83 Comments

1. eoin howe:

   “does a majority of Americans at this time accept sexual assault and violation as a normal and even positive aspect of “correctional” facilities?”

   Id say… yes, they do. Sadly. I asked the 200 level class I taught in Ohio what the biggest joke steryotype of prison life was, and it didnt take them more than a second of looking around the room to come up with “Dont drop the soap!”
   I then asked them how many of them would feel fine with cracking a joke about rape in ‘polite’ company if it werent about being in prison, and received a lot of “oh, I never thought of that…” looks.
   Still infinitely acceptable it seems. But then, convicts have abdicated all their civil and human rights because they committed some atrocity against ‘normal’ folk. Even if it was a non-violent minor drug possession, or a third strike unpaid parking fine. I suppose until the majority realise that they could be on the other side of those bars tomorrow, for the most spurious of reasons, they will continue to express no sympathy at all for those who already are.

   5 May 2006, 10:34 am

2. Stan:

   I’d say this goes beyond a failure of sympathy… not to quibble. That abdication is an abdication of citizenship — still seen as a male domain — and with it the relegation of the hated Other male to the subjected domain of women.

   What do we mean when we say, “Get fucked!”? Let’s stick it to ‘em. I’ll make you my bitch.

   The severity or non-severity of the crime is not the consideration when these expressions of HOPE that people will be raped in prison happen. The equation of rape with control is. If it is a hated Other, like ZM, then it permissible to display the actual relish of rape as punishment. This is telling us about way more than the “injustice” that minor offenders get raped along with the (more deserving?) major offenders.

   This is telling us something about patriarchy that the radical feminists have been shouting into the wind for a long time. Rape cannot be characterized as “not sex, but violence.” Its role in our cosmos is telling us that sexuality itself — in patriarchy — IS constructed as violence.

   This is so deeply subversive of male power in this gender order, that this rather easily demonstrable reality is instantly and massively met with accusations of being “anti-sex” and “anti-male.” This is about social control, about conjugal-right as political-right, about compulsory heterosexuality as a violent heirarchy.

   Just as real warfare exposes the ugly face of capitalism — and so its totality is kept as much as possible out of view — so does the reality of prison show us the real face of masculinity/femininity.

   That’s why De raising this is so important. She also raised — a while back, elsewhere — how gleeful liberal men were circulating a spoof story of Ann Coulter being involved in an S&M anal rape-sex fantasy. Since Ann Coulter is already an execrable character for her politics, it’s okay to portray her (as a WOMAN) in a sexually degrading satire. This was one way for liberal men, who feel emasculated by right-wing accusations of femininity, can strike back and prove their own masculinity — to present their male misogynist bona fides to get back into the club. They had no clue that they were showing their contempt for all women… or perhaps they did.

   5 May 2006, 11:57 am

3. eoin howe:

   I remember that Ann Coulter post. Didnt realise it came from the same source as this. I doubt the liberal respondants knew hey were showing mysigenist disrespect for all women- they will have so comprehensively swallowed the myths of social sexual hierarchy that it doesnt even figure as an idea in their minds. As you point out regularly, you can be highly intelligent, highly educated and still not ‘get it’.
   You are right about the masculinity-femininity aspect. I didnt mean to imply that I was unaware of the problem, or that I thought it was acceptable for people convicted of horrible crimes to be raped in jail. That was just the way of getting an otherwise unreceptive audience of Ohioan high schoolers (college freshmen) to realise what they were accepting and advocating by their refusal to give the subject any thought.
   The above characterisation of sex is remeniscent of the Imperial Roman view of sexuality- their ruling male class were, as some homosex campaigners love to point out, deeply “bisexual”, and yet they had entrenched the idea that the giver was the ‘man’ and the taker was the ‘woman’. This is why it was perfectly acceptable for Roman soldiers to rape both their male and female captives as punishment for having been on the wrong side (the losing side) in a war.

   5 May 2006, 12:18 pm

4. Yolanda Carrington:

   For me, sexual violence in the prison system is proof positive that male supremacy is a SYSTEM, regardless of the gender of the particular actors. Even in an institution where women are absent, the dominance/submission program of the gender system survives. there has to be a class of persons who are sexually dominated and abused. And like the rest of society, oppressions merge right into another within the prison system.

   But there is one aspect to this phenomenon that has troubling implications for me. Many of the survivor accounts from the HRW report stated that new White male inmates stand the greatest risk of rape and forced prostitution, usually at the hands of Black inmates. Now this may sound like an inane question, but could this be a reason why there are so many neo-Nazi/white nationalist gangs in US prisons? Are White men joining these gangs in order to be “protected” from Black men? Are Black men asserting patriarchal dominance within one of the few institutions where they have a semblance of control? Or is the “White men are easy prey” argument just more racist hysteria that white nationalist groups use to recruit new members? What is going on here?

   I don’t believe for a hot damn second that White men are smaller, weaker, or less violent that Black men— and from my own experience, White men are often more violent and manipulative. So how can it be that Black men are raping White men in prison more often than the reverse? Is it because there are more Black men in raw numbers in prison, or are Black men somehow “taking back” their sense of manhood that the White Man stole from them? Please, someone help me understand this.

   From A Black Woman Against Rape Culture
   Yolanda

   5 May 2006, 6:23 pm

5. jessica:

   I’ve been meaning to bring this up, but what about male rapists who end in prison? I mention this because a friend of my brothers recently was sent to Attica for raping a 10 year girl. Even though he comes from a troubled background, and even though I am against rape culture in all of its forms, I find myself wishing that he goes through the same hell that he put his victim through. As someone who has seen the effects of rape and sexual abuse among friends and family, its almost impossible to scrounge up any sympathy for him.

   5 May 2006, 8:31 pm

6. DeAnander:

   I find myself wishing that he goes through the same hell that he put his victim through.

   though offering a certain Hammuraban satisfaction (an eye for an eye is justice of a kind) I think in practise it does not work out as our gut suggests. I hear ya, and I’ve had the same thoughts. but…

   if people learned anything about tolerance, kindness, or ethics from being brutally abused, then the Israelis would not today be abusing the Palestinians, nor would (male) survivors of child abuse be more likely to abuse their own and others’ children. men whose fathers viciously beat them would not beat their wives and girlfriends, and women whose mothers emotionally or physically abused them would not take it out on their own daughters; but all of this, in the real world, does happen.

   men and physical vengeance … male subjects approve of painful retribution

   men who are raped in prison are more likely to rape women when/if they get out again — someone has to “pay” for what was done to them, and women are the obvious, socially-constructed target.

   I think what we (women) wish were true, is that making a male perp suffer something similar to what he did to his prey, would make him understand that what he did was wrong, by making him empathise with the woman or women he victimised, and as a result he would learn not to do that again. in other words we wish that suffering would lead him to understanding and hence to rehabilitation, that he would learn something about humanity by a (Christlike?) sharing of someone else’s pain.

   but if instead, suffering and humiliation (particularly sexual) only lead him to more rage, more self-pity, more intense and visceral misogyny (an even greater need to differentiate himself from, and to dominate, women to “reclaim his masculinity”), then such a punishment (even if it were not barbaric) is pragmatically useless.

   what to do with rapists? search me. but gang raping them in prison doesn’t work for me, no matter how loathesome the man. if he truly cannot learn how to be with other humans as other than a predator, then ye needs to be separated from potential prey (locked up) or muzzled (how?) or shot humanely, like a sheepdog that has gone bad and started killing sheep. as a fallible human myself I have no idea how to tell whether any specific man can learn not to be a predator, nor whether reformation is sincere when professed. I can judge like hell but dare not arbitrate, to turn the old saying on its head. all I know is that brutality in prison generally creates more brutality. Stephen Donaldson was already a pacifist, gay, and a Quaker before prison rape turned him into a tireless advocate for prisoner rights; his was hardly a typical case.

   5 May 2006, 9:28 pm

7. peggy:

   Can a rapist be rehabilitated? Who knows the answer? Can he simply be kept, somehow, from repeating his offense? Even castration would not help, because that would instil more rage in him, and he would act on that rage somehow.
   As so many people keep saying, it is not a matter of punishing or “rehabilitating” individual offenders, it is a matter of changing the whole culture, so that rape becomes understood by *everybody* as a shameful antithesis of manhood. Mere anti-rape campaigns will not help (imho): I think they may just egg on people who think rape is okay and cool.

   6 May 2006, 1:02 am

8. Stan:

   Rapists are not in any way different then men. They ARE men, living in a culture that is based on rape as a means of control, and that constucts male sexuality as violence.

   Peggy hit the nail on the head, methinks. The whole society has to be changed. The problem now is that rape is NOT the antithesis of manhood. It is the peak actualizaton of it. The way it is asserted — and tacitly approved by society and prison management — in prison is an extremely clear indication of this. The ultimate “punishment” in the mind of a white male offender facing prison — and he is taunted with this scenario behind the scenes by cops and other adversaries — is that all hierarchies will be flipped, and he will not become just a woman (bitch), but a Black man’s woman (bitch)… transformed and “put in his new place” by rape.

   This is such a widely recognized and accepted trope herein the US that white people make casual jokes about it all the time. “Watch out, or you could end up in the penitentiary with a fiance named Tyrone.”

   The legal rituals that surround narrowly and legally defined rape have all the characteristics fo the ritual trials, in days past, of southern lynchers, where all-white juries consistently let the white offenders go. Were it not for social movements, there would never be a rape conviction — unless it was a conviction of men from oppressed nationalities accused of raping white women.

   In answer to Yolanda’s question, these places are highly over-populated with Black and Brown folk, and all those dynamics of domination and subordination and flipping the script are at play… with official behind the scenes encouragement. They can use prison against Black men as a message to white men. Step out of line, and we’ll strip you of your privilege, white and male.

   The other missing piece here is that women’s prisons are filling up at alarming rates, and rape is routinely used by the actual prison staff agaisnt them.

   6 May 2006, 8:48 am

9. Yolanda Carrington:

   After going back and reading the full HRW report (depressing as hell, but absolutely necessary), I see an additional race-gender dynamic at work in prison sexual violence: the construction of Black male sexuality as dangerous, predatory, and violent. Black inmates themselves buy into this shit. They see themselves as “tougher,” more “street-smart,” and “badder” than the White guys, who are viewed as feminized “punks” who can’t assert themselves in a fight. It’s as if white male privilege makes a man “soft,” at least in the eyes of Black inmates.

   Of course, all male sexuality is constructed as violent, and this is reflected within the prison inmate hierarchy. New prisoners in general are assessed by their size, appearance, and mannerisms, which determines whether or not they will be a target of harassment and abuse. Ultimately, it a deadly contest of who is the biggest, hardest bastard in the joint.

   Never having been incarcerated myself, it seems to me that prisons are an intensely concentrated reflection of society itself. All the oppression, power dynamics, and related bullshit out here in the streets is magnified to the millionth power behind bars. Many of the interactions between prisoners that the survivors described read like everyday man-woman relations, complete with all the coercion, manipulation, and male control of space and resources so typical of “normal” society.

   What the hell do men and women on the outside think they’re joking about?

   6 May 2006, 2:49 pm

10. Yolanda Carrington:

    And you know what? This is exactly why understanding gender as a distinct system of power is SOOOOOOO important. Even if the revolution came tomorrow and there was no more capitalism-class or race hierarchy, men would just recreate the society that we have now.

    I don’t think that men can imagine a world where they’re not in control, or sexually aggressive, or violent. Even when the sheer severity of oppression and dominance is taken away, the basic understanding is that a man has to be in charge, or take charge. To allow otherwise is to be less of a man, thus less of a person. I have yet to meet a man yet who doesn’t act out this dynamic, either purposefully or unconsciously.

    The only thing that keeps me from losing my mind is accepting the fact that men will fuck up. I don’t excuse the behavior, but I do accept the reality. It’s all I can do.

    6 May 2006, 4:04 pm

11. peggy:

    “Even if the revolution came tomorrow and there was no more capitalism-class or race hierarchy, men would just recreate the society that we have now.”

    I am still not prepared to believe that male human beings are inherently rapists, which is what Yolanda seems to be suggesting. If this were true, then we really would have to give up.

    I still want to believe that the majority of men are not rapists - that the majority of men have never raped another person, male or female, even when they may have had the physical capacity and opportunity to do so. I will assert here (and this is a hypothesis that remains to be proved or disproved) that the majority of male human beings do not *desire* to rape anybody.

    Let us go back to the premise, which most of us here on the list accept, I think, that the United States is or contains a rape culture, that is very strong, because as Stan has shown, the US military is a rape culture, and the US military is in certain respects very strong (although, with all its money and weaponry, it has become seriously ineffectual), and many Americans continue to admire it, and even consider it to be sacred

    I *know* that there is at least one, highly effective military organization in this world, that, although it remains permeated on all levels by gender hierarchy, does not practice, condone, or encourage rape. There may very well be other such military organizations.

    And I think that rape culture weakens the US military, because a military organization requires discipline to be effective, and rape is, among other things, a serious failure of discipline.

    6 May 2006, 10:06 pm

12. frank:

    “And I think that rape culture weakens the US military, because a military organization requires discipline to be effective, and rape is, among other things, a serious failure of discipline.”

    The problem here is that the rape culture is written into the discipline, and then becomes standard operating procedure. Soldiers are taught to follow orders; following orders IS discipline in the military. That’s how we get Abu Ghraib. Do what you are told.

    6 May 2006, 11:28 pm

13. bob m.:

    was wondering if anyone has ever read Carl Sagan’s “in the shadow of our ancestors” or something to that effect.. I remember that it referenced studies on primates.. and that these chimpanzees and other primates basically “raped” and were violent towards each other as well as eating and slaughtering their own young. Male and Female alike. We are not too far removed from our primate ancestors, I wonder if this is all in our biology…. Can we escape this biological urge to be violent (more or less)? thx
    bob m.

    7 May 2006, 2:27 am

14. Stan:

    We are primates. There is no doubting that. But that is not the end of the story, or we wouldn’t be sitting here discussing these complex ideas using little bug-like phonetic symbols strung together into mutually recognized linguistic-cognitive symbols, represented with electronic stimulations of phospho-dots in matrices on a cathode ray tube… charged through an electircal grid, emanating from a nuclear pwoer station or a coal plant… routed by codes of zero-and-one via fiber-optics and satellite signals… etc etc etc.

    We are not foraging for leaves or eating ants off a stick. I will take a shower in a moment — another aspect of a built environment — and I have to drive my internal combustion abomination to a local sprawl mall, to pick up a prescription medication — made by a predatory corporate behemoth — at a pharmacy to treat a condition caused by the military application of a chemical in a country thousands of miles away 36 years ago.

    People built this society, but then the structure of that society conditions the way people are within that society. Couple of pertinent things here. One, human behavior is infinitely malleable and always reflects the built culture and environment — there are people elsewhere who wouldn’t have a clue how to drive my broken down old automobile, much less structure their own lives within this particular society.

    And we are still primates. But it’s too easy to account for our behavior this way. Not only too easy, inaccurate. Remember Bowling for Columbine? Michael Moore went to Canada, where Canadian primates have as many guns as US primates, yet they showed a dramatically lower inclination to use them on each other. Swedish male primates used to keep submachine guns in their chest of drawers (they were all military reservists), and had one of the lowest homicide rates in the world.

    Peggy’s point is correct that many liberation movements have built militaries that do not rape, in fact, that have very strongly enforced rules against it. I suspect she’s talking about the Tamil Tigers, on which she is as well a recognized expert as you might find; and I can also reference both the Fidelistas during the Cuban war of revolution and the Chinese Red Army.

    Moreover, the actual biological response you point to is not called “an urge to violence,” but the called more optional “fight-or-flight” (the latter being far and away the response that is likely ensure one lives to reproduce in the future). Even the selection of fight over flight (very UN-natural in most cases) is a deeply gendered and socially constructed notion related to masculinity.

    Reduction of behavior to biological heredity is what has been refered to here as naturalization or biological determinism, and is has far more ideological power than explanatory power.

    7 May 2006, 8:36 am

15. Elaina:

    Wow. There’s a lot going on in this conversation.

    You know, I still haven’t decided how, in my own imagined utopia of a perfect world, one would deal with somebody who’d committed a rape or who’d abused a child.

    I know that here, when women are pushed to the limits and they kill their rapists or their stalkers or their abusers, they usually end up paying a higher price in a prison cell than their attackers would have.

    If I could snap my fingers or wiggle my nose and change just one big, systematic thing, maybe it’d be that. Or maybe I’d make it so that rapists and child abusers/molesters would just be killed on sight when caught, I dunno.

    The point is that we can’t rely on THIS prison industrial system to fix it.

    Personally, I don’t think that women should have to waste time trying to change men so that they won’t rape us. That’s the job of men. We don’t have the means to do it. I hope that makes sense. I think we should be working on keeping ourselves and each other from getting raped or ending up dead and mutilated at the hands of patriarchy.

    But that’s just MHO.

    7 May 2006, 3:59 pm

16. DeAnander:

    If I could snap my fingers or wiggle my nose and change just one big, systematic thing

    I’d make us all empaths, unable to prevent ourselves from feeling the emotions and sensation of any person w/whom we were in physical contact. So the enjoyment of rape would be spoilt by the rapist’s experiencing all of his victim’s disgust, pain, fear, rage, shame, etc. Only a very tiny handful of deep masochists would choose to rape another person under those rules.

    But nobody died and made me God, so we’re stuck here.

    7 May 2006, 10:37 pm

17. Yolanda Carrington:

    Peggy,

    I did not say that men are inherently rapists, at all, nor did I SUGGEST anything of the sort. I am not a biological determinist, and I REFUSE to entertain the notion that biological men are inherently violent. What I said was that I realized a while ago that men in a PATRIARCHAL society will fuck up where gender is concerned, because they are PRIVILEGED within an oppressive system of POWER.

    Dominance within a gendered system is the only organizational framework most men have, so it is bound to be recreated within any new system men build. That doesn’t mean that men are born to be rapists. If I believed that shit for a second, I couldn’t fight against sexual violence and patriarchy.

    Peggy, correct me if I’m wrong, but I have a sinking feeling that you intentionally misrepresented what I wrote in order to dismiss my argument. I sincerely hope that is not the case.

    Yolanda

    8 May 2006, 1:45 am

18. Philip Fornaci:

    Stan noted: “Never having been incarcerated myself, it seems to me that prisons are an intensely concentrated reflection of society itself. All the oppression, power dynamics, and related bullshit out here in the streets is magnified to the millionth power behind bars”

    I would suggest that the opposite is true, that the enormous growth in the prison population in recent decades has resulted in “free” society becoming more like prison. The entire prison “ethic” — that no slight can be ignored or go unanswered; that “snitching” is the worst of offenses; that all disagreements must become violent at the risk of emasculation; and early death is expected — has been moved from the prisons to the streets. With nearly two-thirds of young black urban men having done prison time, their views of manhood and masculinity have been carefully nurtured in that environment. In turn, the (mostly white) entertainment industry sells these bastardized mores back to black, brown and white youth as hiphop “culture,” so we can all see street violence, misogyny, and greed as normal, at least for the desperate and impoverished. Fifty Cent’s unconscionable “Get Rich or Die” flick is only the most blatant example of this scheme, but consider even Kanye West’s “Golddigger,” a misogynist mega-hit last year.

    As someone who works on behalf of incarcerated people, it is extremely difficult to witness the transformation of inner city neighborhoods into sprawling penitentiaries, but this is happening before our eyes. Schools look like small prisons. Housing projects come equipped with “security staff.” Lethal weapons, drugs, and conspicuous consumption rule. Many of us foolishly buy into notions of “street credibility” and “keeping it real” in misguided efforts to communicate across class lines, but these concepts are in reality fed to us by corporate marketeers.

    To address the issue of rape and male violence we must also address the question of power. Our society is the way that it is because people (mostly white men) have made it this way. They have created a system that allows them to lock up millions of young (mostly non-white) men, abuse them and treat them like animals, then release them back into the world until re-arrested. The very existence of this damaged population becomes a justification for more police and military and “zero tolerance” and all the rest, as well as a source of pop culture that can feed the whole cycle.

    No, prison is not merely a reflection of outside culture, nor can rape be prevented through mere educational efforts. The modern prison is the source of authenticity and morality for today’s modern man, and we must dismantle the system of power that created it if we ever want to end rape and live in a humane society.

    8 May 2006, 2:58 pm

19. Stan:

    Actually, I don’t think I said that. It was Yolanda. For her, it may very well be a more direct reflection of “normal.” Yolanda?

    8 May 2006, 4:17 pm

20. peggy:

    Yolanda, I apologize for what I said. I did not intentionally misrepresent you. But I did make an unwarranted inference from what you wrote. You wrote that even if there were a revolution that eliminated capitalism and class and race hierarchy, patriarchy would persist and men would reconstruct the society we have today. The society we have today is rape-based, at least parts of it are. So I drew the conclusion that you thought nothing could change the rape-mentality of men. That was a wrong conclusion.

    If a revolution wipes out capitalism, together with race and class hierarchy, will patriarchy still persist? Some revolutions, as the ones mentioned above by Stan, have gone a long way to ameliorate, if not eliminate patriarchy. They have certainly gone a long way to eliminate rape. These revolutions took place in countries that were highly patriarchal. But the society they rebuilt, or are trying to rebuild, is one where gender equality is sought and to a great extent achieved. This is despite the fact that the leaders of those revolutions are men. I think there are some men who live in patriarchal societies who despise patriarchy. Stan is one of them, but certainly not the only one.

    8 May 2006, 4:55 pm

21. Philip Fornaci:

    Oops. Sorry for putting words in your mouth, so to speak.

    8 May 2006, 5:26 pm

22. Yolanda Carrington:

    Yes, Philip—the quote you attributed to Stan actually came from me. I have no personal experience with the penal system other than maternal cousins who work as state prison guards, and more than a few paternal relatives (including my dad) who are ex-cons. So you already know more about how the system works than I do.

    Now while I know nothing firsthand about prisons, I am an expert on race/gender relations in society. You see Philip, I look at men of all races, economic classes, and sexualities, and I see the same problems with misogyny, masculinity, authoritarianism, and violence. Now if toxic gender violence originates from or is directly influenced by prisons, how does that account for all the rich White misogynist batterers out there who have never been arrested? Before gangsta rap or mafia films came on the scene, who was responsible for the rich boys violence? Who designed the systems of punitive punishment and domination? These systems existed long before the modern-day prison.

    When I read a report like the ones from Human Rights Watch or Stop Prison Rape, and I see scenarios between incarcertated men that I and damn near every woman alive have experienced, I begin to conclude that patriarchy within mainstream society is the root behind sexual violence in prisons. Other people may disagree with this conclusion. But that is my perspective, based on my own empirical observation and lifelong experience.

    Just some quick thoughts.

    Yolanda

    8 May 2006, 7:41 pm

23. DeAnander:

    I once caused outrage on a Librul blog by saying that only in prison could men experience something very similar to the sexual anxiety and fear that women under patriarchy experience every day. The response from Librul men was angry and immediate — was I really suggesting that life in Western democracies for women was in any way like incarceration? Well, in this one aspect yes I was — that women have to “watch our behaviour”, be constantly vigilant for dangerous men and isolated or outnunbered situations, be very careful how we communicate with unknown men, and sometimes known ones as well. And we very often have to trade sexual favours for protection from other men.

    But the Librul mindset is that in enlightened western capitalist democracies (if that is not a multiple oxymoron, eh) women are Free, and thus to compare western women’s situation with that of imprisoned males is Heresy…

    8 May 2006, 9:37 pm

24. Julian Real:

    The “Black male rapist (in prison)” stereotype is perpetuated by white media and joked about in white social circles, and in my experience, predominantly and rather exclusively among white men. (I live in a largely white area.) This “humour” has a function: it keeps the old U.S. Southern and Northern myth of the Black male rapist alive and well, thank you, and also ignores Black men as real humans, who, btw, GET RAPED in prison.

    It functions especially well to ignore, gloss over, actual conditions of deprivation, harm, and privilege, along with what media eroticises endlessly, as pro-rape. How comforting and myth-taken it is for wealthy white men to conjure the image of the Black enraged imprisoned rapist. First, put any white dude in precisely the same conditions many poorer Black men face, and see how pleasant they are to be around in prison. Second, let’s be sure we take the focus off those in charge of those systems, as has been noted above: white males.

    This little racist fantasy of adult whiteboys asses being more alluring to these mythic giant heartless Black men is fucked up shit; it is racist and dangerous, and it is dangerous especially to Black men, and women of all Colours, who have contact with white predatory or unempathic white men.

    As Yolanda points out, and as Jennifer McLune has written, white men have been raping (and otherwise degrading) Black folks for a long, long time, but adult whiteboys aren’t so concerned with that little reality, are they? They don’t need to “tee-hee” joke about that, because, well, that’s just ugly truth, and that that sort of history ain’t all that funny (any more).

    Prison culture may be spreading outward, but as Yolanda notes, that pre-prison affected culture wasn’t any place that was safe either, especially for women around men.

    As for Peggy’s hope that most men don’t rape. Let’s keep in mind that when asked, the vast majority of a group of college white boys said they would like to rape if there were no negative consequences to the rapist. Let’s keep in mind very few (I’m counting on one hand) white men systematically intervene on white men’s sexism and misogyny, whether expressed verbally or physically. Most white men I know do not concern themselves with matters of racism and rape, except when perpetuating each.

    Now, given that there actually are no serious negative consequences to most rapists, many men do rape–and that includes fucking drunk or passed out or drugged women, btw. That includes women living in a social world where male force is around every corner, and where a being-raped woman’s acquiescence and/or silence is sometimes a way to make herself try and believe that what’s happening isn’t rape, even while she knows it is. God know the fella isn’t often paying attention to the ethical lines of demarcation between negotiated sex acts and assumed right of access. He’s too busy working his self-centered mind-body towards that orgasm.

    A white woman I know just told me that she has chosen to see herself as “wanting and desiring heterosexual intercourse” so that if some male sticks his dick in her without her permission, she can pretend that it wasn’t rape. This is in a context in which all the women she and I know have had men stick their dicks in women without women’s permission at least, and also despite women’s clear instructions “I don’t want you to penetrate me”. That men getting off by any means necessary obliterates men’s humane conscience, means that what boys are taught sex is, is, well, fucked up.

    Most women I know who were raped didn’t want to call it that for quite some time. What normal men call normal heterosex, feminists often call rape. And the feminists are right, if human dignity and physical integrity have any meaning at all.

    Julian (a Jew with male, economic, and light-skin privileges)

    9 May 2006, 3:20 pm

25. Adam:

    I witnessed the attempted rape of more than one person while I was in prison. I chased a mentally retarded man down the cell block when I saw him masterbating to me in the shower. He would go on to rape a young kid several years later. I was terrified nearly every night that I would be raped myself if I slept on my stomach. So I slept on my back for years and learned to wake up at the drop of a pin. The only defense I thought I had at the time was to completely and utterly flip out if I saw someone so much as look at me wrong.
    I knew several men who were actually ‘respected’ for raping other people. Not for raping someone on the streets, but for raping someone in prison (in the joint, street rapists are at the bottom of the pecking order of course. Though there are exceptions to this as well.). It was joked about more times than I care to remember. You see, it doesn’t count if you are a convict and rape a punk, or another rapist or child-molester. Just like it doesn’t count to have sex with a punk in prison. You’re not really gay, just doing what a man NEEDS to do. From what I understand, this is commonly accepted in prisons across the US. Rape in prison, however much most people might fear it, is a power play that people will use while locked up even if they might never consider it on the streets. It certainly isn’t about the actual act of sex in most cases, rather, it seems to be about a reaction to the environment of prison. I think the idea of a Black man specifically targeting a White man is also a reaction, as Yolanda suggested. ‘Taking back’ something. The other side of the coin, however, is not much different that the first, in my opinion. The end result is the same anyway. Most White men are terrified of the Black man in prison. “I’ll toss you to the wolves” is a threat used by white convicts against young prisoners who might try to go against the grain. This of course means essentially giving the person to the Blacks as punishment (after the whites have had their turn, of course). Only then have they become “tainted”. Rape in prison is akin to kicking a puppy in front of someone to show how above it all you are. To show how nothing is sacred to you and that you will do anything to anyone at any time to prove your ‘convicthood’. It’s also the most powerful form of disgrace you can bestow upon someone who has wronged the convict brotherhood. Snitched on your brothers? Rape will teach ya. Stole from your celly? A good rape will teach ya. As on the streets, rape takes on many incarnations and most of them are not because of pent-up sexual urges. I think boredom plays a role here, as well. There’s plenty of sex in prison and most of it is as consensual as something can be while locked behind bars (though I’m not too convinced that one can consent to much of anything while a prisoner). Gays in prison are targets of rape under the excuse that ‘they probably like it’.
    As to whether or not society is reflecting prison or prison is reflecting society, I would say, in my experience, that I see prison permeating our streets more and more every day. I live in a mostly Black community and most of the people I speak with either have a relative in prison or have been to prison themselves. From the plantation to the penitentiary as it is said. Maybe I was simply not as aware of it before I spent time in the system, but the more I look, the more I see prison culture permeating the lives of those around me. In fact, nearly a decade later, I see prison culture still reflected in myself. The gut reactions I still have are learned behavior from the time I spent in a cells with hundreds of other men who learned similar ideals. Society decided to send people to prison as punishment. Therefore prison is essentially sanctioned by the people at large. Therefore, those of us who go to prison wake up every day and think “This is what society has decided to do with me for my transgressions, so it must be what society thinks is Right.” This can psychologically hinder many people from trying to open new doors of thought and from trying to move beyond what society has sactioned. They come out of prison and maintain the ideals they learned from an institution created by those in power and the society around them. I do not really think that society influences prisoners all that much otherwise, and the hard lessons one must learn during your first few weeks locked up may be testament to that. I want to think about that one, though. It is a world within itself with completely different ways of dealing with almost every interaction. It is artifical in every way, influenced by decades of growing culture and tried and true methods of gaining that convict respect. I do think that on some level, that prison reflects society at large in a much more intense way, but only superficially and only as a way to try and cope. To feel like you are still ‘normal’. I also feel that sending a rapist to prison is just pressing the ‘Pause’ button. But now they have rage and a criminal education to go along with their other horrid tenancies. I can’t agree enough with Yolanda on many of her thoughts (you almost had me bawlin’). It will take a total restructuring of society to fix what’s broken. I don’t think we can just open the doors to prisons and let everyone out (much as I’d sometimes like to) until we find a new way to help them cope. I think it might be kind of like taking a soldier who’s been taught to Killkillkill for years and plopping them right back into society without any sort of help with reintigration. I, for one, certainly wasn’t all better when I was released. It took a long time (still workin on it).
    I think a rapist is, in many ways, taught by this culture to rape. I do not think it is some inherent trait or that men tend towards rape because of biology. I think that is an excuse created by a society that loves the taboo of the degenerate. Many of the people locked up have been wronged themselves, in one way or another, by society. Who hasn’t committed an infraction worthy of at least some jail time in their lives? This inconsistancy of the system is in and of itself proof of how broken it really is. Those inside have much more time to think about these things than most folks. The idea that prison is racist, class-based and biased certainly is not lost on most prisoners. Things like prison are so tied up into the larger fabric of the problem that until racism and sexism are seriously addressed in this world, rape as a tool in prison will continue to happen. It will become more prevailant and more deviant, I think. The witty will come up with more jokes about it. Television will do it’s thing and subtly glorify it.
    Rapists are just men. I do not believe that they are different in any way other than the fact that they have crossed a certain line that most people choose not to cross. I’ve known too many of them to be able to simply set them in a margin and say that they are somehow different than any other person. Not to say I understand the psychology, but most rapists I met in prison were, well…normal men.

    9 May 2006, 7:08 pm

26. peggy:

    Just to clarify something I said earlier about my hope/belief that most men don’t rape - really I was talking about the whole world. Most men (and women) are not white, and most men (and women) are not Americans.

    9 May 2006, 10:57 pm

27. Stan:

    Excellent point.

    Just so folks know what Peggy is about, she is from New Zealand, where they have their own special history with colonization and race, and is one of the world’s recognized experts on the Tamil armed resistance in Sri Lanka, where she has done many years of in-the-trenches field work.

    She is a dedicated and righteous sister.

    10 May 2006, 9:46 am

28. frank williams:

    I believe Rape is a lot like Stealing. Instead of stealing property the rapist is stealing sex from another. Man or woman. Boys or girls. Animals. Been going on forever. There never was or is going to be a Utopian society where everyone is good and ALWAYS listens to the wise females. I don’t think anyone will ever be able to fix the rape problem . Too many environmental/mental/circumstancial varibles. Doesnt matter what form of Government or legislation. Problem is people without empathy or consciences. The stronger prevail. If u can’t fight back then you’re screwed. No pun intended.

    10 May 2006, 1:49 pm

29. Julian Real:

    Thanks for your first-person account, Adam. I appreciate you being willing to share it here. It certainly adds another dimension of reality to the comments.

    I wondered, as I read your painful account, about how home is prison for many women, who are battered/terrorized, and raped as part of all that control and showing who’s in charge.

    And sexual slavery around the world, like the story that hit the news about an Eastern European girl who was adopted by a white U.S. man, who only had one bed, and sexually assaulted her from day one, and international and national agencies didn’t ever check in to follow up on how the adoption was going, or did so in such a superficial way: that is, to not notice the child had no bedroom of her own.

    The criminal-justice system’s prison is but one among many, in other words, and I wonder if similar conditions are prevalent among them all, including what it’s like after being “released” for battered women and enslaved women and children who survive.

    But, again, thank you. Peace to you.

    10 May 2006, 4:05 pm

30. Julian Real:

    To Peggy:

    Is it your experience, professionally and otherwise, that there are “rape-free” cultures? I have read some feminist anthropological material that indicates patriarchy or male supremacy has significant variations, but few cultures could currently be called “egalitarian” re: gender. Does that fit with your knowledge? I would be interested to know, also, from your experience, if white colonialisation of people of Colour tends to bring with it a masculinity of rapism that wasn’t there before.

    What seems to be happening from where I stand, is that white rapist masculinity is being spread all over the place, along with corporate capitalism, punishment techniques, certain forms of racism, and other atrocities. Is this grossly overstating the significance of Western white men’s role in perpetuating and maintaining a “world of rape”? Obviously there are some cultures where rape is less prevalent, but are there any where women are not seen as “being for men sexually” in one way or another?

    I’m curious about this, and plead a great deal of ignorance about how male supremacy plays out around the world, except to know that horrors abound against women world-wide, because they are women, including, of course, female infanticide, and the mass suffocation of female babies, and through international systems of sexual exploitation and degradation.

    Thanks for being part of the discussion!

    10 May 2006, 4:17 pm

31. frank:

    I’m trying to wrap my head around this issue, and all the others that are presented here. We’re talking about changing an entire society, changing a system that is beneficial to some, but mostly doing no good for the majority. Attitudes, behaviors, little details that add up to reveal larger problems- all of it has to change. But how am I supposed to react to news that two teenagers here in oakland robbed a woman at gunpoint at 7:45 PM (still light outside)in my neighborhood, forced her into her car, raped her and beat her, and left her in the hills?
    Should I be angry? Should I try and have compassion and understanding for the kids? What would some of the folks on this blog say to these kids? What would you say to the woman, a 35-yr old, here to visit friends?
    Because it sure doesn’t seem like a damn thing is changing around here anytime soon, except for cop cars driving by every once in awhile, and a city that’s getting more and more dangerous.

    10 May 2006, 9:08 pm

32. Yolanda Carrington:

    Hello Frank,

    I myself would never say anything TO a victim-survivor other than expressions of support. She is the one who should have the first and last word about what she experienced. Rape is a traumatic experience—and the number one oppression directed at women, but it affects each person differently.

    Now as for those damn kids, it’s hard to know. I certainly wouldn’t feel sorry for them; if they’re big enough to oppress a woman, they’re big enough to accept the consequences (not that there are any REAL consequences outside the penal system, mind you). But I would venture that these boys had little idea of the gravity of their crime. I doubt they understood the permanent damage they inflicted upon that woman’s life, which she will have to deal with forever. Again, rape is constructed as conquest and dominance, which are DESIRABLE traits for a man. The kids learned that shit from somewhere. If I could say anything to them, it would be this: You are the reason why women aren’t safe in this world.

    As for compassion and understanding, until rape survivors receive compassion and understanding from society, it doesn’t make much sense for society to have any for rapists. Of course, rapists still have human rights, and in a culture that proscribes rape as punishment and retribution, this needs to be understood. The best thing you can do for a rapist is to hold him accountable for his actions.

    I think about that kid Collin Finnerty, the younger of the white boys charged in the Duke case. This kid has already been charged with queer-bashing and rape in two separate cities, and he’s only nineteen. With all his digusting privileges, I doubt he understands what queer-bashing and rape mean for gender-oppressed people. But he sure knows what they mean for men, and what they mean for men is POWER. Not the genuine enriching kind you see, but the coercive, violent power that is social capital in an oppressive society like ours.

    11 May 2006, 12:58 am

33. James M:

    To Frank, from a fellow Oaklander: I’m somewhat familiar, through news accounts, with the sickeningly abhorrent crime you describe. But from my experience of living in smaller & less crime- and poverty-plagued areas in Louisiana, these types of rapes and assaults are disturbingly common and aren’t unique to major urban areas. There seem to be factors in the psychological makeup & motivations of perpetrators of these kinds of rapes that aren’t location-specific. Therefore I don’t think there’s anything that can be changed about the character of our city, whether that’s increased police patrols or whatever, that can prevent the people who seem very determined to commit these kinds of assaults from doing so.

    What these teenagers did ranks among some of the more extreme and shocking examples of rape (though all rape should be seen as shocking), and this is the kind of rape that the judicial system is more geared toward prosecuting. Rapes more typically occur, though, in ways that don’t attract headlines, and are seldom prosecuted.

    You seem to be agreeing with what’s been well-established here, however — that all kinds of rape, whether of the kind committed by these kids or by a lacrosse team or by a date-rapist, stem from a pervasive and seldom-questioned culture. I read a lot of “what shoulds” and “what woulds” in your comment, expressing a frustration I share about what we as men can do in response to such crimes, without presenting women with the false choice of “either look to men for protection, or otherwise be victimized by them.” Things along those lines, like organizing neighborhood patrols and increasing police presence, attack the symptoms of the disease when the disease itself is the culture.

    What I think we as men can and should do is try to understand the culture, and then work to expose and attack it in a variety of ways. I think we have to speak up and set an example to other men. I don’t think we should look at this as primarily a criminal-justice or policing issue, because by the time it’s gotten to that stage, it’s already too late.

    I agree, Oakland is getting worse. And it will probably get much worse in coming years, as the economic fortunes of the entire country decline. But I think this crime and others like it may not have the same linkage with economic conditions that other, say, property-related crimes have, because the incentive is not economic. It will plague us in prosperous times and bad times, until we change the culture.

    11 May 2006, 1:03 am

34. frank:

    Thank you Yolanda and James for your comments-it helps to place a frame around this local situation while looking at the issue through the lens that sees the whole picture. Since we are exposing rape for what it is, or what is has evolved into, i.e. a manifestation of power, I would like to know specifically in what ways can we change the culture? In my heart I would like to believe that everyone has the potential for achieving much in this life. But how, in the case of a man or boy committing rape, have these individuals reached a point in their lives where they believe that raping someone is the best that they can offer society? As Yolanda noted, in the case of the teenagers here in Oaktown, they might well have not realized what the implications were for the crime they committed-in the Duke case, white privilege outweighed any real consequence for their crimes.
    So, how to move forward? And begin changing a society? I don’t think that the clockwork orange approach will work; it has to be taken to the next level- so, where is that? My head feels like it’s going to explode, thinking so much on these issues.

    11 May 2006, 12:13 pm

35. Julian Real:

    Hi Frank.

    I will, perhaps ridiculously, try and approach answering your excellent and important question.  I say ridiculous only because I know I live in a society that is upside-down in terms of values and ethics.

    I know I live in a society so marinated and cooked in racism and misogyny, that to attempt to answer your question is mind-boggling, and yet, we must try and propose real solutions, not just comfort one another in our agony.

    Not too long ago, a set of feminists quite thoroughly explored what was going on in racist misogynist Amerikkka, or CRAP, as I am prone to call it (corporate racist atrocious patriarchy.)

    Those feminists discovered that males are not born rapists.  They discovered that social-political forces, which comprise the foundation and structures of the U.S., among other places in the world, are at work, daily, fostering and maintaining misogyny and racism.  They set out looking what structures–in this case systems and industries–were most geared to produce and reproduce misogyny and racism.  They decided to target one industry in particular, which turns out to be intimately and atrociously linked to several others.  That industry was the pornography industry, which manufactures bigotry and discrimination, for a grand, grand profit ($13 billion annually).  The whole of the sexxxism industries rake or rape in $56-$57 billion annually.  These industries aren’t just selling sexism and racism, among other forms of ethnic hate, they are also requiring the exploitation and degradation of real human beings, largely women and children, in the production of that hate.  To be super-clear:  women and children must be raped for the material to be produced and sold, and will be raped as a result of it being sold.  Pornography is intimately linked to how men treat women and children, often using pornography to lure children, and often using photographs of women to coerce them into prostitution and pornography.  It works like this: how would you like your parents to see these images?  It works like this:  you are really, really hot, did you know that?  It works because children, disproportionately female, are vulnerable to men’s compliments and attention.

    So two of those (white) feminists, with the support and efforts of many others feminists of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and with the information gathered from many more poor, marginalised, and dispossessed women–white and of Colour, decided to go for what might be called one of U.S. patriarchy’s jugulars, but in a non-violent, civil manner.  They created a law that redefined pornography not as the Right had–as obscenity because women are, to the Right, obscene–and not as the Left has defined it–as sexual liberation (for men)–but as something quite different.  They defined pornography as graphic sexually explicit sex discrimination.  They carefully, thoughtfully crafted a law that exposed male supremacy for what it is, while redefining an industry that has become increasingly influential in affecting other media (including but not limited to advertising, fashion, cosmetics, and the content of TV shows) as well as interpersonal behaviour.  Millions of pre-teen and teen boys get off while “using” two dimensional images of women, as corporate pimps define women, and teach those boys that “that” look:  dispossessed, demeaned, deadened by mass-fucking and sucking, ought to register in the body of many males, as “hot”, as “a turn on”, and as something they can’t get enough of.

    I knew a young white male, heterosexual to that point, and perhaps still, who had only used porn before his first “date”.  During that “date” he sat on the girl (they were both around 16 years old)–sat on her waist, and pinned her arms under his knees, and proceeded to fondle her breasts and do other stuff to her.  She was his “magazine” laid out before him, in his mind.  He had learned “this is how women like to be treated, and this is what women are for, and these are the entitlements I have:  to use women whenever I want, however I want to, in order to get a hard-on, or get a cheap thrill, or get off.  He learned this.  He was not born with this knowledge.

    Those anti-racist feminists went after that industry because it, unlike other media, was designed, crafted, produced, specifically to use up prostituted women in front of cameras, to exploit and abuse women, and call that “sex”, and by mass-producing it as sex, it became sex to many people.  The leading cause of divorce (not that I’m pro-marriage) is now men’s pornography addiction.  And so millions of boys and men call the use and exploitation of women, the entitlement to use or abuse women at will “sex”.

    This is not new.  A woman I know was married to one white business exec in the 1960s through the 1980s.  Her husband used to go into the bathroom, jerk off to Playboy for a while, then come in to the bedroom and “use” his wife to reach orgasm.  This was what sex was for him, and she, a survivor of incest and rape, did not know how to say no to it.  She just lay there, humiliated and angry, until she divorced him for having an affair.

    This is what was new, in the 1980s:
    Something truly astoundingly horrible happened, as if things weren’t bad enough.  First, other women and men, including queer women and men, organized AGAINST those feminists.  They tried to block their efforts to get this Civil Rights ordinance passed.  It was not, as is mistakenly reported, a criminal law involving state power to remove offensive, obscene materials.  It was a law that would allow women (or men, or transsexuals) to sue pornographers for harm to their human dignity and status, real harm, provable-in-court harm.

    And then Bill Clinton came into office, a porn-lover and woman-user, and called off all efforts to go after pornography in any way, shape, or form.  The industry exploded into the internet under his watch, while he was getting head under his oval office desk.

    The Right and Left, since then, will not touch the feminist approach to dealing with this industry that teaches males that rape is sex, that using women is what women want, and that racism is erotic.

    The radical Left, even, will not discuss this matter, except here, on Stan’s blog.  Radical men love and use pornography, love and use women, and love and use prostitution as a route of unjust access to already exploited human beings, mostly women and children, globally.

    What can you do, you ask?

    1.  You can interrupt any man who makes a sexist or racist comment.
    2.  You can call out any man, however you wish, on treating women as things-for-men’s use.
    3.  You can refuse to be friends with any man, or woman, who uses pornography, or who uses women as pornography.
    4.  You can read:  Pornography:  The Production and Consumption of Inequality, by Gail Dines, Robert Jensen, and Ann Russo.  You can read Pornography and Civil Rights:  A New Day for Women’s Equality, by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon.  You can read In Harm’s Way:  The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings, edited by Dworkin and MacKinnon.

    See:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415918138/qid=1147376728/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-5203205-5515962?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

    and

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006ER51W/qid=1147376786/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/104-5203205-5515962?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

    and

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674445791/qid=1147376786/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-5203205-5515962?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

    5.  You can call your city hall and leave messages for all your city councilors that you would like them to work towards making your city a “rape-free” zone.
    6.  You can enlist our help in coming up with how that might be accomplished (it would involve taking on the porn industry, it would involve educating children about sexism, racism, and predation, about the difference between being used and being respected, and passing an unmodified version of the Dworkin-MacKinnon Antipornography Ordinance).
    7.  You can organise a group of men who refuse to be silent about the many uses of women by men.
    8.  You can decide on a principled course of action that will not be shaken by popular disapproval, even among “liberals”, “progressives”, “conservatives”, and apathetic or angry pornography consumers.
    9.  You can organise boycotts of all businesses which sexually or racially exploit women in their advertising, or misuse women in other ways, such as at strip clubs, Hooters restaurants, etc.
    10.  You can work with us, here, to refine and expand the approach, and report back on what is working and what obstacles your anti-CRAP men’s group is facing.

    And please do this not so that women say “Thank you.”  For one thing, many women will not thank you because they are bound up in CRAP’s understanding of sexxxiness, and will feel threatened that you are going after it.  For another, you should not be doing this sort of work for the rewards:  there are none (just ask any feminist activist).  Make sure you go after the industries, businesses, and systems (all controlled primarily by white men), and not the individual women who are affected by them.

    Do this work because you are sick to death of CRAP and what it is doing to all of us, while it is disproportionately harming the poor, children, white women, and women and men of Colour–not that those groups are mutually exclusive.

    Good luck.

    11 May 2006, 4:19 pm

36. DeAnander:

    I think it can start in our own lives with public expression of strong rejection and repudiation of rapists, rape jokes, etc. — grass roots meme warfare.

    but we also need national and world wide action.

    for me, obviously given my writing and posted comments, I think demystifying prostitution and pornography is essential because these industries not only promote rape, they trivialise it and in the process of profiteering they perpetuate and enable it. they make money off women being raped. it’s kind of like some other antisocial problem… pick your favourite… it’s much harder to fight it when there’s a $multi-B ad campaign always going on to promote it.

    even if we admit the thesis that as primates we may have male aggression and predation written somewhere in our genome, that doesn’t mean we have to *encourage* it 24×7 for chrissakes…

    11 May 2006, 6:56 pm

37. frank:

    Wow. I guess it comes down to not being silent and turning up the heat. I brought this stuff up with my lady over dinner last night- I had the misfortune of working for a porn distributor early in my graphic art career doing newspaper ad digital paste-up; day after long day looking at IT left me feeling pretty low, and especially weird when i saw how “normal” the whole business seemed, as if it was just another J-O-B for the folks who had worked in the industry for years. I’ve always thought of porn as being just wrong, the wrong way to look at women, classless. My wonderful mother slapped some sense into me when i was a teenager and she found some porn in my room; and now, years later i’ve met the love of my life, and we kind of chuckled when the subject of porn came up (the ha-ha-we’ve got each other, what do we need that for? question)because we both know folks who DO use porn. Women, and married couples, but, essentially, is the issue that the same camera that shoots the “soft” porn also shoots the rapes? Because looked at in that light, perhaps more people wouldn’t trivialize porn so much. And maybe their conscience would prevail. That is if they can be made to feel better for not consuming porn than for getting off on it. I’ll speak up. Thanks for the motivating factor. I think that’s what this whole blog is about. Out here.

    12 May 2006, 12:10 pm

38. DeAnander:

    does the same system that sells the compact car sell the Hummer H2? yup. is one more innocuous than the other? indubitably. are both planet-killing machinery? yup. are both symptomatic of a dysfunctional vulgarisation of privilege (at the expense of a subclass)? yup.

    soft porn, hard porn — good cop, bad cop. both tell women how and what to be, tell men and women what sex is, tell us how to consume something mass produced and standardised rather than to live our unique lives.

    nowadays in the US increasing numbers of women are having plastic surgery on their genitals to remodel them into a standard form of genital “beauty” found in porn (soft) mags and movies. some women bring in magazines or stills to show the surgeon what they want to look like. genital mutilation comes to the West! but of course it is voluntary, consumerist, expensive, high-tech, and boosts the GDP so it’s all good, right?

    the true trick of social control is not to keep people from getting what they want, nor is it to make them accept what they don’t want; it’s to make them want what suits their masters. the ultimate in the techniques of governance is to make us police ourselves, through the medium of our orchestrated and channelled desires. if I were to write a companion volume to Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent I would call it Manufacturing Desire…

    there’s a lot more to be said here but for a moment step back and consider that the “democratic western capitalism” that is supposed to produce freedom and dignity for all, in its heartland the US, is producing the same conditions as advanced feudal systems that went before it: mass precarity and hunger, epidemic rape, enormous prostitution and drug industry, sexualisation of children, female genital mutilation, hypocritical religious extremism; and all these phenomena can be used to turn a profit, so they are unlikely to subside once “integrated into the economy”. one after another institutions which we recognise as ‘barbaric’ in an historical or exotic and precapitalist context — “beauty” practises that injure women’s health, patriarchal bullying and violence, brutal low-end prostitution, gladiatorial games, sexual use of children, drug use and violence among children, using psychoactives to dope and control children, obscene concentrations of wealth, a permanent underclass with few/no rights, filthy and abusive prison conditions, arbitrary detention w/o trial… if these were called “footbinding” say, or if our brothels appeared in etchings by Hogarth, if our feral children were shooting up in the slums of Mumbai circa 1850, if our prison rapes were happening in Turkish jails in mid C19, if our bloody public spectacles were attended live in Roman arenas instead of on TV, if our filthy rich spoke French and drove through the starveling streets of Paris in gilded carriages… then we would say Lordy Lordy, how lucky we are to live in enlightened times when that sort of thing is not longer allowed.

    12 May 2006, 4:36 pm

39. Elaina:

    Frank.

    YES. The camera is shooting rapes, IMHO. And the rapes on camera become how-to documentaries for raping. The pin-up, the centerfold, any woman in a pornographic magazine is being raped. Her body is there for millions of eyes and hands, she doesn’t get to define how it’s used and/or abused; or whether or not it’s used to hurt somebody else. She has no fucking say, she CANNOT control what happens with her image after it’s out there for the rest of the world to ejaculate upon it. She gets her money and moves on to the next thing.

    I don’t give a good god-damn whether or not a woman signed an agreement or a waiver. Women don’t choose pornography as their first choice of profession, generally speaking, and when/if they say that they do they’re usually just doing so as a result of the definitions of “woman” and “sex” in a male society, and their need to be defined as such in order to “get by”. There are a few porn actresses who try and do activism in the opposite direction, who say that their pornography is art and that they “own their sexuality” or whatever. I find that questionable in a world where sexuality is constructed pretty much completely patriarchally, and where these women are INDEED reliant upon their sex for money; the very, very small clutch of porn actresses with access to enough privilege to make their own movies and what have you are still at the hands of a hungry male mob, in that their movies are mostly consumed by male viewers. And these few women do not remove the social stigma, neither from themselves nor other actresses who work for this industry; and they only are contributing to an increasingly self-destructive tendency among women to compel themselves to adhere to the standards set forth in the porn industry that seep out into others; advertising, fashion, cosmetics, etc. etc.

    Anybody who has to fuck for a paycheck or its equivalent is getting raped.

    The men who buy the shit (porn) have the privilege to shell out bucks to aid in their jack-off sessions; johns have the privilege of enough money to spend on ejaculating into women, or on them. They push the rewind/fast-forward buttons, they tell the women they’re buying for the hour or the evening exactly what they want them to do, they turn the page at any time. They have buying and exploitation power. The women in the images do not. They have the ability to turn to the women in their lives and either force, coerce, or nag them into doing what the prostitutes, the women on film, in the magazines are doing. If women don’t do this, many times they come under intense scrutiny and pretty much harassment from their partners, even those men who most folks would see as “loving” or “caring” or as “good people.”

    Or even young men, even those who for all legal purposes are children themselves. They do it to. This is the proof that the porn industry is doing what it’s set out to do. It disheartens me greatly when I hear about rapes committed by young people. It makes prevention that much harder, and it forces us into a place where we have to demand some kind of very, very definitive punishment, if the punishment is indeed to work to prevent future rapes or assaults from happening.

    So yes, I DO think it’s helpful to realize that the camera is indeed the same that shoots both “soft” and “hard”-core— one leads to the other, in most cases; softcore’s available on cable channels pretty regularly and much more easily accessible to children. They learn fucked up shit from it as well, and ridiculous bullshit about sex and “love” and what have you, and they learn about being brutal to women. Young girls internalize these images and model behavior after them and young boys learn that if a woman doesn’t act this way, if this is their first exposure visually to the act of sex, that said woman is a freak and a prude and not “giving them what’s theirs.”

    This computer I’m on right now sounds like a fucking Volkswagen. I’ma go read or something. I have a headache. Jesus.

    12 May 2006, 9:03 pm

40. Elaina:

    Oh, yeah, and to get my 50 cents into another little blip of consciousness on this thread, NO, revolution will NOT fix said “women problems” until it’s movement realizes women’s struggle for what it is, and stops attempting to invisiblize it by lumping it into some broader thing, like a side item in a KFC combo.

    Women’s Oppression is a huge chunk of the of the chicken, it ain’t the fuckin’ slaw.

    Women’s Oppression is distinct, has similar characteristics among all social strata (and very differing ones as well, but the ability to be raped is a pretty evident starting ground), and is perpetuated by ALL men, and ALL men benefit from patriarchy, one way or another, albeit the degree and kinds of benefit is different depending on class, etc. While women experience oppression differently, we ALL experience it.

    Look, here’s the thing. Patriarchy=Male Power. It’s the carrot that the WHITE man dangles to men across the globe that he doesn’t dangle to women anywhere. Men take this privilege white or not, much as poor whites have swallowed up the crumbs from the master’s table that weren’t offered to Black People and other people of color.

    Women’s Liberation cannot be consumed “by the movement”. It’s deliberate practice has to fuel the movement, or else the movement’s only workable for roughly half the population. The movement is supposed to be about the MASSES. Well, the masses are women. We deserve leadership and autonomy in this movement, we deserve access to the resources which would lead to us taking said leadership. We deserve support and we deserve to have those parts of our lived experiences that constitute a kind of informal activism to be recognized as such, instead of having our “activism” defined by a movement that’s headed up, for the most part, in the radical leftist camp in gringolandia, by white bourgeois males. We deserve a lot of other stuff, too, but my head’s pounding and I’m kinda sick of typing.

    Just revolution, as it’s normally thought of, and with a revolutionary movement in Gringolandia that’s still dominated by men, many of them white and bourgeois and liberal in their approach to women’s oppression, will not lead to Women’s Liberation, unless Women’s Liberation and Women’s oppression are moved from the place of “Secondary Contradictions” to where they need to be, which is an intgral part of the “primary contradiction”- the set of stuff that’s intrinsic to overthrowing the Man.

    God, my head really hurts now. Think it’s a migraine??? I dunno. *Slumps over in chair*

    12 May 2006, 9:21 pm

41. DeAnander:

    you rock elaina.

    12 May 2006, 9:50 pm

42. Yolanda Carrington:

    HELL YEAH ELAINA!!!!!

    Yolanda

    15 May 2006, 5:23 pm

43. Stan:

    For an eye-opening and thought-provoking audio (for use in workshops?), go to The American Life http://www.thislife.org/ then click on “Complete Archive” on the left margin. Then click on 2006. Then select the Masy 5 edition “Lockup.” Go to Act Three.

    Who’s Your Daddy? A reading of a pamphlet written by ex-con Stephen Donaldson for heterosexual men who are about to enter prison, about how to “hook up” with a stronger man – a “daddy” or “jocker” – who’ll provide protection in return for sex. He explains the rules and mores that govern this part of American prison culture. There’s no graphic language and there are no graphic images in this story, but it does acknowledge the existence of sexual acts. Read by Larry DiStasi. (6 minutes)

    This is a very useful piece for talking about gender.

    15 May 2006, 7:12 pm

44. DeAnander:

    I have not yet read this particular chunk of Donaldson’s writing but I bet it echoes eerily the traditional advice given to daughters by mothers, on “how to find and keep a decent man.”

    …

    the news from Congo and Mexico today is so horrible that it is hard to concentrate on anything else…

    http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=863

    http://www.counterpunch.org/novoa05132006.html

    http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/051106WA.shtml

    the knowledge of this reality — these “facts on the ground” as wicked old Sharon said — makes the brainless celebration of violent misogyny in US commercial media intolerable, intolerable, INTOLERABLE…

    15 May 2006, 7:39 pm

45. DeAnander:

    btw here is some discussion

    http://www.metafilter.com/comments.mefi/37834

    note the defensive jocularity and the staunch denial… i.e. “no way would I catch for someone” as if this were going to be a matter of free choice… someone should be writing about the construction of agency and choice in the context of prison sex, and compare to the use of ‘consent’ in pro-prostitution arguments in “the outside world.” (as if there were an “outside world” where there was no domination by violent and often mad males)….

    15 May 2006, 7:44 pm

46. Stan:

    When I heard this on the radio yesterday, I said to myself, “This is it. This is the piece we can start discussions with to get to the root of how difference is constructed as heirarchy… and when there is no “difference,” it is constructed to construct heirarchy. This is where we can show men what it is like to be women… how rape in the background serves to push all women into the sexual-contract: protection in exchange for obedience.”

    I note in the metafilter discussion how the men try to find anything to make this diffent than what happens to women… women are not locked up by the state… rape doesn’t generally happen “in the ass”… etc etc etc. The avoidance is visceral, desperate. I can’t be a “catcher”! We have to stop PRISON rape… oh yeah, and all other rape, too . [an afterthought]

    This is a perfect metaphor for women’s condition, for “consent,” because it is NOT metaphorical… it is real, and it is happening to men, and THAT makes it an urgent issue all of a sudden.

    How do we now parlay that outrage into an understanding that this is what feminism is about… the same urgency to end the system of sexual subjugation of all women.

    I recorded it on my little DVR. I am so grateful to Stephen Donaldson for this (RIP), even though that may not be what he intended.

    15 May 2006, 9:56 pm

47. James M:

    The ever-reprehensible Jim Goad has a nevertheless good story on Donaldson … good because it contains extensive quotes from “Donny” about the brutality of, as well as perverse forms of intimacy that emerge from, prison rape. Goad’s misogynist and compassionless commentary, along with the accompanying illustrations which attempt to make light of the subject, are enraging. But if you can get through it I think you’ll find Donaldson’s descriptions of his ordeals to be revealing as to the power dynamics we’re discussing here.

    Donaldson, though, is a complex and unusual case — while he started a group to combat prison rape, he also expresses in this article that he came to prefer the consistency and order of the prison sub / dom hierarchy to the relative disorder of the outside world. Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps. And now that I think about it, maybe that’s not so unusual, especially when the subject is expanded to include the sort of seemingly “willing” participation in the system of gender that characterizes much of society.

    Anyway, here’s the link:

    http://www.jimgoad.net/am4pdf/donny.pdf

    It’s highly offensive and disturbing; you’ve been warned.

    15 May 2006, 11:17 pm

48. DeAnander:

    Like Donny’s other work, the “how to hook up” pamphlet (which I read in horrified fascination earlier this evening) contains everything we know about constructed heterosexuality. Every convention of the supermarket romance paperback, every convention of the porn flick, the bordello, the Victorian marriage, the neocon theory of Contract, the exercise of agency in desperately narrow constraints; his description of how the prison male mafia has to “manufacture” new punks is structurally identical to the “seasoning” of “new girls” by pimps and madams; etc etc. I mean, it’s all there. Men re-creating patriarchy even in the absence of women. Women as merely the preferred sex object du jour, with others substitutable as conditions are altered.

    What is amazing is how any reader with both hemispheres functioning could read Donny’s text and then go on stubbornly insisting that prison rape is so totally different from what women experience in the “outside”. Difference of degree, difference of intensity of constraints I will grant, depending on the woman and her class and race; but not so different at the lower end of the income and the darker end of the skin colour continuum. How different is the experience of the trafficked woman or girl in the low-end brothel? No escape, passport confiscated, corrupt police complicit in the system…

    Notice how the male bloviators stereotype “feminism” as only upper-class white feminism, only concerned with “date rape on campus”? — as if US feminists had never made larger connections or worked in solidarity with third world movements, as though there had never been any Black or Chicana or Asian or Native American women writing about feminism, practising feminism… “Wellesley” is the label thrown at that one beleaguered feminist woman trying to get them to at least take a passing sniff at a clue. Gawd. And the underlying, never fully articulated but very visible assumption: “but it’s NATURAL” for women (i.e. being anally raped is ‘unnatural’ but being raped vaginally is ‘normal’ and hence “of course” it doesn’t hurt as much or isn’t as bad)… as if men never raped women anally, and as if vaginal rape didn’t hurt like hell for an unwilling woman — talk about bedrock essentialism, “but that’s what God made ‘em for so it’s all right.” And the (perfectly reasonable) horror of being forced to perform fellatio, coming from men who — wanna bet? betcha a dollar — probably thought ‘Deep Throat’ was a really fun, sexy movie.

    And Donny’s explanation of the good things that the punk can get out of the relationship as long as he accepts the sexual contract are exquisitely painful, I think, for many women to read: if you can win the guy’s trust you may get hugs and cuddles, you may get some affection, even be taken into his confidence, he may act almost like a friend or a real partner *so long as you never, but never, question his sexual prerogative*. Massa can be quite kind to his slave so long as the slave knows his (her) place and doesn’t get uppity. Anyway, the disturbing thing that Donny’s material opens up is the notion of a “male sexuality” (for the moment let us ignore whether it’s biologically or socially conditioned) that exists per se, not in reaction to any particular “love object” but as an appetite in itself, ready to consume whatever object looks accessible; where most women, I think, believe at heart that sex is an expression of intimacy, trust and love Donny reveals a male worldview in which intimacy trust and love are only granted to a subordinate who has repeatedly proven loyalty and submissiveness by providing sex-on-demand, and will be withdrawn and replaced with punitive rage if that sexual service is not reliably maintained.

    It’s enough to make you wonder how many men have ever meant anything other than “can I stick it in somewhere” when their mouths have been saying “I love you.” Surely some have — there’d be a helluva lot less love poetry written by males if there weren’t other emotions in the mix.

    16 May 2006, 12:34 am

49. Stan:

    I reposted this in altered for at Huffingtonpost.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stan-goff/prison-rape_b_21075.html

    Interesting. One comment says that the other comments won’t get it (she’s right). And the other comments are focusing on anything except patriarchy… behaving as if the main point is something to do with prison rape. This instinctive avoidance is VERY VERY telling.

    16 May 2006, 8:58 am

50. frank:

    Dang. Well put Elaina, well put, and I’ll get right in line behind you on this, no question; been speaking with my partner on this stuff, and even though she’s no bra-burner, she’s on it as well. We both agree that the system is shot to hell, but unlikely to change in this capitalistic, patriarchal society unless it all burns to the ground and we have to start over again. Ach. How to balance what needs to be changed with what my small but tight-knit family believes? And as I write this I consider, every day, that I have the use of my eyes, my legs. I don’t have cancer. I have all my teeth. I’ve never been shot, raped, stabbed. Never had a bomb dropped on my house. I have plenty of good food to eat. Good weather. Don’t have to deal with poisonous snakes or tsunamis where I live. I’m close to my family. I grew up learning that it’s not OK to hate anybody for any reason. I have a wonderful partner. The list goes on and on…I feel like I’m living the life of Riley to be honest. When will it end? I’ll lead by example until that day comes. be safe everyone.

    16 May 2006, 10:48 am

51. Charles Brown:

    Peggy, did you post to M-Fem list in the past ?

    Charles Brown

    16 May 2006, 3:13 pm

52. peggy:

    Yes, Charles, I did - in the days when I said all kinds of things I should not have said on the internet under my own full name. Here, I thought I could be anonymous and if i said something really dumb, nobody but Stan would know. But Stan has outed me.
    Stan, I know you meant no harm, but I am really not an expert on anything. I have gained some notoriety because I have worked with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Not everybody thinks that it is cool to hang out with the LTTE. I have lost some friends because of this. Nevertheless, my book about what I learned during 96-98 in Sri Lanka will be published in the spring (Enemy Lines: Warfare, Childhood and Play in Batticaloa. University of California Press. 2007). Stan, you owe it to me now to buy this book! And make all your friends and relatives buy it too. Charles, you don’t have to buy it, because you have never done anything bad to me. Anyway, it has little directly to do with either Marxism or feminism.

    Back on topic, and in response to Julian’s query above (5/10/2006 @ 4:17 pm} - if there were a totally rape-free society, it would be hard to prove, because it is so hard to prove a negative. Like, I am almost one hundred percent positive there are no mice in my house, but I can’t say for sure, because maybe there is a mouse hiding somewhere I just have never seen. In the same way, I cannot say that in a certain society there is absolutely no rape ever. I can only say there are societies where rape is not condoned and is severely punished where it occurs.

    16 May 2006, 7:40 pm

53. lapetrov:

    F. Scholar ended with this:

    “It is masculinity as institution and ideology that posits a Cartesian duality between Man and the Other (be that other woman, lesser man, or nature), and defines masculine practice as conquest…”

    And I wonder if that is truly or fully the case. It almost rests from us our power to determine and shape the institution and ideology. We know that masculinity has and does change over time (though much remains essentially the same too). Why? Because selfishness (being the “top dog”) is almost always rewarded.

    For those interested, I’m going to recommend an book I’ve been reading for a project on Masculinity and Violence: _The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence_ by Michael Ghiglieri (1999). He makes a strong argument for accepting the power of natural selection on human behavior. We think we’re so civilized, but it’s only skin deep; we’re more chimp than we’d care to admit. But he does not want to make us all “biological determinists,” rather he wants to get us to take responsibility for ourselves and each other, to bring about change. I’ll give you an exerpt from his final paragraphs (I’ve divided it more than he to facilitate reading online):

    “The antidote to men’s violence in America is for the vast majority of US citizens to make the individual decision to cooperate as a group to achieve two processes not currently happening.

    “The first process is to teach children, all children, from day one, self-control, self-discipline, and self-responsibility in a world where we ourselves show that offensive violence is wrong. We must make the teaching of fairness, justice, and human values our primary goals. […]

    “Second, we must decide to cooperate to make felonious violence –rape, murder, offensive war, genocide, and terrorism– not only ‘not pay’ for the perpetrator but also reap pain.”

    The question seems to be how should Justice “reap pain” on the violent perps such that they don’t want to ever experience it again and rehabilitate themselves into model citizens? And, how to rest accountability from the higher-ups encouraging “bad apples” to misbehave?

    2 June 2006, 1:15 pm

54. Elaina:

    “And I wonder if that is truly or fully the case. It almost rests from us our power to determine and shape the institution and ideology. We know that masculinity has and does change over time (though much remains essentially the same too). Why? Because selfishness (being the “top dog”) is almost always rewarded.”

    I think that Stan’s outlook on Cartesian duality is something that is sorely needed, because, well, I for one am not looking to “determine and shape” the “institution and ideology” of “masculinity.” I think that masculinity, as an institution and ideology, will have to come tumbling down before these problems go away. I don’t want to go through the “proper channels,” as it were, on this issue, because the “proper channels” are all man-centric. What this understanding does give folks is a new way of thinking about stuff that allows them to question very, very basic and assumed “knowledge” about the way the world works. And I’ll add that it’s masculinity itself that is rewarded, the “top dog” thing among humans, as we currently experience it, comes from it’s construction and institutional power.

    The question seems to be how should Justice “reap pain” on the violent perps such that they don’t want to ever experience it again and rehabilitate themselves into model citizens? And, how to rest accountability from the higher-ups encouraging “bad apples” to misbehave?

    Ok. While I’ll go ahead and admit that I’m not so much against “reaping pain” on these folks that you’re talking about, it seems like you’re kinda working backwards here from very explosively, obviously violent expressions of male supremacy (rape, et. al.) instead of taking a wholistic approach. Male supremacy is most evident in “offensive violence,” I guess it’s safe to say that. But what you’re overlooking, and the very things that propagating the cartesian duality myth ignores, are everyday, smaller, more invisible instances of male privilege and supremacy that work to chip away at women’s mental and physical capacities and keep it somewhat “easy” for men to keep on raping and hurting us, and committing acts of “offensive violence” upon us.

    Some examples are nagging women for sex at times they don’t want to have it, forcing women into more domestic work by refusing to complete a full half of it in a household, insisting on a “right” to have pornographic materials in the house when it bothers the woman/women living there, forgetting important dates and appointments while the woman in the house is expected to remember them and blaming forgetfulness on “manhood,” and other odds and ends where “masculine” behavior manifests itself as a result of accepting the “duality”, or the concept that “masculinity” is somehow completely “animal” or “natural,” and not a human construct.

    Language, in the symbolic form it takes among the homo sapiens, is a fully human construct. “Masculinity” is as much as language, and as much as it’s terminology exists only under the auspices of human language, a concept conjured up by people.

    While hierarchies exist in “nature”- as if humans and culture ever existed apart from it in the first place, but anyways- I’ve yet to see, with the possible exception of pan troglodytes and the recent note of “warfare” among chimp groups (which, and I’m not sure the exact date that this tendency was first noted, but given the talent of pan troglodytes for mimicking human behaviors, is it really hard to surmise that they mighta actually just be copying that behavior from humans and adapting it into their own proto-cultures??? I mean, while we’re waxing all “shaved chimp” and everything)- the use of the hierarchical form to impose deliberate punishment, including rapes and murders, upon entire subsets of species by higher-ups within the same species.

    It goes to the issue that stan’s brought up about the existence of actual difference and looking for the point at which that difference takes shape in the form of oppression, which is the form that human hierarchies lean to.

    And I’ll also add that Prevention doesn’t just mean teaching kids to “do what’s right.” Not when “what’s right” so often translates, culturally, into something that’s very, very wrong for more than half of the population. Prevention also has to do with contemporary action and assumption of responsibility, as the book you cite notes. But how we do this is important. We can’t just teach boys that they have to “be good men,” because being “good men” often times means subjugation for others. We have to grow kids that don’t think that male is better than female, who might not even think in terms of “male and female” outside of strictly phyisiological features.

    Anyways, break’s over, back on my head.

    2 June 2006, 3:14 pm

55. DeAnander:

    Ironically even the proclivity for punishment, i.e. the determination to make the perp “reap pain”, is itself gendered. a clinical psych study from the UK monitoring brain activity suggested that in male subjects the empathic response was muted by conviction of a harmed person’s guilt or wrongdoing — or to put it more actively, men’s brains were more likely to show a pleasure response when a person they thought had behaved badly was hurt (punished). Women’s brains tended not to show the immediate gratification and women were more likely to express empathy for the person being hurt even if the victim had behaved badly and “deserved” punishment.

    This vindictive quality in male subjects doesn’t surprise us culturally. Researchers immediately leapt in with cultural justifications: men are [should be, God said so] responsible for policing and justice, men are the guardians, blah blah.

    But it says something to me that the author of the book under discussion, while attempting to challenge “masculine thinking,” can’t get his head out of the typically masculine preoccupation with punishment and vengeance…

    2 June 2006, 3:50 pm

56. lapetrov:

    Elaina,

    Thanks for your response. I agree, the “what’s right” is very problematic on many levels, and beyond questions of gender.

    And as you imply, masculinity IS a human construct. This is precisely why, much as you may not wish to, WE ALL shape and determine both institutions and ideologies. Those things don’t happen “out there.” Masculinity doesn’t need to “tumble down” because it can be anything we say it is, anything we make it. Why do away with it wholesale? Not everyone is prepared to forge their own way alone into the realm of sex. (Is not gender partly a performance with sex in mind?) There will always be those who need structure and guidance; they need masculinity –just a “gentler, kinder” one.

    Gender and sex equality (or mutual tolerance) is, like all struggles, a fight to be fought both from within and from without. No one is going to legislate to anyone to do their fair share at home.

    I made a big stink about pornography in my house and was serious enough about it for long enough that the last time we moved the last of it was given away. (Now I’m the one wanting to rent a DVD!)

    Anyway, point is: a partner is the only one who can fight for equity and respect in his/her own space. Teach all children self-love and self-defense I say.

    And, reeducation to the association of female with domestic is most certainly in order. Do you think men in general might kill and rape less if they got more “domestic” labeling?

    One of Ghiglieri’s points is that there is no loyalty to species, only self and group. Hierarchy, like difference, is a tool, and a great one at that –for those adept at seeing to it that they and their group are most successful in surviving and thriving. And because it’s circular (much like masculinity as defined currently), it’s very hard to undo, except from within its highest ranks, or with revolution.

    The fundamental problem to working from within is how not to get co-opted by the perks of the rank and become part of the problem. Most men fail in that regard, sadly. And well, revolution usually requires violence (tools of the master).

    Personally, I think having a man for “First Lady” might crack an opening in the wall in the US. At least it would give us some time to see the stupidity of Mr. and Mrs. President as a gender defined instutition and open the door to a qualified woman politician one day holding that office. (Tammy Baldwin anyone?)

    I probably should have checked first ’cause I don’t know if humor is allowed here…

    http://billforfirstlady.com/billsvideo/

    2 June 2006, 4:30 pm

57. frank:

    Well then, DeAnander, keep going…if a woman was the author of this book, where would the focus lie? Or if women had the sole discretion as to the fate of rapists, what would be the outcome?
    Personally I feel that the castration of rapists, at the least, would prevent them from repeating the offense, no?

    2 June 2006, 5:57 pm

58. lapetrov:

    Frank, are you talking chemical castration? Aren’t there sex offenders out there that get that? Has it been proven effective in reducing recidivism?

    In his chapter on rape, Ghiglieri says the question is not why men rape, because motive can only be surmised. The question that can be answered as he writes “in the real world” is, is it a means or an end? “In other words, which is more important to the man who rapes, dominating women or copulating with them?” Given the original topic was men raping other men, I don’t think the fundamental question changes if we subsitute “men” for “women” in that last question, but given the homophobic world in which we live I think it may be impossible to answer.

    From this discussion, y’all don’t seem like real pop culture types but the Sopranos killed off their one “gay” character this season, brutally of course. Mafiosos, inmates –more or less living by the same rule book, ¿no? For both, homosexuality simply isn’t tolerated among the power brokers. So, rape in prison is always going to be reported (and viewed) as a power play, a question of dominance first and foremost –with sexual pleasure taking a back seat, so to speak.

    But is it? Rape is under all circumstances a sexual assault. Dominance and violence serve to ensure the victim will be unlikely to fight back too hard and/or seek recourse to formal justice. Free men whose principal aim in life is to dominate others don’t have to rape them to do that most effectively. Imprisoned men may rape other men to dominate them, but then find they like it too –and not just cuz they “need” sex. Could they realistically ever admit that?

    Men, of all races and ethnicities, will have to come to grips with some very deep-seated fears they have about loving other men, expressing that love, and enjoying other men’s bodies before things will change significantly, at least in the west.

    I hear in some eastern and middle eastern cultures the patriarchal system allows for love relationships among men –women are for having children, men are for companionship. Are their prisons similarly plagued with rapists?

    2 June 2006, 11:07 pm

59. Elaina:

    Ok. I think this is the Third Official Time I’ve seen/been engaged in exactly this argument on this blog.

    Lapetrov: “This is precisely why, much as you may not wish to, WE ALL shape and determine both institutions and ideologies. Those things don’t happen “out there.” Masculinity doesn’t need to “tumble down” because it can be anything we say it is, anything we make it. Why do away with it wholesale? Not everyone is prepared to forge their own way alone into the realm of sex. (Is not gender partly a performance with sex in mind?) There will always be those who need structure and guidance; they need masculinity –just a “gentler, kinder” one. ”

    Elaina: I guess I can start my rebuttal by saying that the next time I hear “kinder, gentler masculinity”, in any form, shape, or stealthily worded quip, I’m for real and for certain gonna vomit everywhere. What do you do when, say, you throw a rod in your motor and then wreck the car as a result of doing this in heavy traffic, and the car’s totalled out and not worth the work and money spent fixing it? I guess if you got the time and the money, and if it was a really great car, a classic- maybe then you’d go ahead and do it.
    If the damn thing was a junk-heap, had BEEN a junk-heap since your first experience with it, had never been reliable and you’d already spent time and energy and work on it, and now your flat-assed broke and outta patience, what do you do? You junk it and you find a better way to ride.

    Men have had time to make bigger dents in their “masculine identities,” they have had ample opportunity to do what many in this discussion are doing now, and actively work on breaking down their own privilege and laying it bare, so that it won’t act to hurt us and it won’t hurt our children and our mothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and brothers. Instead they’ve shifted around, they’ve dodged, and they’ve managed to keep a stranglehold around OUR autonomy. They’ve been working on the rear-defrost while indeed the motor was about to go.

    Guidance can take forms other than “masculinity” and “femininity.” And I’d rather masculinity take a tumble, instead of having to shove it off the cliff. But dammit, I’ll shove if that’s what I gotta do. And it’s looking that way with every damn day that goes by.

    Ah, metaphors.

    Anyways, I’d also like to know where you got the fucked-up idea that I’m not cognizant that WE ALL have an active role in gender construction. Thing is MOST of us do what we do IN RESPONSE to conditions and situations that revolve around a ruling class. The ruling class here is White and it is Male. It is the class with the power to hurt us if we don’t conform. Which is why I feel compelled to fight it. And yeah. Male privilege is damn near everywhere I go, so I’m pretty familiar with the “right here” of it, thanks so much.

    So, men get to buck up and do what the fuck it is that they need to do, whenever it is that they feel like getting around to it. Yay. Sounds like everyday life to me. *gags a little*

    Lapetrov:”No one is going to legislate to anyone to do their fair share at home.”

    Elaina: Yeah. Liberal law has given women the short end of the stick for like, EVER, so I wasn’t thinking about trying to navigate that one. The things I have in mind are more like setting up concrete social structures, networks that women can reach out to (that consist mostly of women) that, by hook or by crook, make sure that men are accountable, one way or another, for the shit that they pull under the auspices of privacy. It’s not “policing” in the “big-brother” sense, not what I think of, anyways. While we’re getting all theoretical and everything. Shirking the domestic duties ain’t the only stupid shit that men pull in the privacy of their own homes. They also do stupid shit like beat up and rape their wives and molest their daughters. Frequently. Not always, but often enough that everyone here should be pissed about it and dedicated to ending it. On the ground, as close to