Why don’t we talk about rape more?  Why is this subject such a taboo one?  When I think about the obstacles to getting survivors the support they need after an assault, or getting the appropriate resources in place to prevent rape from happening, the biggest one in my head is the assumption that rape isn’t…that big a deal.  Either it doesn’t happen as often as “those crazy feminists” say, or it’s just not that important.  I mean, c’mon - if it were really important, we’d hear more about it, right?

This is on my mind because of a tabling event I did this weekend with BARCC.  We were providing information at an ethnic fair and as is normal for my experience at tabling events, virtually no one wanted to talk to us.  My fellow volunteers and I talked about a couple of the obstacles that might be keeping people away from the table - we didn’t look like members of the community in which the fair was taking place, we had limited language skills for the population we were serving (although I don’t know how anyone would know that by looking at us), and we don’t really have any fun things to give away (compared to the Boston Public Health Commission, anyway, which has TONS of cool stuff).  We talked a little bit about the particular obstacles that exist in minority communities to talking about or reporting rape - Dr. Katherine Morrison at Curry College has done some awesome research about those obstacles, specifically for African-American women - but one of my fellows made a great point.  He said something along the lines of, “it doesn’t matter what culture or community we’re talking about.  No one talks about rape.”

He’s right.  While public health specialists have written many books and articles about appropriate ways to discuss rape and sexual assault in minority communities, it’s not like mainstream, white American culture is particularly open about it.  It’s not like there’s any magical community where rape is discussed regularly with the type of urgency and honesty that its prevalence demands, except maybe the insides of a rape crisis center.  So I’ve decided to ask why we don’t talk about rape.  I’d like you all to chime in on the conversation.  Here are my theories:

1. Rape is tightly wound up in sex, obviously.  Our culture isn’t too open about sex in general, and talking about rape often requires talking about sex and how the two are different.  Considering that we live in a country where a good chunk of the population doesn’t get any comprehensive sexual education and doesn’t really know how conception works, it’s not super-surprising that people aren’t OK talking about about violence that seems to share so many things in common with sex.
2. Rape is scary to talk about.  Even in our best rape prevention literature and workshops, talking about rape can make ME feel paranoid.  It’s not helpful, most of the time, to tell young women and men that every man they meet is a potential predator and could assault them at any minute, but…with the social camouflage that perpetrators have to operate, and with the casual misogyny that exists in mainstream culture, it’s true that most people have a difficult time telling who the predators are.
 
3. For straight men (or at least for me), there was a slightly different aspect of this paranoia: the realization that I, as a man, was a symbol of potential abuse, trauma, and misery to roughly half of the human population.  No, not all or even most women assume that I’m a rapist, but as a social symbol, as a man, I’ve had to learn that one of the things my body and form and gender identity represents to the rest of the world is violence.  That was chilling to realize, when it finally hit home.
 
4. Entrenched interests actively work to prevent us from talking about it.  Thomas, I think, coined the phrase “the pro-rape lobby,” and I think that’s a pretty apt description of the forces I see at work here.  This “lobby” is a group of people who have vested interest in gender relations remaining the way they are: imbalanced and unjust.  There is a tremendous amount of power and money in keeping the system the way it is now; talking about rape would shake those foundations a lot.  Using that article that Thomas wrote above as an example: how much money do the Steelers stand to lose if Roethlisberger doesn’t play for them?  How much do they stand to lose if they don’t make it to the Super Bowl?  How many people care about the welfare of a survivor when weighed against all that power and cash?

This is where I think a lot of the stigma of talking about rape comes from - the entrenched power enforcing it.  I don’t believe that there’s any inherent shame in being assault by another person.  Why should there be?  But survivors regularly tell BARCC that they feel ashamed of being assaulted, they feel stupid, they feel like “they should have known better” or similar things.  People don’t come to those conclusions from nothing; they come to those conclusions because a large segment of the population regularly tells us that it is our fault for being assaulted, that we are stupid for “letting” someone attack us.  Shame and fear and silence are not inherent to rape as a social phenomenon; they exist because we as a culture have made them part of experiencing rape.  Survivors in the past who have tried to speak up, and speak up powerfully and publicly, met with powerful social forces that were designed to prevent them quiet.

This is a place where I think allies have a tremendous responsibility, but also a tremendous opportunity, to change our cultural dialogue.  Survivors face about a million and one obstacles to speaking out about their experience, and many of those obstacles are dangerous to a survivor’s livelihood or personal safety.  It is both unreasonable and unfair to expect survivors to want to speak out about their rapes, but allies can help to shield those that do from the consequences they might face (whether it’s the hazards of the criminal justice system, loss of job or hostility from family members and other friends who knew the perpetrator). 

Allies can also try to open up the cultural dialogue about rape overall, and to target that pro-rape lobby directly where possible.  One of my pastimes is reading about other social movements to see where they come from and how they achieved their objectives.  One that comes to mind specifically in regards to silencing is the LGBT movement’s fight to get the rest of the world to recognize the dangers of HIV/AIDS.  The history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) I found to be fascinating and instructive, and with quite a few parallels to the work BARCC is doing.  ACT UP needed to push the rest of the country to understand that AIDS was a real thing, a massive problem; that the mainstream media sources were spreading lazy or incorrect information about it; and that politicians and decision-makers were waiting far too long to take action to stop its spread.  Activists who went on to be active with ACT UP also created the now iconic slogan “silence = death.”

This is what I think we need to see to push back against the pro-rape lobby.  We need to both provide survivors with the space to speak and the support and tools necessary to shield them from the social forces that want to keep them quiet, and continue to press the dialogue outside of just survivor experiences.  The more we talk about rape, the less power shame and fear have, and the less reasonable it becomes to keep the entrenched gender system in line the way it is.

Today’s is another guest post from Catt Kingsgrave-Ernstein of Rensselaer County SACVAP, who continues to be awesome - this time, on the topic of Mel Gibson, domestic violence, how we criticize people for coming forward. She has some great thoughts on the topic; everything below this line is Catt. Take it away, Catt!

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So.

Mr. Gibson is again in the news for letting his inner asshole off the leash. He has again revealed himself as a tiny, terrified man who has to lash out at people around him in order to feel powerful and secure. And what’s more, he’s revealed that he has less than sane ideas about the social habits of men of other races than himself, as well as some pretty loathsome ideas about what kind of infraction is worthy of a sentence of gang rape.

His train to creeptown is pretty well documented at this point, and I don’t feel like I need to link to sources for it—Google’s got everything you need on that score.

What I do want to talk about, though, is the pushback I’m starting to see from people who seem to want to blame his victim for ‘exposing a private conversation’. And who are trying to say ‘she edited the tapes to put a bad light on it.’

Let’s pause here, while we consider under what possible light could ‘If you get raped by a pack of f***ing n*****s it’ll be your own f***ing fault’ be construed as anything BUT loathsome, abusive, and evil. Even if he’d said “If you get raped by a pack of fluffy bunnies it’ll be your own fluffy fault”, it would STILL be inexcusable. But given that he was insinuating that black men have nothing better to do with their time than to roam the streets in packs looking for women to rape, I don’t think we can say that statement was in any way innocent, or in any way not-racist. So why does it suddenly become excusable solely because he didn’t think he would be overheard while he was saying it?

Of COURSE he wouldn’t say something like that in front of obvious witnesses—the man was already made to apologize for his drunken racism when he was pulled over in California on a DUI, and he knows that image is everything. But all abusers know the same thing. They know that their power base rests on isolating their victim, undermining her support system, and above all, appearing utterly blameless to anyone who might be close enough to perceive what’s going on, or to interfere with it. Abusers KNOW this shit, people. They know how to make their victim seem crazy, hysterical, unbalanced, even to her own mind, to her own children, to her own family, and they know how to gaslight the press, the authorities, and the world outside their own little lair into thinking the abuser himself is the one getting the raw end of the deal.

Also, I feel it’s relevant to point out that “Der schlechte Affe hasst seinen eigenen Geruch.” The bad monkey hates his own smell. Or to put it in the words of H.L. Mencken, “It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.” Mr. Gibson seems quite comfortable with the idea of a woman deserving rape on the grounds of having irritated him personally, doesn’t it seem? One wonders (but not very hard, really,) if in a shadowy corner of his imagination he himself isn’t roaming the streets in packs looking for women who need raping. Who have it coming. For whom a brutal abuse by many angry men—or maybe by him many times over,—would be no better than she deserved.

At one point on the tape, Oksana asks Gibson what kind of a man punches his lover in the face while she’s holding their child. Now take a moment to think of this in a more familiar context than two celebrities in a custody battle—put this into context of your own family for a moment. Imagine your father saying that to your mother. Think about what she could possibly have done to have your own father punch her in the head, twice, while she was carrying an infant in her arms. Maybe your sibling, maybe yourself. Think about what excuse you could possibly accept for his behavior. What she could possibly have done that would make punching her in the head, twice, while she couldn’t even put her hands up to protect herself, excusable.

Then consider Gibson’s reply to the accusation; “You f***ing deserved it!”

In what light is that acceptable, people? In what light does his not realizing he’d be HEARD excuse the fact that he did it, he isn’t sorry for doing it, and if he could get away with it, would clearly do it again.

I’m sure the FBI conviction files are full of criminals who definitely and absolutely would NEVER have said certain things if they’d known someone was recording them. And the jails are full of violent criminals who would never have done what they’d been convicted of if they’d realized someone was there to see and testify. All it means is that, as an abuser, he had a failure in judgment, and lost control of his victim.

And in answer to the people who express suspicion over her having taped what was ostensibly a private conversation, consider this: Why would she have taped it if this were the first abusive call she’d received? Why would she bother to tape it if she didn’t know that the likelihood of his verbally abusing her wasn’t very high indeed? She knew what to expect from him when she set the recording device up, and he delivered the unfiltered goods because he wanted to abuse her. He wanted to make her hurt, and she was out of arm’s reach, and so the phone was good enough for the moment.

Abused women often have to overcome the social camouflage of their abusers in shocking, and uncomfortable ways. They often have no choice but to wave the bloodied laundry of their ‘private’ situation on the street for all to see, or at least so that they can’t easily pretend not to see it. They often have to resort to documentation of just this sort of ‘private correspondence’ in order to prove to anybody else that they are actually in danger, are actually being hurt, are actually being killed in little pieces every day. Did she ask for money to hold the tapes back? I honestly don’t know.

But I do know that if I was being attacked like that by someone as rich and influential as Mel Gibson, I would feel very deeply that the protection of money and possibly even extortion was a necessary thing. Shame is apparently the only stumbling block to his abusive tendencies, and so if I had stood in her shoes, you damn betcha I’d have tried to use it to get the bastard off my back. Because compared to punching me in the face, putting my daughter in danger, and asserting that I deserved gang rape for my defiance of his expectations, I can’t say I’d feel extortion was much of a crime at all.

In short, I put it to you that this was not a case of editing, this was a case of abuse. This was not a domestic dispute and a nasty custody case, this was a victim trying to establish incontrovertible proof of what was happening to her. If Gibson hadn’t been a celebrity, none of us would have heard about this tape except for the local sheriff and/or family services in Oksana’s town. Just like the internet at large never hears the hundreds of other abuse tapes that victims have to create in order to finally get someone to believe that what is happening to them is real. Just like the internet at large never gets to hear but a fraction of the stories about the victims who never do get anyone to believe their story until it’s too late.

This happens every day. And there is nothing out of pattern in what Gibson was taped while screaming. There is nothing out of character in the threats, the abuse, and the insinuations—he might have been reading from a well-researched script, the dance steps are so exact. I have heard this story before—it usually ends in either blood or tears. I hope that this time it ends in safety for the victim, and a well-deserved shaming for the abuser.

So the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa is over.  It concluded yesterday with a new champion for the first time in 12 years.  Welcome La Furia Roja, Spain’s possession-heavy and technically sophisticated national team, to the exclusive list of now only eight teams who have won the World Cup in its 80 year history.  They deserved it - Spain has played the best, most demanding soccer for probably the past two or three years, and they came into this tournament roughly equal with Brazil as favorites.  The game yesterday was not a memorable one, though.  The Dutch team had a deliberate plan to disrupt the way the Spanish play by incessantly fouling them.  It almost worked, but it was ugly, destructive, and ultimately got a player kicked off the field and lost the Dutch the game.

Side note: I think it’s time for this blog to get a tag filter for “tortured metaphor,” because this post is about to be another one.  Oh yeah, it’s time for me to draw parallels between soccer and sexual assault.  We’re gonna do this - it will happen.

Soccer is a simple game.  There are only 17 rules that govern the entirety of the sport on the field itself.  Those rules indicate appropriate play, and levy punishments for violating the standard.  The rules are also vague as hell, allowing referees latitude to interpret a particular moment in a particular game in the way that he or she sees most fit.  Refereeing standards change by culture and by particular ref, which can lead to hilarious confusion in international tournaments like the World Cup at times.  Soccer is a contact sport - players are allowed to tackle one another to get the ball, try to muscle each other off the ball, and nudge each other while jumping for a header.  The ref’s job is to make sure that the game keeps its physical character, but remains as safe as possible for the players and doesn’t devolve into a brawl.

Most normal fouls in soccer take place when two players are trying to accomplish opposing goals - a defender is trying to stop a forward from putting in a cross and goes into a tackle a little too quickly, or a midfielder is trying to win an unclaimed errant ball against another player.  These are part of the game, they are (usually) not intentional, and you’ll see most players who foul or get fouled in a standard situation like this help each other off the ground, and maybe even give each other a pat on the back.  In the best of cases, this is a simple gesture towards sportsmanship - hey, sorry I hit you harder than I thought, nice run, let’s get on with the game.  Good times for all.

The type of fouling the Dutch used yesterday was different.  Their game plan was to use tactical fouls to break up play.  When committing a tactical foul, the player isn’t trying to win the ball or even make a play; the goal is to stop whatever the other team is doing, break their rhythm, and intimidate them.  The most common use of tactical fouls is to send a message to a particularly skilled member of the opposite team (we’re going to kick you every time you get the ball until you’re bleeding), or to try and stop a team that has vastly superior technical skills.  This latter strategy is what the Dutch used yesterday - the Dutch coach probably decided that the Spanish team, known for the last two years for it’s amazing ability to maintain possession of the ball and make beautiful, rapid short passes to one another, was too talented to play straight-up.  He decided only way the Netherlands could hope to win was to disrupt the Spanish passing game, to throw them off their rhythm, and to make them nervous.  It was clear by the 15th minute that the Netherlands’ strategy in the final was to kick, trip, hit, and physically batter the Spanish team to the point where they got rattled.  It worked, especially in the first half - the Spanish pass machine failed to find its feet, the players misplayed tons of short balls, and guys like Andres Iniesta who normally couldn’t lose control of the ball if he wanted to were being let down by their first touch.

Eduardo Galleano’s brilliant Soccer in Sun and Shadow is probably one of the most well-known books using soccer specifically as a metaphor, and you all should read it.  It you are a person with feelings, you will cry.  It was books like Galleano’s that helped me see the universality of sport as a lens for our world.  Not even joking, at about 9:50 pm last night, after watching, then discussing the game with friends for most of the day, I told my roommate that I thought the tactical fouling in this Final had given me the perfect metaphor for sexual violence.  He was skeptical.

Here’s how this tortured metaphor works: the field, the game, the rules of soccer - these serve as community guidelines.  Although they never know how a particular game is going to go, soccer players have basic guidelines that constitute the norms of their world when on the pitch.  This is similar to our general communities, too - I never know exactly how my day is going to go, but there are basic realities that I generally expect will exist in my life.  Soccer players know that no one follows all the rules perfectly all the time, and that those rules are open to interpretation.  They also know that the more flagrant a violation of those rules, the more likelihood there is that the transgressor will be punished.  Players get nipped in the ankles all the time and expect it, and it’s unusual for a referee to stop play because of it, but players don’t expect to get kicked in the chest like Xabi Alonso was yesterday, and most of them know they can count on the adjudicators of the game to take appropriate action (Howard Webb gave Nigel De Jong a yellow card for his very nicely executed front kick).

This being established, I come back to the tactical foul.  This is the best sports-based metaphor for sexual violence I’ve ever found.  Let’s investigate.

Like rape:*

1. Tactical fouls never “just happen.”  Normal fouls happen.  Tactical fouls are a deliberate attempt on the part of a particular player, or even a team, to assert control and dominance over a match through fear.  There is a very clear perpetrator for a tactical foul, and a specific reason that teams use them - they scare their opponents and make them play differently.
2. Tactical fouls break the rhythm of the game.  They force players to concentrate solely on the fouler or the foul itself (especially if it was violent); even the best players can’t easily concentrate on the play they were about to make when someone else is kicking them in the shin.  Tactical fouls throw the normal patterns of a game into flux.
 
3. Tactical fouls create an atmosphere where people change their behavior because of fear.  You could see this in the Spanish play in the first half: every time one of them received a pass near a Dutch player, they looked like they were bracing for impact.  This isn’t very different from the culture of fear that sexual violence shows to women and gender non-conforming folks and forces them to think about their safety every moment of the day.  The Spanish team, which is normally so silky with its passing, couldn’t play their own game when all of them were watching both the ball and their own ankles for fear of a Dutch challenge.
 
4. Every player who is fouled reacts differently.  Some players bounce right back up, take the free kick (if they even got one in the first place), and keep playing, hoping to level with the fouler by scoring and winning the game.  Some players are injured, and can’t easily bounce right back up.  Others, especially if they’ve been fouled a couple of times, might get angry and foul back (like Iniesta did in the second half).
 
5. Tactical fouls are dangerous.  Some players know how to tactically foul with the least chance of physical injury (and the least chance of getting caught); others are not so skilled.  When Xabi got booted in the chest, he had to limp off the field for a moment.  Thankfully, it looks like he didn’t sustain any major injuries, but De Jong could have broken Alonso’s ribs.
6. Tactical fouls are supposed to be punished, but context matters a lot and determines what, if any, punishment gets doled out.  Subtle players who pay attention to what the refs are watching can tactically foul almost with impunity.  Other players know about them, sure, and they might even develop a reputation as a dirty or underhanded player, but neither the refs nor the governing body of soccer does anything about it.  The more blatant the foul, the more likely the ref is to recognize it, but even then there might be external factors preventing the ref from taking action.  That was certainly the case in this final: Howard Webb, the referee, was under pressure to keep control of the game, keep the players safe, and not to “ruin” the match by throwing anyone out.  He was sorely pressed, though, once he realized the Dutch were going to play the type of game they did.  If he actually gave out the number of cards he should have, a lot of the Dutch players (and probably Carles Puyol, too) would have been booted from the game by the second half, and that’s a Final no one wants to see.  Once he gave a Dutch player a yellow card, both that player and Webb knew that he was under too much pressure to keep the game “good” to give them another yellow card without them committing a stupidly obvious foul.  The result of this pressure was that a lot of Dutch players ended up with a warning, but were allowed to stay on the field because their being on the pitch was more important in this sport than protecting the Spanish.  Huh, a player or the moment being more important than protecting other people?  This reminds me of another sport.
 
7. Tactical fouls are a lot harder to condemn if your team is committing them.  This one is probably the most depressing, but it’s important for the metaphor to work.  Thankfully, the US doesn’t usually play a particularly dirty game in international soccer, but it’s tough to condemn my team, my country, for doing it.  When my team is tactically fouling, it’s strategically genius, it’s a way to show dominance, to expose the other team as weak and girlish.  Hey, if it’s my team, I may not even call it tactical fouling; when we do it, it’s just “playing physical.”  In reality, thuggery is thuggery no matter who is doing it, but my loyalty to my team makes that harder to see.
 
8. Tactical fouls do fall under the authority of a moderator of community standards - the referee, in the case of the game, and the police or law enforcement community in the case of sexual violence.  In the best of cases, a referee is an impartial authority figure who maintains the spirit of the game and respects the community in which it is being played while also protecting the players.  In reality, refs are still human.  They don’t see every play that happens, they bring their own team or play-style biases with them, they get tired, or lose control of matches at times.  Refereed sports can only maintain the game to the level of the community standards - there is, unfortunately, an acceptance that tactical fouling is just something that exists in soccer, and even though its ugly and potentially harmful, the refs can’t come down too hard on it.  If that community standard were to change, tactical fouls might disappear, too.  If our community standards about sexual assault were to change, too….
 

The Dutch played like thugs in yesterday’s game, and thankfully for a neutral observer like me, they paid the price for it.  They never played the game their talent could have allowed them to, they lost a player to a red card, and the Spanish won the game.  The whole world saw the Dutch strategy and we’ll see how it shakes out over the next couple of days, but soccer pundits are already starting to call it like it was - a bad idea, a shameful game, and a good way to lose the match and the respect of the international soccer community.  So many of these things SHOULD parallel we treat sexual violence - it should be shameful to commit it, it should make perpetrators lose the respect of their peers and fellows, and they should be tossed out fair participation in their community if they insist on deliberately hurting others. 

Also, viva La Furia Roja!

*Ok, mega-disclaimer: clearly, I understand that tactical fouling and rape are LIGHT YEARS apart in terms of their actual impact on the world and people.  Likewise, I understand that the Dutch team is not, in fact, made up of horrible men who do terrible things to their fellow humans.  The metaphor works because of the structural similarities, not because the scale or scope of the activities is anywhere near comparable.  I would never argue that.  At the end of the day, soccer is a (beautiful) game, but a game still.

Lisa Shannon has a wonderful op-ed about how sexual violence is not “cultural”. Cara at the Curvature unpacks that a little more. I’ve been sitting here trying to come up with something to add, but really, they have said it all, and very well. Please go read!

You may have heard about Rape-aXe, the anti-rape female condom. Many people are calling this a great idea. I do not find it to be a great idea. This is a device that only “works” if you are already being raped. And the inventor is recommending that it be part of a woman’s daily safety ritual - that women should shower, brush their teeth, and insert a bear trap in their vagina in case someone rapes them that day. I find this ludicrous. It also puts all of the responsibility on the woman, and teaches them to live in fear, neither of which is healthy. How about we put that time and energy into social change? Some good posts about why Rape-aXe is an awful idea can be found here, here, here, and here.

Amanda Hess writes about Olivia Munn’s Playboy shoot. No, wait, this is relevant! See, Munn was very clear in her contract about what she would and would not do or show - and the photographer spent the entire shoot attempting to coerce her into doing things she had not consented to. It’s not rape, but it’s absolutely a product of rape culture.

What you should know about this - nonconsensual touch by strangers - is that it happens all the time. I have blogged about that before. It is still true. And unfortunately, that blogger’s correct in that people tend to not yell, not bring attention to it. I’m glad that the convention I’m going to this weekend has a very clear anti-harassment policy and a history of banning people who violate it.

Harriet J. has another great post here, particularly the rape-apologism bits.

I will conclude for now by reminding you that our next volunteer training is in late August, with information and interview sessions August 2 and 11. Click here to apply!

Good morning good people!  I hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July, if it is a holiday you celebrate!  I hope you didn’t catch on fire in the heat!  And I hope that you watched Germany trounce Argentina on Saturday, because it sets up a salivating Germany versus Spain semi-final in the World Cup!

I did have a good 4th, and I did watch the Germany vs. Argentina game, and I did melt in the heat, but what is catching my attention this morning is a wonderful article from the font of cultural wisdom known as Men’s Health: 25 Secrets She Wished You Knew.  It’s a really good thing that Men’s Health has taken on the incredibly difficult task of teaching me, a normal human, how to understand the confusing and alien mind of a human female.  If it weren’t for this article, I wouldn’t know that I should approach women in my life as if they were mewling pre-pubescents, forever incapable of using language to communicate with me and the outside world.  I wouldn’t know things like secret #2, “Women speak a different dialect than men. For example, “I’m fine” means “I’m so not fine,” just as “No dessert for me” means “I’ll be polishing off yours.”  Or maybe secret #5, “Always tell me when I look hot; never tell me when I don’t. And don’t forget: I need 20 compliments to offset one thoughtless remark.”  This lets me know that women are, much like young children, attention-hogs who must be placated at all times.  It helps me a lot, as a rational, thinking human, to know that these rules apply universally to all women, too.  It sure is a good thing we don’t trust them with important things, like governance or war, amiright?

To cut the Tuesday morning snark a little bit, though, I can’t really blame Men’s Health that much.  I mean, I can pick at the article and dislike it and find every single flaw there is with it from a reasonable-person perspective (and there are many), but they are just parroting a long-standing cultural view of women.  Amongst my favorite words to use when I need to impress people with both my vocabulary and also the breadth of my reading is infantilization, and the second definition there is really the kicker - “To treat or condescend to as if still a young child.”

A lot of the workshops the CAPS volunteers do for BARCC focus on respecting boundaries - the lines of behavior each of us set up to make it through the world.  Everyone’s boundaries are different, and the same person can have very, very different boundaries depending on the type of behavior or activity in which they are engaging.  I’m really comfortable speaking in public; I’ve been doing it a long time, I have what I’d like to think are decent skills, and pretty much the only situation where I don’t feel OK talking is when I don’t know if my audience speaks the same language I do.  Conversely, I hate singing.  I have a terrible singing voice, and going to things like Karaoke make me exceptionally uncomfortable.  I know that friends who don’t know me well enough to know that I don’t really like it will pressure me to do so, and I’ll get really anxious to the point where my body reacts physically.  It’s not traumatizing, but it does make me deeply uncomfortable.

One of our missions in CAPS is to find ways to help make people more cognizant of boundaries, and to respect them more.  Thanks to the work of researchers and academics, we know a lot more about how predators operate.  While stranger rape does happen for sure, more rape and sexual assault is committed by someone a survivor knows, by a factor of pretty close to 3:1.  We know that most predators test their intended victims by purposefully violating their boundaries and seeing how they react.  They deliberately target people who cannot easily enforce their boundaries.  Our goal in CAPS is to help everyone recognize when someone is crossing boundaries, and give people the necessary skills to step in and stop that type of behavior.  The thought process is that if (most) predators can’t test the boundaries of their victims because everyone else surrounding them constantly steps in to prevent it, then eventually, the predator won’t have access to anyone to victimize.

This is a good idea.  I like the work I do in CAPS, and I think it’s effective.  Teaching people how to enforce their boundaries, though, often assumes that we’re in situations where there is at least some tacit approval for us having boundaries in the first place.  This type of training is great when aimed at groups of peers: high school students, college students, generally adults, too.  It’s less effective when we’re trying to train groups where there is no assumption that either one subset of the group is allowed to have boundaries, or that the other subset needs to pay attention to them.  The best example of this type of relationship?  Parents and their children.

This type of relationship is not completely without boundaries, of course - there are many lines that parents cannot cross with their children.  But in most cases, if a child does not want to do something, or is uncomfortable about doing it, or feels hesitant, a parent can make the kid do it anyway and there is general social approval for that type of parenting.  A father who makes his son or daughter try out for, say, a little league team, even if the kid hates it, is not generally going to be shunned socially by other parents or friends.  This is what a parent is supposed to do, sometimes - show their children that life is often unpleasant and we have to do things we don’t want to.  Part of the reason that parents get social backing to (occasionally) cross their children’s boundaries is that we, as a culture, generally recognize that adults are more aware of their world than children are.  I hated telephones as a kid - I had a couple of bad experiences accidentally hanging up on people, and they came to represent scary, unknown things for me.  My dad forced me to answer phones at his office for a summer as a 14 year old, partly because I needed a job, but partly because he knew I was going to need to learn how to use a phone proficiently as a life skill.  I hated it, but I eventually came to understand his decision (although my friends might still question whether I have truly changed my opinion on phones; the truth is, I still sort of hate them).  It was more important for my dad to help me develop life skills than it was to shelter me from feeling anxious and miserable.  He crossed my boundary there in a benevolent way, the way that parents are SUPPOSED to every now and again.

Here’s where this gets tricky, though.  There is no shortage of pop culture, media, old fables, and general social messages that tell us that same thing…about women.  While I could link up a thousand and one miserable articles, I feel like a basic jaunt through Sociological Images or, if you have a particularly thick skin, AskMen.com, would give you MORE than enough examples of the types of messages our culture provides about how women are basically children: they never say what they mean, they are fickle, confused, ruled by emotion, completely unable to concentrate on important tasks (or any tasks aside from picking out shoes, hurr hurr) and need constant attention or else they pout.  Of course, these messages are always provided as an absolute: ALL women act this way, no exceptions!  We expect kids to act this way.  We expect children to throw temper tantrums, to lie when they steal a cookie, to be easily distracted.  But culture tells men that women are the same way.

As a straight man, I was the prime recipient for most of this messaging: from Maxim and other lad-mags, when I was young enough for them to seem sexy; from the vast majority of dude-focused TV and movies, and from the men in my life.  Even I’ve repeated some of those tropes at times, when I was in a space where I felt like I had the social support to say it, and when I had an ax to grind against some particular woman who I felt had wronged me (yes, I’ll turn in my feminist card now).

So, what happens when we live in a culture that tells us that it’s ok to transgress on the boundaries of children (for their own good!), and then tells men that women are, essentially children?  BARCC training can help us recognize that boundaries are important and that they shouldn’t be violated, but that training has to push back against a lot of social expectations that position men as the adults of society, and women as the kids.  I think this idea can be easily summed up by the pro-rape slogan, “no means yes.” In what kind of 1984 hellhole does that make any sense at all?  The answer is simple: in a culture that thinks that half of the adult population is, in fact, not adult, it makes perfect sense.  If women aren’t capable of using that sophisticated adult language that real humans use, if women aren’t even really capable of understanding the repercussions of their actions, and if they lie all the time anyway, like children, then why wouldn’t no mean yes?

I do have hope, though.  In that article linked above, Amanda Hess cites a study from Yale Law professor Dan Kahan that found that men and women with a more egalitarian world view didn’t treat women like children.  Hooray!

And now, only because I got into an argument with someone this weekend about who wrote the song for the new Kia Soul commercial (which I got wrong; I thought it was Tribe Called Quest, they thought it was De La Soul), here’s Black Sheep’s 1991 classic “The Choice is Yours” (check the second verse for a mildly anti-DV message!)