Woo-hoo!  Today is a good day!  For those of you who haven’t read it already, Federal Judge Vaughn R. Walker struck down California’s Proposition 8 as discriminatory in the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger case.  From the New York Times article:

“Proposition 8 cannot withstand any level of scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause,” wrote Judge Walker. “Excluding same-sex couples from marriage is simply not rationally related to a legitimate state interest.”

This is very exciting!  This is a day when our legal system has functioned correctly, to uphold the civil and human rights of our citizens, and bring the light of reasoned law against bigotry and hatred.  Decisions like this are what the law is for, in my mind: to make sure that all citizens are equal; that they all receive the same rights in front of the government, and that outrage based on lies and falsehoods are struck down.

What’s remarkable about Judge Walker’s decision (based on blogs written by lawyers who know these things better than I do) is that he presents a very, very, very lengthy account of the facts in this case.  Thomas over at the Yes Means Yes blog did a great job of pulling out Judge Walker’s findings of fact (as opposed to law).  This is important for two reasons: first, it’s a lot harder for the Supreme Court to overturn a decision on the facts - while it can make the determination that Walker just completely got all the facts WRONG, it would be hard to do that in this case because his decision is well put together and quite long (136 pages, with citations).  This means that if Perry vs. Schwarzenegger does go to the Supreme Court, they will have the same set of facts to investigate.  They might determine that Walker’s application of the law was wrong, but they’d be hard pressed to do that with the facts he compiled.

The reason this case is so exciting to me, aside from that it takes a grand blow against the idea that the LGBT population is a little less human than everyone else and therefore entitled to less rights, is that Walker heard a lot of testimony from actual experts on issues like child development.  The facts (again, as summarized by Thomas) that he laid out in his decision are not at all “new” or “surprising;” they are what any LGBT person or ally knew already: humans are humans, being gay isn’t being broken, and children aren’t harmed by gays and lesbians.  A selection of the facts that all of us already knew, but are nice to see on paper in a legal decision (these are from the decision itself, minus the many, many supporting paragraphs of citations and expert witness testimony):

46. Individuals do not generally choose their sexual orientation. No credible evidence supports a finding that an individual may, through conscious decision, therapeutic intervention or any other method, change his or her sexual orientation.

80. The campaign to pass Proposition 8 relied on stereotypes to show that same-sex relationships are inferior to opposite-sex relationships.  Emphasis mine.

I like Pam Spaulding’s take on why Prop 8 was overturned:

In the courts, you must defend your position. And in the long run, you couldn’t. Or rather many of you wouldn’t. Again, the specters of gay bogeymen were invoked as your leaders spun false images of avenging hordes for their reluctance to be questioned in the courts about the unprovoked lies they said in pulpits, in speeches, and on commercials.

This time, it didn’t work. The court saw through the phony claims and realized something, which I hope that many of you now do - you have no logical reason to either deny us the right to love or to deny us the ability to protect the ones whom we love.

I’m trying to calm down and to look at this from a more nuanced and distanced perspective.  This decision did not grant federal marriage rights to the LGBT world; it may not even stand up to a SCOTUS review.  But it was a strong blow for equality.  Even more than that, though, it was a strong blow for reason, and that’s why I’m writing about it here (aside from that I’m really excited and just want to write about it everywhere).

Judge Walker’s decision was, once again, based on actual facts.  It was based on the objective reality that scientists studied and codified.  I’m not saying that scientists are without their own biases as individuals, or that all science is great at measuring reality (there’s a lot of really bad science out in the world), but in general, this was a legal decision informed by truth.  Gays and lesbians are not child molesters, pedophiles, or any less capable of love and marriage than straights.  The stereotypes of what the LGBT population is like are hard to budge, culturally, but major legal victories like this can help dramatically.  We now have, in a very formal legal document that collects a lot of valuable research, a refutation of pretty much all of those social stereotypes and bigotry that homophobes have tried to use to prevent LGBT people from gaining access to equal rights.  Their bigotry was exposed for what it is - completely unfounded, not based on any objective reality, and full of haterade.

How will this decision send ripples through other anti-oppression work fighting the same sort of bigotry, bigotry that’s been accepted as social truth for so long that even acres of research proving it false won’t make it go away?  For the purposes of BARCC in particular: how many of the cultural messages that we get about rape (and which we have tons of evidence to disprove) might we be able to weaken or destroy if we had something comparable to this decision?  I don’t know, and I’m not even sure what form that would take in the court system, but Walker’s decision gives me a little bit of hope.  Clearly, there are people all over the country who are willing to fight back against stereotypes, falsehood, and policies based on them.  If we can do this with Prop 8, maybe we can start to apply the same sort of thinking to rape culture.  Then, maybe, we can get some support for policies that will actually help prevent rape (because they are based on reality and not crap), and stop hearing stories like this.

Good morning, good friends!  Despite the fact that it’s Monday morning, I have many reasons to be happy this morning.  Let me recount a few of them briefly:

1. My fabulous co-blogger Shira raised some crazy moneybucks for BARCC with her blogathon!  I also won a cool pendant-thing in her auction that I’ll probably give to my mom!  So Mom, if you don’t get a cool pendant-thing from me soon, it’s because I decided to keep it for myself instead!
2. My men’s group NOMAS-Boston had a really successful “Dating While Feminist” event on Thursday night last week!  We had some great speakers, cool discussions, and I got to wear ridiculous nametags!
 
3. After not being at Fenway for like six years, I’ll have gone to three Sox games in a weekend!  Let’s hear it for visiting friends from out of town who are obsessed with the Sox and who have unreasonable good luck with scalpers.

So in general, it’s a better Monday morning than most.  What I’m thinking about today, though, is sex: sex and its relationship to rape, or more precisely, how we think about its relationship to rape.

How many of you have heard the oft-used anti-rape line/slogan “rape is not sex” at some point?  How many folks agree with that idea?  I generally do.  Now, let’s take this a bit further - how many of you have heard the line “rape has nothing to do with sex?”  I have, a couple of times, and I cannot agree with it, and I think that trying to see rape as completely separate from sex wildly hinders our ability to do good work to stop rape.  At its core, we need to fix the way we think about sex to undercut support for rape.

Amongst our speakers at Dating While Feminist was Jaclyn Friedman, one of my feminist heroes and co-author of the book Yes Means Yes, which both Shira and I have mentioned before.  Jaclyn writes all over the place, but she was doing a guest stint over at Feministe recently and she put up a powerful piece about taking control over her sexuality.  Her piece helped continue my thinking about sex.  Sex is really cool.  Sex is good, for those folks who want to have it.  Sex is a basic and intrinsic part of my experience of the world.

A corollary to that: sex is powerful, because my sexuality is a huge, massive part of how I see myself.  My gender presentation, for example, is heavily based on what I think I need to look, sound, and act like in order to make women interested in me as a sexual partner.  I dress, act, and behave in a pattern that I think indicates, based on social symbols, that I am what society (mostly) expects a man to be.  Who I want to sleep with, and how I try to get them to want to sleep with me is a pretty damn fundamental piece of who I am, overall.

And wow, have we used that fundamental nature of sexuality to control, manipulate, abuse, and dominate society or what.  We use sex to sell products, to push social conformity, to scare populations into submission.  There are very real social sanctions for not at least paying lip service to the social models we’re supposed to emulate to attract a mate.  I will buy any product, act in any way, and generally chase whatever expectations society tells me I need to chase in order to be considered a sexual being and make it possible for me to find sexual partners.  Holly has, as usual, explained this better than me:

Man, there’s not much of a slot in the gender spectrum for being butch, female, and straight. Maybe in San Francisco? If it were a viable, non-social-life-killing option I’d take it. I used to be a lot manlier, used to have super-short hair and dress like a dude, and it just didn’t work out. I loved how it felt, but people’s reactions sucked: strangers would be jerks about it and guys told me they really weren’t attracted. Now that I’ve got long lovely red hair and wear skirts and push-up bras and shit, life is better. I still love my flannel and my steel-toe boots and my power tools, but I don’t have the patience or drive (or the she’d-be-hot-in-anything bone structure) to swim against the current on this. Part of attracting boys is wearing the “I’m attracted to boys” uniform, and, well, I know it’s weak but I’d rather have the boys than be a Gender Revolutionary. emphasis mine

And of course, we’re all told that by and large, there is one “I’m attracted to boys” uniform, and to a lesser extent that there’s one “I’m attracted to girls” uniform.  There isn’t any space in that uniform for non-gender conforming people.  There isn’t any space in that uniform for more genuine desires.  There isn’t a lot of space in that pre-fabricated notion of sex that we’re sold to express something as complex and interesting as human sexuality.

Telling people “you can’t have sex unless…” is a powerful force for social control.  You can’t have sex unless you make a certain amount of money.  You can’t have sex unless you pluck and wax yourself into oblivion.  You can’t have sex unless you act passive and demure.  You can’t have sex unless you’re gender-conforming.  You can’t have sex unless you wear a thong or drive a porsche or do something ridiculously specific and of course TOTALLY natural that will make people that you are interested in fall in love or lust with you forever.  Are shaved legs in any intrinsic way more attractive than non-shaven ones?  I mean, really?  What purpose does it serve to tell women (especially straight women), that a pre-condition of having men interested in them is to remove a natural-growing part of their bodies?  It takes a lot of time and hassle to do it, and it can be expensive.

Oh, right - it’s because Gillette can make a lot of money by selling sexual insecurity to women, which again, is fundamental insecurity.  If women are spending money buying razors, and time to shave themselves, then they don’t have as much money or time to push back against a system that tells them their natural bodies aren’t attractive and that they need to be constantly altered and changed in order to be acceptable.  If they aren’t attractive, then they aren’t women.  For someone who identifies as a woman, getting this social message is pretty much being told “you are bad at being yourself.

These messages about what we have to do to have sex are manufactured for the purpose of pushing either products, or maintaining a certain type of status quo in the world.  These messages become true over time, too, as Holly recognized above.  I wish I could tell all my female friends that they shouldn’t pluck or wax or shave, because they are awesome and men and women would want to have sex with them no matter what, but I’d probably be wrong - not making those displays of body modification would probably hurt their chances at finding (especially) male partners.  I wish I could shake my own conditioning that makes me both look for those displays of social conformity in my partners.

So, what have we learned?  First, that sexuality is a pretty fundamental part of human identity.  Second, that sex is coded in our culture as controllable: this is something that can be manipulated, because it is so fundamental.  It can be packaged and sold to us in a very specific box, and most of us will scurry around trying to squeeze our sexuality into that box.  Third, it can be manipulated in ridiculous ways that are arbitrary to the benefit of corporations or individuals.

Back to “rape is not sex:” It’s not.  Rape is a crime of control and dominance.  Manipulating our individual identities for profit or the social status quo is also control and dominance.  I’m not trying to say that a woman shaving her legs because she feels like she has to in order to experience being a sexual human is being victimized like a survivor of rape or sexual assault, but I am thinking that they exist on the same continuum.  One is about social control and dominance, and the other is about individual control and dominance.  Rape is all about sex, because society has done such a good job showing us that sex can be used for control and oppression, and because none of us (even the asexual population) is without a gender and orientation.  Rape seems to be the most extreme example of what society is already doing to us in regards to sex and sexuality: limiting our options and controlling our bodies and forcing us to do things we don’t want to do.  Sex (and race) is the venue where society forces on most of us an image of who we are, what we’re supposed to be FOR, and how we don’t live up.

And this is why articles like Jaclyn’s are so powerful, and so important.  Social control over sex is not completely overwhelming, at least not all the time.  Individual people find ways to push back against a system that tells them how to look, how to act, how to behave, and how to live in order to experience a very basic aspect of being human, and every time someone who’s done that finds a way to talk about it, it puts a little dent in the steel picture of what we’re all supposed to look like.  Every time someone calls bullshit on beauty standards, gender expectations, and the gender binary, sex as a pre-packaged concept that we’re all sold loses some value to dominate us.  The less controllable sex is, the less it can be used as a tool to constrain people, the less rapists will be able to apply it to control survivors.