then you can have a good time!"

The three of them did that laugh people do on the bus, where you laugh but not too loudly because other people will hear you. The other advice giver responded "nah, he would never do that. He's a nice guy." And then we were at our stop, and we all got off.

One of the regularly reoccurring things we try to tackle here is the idea of rape culture and how insidious it is. So many people have already written such awesome things about this topic, I'll send you to them for a basic intro if you don't already have one.

I don't think any of those guys was a rapist. Certainly, the guy who was asking questions was nervous about asking this woman out, which would indicate that he cared at least to a small extent what she thinks of him. I'm not trying to peg any of the three of them as perpetrators, but what they SAID and what a perpetrator would DO are not so different.

This is what rape culture looks like - a guy who did intend to roofie his date's drink could have been in this conversation, and not been kicked out of it. He probably would have scared everyone else a little bit, but not so much that his classmates reject him socially.

We've had a couple of posts at this point about fighting rape culture, but this fight is going to take place on a ton of different levels. To really reveal rape culture and make it as obvious as it needs to be for us to finally get rid of it, we need to work on a high, macro-level; at a community level; and within our own mental and emotional space.

On the really high macro-level fight, we need to push policies and legislation that don't treat women and gender-non-conforming folks as afterthoughts and second-class citizens. Until we start seeing laws that treat the LGBT population and women as equals to men, we will continue to see, enshrined in our legal code, the belief that these populations are not human and therefore not protected under the laws the same way people (i.e., men) are.

Laws do sometimes lead society, or at least meet up with its more progressive vanguard, and can seriously change public perception about what people are. This work requires electing progressive officials, and then also holding them accountable and mobilizing for better legislation. One political candidate pushing for reform is a nice idea, that same candidate pushing for reform with a chorus of voices behind him or her is a force of action.

On a community level, we need to push away messages that conflate irritating things with rape. I get wary about telling people to moderate their language because I don't want to confused as pro-censorship, but I think Dane Cook has a good point (never thought I would cite him here):

I think the word we need to remove from our everyday vernacular is the word "raped."

I think the word raped gets thrown around far too casually. You ever listen to a bunch of guys playing video games with each other online? It's like, "Ah man you shot me in the back dude. You raped me dude!"

I'm pretty sure if I talked to a woman who's been through that horrific situation and I said, "What was it like, you know being raped?" She's not gonna look at me and go, "Have you ever played Halo?"

Obviously, getting guys to stop talking about videogames with stupid language isn't going to stop rape on its own, but like I've said before, it makes behavior that mistakes violence for sex more obvious. It makes it way easier to tell the difference between the guy on the bus, who said something stupid because that's one of the few ways society allows guys to joke with each other, from the guy who's actually going to hurt someone.

More examples: don't buy crap like this. While our local version of Holla Back is unfortunately suspended, take that spirit while walking through our streets to help make catcalling intolerable in our neighborhoods. Push back against companies that use women's bodies to sell things. The less acceptable we make rape culture at the community level, the more it gets pushed away.

And of course, we all need to do some serious work trying to deprogram the social messages we've gotten about sexuality, gender, and our roles in the world that are intensely problematic. This work is hard. A tremendous amount of the way I dress, carry myself, and speak were informed by what I thought men were supposed to be, and I'm only now starting to look at those things critically. I still don't wear any pink clothing because I'm partially afraid it feminizes me (although I'll pretend it's because it makes me look washed out).

We have all received some seriously damaging messages about sex and sexuality and gender. Make no mistake here - as a cis-man, I've been pretty well trained by society to hate women. I've been trained that anything that sounds like or resembles traditional femininity is weak and deserves to be violated, harmed, or degraded. It's a fight to push back against those messages, but with time, I'm starting to learn how to do it. I'll write a post on this eventually.

I try to draw my inspiration from a lot of different places to continue fighting for gender justice. While Andrea Dworkin is not my typical source for this, sometimes I find her writing has a power I cannot find elsewhere. With the BARCC Walk for Change coming up this Sunday (register to walk!) I feel some strident words are in order to help me remember why I volunteer with BARCC:

I want to see this men's movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don't make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can't be self-indulgent.”

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