I knit on the bus. It’s a great way to use what would otherwise be pretty dead time; I’m busy enough that the idea of wasting any usable time makes me twitchy. Plus, knitting isn’t just a productive thing for me; I find it very pleasant in a tactile way. I could rhapsodize about merino/bamboo/silk blends for paragraphs, but that’s not really the point. The point is that I do something slightly unusual in public. Also, I am a petite and approachable-seeming woman. This will be relevant.

When you knit on the bus, you get a lot of looks; they range from amused and nostalgic (“oh, my grandmother did that!”) to skeptical (“she better not infringe on her seatmates’ space”/“can she really do that without dropping a stitch?”) to the fellow-knitter nod. You also get a lot of people starting conversations. Most of those begin with the aforementioned “My grandma used to knit” or “What are you making?” I don’t mind those so much when I don’t have my earbuds in; when I do have my earbuds in, there begins a complicated process of marking my place, turning off my music, unplugging my ears, and saying “I’m sorry, what?”, answering the question or comment, then figuring out where I left off and beginning again. Which can be a bit annoying, but okay.

Which brings us to yesterday. I didn’t have my iPod on or earbuds in, so I looked more approachable already; when the (older) woman who sat next to me asked what I was making, I smiled and said “a baby blanket.” She moved on to a variation of the above line: “My mother used to knit.” I nodded and gave a noncommittal “Oh, nice.” She said, “She held the yarn differently.”

And grabbed my hands to demonstrate how her mother held the yarn.

Now, thankfully, the blanket in question is in a really basic pattern, so it’s hard for me to screw up; I call it my idiot knitting. I can deconstruct rape culture for you while knitting this blanket. In detail. And still be knitting on autopilot. The idea that she could’ve screwed up my entire knitting project had I been working on a delicate lace shawl is worthy of note, but is again not entirely the point.

The point is that my body is not public property. The point is that grabbing a stranger’s hands is really not okay.

The point is that this happens all the time.

Not usually with the knitting; many people see that hey, there’s something complicated going on with those hands and sticks and yarn and maybe I shouldn’t step in there. But very often, in the course of my everyday life, I find total strangers getting handsy with me, and I am really not okay with that.

It’s the waiter who pats me on the shoulder as he’s taking my order. It’s the patron in the yarn store who casually puts her hand on my waist as she navigates around me. It’s the person in CVS who just loves my hair so much she has to stick her hands in it.

All. The. Time.

I have found, also, that many of the men in my life have been skeptical that this happens with the frequency I say it does. So I’ve started making them aware of it. I’ll shoot them a look when someone directs me with a hand on the small of my back or my waist; I’ll say “that” with an eyebrow lift after some stranger has wound a curl around their finger or squeezed my upper arm. And slowly but surely, they are realizing how prevalent it is.

And how screwed up it is.

And we are socialized, as women, to not speak up. We are told repeatedly that we should save our ire for things that Matter. That if we object to the small things, our objection to the large things will bear less weight, have less value; that we’ll be painting ourselves as petty complainers.

But the thing is that rape culture exists on a continuum. Is it sexual assault when a stranger grabs my hands or my waist or my hair? In these instances, I do not feel sexually violated, so I’d say no. (It’s important to note that other people may feel differently, and this sort of touch can feel very invasive and triggery.) So the conditioning is to let it slide.

The problem with letting it slide is that small things lead to big things - not necessarily for the people getting handsy with strangers (though in the case of actual bus gropings, for example, absolutely), but for our culture as a whole. These small things are not really that small when you consider the message that they send - and that message is that female bodies are public property.

Because when female bodies are public property, it’s okay to touch them - not just hair, but to grab someone’s butt. When female bodies are public property, it’s okay to take upskirt pictures of random women on the bus. When female bodies are public property, it doesn’t matter what you do to them. They are there to be grabbed, to be ogled; they are there to have things done to them, and how dare the woman object? She left the house in that skirt. She left the house with her hair all pretty.

She left the house, period.

That’s not what the woman on the bus was thinking. Or the waiter, or the yarn store patron, or probably any of the random strangers I’ve been randomly touched by. But it’s there. It is a subconscious thing in our society - that if you are female, everyone has access to your body. That offering access to your body is opt-out, not opt-in. And, like Facebook’s privacy controls, even if you opt out, your choices are disregarded anyway.

I am, unsurprisingly, not okay with this. And I think it can change - I think it has to change, because I think that the smaller things need to change in order for the big things to change. In order to make it clearer that sexual assault is wrong, we need to make respect for bodily autonomy clearer - when people understand that it feels very invasive to have a stranger touch your hip or your waist, they can extrapolate how invasive other things are.

It’s a small thing, as rape culture goes - and it’s one that people tend to ignore. But I think it needs dealing with.

I disentangled my hands from the woman’s and said, with a pointed smile, “Excuse me - I don’t know you well enough to be holding hands with you!” She didn’t seem to like that, and she didn’t talk to me the rest of the bus ride. I could’ve said “Uh, this is a complicated pattern, please don’t make me lose my place!” or something else that might have been less off-putting to her; I could have made excuses. But no - I wanted to address the actual issue at hand, and do so without the loud “DON’T TOUCH ME” I’d've done if someone had touched me in a sexualized manner. I wanted to get the simple point across that I don’t know you and I don’t want you to grab my hands.

This is my body. I’ll wear tight jeans; I’ll wear short-ish skirts. Sometimes there is some cleavage. Often there are sparkly things in my hair. I’m physically affectionate; I hug my friends, I hold hands on the street. I’m friendly - I smile, I do chat on the bus if I haven’t got the earbuds in, I have random conversations with strangers.

But I don’t want you touching or grabbing me without asking. And I don’t want you doing it to anyone else, either.

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I want to thank Dave for stepping up and doing basically everything for the blog this past week and a half? Two weeks? I was in Wisconsin for a feminist science fiction convention, which I’ll write about next week (we did an excellent panel on rape and sexual assault in genre fiction), and when I got home I launched straight into a frenzy of preparation for this week’s new volunteer training. We have 28 wonderful and excited trainees in the room down the hall right now, getting ready to learn about evidence collection. I love their energy, I love getting awesome new volunteers, and I should really get back to them! :)

Anyone with a background in marketing or advertising has learned about branding: the “personality of a product, service or company and how it relates to key constituencies: Customers, Staff, Partners, Investors etc” (thank you, Wikipedia).  The vast majority consumer products are branded - they are sold to us through a combination of their actual functions and symbols, colors, and emotional triggers designed to give us an understanding of what the “personality” of the company selling the product is supposed to be.

Pretty much everything that exists in our world is, or can be, branded, whether or not they already have their own personality.  Savvy politicians brand themselves (like, say our current President).  Cities brand themselves, or at least get branded over time.  Businesses generally have a little more control over their brand and image than things like cities do, but events in the real world have an ability to either reinforce or break down the brand that a product or city or politician has developed over time (see BP’s brand and how it has changed since they broke the Earth).

Branding is powerful.  Coca-Cola is the most powerful soft-drink brand in the world.  Even though Pepsi regularly beats Coke in taste-tests around the world, Coke outsells Pepsi in virtually every market.  Researchers have started to look into whether knowing the brand of a soft can actually change its flavor to consumers.  I’m a sucker for this - I loves me some Vanilla Coke, but I generally detest Pepsi.  Sure, there are differences in taste, but I’ve been so convinced by good marketing and emotional connection to the product that Coke tastes better than Pepsi that in some very real way, my brain makes it so.

I’ve started to think about branding in different contexts after a friend sent me this article from the New York Times: how are we branding gender?  I don’t think we’re getting any less branded messages from the world about what our gender identities mean.  When I wrote my post last week about broken guitars, I wish I had thought of the word branding, because I think it’s a useful tool for me in my thinking about gender-based violence.

Men get branded as violent.  Women get branded as victims.  What are the effects of that branding on individual men and women, if Coke alone can convince me that their blend of unusual chemicals tastes better than a virtually identical blend of chemicals and make me purchase one over the other?  If I have an emotional attachment that strong to a soft-drink, what has my emotional attachment to, say, the entirety of my gender and sexuality identity done to my behavior?

Laura Kipnis touched on the idea that women are branded as vulnerable in her book The Female Thing:

It is, after all, a story upon which a good chunk of gender identity hinges, including a large part of what it feels like to be a woman: endangered.

Rape, sexual assault, domestic violence - these things are discussed as “women’s issues,” in part because men DO primarily perpetrate this type of violence against women, but also I think, because we as a culture have determined that being a victim, of anything, is the provenance of women.  Being disempowered, being assaulted, being a survivor of something seems to be as much a part of the social narrative of female-ness as any physiological characteristics (and maybe even more). 

We treat violence against women the way we treat…boys growing chest hair during puberty.  Sure, individual guys might need to manage it a little bit, and for some it will be more of an issue than it is for others, but pretty much it’s a part of being a man, even though there are large swathes of the population that probably don’t grow chest hair, or don’t grow it during puberty, or grow it well before puberty.  Likewise, women being victims and assaulted is part of being female, says the wider culture.  What could we possibly do about it?  It’s part of being a woman.  This is the branding of sexual violence, and I hate it because it’s really, really hard to fight.

There are other ways of looking at sexual violence.  Car crashes might be a good example: car crashes happen too often.  They are tragic and hurt or kill many, many people every year.  We recognize that car crashes are, pretty much universally very bad things.  Even though Americans recognize that car crashes occur regularly, we at least TRY to prevent them - we have police to ticket speeders and arrest drunk drivers, even if we can’t stop all of them.  We have state bureaucracies in our RMVs or DMVs dedicated to ensuring that, before people operate a car, they have some understanding of how they work and the dangers of using them.  Social organizations like MADD fight to make sure teens and new drivers know not to drive under the influence.  I like the way we look at car crashes.  I call this, for lack of a better phrase, the objective approach.  I want us to replace the branding approach of sexual violence with the objective approach.

The New York Times article really brought this point home for me, during the description of the first survivor’s attempts to navigate the legal system in Brooklyn:

The case was initially classified as a simple assault, Rebecca said. She remembered how the detective assigned to the investigation had told her that “the Brooklyn courts are tough and they may just throw out my case.”

The court system never got the opportunity. The man she accused of attacking her was never arrested, she said, even though she had more evidence than many sexual assault victims do: a witness, medically documented injuries and condoms that the man wore.

. 

Damn.  What else could she have possibly needed to move forward with this case?  Well, if she were fighting this case in a society that treated rape more like a car crash, nothing: she had witnesses, evidence, and medical reports.  She would be fighting on the facts, and facts can be proven easily with objective research.  But she wasn’t in that society, she was in our reality, which treats rape and sexual assault like a branding issue.

The branding approach we often can’t fight using facts.  I can’t prove to anyone that Coke is better than Pepsi, I can only state my preference.  Because Coke has better branding than Pepsi, most people will agree with me that Coke is better, no matter how much possible evidence we collect about the ingredients in Pepsi activating more taste buds or being more dynamic on the tongue or something similar.  If we keep looking at sexual violence as an intrinsic part of what it means to be a woman, then it will always be hard to convince the rest of society at large that we can, and need, to stop rape.  Isn’t it supposed to happen?

I’ve seen a couple of links recently that have a good, if somewhat terrifying job, of connecting the type of street harassment I wrote about last week with the larger issues of violence against women and rape.  First up (hat-tip to Ben A-Z), a Welsh campaign called “One Step Too Far.”

And next, a somewhat logical (if brutal and not necessarily beneficial) step from this type of harassment: the game “Hey Baby.”  The game lets you play a (what is insinuated to be) woman who is fed up with street harassers, and who also has a machinegun.  This game is exceptionally violent.

My goal is not to examine whether violent video games are good or bad or anything along those lines - I’m a long time gamer, I’ve been the cause of more virtual deaths than I want to think about.  But I do think it’s valid to look at both why a game like this exists, and why men who see it might have a shocked or confused reaction to it.  Thankfully, someone’s already done that - Leigh Alexander, game critic and news director at Gamasutra, wrote a great piece on Hey Baby:

It’s latent misogyny that happens in big cities; it takes my power away. It makes me an object in front of people I don’t even know, and that’s not okay whether they’re nice about it or not. It is nothing less than a slow-burning chronic trauma.

This idea, that these every day irritations are on a continuum with rape, is an essential point in my mind: rape is not a crime that has no grounding in the other aspects of our culture.  If street harassment were generally understood to be unacceptable, would we have less rape?  I’m not sure, but I bet that survivors wouldn’t have to jump through all of the hoops they do now to report it and be believed.  By stopping things like harassment, we areworking to stop rape, also.

I play guitar.  Poorly.  I’ve always loved music, and rock music in particular has been a big part of my emotional world since I was a little kid (shout out to Alice in Chains!), and when the first generation of guitar-based video games came out, I was on it.  My love/obsession with Guitar Hero got a bit out of hand; by the time I was spending hours trying to crank out “Psychobilly Freakout” on expert, I realized I could probably be using my time in more productive ways.  Thankfully, my brother agreed with me, and about three years ago he got me a real guitar starter kit for Christmas.  It was a pretty boss looking guitar too; all black with little shiny bits in it.  To ensure that I was keeping my pro-feminist cred, I slapped a white ribbon on it which is astonishingly still there.  SWEET!  Now I had a guitar!  I was going to be a REAL ROCK GOD!

Not quite so fast.  Sure, I have decent hand-to-eye coordination from years and years (...and years) of video games, but those skills do not automatically translate to playing an open G chord.  My learning process has been slow, mostly uneven, and hampered by my complete inability to maintain any sort of reasonable practice schedule.  Still, I am better now than I was in 2008, I’ve got a couple of recorded bits and pieces of songs, and I like to boast to my friends that I can play 20 seconds of all of their favorite songs.

As I was learning guitar over the past couple of years, I’ve also been learning more about gender justice and the world, and there developed a nice parallel between the two that helped me understand some of the larger issues I saw at play in violence prevention.  Seriously.  My brain works in tortured metaphors, honest!

BARCC has been around for a long time.  If ending sexual violence, or at least preventing it was easy, then we would’ve done it a long time ago (or made a lot of progress).  But it’s not easy, and one of the reasons it’s not easy is that, for lack of a better phrase, the way our culture socializes men creates a lot of violence.  Without pushing hard to change that basic socialization, we’re going to see men acting violent.  This was a very, very difficult idea for me to understand for a long time.  I sort of understood the idea of systemic change, but I couldn’t comprehend it in any meaningful way - until my first guitar.

As much as I love that guitar (and I totally do - it’s still looks really cool, and it was a gift from my brother, so it will always have emotional meaning to me), it was a guitar from a starter kit.  It was constructed at minimal cost and using the lowest quality materials that would still allow it to (mostly) function.  If I played it for more than an hour at a time (especially if whatever I was playing was bend or chord-heavy), the guitar would lose its tune.  It got frustrating after a while - I would look up tabs for my favorite songs, try to play them, and it wouldn’t quite sound right, even when I was playing the right notes and the right chords.  Sure, tuning it up helped; changing the strings helped for a little while, and glaring at it wickedly made ME feel better, but it didn’t solve the problem long-term: this guitar was made to lose its tune.  The way it was constructed made that inevitable.

There is a lot of great research on rape, the causes of rape and how it represents the broken system of socialization our culture promotes, especially to boys and men.  Starting with Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 Against Our Will, the first book to posit that rape was a result of male socialization, the overarching theme of this research has been that the ways we socialize boys and men (primarily) is…broken, and that it makes sexual violence inevitable.  When we teach boys and men that violence is synonymous with masculinity, they will become violent (the entirety of the Tough Guise series is awesome, by the way; you should definitely check it out if you haven’t). 

In an overarching culture that provides men with a lot of social rewards for being aggressive and violent, the small voice violence-prevention experts have isn’t going to be able to easily budge those messages.  Andrew Taslitz, law professor at Howard University, wrote in his 1999 book Rape and the Culture of the Courtroom that, “For most men, aggression, whether physical or verbal, is instrumental, a way of controlling others, attaining social or material benefits, dominance, and self esteem” (emphasis mine).  We know from Lisak’s research, and the research about rape perpetrators in general, that perpetrators hold hyper-masculine beliefs (.PDF link; check page 8 for the hyper-masculinity research).  They buy into the cultural conditioning that men are supposed to be really hard, and a substantial part of that conditioning is to be violent.  Similarly, abusive men (in this study, specifically men who perpetrate domestic violence) assume that other men are much, much more violent than they are.  I can understand where they might get that impression.  If we didn’t train men that being violent was a necessary component of being male, that would change our cultural landscape dramatically.

A lot of times, working in the sexual violence prevention world sort of feels like trying to play my first guitar.  Changing a string here or there or tuning it helped it sound better for a little while, but I could always guarantee that it was going to need tuning again the next time I picked it up, whether it was later the same day or the next day.  This was intensely frustrating, especially as I started to get a little bit better at playing it.  I tried to play the Allman Brothers Band song “Jessica” for probably two years before I decided that my guitar just wasn’t up to the task of maintaining its tuning long enough to go through the necessary practice.  I could almost play the song, but no matter how skilled I was, it never sounded right. It didn’t until my close friends got together to get me a serious guitar for my birthday a few years ago.

This new machine - it is the magnificent.  It holds its tune!  It plays beautiful music (well, based on my ability, anyway)!  Notes sound the way they are supposed to, now.  A lot of the old tabs I thought I was playing wrong I wasn’t - my old guitar just wasn’t up to the challenge of those songs, even if I had the skills to play them.

I now see sexual violence in pretty much the same way, which either means that I think way too metaphorically, or I’m way too excited about having a nice guitar.  Possibly both.  Some of the causes of rape and sexual assault will always be attributed to individual perpetrators.  But those issues are like tuning individual strings, or having to do regular maintenance on my instruments - they can be tweaked, adjusted, tailor-made for the situation at hand.  The reason sexual assault is epidemic in our culture is because the whole system on which we are trained to be men and women was made wrong.  It has lousy components, it is poorly put together, and it will always lead to violence because violence is part of what it does. 

What we need in order to replace this broken system is a new model.  I’ve harped on this before, but really, major media symbols and messages about what men should be and what is inherent to masculinity are essential to finding that new model.  The more we can help those models permeate the mainstream consciousness, the more we’ll be able to have a society that actually is up to the challenge of eliminating sexual assault.

*I realize that this post is very male-centric, and I understand that rape and sexual violence can have many different perpetrators.  However, almost all of the research about rates of perpetration still indicate that male-identified people commit the vast majority of rapes, and it is that category of violence that I think we have the most opportunity to combat through new social messaging.

And in keeping with my musical theme, the Allman Brothers Band’s “Jessica.” I would say it’s borderline impossible to listen to this song without feeling happy.  And with the newer guitar, I can almost play it (except the piano part)!

Today’s post is a guest post for our awesome colleague Lisa!

“It’s a no-brainer you wouldn’t sit by and watch if you saw someone being kidnapped. But what if you saw a woman being led away, a woman who can barely stand up because she had too much to drink?”

May 7, ABC’s prime-time show, What Would You Do?, aired an episode asking this question. It explored people’s reactions to a man attempting to leave a bar with an intoxicated woman who was out alone celebrating her 21st birthday. Watching the promos for the episode, my immediate (and cynical) thought was that bystanders would do nothing. In actuality, the results of the show were a pleasant surprise. However, I would argue that the scenario cultivated by the show was one in which it was substantially easier to identify something was amiss and to intervene. Furthermore, the show neglected to name the threat as “alcohol-facilitated sexual assault,” preventing its message from having much real meaning. (See George Mason U‘s site for a breakdown of what I mean by this term).

The scenario is set up in a bar on the Jersey Shore (though in a noticeably classier one than those featured in the reality show of its namesake). The bar is well lit and it appears to be daylight outside. It is not busy; in fact, all bar patrons have their own stool and thus it is relatively quiet and easy to hear other conversations. In this setting, it is easy for the other patrons to hear the young actress tell the man that she does not know him. This line is repeated quite often, prompting people to tell the man to leave her alone and prevent the young woman from leaving with him. I will give credit where credit is due and celebrate the patrons for stepping up and assertively preventing the man from taking the woman out of the bar. However, I don’t know about everyone else, but when I’m at a bar, it is often dark, crowded, and so noisy I may even have to shout to be heard by my friends.  To notice an interaction like this, one would need to be paying attention. It also may take a little more courage to intervene or perhaps require a higher standard of proof that something is awry.

This notion brings me to my next point, that it may not always so clear that the interaction poses a risk to the person in question. I would argue that it is unlikely that in a real-world situation the woman would have protested that she did not know the man. There is evidence that one way perpetrators are able to use alcohol and other substances to facilitate sexual assault is that the use of alcohol makes it difficult for people to detect ambiguous risk cues. For example, actions such as drinking or being led to an isolated place can be ambiguous because they can also be part of normal social behavior and flirting. Therefore, an intoxicated person may be less likely to perceive risk. This lack of perception of risk may make a person more likely to willingly leave the bar with someone (unlike the protests featured in WWYD). This reality calls for careful attention from bystanders and to recalibrate what is deemed as a warning sign (i.e slightly more subtle than the person shouting “I don’t know you.”).

Unfortunately we live in a society where alcohol consumption is gendered. People tend to perceive women who are drinking as sexually available and men who are drinking as aggressive. These expectancies set up a dynamic that not only enables alcohol-facilitated assault but wrongly places blame on the victim. As expertly stated in Jeanette Norris’s paper on alcohol consumption and sexual victimization, “Just as no one who is about to go out in public is expected to prepare to be mugged at gunpoint, neither do women preparing for an evening of socializing think about which man might sexually assault them.”

WWYD plays into these expectations in some respects. (You’ll have to catch the episode on TV to see this clip because it is strangely missing from the web video.) Their resident “relationship expert” offers a frightening nugget of wisdom excusing the appalling behavior of two young, married men (one an off-duty police officer) who joke with the young man about the potential of the young woman’s surprised reaction in the morning when she “wakes up with her pants around her ankles.” The expert explains these men likely feel they are missing out on their “days of freedom” and are living vicariously through the young man. Oh really, they are reminiscing about the good old days when they were single and could entice young women onto the beach and rape them? I found it gravely concerning that the show never addressed head-on the true issue at hand: alcohol-facilitated sexual assault. In fact, the word “rape” is uttered only once. Please, WWYD, call a spade a spade.

By now you might be thinking I’ve painted a hopeless picture. The show itself even concludes by stating that despite its results one cannot count on someone stepping in. To this point, I challenge everyone to change that norm. In spite of its many, many flaws, WWYD does offer a glimmer of hope in people’s humanity. Think about what made the people more likely to intervene in WWYD when the environment was small, quiet, and clearly dangerous and adapt those abilities to be effective in real-life situations. My favorite piece of WWYD’s naturalistic observation was that “once women got involved, it inspired others to get involved.” Sarcasm aside, there is power in numbers and if you speak up, others will be more likely to follow. I challenge everyone to question gendered expectations for drinking behavior and learn to recognize warning signs*, to step beyond the typical “don’t get involved” attitude, and to intervene when they feel it is safe to do so.

* Some things to be aware of include the greater likelihood that in sexual assaults involving alcohol parties do not know each other well (i.e. they are strangers, acquaintances, or casual dates) and both people may be consuming heavy amounts of alcohol.