A Woman’s Body is Like a Foreign Country…
"A woman’s body is like a foreign country":
Thinking about national and bodily sovereignty
Dr Rebecca S Whisnant
Nauru, a tiny island in the remote reaches of the Pacific, is on the brink of total economic and ecological collapse. After nearly a century of selling off the island’s phosphorus-rich soil for use as fertilizer in the West — first under colonial duress, later as a desperate attempt to survive in the global economy — Nauru is left with nothing more that it can produce or sell. "The people have dug up and sold off the interior of their homeland," as writer Jack Hitt puts it, leaving that interior gutted and barren, a gaping lifeless pit.
Here Hitt describes his first view of "Topside," the abandoned mining range that now occupies all but the narrow shoreline encircling Nauru:
Brian [his driver, a native Nauruan] turns up a dirt road. Right away, as we slip behind the outer scrim of trees, shrubs, and ground cover, all things green disappear to reveal a sight both terrible and spellbinding. The road itself becomes a kind of levee laid atop an expanse of pure ruination. . . . The small atoll has essentially been tonsured. The sickly collection of water-starved vegetation on the periphery . . . mask[s] the horror that lies just on the inside of that ring of trees and scrub: The entire interior has been cut down, and the underbed of phosphate strip-mined so deep that the only things remnant are the coral bones of the atoll as it might have existed a million years ago. It’s a haunting landscape of dug-out stone channels. With all the topsoil and phosphate gone, what’s left are sinuous canals marked by sunbleached limestone towers and coral outcroppings. . . . Old filthy trash blows around this blistering desert, the shredded plastic bags snagging on a bit of coral, the weightier garbage eventually sinking into the ruts where the rot managed to service the root system of a few brave weeds. If there is a speck of nutrient to be found there, it is hunted by the feral dogs that long ago fled the domesticated life on the shore for a brutal Phillip K. Dick existence in the coral channels. . . .
We sit in a hissing silence for a while. There is no breeze, just fine talc, airborne and stagnant like particularate suspended in the stillness of a laboratory vacuum. It seems to crackle and pop in the heavy birdless air. The emotional sensation of just standing there is one of intense, primal fear, like I could be murdered. . . . Brian sits still and stares straight ahead . . . as if his chiseled profile is part of the tour: an expression of shame I have never before seen. (330-32)
With what was once lush tropical forest now gutted and despoiled, utterly incapable of producing or sustaining life, Nauru must import everything its citizens need�even water. As their desperation grows, the Nauruans consider their dwindling options for economic survival: from extracting "residual phosphate" from the limestone pinnacles of Topside, to slicing up and polishing those pinnacles and selling them to Westerners as coffee tables, to selling the country’s phone code to be used for phone sex lines. (330-332)
Nauru, in essence, has nothing left to sell — except, Hitt observes, "its very sovereignty." After a mere thirty-plus years of independence from a succession of colonial powers, Nauru
has no choice but to root through the last valuable trinkets of their independence — a UN seat, a batch of "embassies," a passport stamp, bank regulations, a vote on certain international councils. And Nauru trades them with the same brutal, hard-core capitalist spirit that they learned at the knee of their teachers — the factory managers at the phosphate plant. (343)
I and two other feminist scholars have recently been pursuing a joint research project on commercial pornography. Thus, regrettably, I must spend time surfing and culling images from internet pornography — surveying its vast, dizzying landscape of splayed, shaved, sullied, mocked and, above all, multiply and aggressively penetrated female bodies.
Here a man pushes four fingers deep into a woman’s mouth, to distend and stretch it. (On other sites, dental instruments are used.) Here a penis is shoved into a woman’s mouth sideways, pushing out her cheek in a distorted and seemingly painful manner. Her eyes look puzzled and afraid.
The genre known as "gag factor" is enormously popular. A site called "Gag on my cock" promises "fresh new gag victims" weekly, and boasts that "we fuck them in the face ’til they cry!" A few young women are shown wearing "gag on my cock" t-shirts and smiling; the accompanying text reads, "Can these fuck toys be any dumber? They think the t-shirts are a fucking joke . . . stupid hoes, the joke’s on them!" The images of fellatio on the front page show men holding women by the throat, yanking their heads back by their hair, and even holding the women’s noses so that they can’t breathe. The image that’s front and center on the page shows a young woman with a penis in her mouth and a man’s hand pushing her head back so that she’s looking straight at the camera. She is crying, her mascara running down her face.
A fascination with multiple penetration is pervasive. It’s not uncommon to see a woman fellating one man while two others simultaneously penetrate her vaginally and anally. (In the lingo of the business, this is known as "airtight.") When the penetrations are not simultaneous, they are sequential: oral, vaginal, anal, performed by one or more men while they call her abusive names and declare that she loves it. At the scene’s end, all the men ejaculate in the woman’s face or on her breasts, leaving her soaked in semen.
On the front page of the "Altered Assholes" site, women’s stretched and inflamed anuses are displayed, in some cases with a man’s hands roughly pulling the woman’s buttocks apart, to ensure that the camera captures the full extent of the damage. The promotional copy for a DVD called "Anally Ripped Whores" reads, "We at Pure Filth know exactly what you want . . . chicks being ass-fucked till their sphincters are pink, puffy and totally blown out. Adult diapers just might be in store for these whores when their work is done."
This is the world of contemporary, mainstream "gonzo" pornography. In this world, women have no boundaries and no privacy: no part of any female body is off limits to male inspection, evaluation, use, and abuse. What is fetishized is penetration not merely as border crossing, not even as forceful border crossing, but as border obliteration — the kind of bodily invasion that permanently alters the body, so that what was formerly an effective boundary to the body no longer is. That women’s bodies have an interior realm, one that is sometimes inaccessible and that is clearly distinguishable from their exterior, is treated as an intolerable affront. Foreign objects are introduced into women’s bodies, while repeated violent penetration brings what’s inside out: women gag, vomit, lose bowel control. Having spent a bit of time in this world, I start to suspect that if men could turn women inside out entirely, they would.
After looking at pornography for a while, I want to hide — to cover myself, tuck myself away. Although I believe that porn produces (and reproduces) bodily and sexual shame in women, such shame is not what motivates my desire to hide. Rather, I want to hide because I’ve seen that someone is after me: my own privacy and internality as a woman are under a massive, all-fronts assault. It’s a stealth assault — hidden in plain view, as it were, and often called something else, like "freedom" or "sex." The pornographic images themselves are invasive; as much as I hate them, they stay with me, inside my head, inside me.
In her eloquent essay defending abortion rights, Marjorie Reiley Maguire offers the following comparison:
[E]ven if the fetus is a person and thus has the right to bodily integrity, the fetus is beyond the protection of the law. The fetus can be compared to a citizen of a totalitarian state whose freedom is taken away by the government. . . . a woman’s body is like the borders of a foreign country. There is a sovereign immunity to a person’s body that the law transgresses to the nation’s detriment. The end cannot justify the means of such an invasion.
This provocative analogy has much to recommend it. Maguire’s strategy recalls, of course, Judith Thomson’s famous argument that abortion may be within a woman’s rights regardless of our conclusions about fetal moral status: whether or not fetuses are persons, a woman has the right to control the uses of her own body. Maguire suggests that, just as a nation’s sovereignty imposes limits on what others may do to promote the welfare of those living in that nation, so too does a woman’s bodily sovereignty impose limits on what may be done for anyone else who may
reside within her sovereign territory.
Abortion opponents will quickly object that this approach rather leaves the fetus in the lurch, and if we grant for argument’s sake their powerful and controversial assumptions about fetal personhood, we can see their point. It is, in fact, a point strikingly parallel to common justifications of "humanitarian intervention": sovereignty is all very well, but at a certain point, basic human rights must trump considerations of sovereignty. Just as there are limits on state sovereignty — namely those which prevent or put a stop to egregious harms against the defenseless citizens of an errant state — so too must there be limits on women’s bodily sovereignty, specifically those that prevent a woman from injuring or killing a defenseless fetal "citizen" residing within her borders.
DeAnander:
I emphasize here that Dr W has shared with us a draft document, thoughts that are not yet complete, in the hope that discussion will further her — and our — analysis. This is not a finished argument, because it is not a finished argument
8 September 2006, 8:49 pmelaina:
I read this and immediately thought of the reaction I had when I was trying to find the correct spelling of Abeer’s name on the internet and inadvertently fell into a rape-porn trap that opened so many windows to more rape porn that windows shut down on me.
I still haven’t blogged about what happened to her. I am still too full of rage. I get physically ill when I think about it, and when I think about what it means that I found PORN related to it, very easily walked into that kind of porn just by wanting to know how to spell her name.
God-damn.
8 September 2006, 9:40 pmRebecca W.:
It seems a bit odd and disjointed out of what will eventually be its broader article-length context . . . but perhaps some readers will find the vignettes thought-provoking, anyway!
8 September 2006, 9:46 pmMarilyn Farhat:
I have to disagree with the logic of Reiley’s pro-abortion stance. The issue of human rights is not subject to territorial rights. Human beings are human beings whether they are saints, criminals, mentally retarded or geniuses, whether they live on the moon or in someone’s idea of a place that is outside the realm of morals that bind the rest of us, or whether they live in a womb (or more aptly, the mother).
I am an opponent of the death penalty on the grounds that it is criminal and immoral to kill a human being who is posing no threat to anyone at the particular time they are in custody. Others may disagree based on the moral code of revenge and “an eye for an eye” treatment.
Along the same line of thinking it is immoral to kill an unborn child if he/she does not pose a threat to anyone.
True, women own the rights to their bodies, but they are the caretakers of the life that lives within it. Women are not just bodies (vessels). They are human beings. They are there to meet the needs of the unborn child first and foremost.
The father’s role is very important in the life of an unborn child also. After all, the child is a result of a union between two people (that is another whole can of worms for another discussion). The father’s role ceases to be a biological one after conception and moves into the social and supportive realms(assuming the father is given the opportunity to be supportive or is interested).
I think those who advocate for blanket abortion rights miss the whole point of life and liberty (assuming they believe in those concepts). Life supercedes ownership, territoriality, and the right to choose, after all, when a woman chooses to abort a baby, she is not choosing to throw away a dress.
I think we really need to consider our moral base and be consistent. If we believe all human beings, no matter who they are, deserve not to be killed (except in self-defense), we have to apply this way of thinking universally. Abortion is not a matter of practicality.
Is it perhaps that killing unborn children is much simpler and easier to stomach than killing those individuals in society who are parasites and who thrive on the misery of others? Is that the reason why, historically speaking, children have had very little rights in many cultures and were traded and bartered with (children have no legal status or power on their own. That is why, in morally civilized societies, the responsibility of citizens is to protect those who cannot protect themselves)?
Ultimately, we make the choice (or accident) to get pregnant. If we are responsible enough to engage in sex and its pleasures, we should be responsible enough to nurture its outcome and not treat it as a nuisance. Unborn human life is not the arena to fight political and feminist battles (in my opinion). It is ironic how the “vessel” metaphor is abhorred by feminists who want to release women from the bonds of role oppression but who use the same metaphor to justify abortion.
I am a registered nurse who works with criminal males. In my professional capacity, I and my colleagues have to provide the most dignified and recovery oriented approach to their health and treatment. What they have done or where they came from becomes irrelevant to their status as human beings. The way we feel about them and their crimes is never and should never be used to deny them what is rightfully theirs. Some of their crimes would make your hair stand on end.
The rights of human beings are (or should be) universal.
Territorial boundaries are fictitious states we create to separate ourselves from each other. Many times, they are symblic boundaries designed to justify the way we act.
There is no such thing as a human being who exists outside the realm of the law. The fetus lives in a woman’s body, so technically speaking, the woman’s body is there to meet the needs of the baby. That process continues after the baby is born.
We cannot treat human life as a political issue, otherwise we fall into the same twisted way of thinking that this administration is using to justify the false imprisonment, torture, and murder of prisoners around the world because they do not fit the current definition of prisoners of war or legitimate combatants. The doctrine io “pre-emptive strike” in war is similar to the doctrine of “abortion.” The first one is international and global, the second is a personal one.
Our current social and legal reality in the US does permit a woman to engage in abortion (first trimester), the same way the legal reality in California and Texas allows the execution of certain types of convicts. Does that make either of them right? Not in my opinion.
There is another issue that can be discussed (in another section maybe) and that is the practice of partial birth abortions that is somewhat prevalent. It is not legal in all states. The reason for that type of abortion is a legal one and it is performed late term. If the baby’s brain is damaged with a sharp object when halfway outside the body and then reinserted into the body, it is considered a spontaneous abortion because the body will recognize it as unviable and will reject it. In that sense, neither the doctor nor the mother can be charged with first-degree murder.
Those are issues that need to be continuously discussed in society and they should not be divided across party lines.
Consistency in morality is one of the backbones of our measure of humanity and how we transmit that humanity to our children. There are times when killing is necessary. Killing defenseless people is not one of them. Banning the killing of one defenseless segment of society while excusing the death of another is not one of them either (in my opinion).
8 September 2006, 10:10 pmDeAnander:
Well, all you easties are already asleep I guess. So if no one else will bite, I will.
One thing that immediately strikes me about the Nauru story is — as Hitt himself and RW also perceived — the close parallel between prostitution and what has happened to this island under colonial/capitalist extractive industry. At first the native people were forced to submit to the extraction of their local resource (the unusually phosphorus-rich soil), under mailfist colonial rule.
But after enough of the island ecology is disturbed, and the balance of population and food economy warped by the monetist/capitalist colonial trade, the populace becomes dependent upon the outside trade and no longer have to be forced at gunpoint to destroy their island; they do it themselves, in what the neoliberals are pleased to call “free choice in a free market.”
The parallel that springs to mind is that large numbers — the majority — of prostitutes worldwide are inducted into prostitution by force and fraud, as young girls. Initially they are “seasoned” whether by incestuous abuse in the home, abusive boyfriend/pimps, or professional “woman tamers” working for brothels; but as they acquire drug and/or alcohol habits, or are trapped into unpayable debt by pimps and brothel owners, or become deluded by obsessive dreams of quick affluence (the persistent fantasy of meeting the ‘handsome prince’ one day as a john), they no longer have to be beaten regularly or forced at knife- or gun-point to sell their bodies. They start to do so “voluntarily”…
Another thing that occurs to me immediately is that this Nauru illustrates painfully the myth of “comparative advantage” — that polity A which has an unusual resource can and should abandon all other sources of sustenance and trade that resource in a wider marketplace, rather than doing locally anything which can be bought from elsewhere by exploiting the resource. Comparative Advantage is a fundamental tenet of orthodox economics and it seems, prima facie, quite reasonable until we consider Nauru. The nation of Nauru stripmined the biotic wealth of the island called Nauru, becoming dependent on the global marketplace for every good and service that the local biotic infrastructure used to provide: food, building materials, fuel, even water. If the resource being traded is finite, then there is no such thing as “advantage” in the scenario called Comparative Advantage, because the endgame is always utter dependency on an outside supply of necessities when the valuable local resource runs out.
What has happened to Nauru is a slightly (only slightly) exaggerated version of what has happened to agriculture in one S Hemi country after another under the pressure of cash-cropping for the global market. First the colonialists disrupt the traditional system of food self-sufficiency, destroying adaptive lifeways and forcing the population to work as slave or peon labour on the hacienda system. Subsistence foods traditionally grown by the peasantry are eliminated in favour of “high value” exotic fruits and spices, or Western imported species which grow better in the warmer climate, or crops which require large expanses of land which is now expensive in the developed N Hemi; whatever ‘advantage’ the colonised landscape offers to the colonial trade system.
Even after the overt colonial yoke is thrown off, local elites have now become accustomed to a pipe dream of affluence, and/or the country is now addicted to some kind of exotic input (fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, lucrative WB/IMF “development projects”) or just plain indebted due to loan sharking by development banks. Continuing to participate in the monetist economy, exploiting the “comparative advantage,” seems logical or profitable to the elite (often re-educated at Western institutions by this time and brainwashed into a lofty contempt for the old lifeways and diet of the precolonial era); so the extraction of that advantageous quality continues… until it is all gone and the country is cored out and bankrupt, having become completely incapable of self-sufficiency.
The initial myth is always that the advantageous resource is infinite, or that there is enough of it to “make us all rich forever”. The myth is that selling sex costs a woman nothing, that she possesses an infinite resource that can make money out of nothing…
The aerial view of Nauru illustrates vividly a term from another brutally extractive industry, the logging industry of the N American Northwest. It is the practise of the lumber companies to maintain what they call a “sucker strip” along the state and federal highways: a band of trees from a few tens of yards deep to a quarter mile or so deep, which hide from motorists on the highways (mostly tourists in the long empty stretches between towns) the devastation of the clearcuts behind. If you fly over much of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia you can see the “sucker strip” like a little decorative ribbon edging the highways, and behind it, covering thousands upon thousands of square miles, the wreckage of what once were living forests; eroded mountainsides, choked streambeds, enormous areas where nothing grows but a few invasive weedy species; arroyos forming, great bald patches where masses of topsoil have slid away down hillsides with no root mass to keep them tethered: the process of desertification well underway. Like the interior of Nauru. A dirty little secret hidden from the happy tourists driving their Winnebagos and minivans down the scenic highways, or playing at the lively tropical beach resorts of Nauru…
Next RW’s piece makes me think about the descent of Nauru into shadier and shadier commerce: as the island reaches the end of its resources, and has stripmined all its assets, it has nowhere left to go but into services that most nations decline to offer. Shadowy banking havens, phone sex hotlines. Much as porn starlets find themselves pressured into rougher and rougher trade as their youth (a finite asset, stripmined and consumed) departs and they no longer have that “comparative advantage” to compel higher prices or decent treatment.
This is the free market, that cryptoDarwinian mechanism of which neoliberals are so darned proud. This is commodities finding their “natural value.” This is “the invisible hand” at work.
It is also the big lie behind the “Green Revolution” and the alleged “improvement” of agriculture worldwide. Note the reason why Nauru was stripmined: to use its phosphorous deposits for Western agriculture, to goose up (temporarily) the productivity of cashcropped farmland worldwide. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, and literally stealing the food and the livelihood from the mouths and hands of native Nauruans to create the empire of bottom-dollar corporate food we are now accustomed to. Food productivity was literally stripmined out of one location and transferred to another — from the periphery to the core — irreversibly. Nauru can no longer support life. Everything has to be imported.
Si monumentum (to capitalism and free markets) requiris, circumspice. [”If you’re seeking a monument, just take a look around,” — part of the epitaph on the tomb of Christopher Wren, buried in St Pauls Cathedral which he designed.]
Now I’m going to say one more thing about this fairly robust and commonplace category of porn that is about celebrating the damaging of women’s bodies — an anecdote which perhaps I’ve told before but it may have been quite a while ago.
About 20 years ago one of my neighbours had a 20-something year old son, and he and his friends used to hang about their condo. His mom was a casual friend of mine, so I would greet the young men in a neighbourly fashion when I saw them. One of the son’s friends was a rather creepy little fellow in his late teens — 17, 19, maybe as much as 20 years old. One day I came across him on the sidewalk leaving the neighbour’s house and he said Hi and then asked if he could show me something. When I expressed polite interest he showed me the cover of some kind of ‘zine, a 4-colour print job so not a completely amateur production (this was before ubiquitous dirt-cheap colour printing, remember?).
The picture, doctored to look like video or maybe pulled off a video screen, was (with some effort to overcome the scan lines and fuzziness) of a woman’s breast, being pierced by a very long and large hypodermic needle (like a large-animal vet’s needle for injecting livestock). It might have been from a medical instruction video for a biopsy. Or it might not. The creepy young man was standing there looking intently into my face, watching for my reaction. Hoping for what, I still wonder. Shock? Fear?
There’s an instinct that I think most kids learn when dealing with bullies, and women when dealing with potentially dangerous or creepy men (of any age): never show fear, never show disarray, never show weakness. I handed it back to him with a contemptuous shrug. “Same old shit,” I said casually. “Nasty little boys were looking at dirty pictures long before you were born.” And I walked away, not too fast.
Not the most satisfactory response (the most satisfactory response would, perhaps, have been to beat him senseless, but that wasn’t an option). But it worked in the sense that he didn’t get whatever it was he was hoping for.
And this leads me to think about the function of these horrid images of women’s humiliation and pain, and the horrid crowing of the jerks who create them and consume them: the crowing that RW documents in the text of the websites she visited in the course of her dismal research project. They are indeed Trophy Pictures as I described in a previous article here. But they have another purpose: they are a threat.
They are as much a threat — particularly when shown to women, particularly when shown to women who are then watched closely by a guy with that hungry expectant look in his eyes, hoping to see the fear — as the cross burning on the lawn. They carry the same gloating message: This is what People Like Me can do to People Like You, and we can get away with it. The very ubiquity of this type of porn, the fact that it is perfectly legal is the threat. It is the threat that “everyone knows” and no one is going to do anything about it: that there is no recourse, no official sanction, no protection, no consensus in the community that this assault on the self-respect, the dignity, the bodies of a despised caste of human beings is wrong.
Instead it is “entertainment,” it is “freedom,” it is “sex.”
There’s a deeper theme here which I don’t feel up to tackling at this point, and that’s the persistence of this urge to utter destruction: that there appears to be a streak (particularly in males) of rage and fury against life itself, a burning desire to create deserts out of living ecosystems and burning rubble out of houses and farms. Something in us likes to see things blow up, enjoys destruction; and something in many of us seems to hate life itself. Where such a maladaptive impulse could spring from ought to baffle any sociobiologist.
Why are some of us in love with entropy? Why do little boys love to kick over sand castles, reducing to entropic disorder in seconds the invested labour of others over hours (liquidation on a childish scale)? Why do some men seem to enjoy felling great trees and look proudly on the devastation they have achieved? How can men look at the nightmarish landscape of an MTR project, or an open face mine, and swell with pride and a sense of power and achievement? If we understood that we might understand also the compulsion to destroy and degrade women’s bodies — to destroy the proximate source of human life.
And if we understood these things then we might understand that part of the fascination of industrial capitalism is that it feeds and coddles that destructive and hateful impulse: it is the most powerful and effective system for destroying life and accelerating entropy that we’ve come up with yet. And though I’m completely at a loss to explain this, I suspect that this is exactly why some of its most loyal adherents love it: because it reduces whole nations, whole bioregions, a whole planet to that “anally ripped whore,” a target of mockery and contempt and derision, a trophy picture of male power and prowess.
It’s late and I’m ranting, and not very linearly either… enough.
9 September 2006, 1:14 amJames M:
I want to hope against all my better judgment that it isn’t true, what Elaina said — that by googling Abeer, links to rape pornography come up in response. It’s sickening to contemplate. But I know it only makes sense.
What happened to Abeer is only different from the kind of porn described in the above article in the respects that she didn’t sign a contract beforehand, and she was murdered at the end. What occurred in between likely followed the same script. What those soldiers did to her was only a transference to the real world of the pornographic scenarios they most likely viewed in their off-time, with an added degree of violence encouraged by their perceived license to behave outside the law — and all morality — in Iraq.
And why shouldn’t they perceive that license? “A woman’s body is like a foreign country” … they had already been given license to violate the boundaries of Iraq, to rape it, to kill all those who resisted … and the brutalization of Abeer was just an extension of that license. What was one little girl to them? What did her sovereignty, her physical boundaries, matter in that context? She was just another Hajji, just another less-than-human being, there to be exploited.
But she was a Hajji who had the misfortune of being “pretty.” For me, one of the most disturbing aspects of these soldiers’ crime is that they planned to rape and kill her because she was beautiful.
From a Washington Post story:
Fifteen-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza was afraid, her mother confided in a neighbor.
As pretty as she was young, the girl had attracted the unwelcome attention of U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint that the girl had to pass through almost daily in their village in the south-central city of Mahmudiyah, her mother told the neighbor.
Her youth and physical beauty, it seems, made it all the more an imperative to despoil her, to lay waste to her.
I think that there is something more at work here than just the lure of power & domination that rape holds for those who engage in it. Edgar Allan Poe described the impulse toward “perversity†as the desire to do something for no other reason than that you know you should not. Willfully destroying a defenseless thing of beauty would be one example. Perverse acts, he went on to say, provide a kind of thrill that is not duplicable by other means. I think that may help explain what drives men to do what was done to Abeer, to destroy innocence, to lay waste to beauty, to turn forests into moonscapes, to kick over sand castles as De described. The thrill of the perverse. It wasn’t mere need for sexual gratification in this case, which for these soldiers was obtainable by any number of other means … but the desire to ravage something beautiful, because of the thrill contained in defying the dictates of even the most basic moral instincts. (And I say something” because her humanity, her subjectivity, was probably never considered at any point by the perps.)
I think that Poe’s definition of the perverse also provides a useful frame here, for understanding the “pervert” who views gonzo pornography.
9 September 2006, 4:26 amStan:
I have moderated in Marilyn’s comment on abortion, but I NEED TO ISSUE A WARNING. There is a strong possibility that this topic with hijack the entire thread, which is not solely about abortion, and which was posted for the purpose of facilitating a broader discussion of women’s sovereignty.
If this develops into a hijacking, we will transfer the thread elsewhere,and pull down any post within this thread relating to a separate debate and move them elsewhere. We have left Marilyn’s post — which is quite lengthy, and for that reason likely to create a diversionary thread — because it violates no rules.
I want to suggest that those who want to continue a debate/discussion of abortion communicate offline with Marilyn. This is not some kind of decree; merely a suggestion.
I admit that our misgivings about diverting attention from the very excellent post from Rebecca may be mislaid, and that the issue of reproductive sovereignty is part of this issue. So there is no prohibition being issued. Rebecca, after all, uses the problematic (as they call it now) of abortion to illustrate a point about sovereignty.
Please think, readers, before you hit the send-button.
And consider this definition:
Sovereignty is the exclusive right to exercise supreme authority over a geographic region, group of people, or oneself. Sovereignty over a nation is generally vested in a government or other political agency, though there are cases where it is held by an individual.
I myself am put back in mind of Pateman here, and the issues that her critique of conract theory raise about the difference between personhood and the dualism of an abstract person being the “possesor” of a material body.
9 September 2006, 7:42 amAudrey:
The comparison between Nauru and women’s bodies can be expanded out beyond just pornography – it applies to much of women’s experiences - this willingness to stripmine ourselves to the point where we are robbed of resources and left less than functional.
We corset ourselves into a lifestyle where we’re willing to surgically remove toes so we can fit into pointier shoes that restrict our movement, or go on starvation diets that stop normal reproductive cycles and ravage our bodies in other ways, or get implants can interfere with nursing. I don’t want to put too much focus on the reproductive system as if there’s some moral obligation to preserve that, but within the context of strip mining resources from our bodies, I think the comparison holds. Fingernails and hairstyles restrict our free involvement in various activities for fear of messing up our look; hair products leach various chemicals into our bodies, causing cancer, or premature puberty; we use botox to hide the trail of emotions in our lives. We mutilate our daughters’ genitals, or have cosmetic surgery on our own.
As DeAnander wrote, “(They) no longer have to be forced at gunpoint to destroy their island; they do it themselves, in what the neoliberals are pleased to call “free choice in a free market.†That sums it up perfectly.
9 September 2006, 10:24 amMarilyn Farhat:
Hello Stan and Everyone,
Firstly, I hope that the topic I chose for my first post does not become the issue, but I chose it because I saw some glaring inconsistencies with the original idea of sovereignty. My point remains that all human beings, no matter who they are, are “sovereign,” over themselves as individuals, including women and unborn babies, of course.
My second point was that we have to mainatin consistency in how we apply the rights of individuals.
The originator of the topic did introduce the fact that the topic was still in process and feedback was needed.
There are so many themes and metaphors that are presented that do not necessarily flow well.
If I may make a suggestion: there are easier ways to present a topic to make it simpler for discussion. There are many bright and educated people on this blog who want to include as many ideas as they can and sometimes it is difficult to say what needs to be said in one topic, and it becomes a time consuming effort to follow through and pick which point to address.
The idea of abortion was presented as a valid comparison by Reiley Maguire and the originator of the topic. As such, it became part of the discussion. It is a volatile and important issue to many. The fact that the moderator intervened and commented on it proves that point.
I am a firm believer in women’s rights and the need for women to take charge of their destinies, which brings me to a point more related to the actual topic:
The issue of women’s bodies and rights and how males, females and society in general view them is a very complicated one and differs among individuals, families, nations, cultures, and religions.
Western culture does put women’s bodies on display. Eastern culture, on the other hand, does the opposite. It tries to hide them. It is overly protective of its women to the point of oppression in the other direction.
Ultimately, the issue of women’s rights is a social and political issue before it is a “sex” issue, or a sovereignty issue. It is an issue of empowerment. Sexual manipulation and oppression are a result of the cultural paradigms that sustain them. Therefore, as long as we continue to treat women as second class citizens or as the “weaker” sex, they will fit into that role and that will continue. Women have contributed to that role perpetuation in many instances.
I would hope that more effort is put forth by feminists on ways to empower women to participate in the important sectors in society, mainly in government and peace negotiations (different from peace activism). Those areas remain starved of women.
I am very frustrated with some of the feminist approaches to dealing with the issue (similar to frustrations with some liberal approaches), which can be defeatest and focus on the problems from a bodily function perspective. I find that disturbing sometimes because, dammit, we are far more important than the sum of our bodily parts and we have to support each other in the pursuit of equality and respect by insisting that we be treated respectfully.
I know a number of women who consider themselves feminist but who are afraid to voice their opinion so they do not offend others or for some other deeper fear or who tell me (and those are professional women), Marilyn, maybe you will find an “older” man who will “let” you do what you want to do (since I am very active politically). There is this underlying assumption that a man would not tolerate independence in a woman. Go figure this one out.
As far as pornography is concerned, what can I say? Remember the “oldest profession in the world” and the only one open to women in ancient times? But maybe if women get their real freedom from social (and therefore, economic) and political oppression, most would decide to forfeit that line of work, but many won’t and many will exhibit their low self-esteem issues for other reasons.
It is a very difficult world for women out there, expecially for first generation immigrant women who find it difficult to be accepted or “fit” in their old or new countries.
Our greatest challenge as women is to learn to think for ourselves and feel good about whatever decision we make. Without that freedom, all other freedoms are moot.
9 September 2006, 6:00 pmpeggy:
He called it “round the world.” My long-ago former husband, who just this year has happily retired afer twenty years of teaching in a middle school where the kids were in their early teens, plus some who just got kept back grade after grade and looked in their twenties. I am happy for him that he is healthy at the age of 62 and will be enyoying his retirement. The father of my only children, two sons.
He said he had heard, and believed, that it was greatly pleasurable to a man, and he wanted to do it with me. Penile intercourse in all three major orifices - anus, mouth and vagina. He had come in my mouth and vagina before, but never in my anus. I let him push his penis into my anus, and it hurt, and I didn’t like it. He was angry with me for not liking it.
He was angry with me for letting him impregnate me with our second child. I had told him that I wanted another child with him. I did not know at the time that he was in love with another woman, and had been having sex with her. But he thought I knew, and he thought I was trying to have another child with him to break up his affair with this other woman. So he was angry with me, and had rough sex with me, knowing that no birth control pills or devices were being used, and out of that rough sex, our second was born. Another son. My husband ignored the baby for a week after the baby was born. Then I said to my husband, whatever you may have against me, do not take it out on this innocent child, your second son. And then, as far as I know, he accepted this second son together with the first as his own, and loved them both. The only thing that contines to trouble me is that maybe he passed on his hatred of me to them. They don’t act like they hate me, but they don’t act like they love me, either.
I am sitting here now with a friend, and read her the article at the top of this post, and told her what my husband of long ago said about “around the world.” And she pointed out the connection. A woman’s body is to be penetrated at all the important places, like the earth, to be despoiled for the pleasure of the conqueror. To be owned and destroyed.
But I still question the connection. My husband was angry with me for having my own ideas or whatever. But why should a person be angry with the earth, which does not have its own ideas? Why did my husband destroy things on our piece of land for no reason? He loved that piece of land - or so he said. It did nothing to hurt him. So, if there is a connection, I still do not understand it. Greed, desire to exploit and dominate - okay it is bad, but I understand it. But pleasure in hurting? And hurting something that never hurt you? I don’t get it. I really don’t get it.
10 September 2006, 5:33 amDeAnander:
@peggy, aside from grief and rage — how could a man who claimed to love you treat your body in such an instrumental and uncaring way? how dare he? — what I find in this anecdote is evidence of the great harm pornography does to women. it normalises the idea that a man has a “right” to make his wife submit to painful or bizarre sex acts, since these acts have been made culturally ubiquitous by pornified male society. he “has heard” that this is very pleasurable for a man, has he? and where did he hear that?
there was a time — and we regard it rightly for many reasons as “the bad old days” — when men were only “allowed” to exact reproductive sex from their wives. anything “kinky” or “weird” could be refused by a virtuous wife, or even be grounds for divorce. it was understood (by respectable middle and working-class culture anyway) that prostitutes existed as a sacrificial class of women to absorb men’s sadistic or sociopathic sexual inclinations; every sexual activity other than missionary-position intromission for the purpose of impregnation was considered prostitutes’ work, and hence an insult that a respectable man would not suggest to his wife. married women could summon an armour of sexual conservatism and respectability to protect themselves from the grosser forms of instrumentalism in the marriage bed.
this is a glib generalisation of course and I’m sure that there were many exceptions, that sexual sadism was a part of battering in many marriages, etc. — and I’m not discounting the painfulness or humiliation of vaginal rape, by any means. but this was the official story, in a certain time period, among the “respectable” classes in the Anglo tradition, in my family’s history: there were certain sexual demands that women — even wives — had a right to say No to.
there were boundaries to the demands wives were expected to accommodate. they were obligated to provide “normal” sexual access to their bodies, but not “perverse” access: neighbourhood opinion, parental opinion, the Church and the State agreed. a man might rape his wife vaginally and get away with it, but the rape of “unnatural” orifices would result in sympathy for the woman and possible sanctions against the man. a woman suing for divorce had only to mention that her husband had forced her to “commit unnatural acts” and she had a pretty strong case, in the court of public opinion and under the law. [of course those “unnatural acts” also included anything that might please her better than missionary heterosex, so her sexual unsatisfaction was part of the social contract of respectability.]
this was of course part and parcel of a virulent homophobia and insanely draconian sanctions against homosexual men and lesbians, a sadistic and vicious pun ishment of “fallen women” and unwed mothers, etc. so it can hardly be lauded as a benevolent social order. but the value of this emphasis on “normal” sex as a means of protecting women from total border-obliteration, from husbandly sexual demands with literally no limits, I think cannot be disregarded or dismissed. it explains much about the loyalty of right-wing women to a conservative “family values” agenda, and about the tension between e.g. conservative Islamic women and “modernity”.
modernity for most women, as regards sexual dealings with men, seems to have meant a relaxation of all constraints of decency or reciprocal altruism on men, and a corresponding increase in the sexual demands placed on women. what’s notable about peggy’s ex-husband, to me, is that — based on this anecdote, at any rate — he does not seem ever to have asked “would you enjoy this, would this be mutually pleasant?” nor did he come to her saying “I read about this or that sexual practise that is supposed to be just wonderful for women, would you like to try it?” instead he assumed — the assumption of a john towards a prostitute — that he was the designated consumer and his wife the designated provider of sexual services. and he was then angry with her for not liking something that hurt and demeaned her … and where does that anger come from?
from her presuming to contradict his porn-addled fantasy of what a “real woman” should be like? for not reciting the correct lines in his little script? or for not alleviating the guilt he must surely have felt, as a human being objectifying and hurting another human being whom he claimed to love? if we understood the bizarre mechanism of an abuser being angry with his victim for not enjoying the abuse, we’d be one step forward in understanding patriarchy. it seems that an inevitable component of the obsession with mastery in domination is that the slave has to smile and pretend to be happy with submission and pain; the ultimate in domination is to dominate even the victim’s natural self-expression, to make them self-police their personhood into invisibility or a lying smile and shuffle.
pleasure in hurting… you and me both peggy, I don’t get it either and never have.
early essentialist radical feminists theorised rather simplistically that men have had an inferiority complex from our early hominid days, because women could produce living babies from their bodies and men could not. before the connection between mating and pregnancy was well understood, this might have seemed like a spontaneous generative power among females and may account for early Mother Goddess worship, etc. — this is part of a Fall narrative of “early matriarchy brought down by male rebellion”. the essentialists concluded that men cling to the power of destruction because of their raging jealousy of the power of creation; they try to award primacy to the power of destruction because it is the only power they feel they own. I’ve always been suspicious of both essentialism (the lesbian S&M scene demonstrates pretty clearly that women can enjoy sadism and misogyny) and narratives of the Fall (I tend to believe that we’re a nasty monkey and always have been, but I’m a crabby old misanthrope), but maybe there’s some nubbin of truth buried under the urban-legendism there. why do little boys like to kick over sand castles? because they want to believe that there’s more power and status in destroying the castle than in knowing how to create it?
10 September 2006, 5:10 pmDeAnander:
Vinnie comments on the old Porn Thread that he hasn’t seen any gay-porn images corresponding to the vitriolic misogyny RW documents in her draft essay above. No images of “blown out male whores” for gay male delectation. I know (vaguely, not from close observation) that there’s a fair amount of racism in gay porn, and of course the S&M chic of the 80’s was promoted first and foremost in the gay male community before spreading to the lesbian and het communities. (”We wear it this year, you’ll wear it next year,” as a gay male fashionista friend of mine used to quip archly). But the obsession with damaging and destroying the human body doesn’t seem to be expressed in gay male porn — despite its fascination with phalluses and penetration.
Any thoughts on this? Is anyone here familiar enough with gay male porn to analyse and comment?
10 September 2006, 5:17 pmDeAnander:
actually I don’t know that Vinnie is a guy. why do I assume that? guess I’ve never known a female Vinnie, but that certainly doesn’t mean there couldn’t be one. apologies to Vinnie if you are a Lavinia rather than a Vincent (or whatever). “on the Internet…”
10 September 2006, 8:02 pmpeggy:
De - Thanks for your kind comments. Yes, my husband at that time really and truly believed that a wife was supposed to be a porn fantasy - though he did not use those words. He thought his desires were perfectly natural, explained to me the concept (which he took as a fact) of “blue balls”. In retrospect, I know that he was a pscyhologically very messed-up guy. But the thing that really surprises and shocks me now is that back then I believed those things he said. How could I have believed all that? I was a very intelligent young woman. In addition I knew very well how to masturbate to my own satisfaction - nobody had to teach me that. It just came naturally, so to speak.
Late in our marriage, we went to a marriage counsellor, and explained our respective problems, and the marriage counsellor looked at me and asked, “Why can’t he just masturbate?” I didn’t know what to answer.
I must add that early in our marriage, very early, I said no to him one night, and he was not happy about that, of course. And over the years, my no to him became persistent. And I found another lover who was not what a modern woman would call “great in bed” but at least he was not a rapist, and was tender and caring, and could go without sex with no problem. Indeed, for him it was a matter of masculinity, of masculine discipline, to be able to do without as well as a woman could. He couldn’t understand why I was so hot for him.
I am talking about all this here, because without that personal experience I would have had a difficult time believing that so many perfectly normal American men are so thoroughly pornographized, and so many perfectly normal young American women go along with it, and even appear to participate in that pornographized culture with enthusiasm - maybe because they are not aware of where in real life it will take them.
Also, I want to make the point that the particular kind of pornography that American men subscribe to is a culturally specific thing. Not all men everywhere believe in the American/Western construction of masculinity. My lover was not American. He was of a completely different culture and lived far away from America. He had his own what-some-might-call pscyhopathologies, to be sure. I have mine. But I am pretty sure that the kind of Americo-porno-psychopathology described in the opening article here would have been as terrifying, disgusting, and unbelievable to lover of old as it has been to me.
Sex and gender relations do not HAVE to be as they are currently constructed in America and its cultural satellites. There are other ways.
10 September 2006, 8:16 pmCharles Brown:
http://www.incite-national.org/involve/statement.html
Critical Resistance - Incite Statement
Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex
We call social justice movements to develop strategies and analysis that address both state AND interpersonal violence, particularly violence against women. Currently, activists/movements that address state violence (such as anti-prison, anti-police brutality groups) often work in isolation from activists/movements that address domestic and sexual violence. The result is that women of color, who suffer disproportionately from both state and interpersonal violence, have become marginalized within these movements. It is critical that we develop responses to gender violence that do not depend on a sexist, racist, classist, and homophobic criminal justice system. It is also important that we develop strategies that challenge the criminal justice system and that also provide safety for survivors of sexual and domestic violence. To live violence free-lives, we must develop holistic strategies for addressing violence that speak to the intersection of all forms of oppression.
The anti-violence movement has been critically important in breaking the silence around violence against women and providing much-needed services to survivors. However, the mainstream anti-violence movement has increasingly relied on the criminal justice system as the front-line approach toward ending violence against women of color. It is important to assess the impact of this strategy.
1) Law enforcement approaches to violence against women MAY deter some acts of violence in the short term. However, as an overall strategy for ending violence, criminalization has not worked. In fact, the overall impact of mandatory arrests laws for domestic violence have led to decreases in the number of battered women who kill their partners in self-defense, but they have not led to a decrease in the number of batterers who kill their partners. Thus, the law protects batterers more than it protects survivors.
2) The criminalization approach has also brought many women into conflict with the law, particularly women of color, poor women, lesbians, sex workers, immigrant women, women with disabilities, and other marginalized women. For instance, under mandatory arrest laws, there have been numerous incidents where police officers called to domestic incidents have arrested the woman who is being battered. Many undocumented women have reported cases of sexual and domestic violence, only to find themselves deported. A tough law and order agenda also leads to long punitive sentences for women convicted of killing their batterers. Finally, when public funding is channeled into policing and prisons, budget cuts for social programs, including women’s shelters, welfare and public housing are the inevitable side effect. These cutbacks leave women less able to escape violent relationships.
3) Prisons don’t work. Despite an exponential increase in the number of men in prisons, women are not any safer, and the rates of sexual assault and domestic violence have not decreased. In calling for greater police responses to and harsher sentences for perpetrators of gender violence, the anti-violence movement has fueled the proliferation of prisons which now lock up more people per capita in the U.S. than any other country. During the past fifteen years, the numbers of women, especially women of color in prison has skyrocketed. Prisons also inflict violence on the growing numbers of women behind bars. Slashing, suicide, the proliferation of HIV, strip searches, medical neglect and rape of prisoners has largely been ignored by anti-violence activists. The criminal justice system, an institution of violence, domination, and control, has increased the level of violence in society.
4) The reliance on state funding to support anti-violence programs has increased the professionalization of the anti-violence movement and alienated it from its community-organizing, social justice roots. Such reliance has isolated the anti-violence movement from other social justice movements that seek to eradicate state violence, such that it acts in conflict rather than in collaboration with these movements.
5) The reliance on the criminal justice system has taken power away from women’s ability to organize collectively to stop violence and has invested this power within the state. The result is that women who seek redress in the criminal justice system feel disempowered and alienated. It has also promoted an individualistic approach toward ending violence such that the only way people think they can intervene in stopping violence is to call the police. This reliance has shifted our focus from developing ways communities can collectively respond to violence.
In recent years, the mainstream anti-prison movement has called important attention to the negative impact of criminalization and the build-up of the prison industrial complex. Because activists who seek to reverse the tide of mass incarceration and criminalization of poor communities and communities of color have not always centered gender and sexuality in their analysis or organizing, we have not always responded adequately to the needs of survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
1) Prison and police accountability activists have generally organized around and conceptualized men of color as the primary victims of state violence. Women prisoners and victims of police brutality have been made invisible by a focus on the war on our brothers and sons. It has failed to consider how women are affected as severely by state violence as men. The plight of women who are raped by INS officers or prison guards, for instance, has not received sufficient attention. In addition, women carry the burden of caring for extended family when family and community members are criminalized and wherehoused. Several organizations have been established to advocate for women prisoners; however, these groups have been frequently marginalized within the mainstream anti-prison movement..
2) The anti-prison movement has not addressed strategies for addressing the rampant forms of violence women face in their everyday lives, including street harassment, sexual harassment at work, rape, and intimate partner abuse. Until these strategies are developed, many women will feel shortchanged by the movement. In addition, by not seeking alliances with the anti-violence movement, the anti-prison movement has sent the message that it is possible to liberate communities without seeking the well-being and safety of women.
3) The anti-prison movement has failed to sufficiently organize around the forms of state violence faced by LGBTI communities. LGBTI street youth and trans people in general are particularly vulnerable to police brutality and criminalization. LGBTI prisoners are denied basic human rights such as family visits from same sex partners, and same sex consensual relationships in prison are policed and punished.
4) While prison abolitionists have correctly pointed out that rapists and serial murderers comprise a small number of the prison population, we have not answered the question of how these cases should be addressed. The inability to answer the question is interpreted by many anti-violence activists as a lack of concern for the safety of women
5) The various alternatives to incarceration that have been developed by anti-prison activists have generally failed to provide sufficient mechanism for safety and accountability for survivors of sexual and domestic violence. These alternatives often rely on a romanticized notion of communities, which have yet to demonstrate their commitment and ability to keep women and children safe or seriously address the sexism and homophobia that is deeply embedded within them.
We call on social justice movements concerned with ending violence in all its forms to:
1) Develop community-based responses to violence that do not rely on the criminal justice system AND which have mechanisms that ensure safety and accountability for survivors of sexual and domestic violence. Transformative practices emerging from local communities should be documented and disseminated to promote collective responses to violence..
2) Critically assess the impact of state funding on social justice organizations and develop alternative fundraising strategies to support these organizations. Develop collective fundraising and organizing strategies for anti-prison and anti-violence organizations. Develop strategies and analysis that specifically target state forms of sexual violence.
3) Make connections between interpersonal violence, the violence inflicted by domestic state institutions (such as prisons, detention centers, mental hospitals, and child protective services), and international violence (such as war, military base prostitution, and nuclear testing).
4) Develop an analysis and strategies to end violence that do not isolate individual acts of violence (either committed by the state or individuals) from their larger contexts. These strategies must address how entire communities of all genders are affected in multiple ways by both state violence and interpersonal gender violence. Battered women prisoners represent an intersection of state and interpersonal violence and as such provide and opportunity for both movements to build coalitions and joint struggles.
5) Put poor/working class women of color in the center of their analysis, organizing practices, and leadership development. Recognize the role of economic oppression, welfare “reform,” and attacks on women workers’ rights in increasing women’s vulnerability to all forms of violence and locate anti-violence and anti-prison activism alongside efforts to transform the capitalist economic system.
6) Center stories of state violence committed against women of color in our organizing efforts.
7) Oppose legislative change that promotes prison expansion, criminalization of poor communities and communities of color and thus state violence against women of color, even if these changes also incorporate measure to support victims of interpersonal gender violence.
9) Develop strategies for mobilizing against sexism and homophobia WITHIN our communities in order to keep women safe.
10) Challenge men of color and all men in social justice movements to take particular responsibility to address and organize around gender violence in their communities as a primary strategy for addressing violence and colonialism. We challenge men to address how their own histories of victimization have hindered their ability to establish gender justice in their communities.
11) Link struggles for personal transformation and healing with struggles for social justice.
We seek to build movements that not only end violence, but that create a society based on radical freedom, mutual accountability, and passionate reciprocity. In this society, safety and security will not be premised on violence or the threat of violence; it will be based on a collective commitment to guaranteeing the survival and care of all peoples.
SUPPORTERS
Organizations
American Friends Service Committee
Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, North America
Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, San Francisco Chapter
Arizona Prison Moratorium Coalition
Asian Women’s Shelter
Audre Lorde Project
Black Radical Congress
Break the Chains
California Coalition for Women Prisoners
Center for Human Rights Education
Center for Immigrant Families
Center for Law and Justice
Coalition of Women from Asia and the Middle East
Colorado Progressive Alliance
Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (New York)
Communities Against Rape and Abuse (Seattle)
Direct Action Against Refugee Exploitation (Vancouver)
East Asia-US-Puerto Rico Women’s Network Against Militarism
Institute of Lesbian Studies
Justice Now
Korean American Coalition to End Domestic Abuse
Lavender Youth Recreation & Information Center (San Francisco)
Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
Minnesota Black Political Action Committee
National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects
National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (Seattle)
Northwest Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian, & Gay Survivors of Abuse
Pennsylvania Lesbian and Gay Task Force
Prison Activist Resource Center
Project South
San Francisco Women Against Rape
Shimtuh Korean Domestic Violence Program
Sista II Sista
Southwest Youth Collaborative (Chicago)
Spear and Shield Publications, Chicago
Women of All Red Nations
Women of Color Resource Center
Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (Bronx)
Individuals
12 September 2006, 1:45 pmDebra M. Akuna
Gigi Alexander
Jiro Arase
Helen Arnold, Office of Sexual Misconduct Prevention & Education, Columbia University
Molefe Asante, Temple University
Rjoya K. Atu
Karen Baker, National Sexual Violence Resource Center
Rachel Baum, National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects
Elham Bayour, Women’s Empowerment Project (Gaza, Palestine)
Zoe Abigail Bermet
Eulynda Toledo-Benalli, Dine’ Nation, First Nations North & South
Diana Block, California Coalition for Women Prisoners
Marilyn Buck, Political Prisoner
Lee Carroll, National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
Emma Catague, API Women & Safety Center
Ann Caton, Young Women United
mariama changamire, department of communication umass amherst
Eunice Cho, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
Sunjung Cho, KACEDA and Asian Community Mental Health Services
Christina Chu
Dorie D. Ciskowsky
Cori Couture, BAMM
Kimberle Crenshaw, UCLA Law School
Gwen D’Arcangelis
Shamita Das Dasgupta, Manavi, Inc.
Angela Y. Davis, University of California - Santa Cruz
Jason Durr, University of Hawaii School of Social Work
Michael Eric Dyson, University of Pennsylvania
Siobhan Edmondson
Michelle Erai, Santa Cruz Commission for the Prevention of Violence Against Women
Samantha Francois
Edna Frantela, National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
Loretta Frederick, Battered Women’s Justice Project
Arnoldo Garcia, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
Dionne Grigsby, University of Hawaii Outreach College
Lara K. Grimm
Elizabeth Harmuth, Prison Activist Resource Center
Will Harrell, ACLU of Texas
Sarah Hoagland, Institute of Lesbian Studies
Katayoun Issari, Family Peace Center (Hawaii)
Desa Jacobsson, Anti-Violence Activist (Alaska)
Joy James, Brown University
Leialoha Jenkins
Jamie Jimenez, Northwestern Sexual Assault Education Prevention Program
Dorothea Kaapana
Isabel Kang, Dorean American Coalition for Ending Domestic Abuse
Valli Kanuha, Asian Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence
Mimi Kim, Asian Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence
Erl Kimmich
Paul Kivel, Violence Prevention Educator
M. Carmen Lane, Anti-violence activist
In Hui Lee, KACEDA
Meejeon Lee, Shimtuh & KACEDA
Beckie Masaki, Asian Women’s Shelter
Ann Rhee Menzie, SHIMTUH & KACEDA
Sarah Kim-Merchant, KACEDA
Patricia Manning, Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) Volunteer
Kristin Millikan, Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network
Steven Morozumi, Programs Adviser, Univ. of Oregon Multicultural Center
Soniya Munshi, Manavi
Sylvia Nam, KACEDA & KCCEB(Korean Community Center of the East Bay)
Stormy Ogden, American Indian Movement
Margo Okazawa-Rey, Mills College
Angela Naomi Paik
Ellen Pence, Praxis
Karen Porter
Trity Pourbahrami, University of Hawaii
Laura Pulido, University of Southern California
Bernadette Ramog
Matt Remle, Center for Community Justice
Monique Rhodes, Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault
Lisa Richardson
Beth Richie, African American Institute on Domestic Violence
David Rider, Men Can Stop Rape
Loretta Rivera
Alissa Rojers
Clarissa Rojas, Latino Alianza Against Domestic Violence
Paula Rojas, Refuio/Refuge (New York)
Tricia Rose, University of California - Santa Cruz
Katheryn Russell-Brown, University of Maryland
Ann Russo, Women’s Studies Program, DePaul University
Anuradha Sharma, Asian & Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence
David Thibault Rodriguez, South West Youth Collaborative
Roxanna San Miguel
Karen Shain, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
Proshat Shekarloo, Oakland
Anita Sinha, Attorney - Northwest Immigrant Rights Project
Wendy Simonetti
Barbara Smith, Founder - Kitchen Table Press
Matthea Little Smith
Natalie Sokoloff, John Jay College of Criminal Justice - C.U.N.Y.
Nikki Stewart
Nan Stoops
Theresa Tevaga
Kabzuag Vaj, Hmong American Women Association
Cornel West
Janelle White, Leanne Knot Violence Against Women Consortium
Laura Whitehorn, Former Political Prisoner
Sherry Wilson, Women of All Red Nations
Glenn Wong
Beverly Wright-Alley, Radical Women
Yon Soon Yoon, KACEDA
Mieko Yoshihama, University of Michigan School of Social Work
Tukufu Zuberi, Center for Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania
frank:
This is pretty twisted shit. If it’s well beyond time to burn the whole thing down, what’s stopping an unsanctioned team to take out the bastards perpetrating this garbage? Without drawing any parallels, the israelis have been successful in taking out some folks, albeit in the name of zionism. Why not do the same thing with rape-porn-mongers?
13 September 2006, 6:34 pmlapetrov:
I agree that essential feminism has it’s limits. But, an ancient memory of powerlessness before the awesome power of Woman could very well account for the love of death in today’s hegemonic masculinity. Thanatos, as Freud concluded, predominates Western culture.
But, there’s also the chance that it’s as simple as the fact that death is the ultimate inevitability. There’s no escaping it. Maybe it’s a question of wanting to be on “the winning team”?
What plagues me is, what to do about it? As far as the corrosiveness of pornography goes, the pursuit of economic &/or sexual happiness simply cannot continue to trump the physical and psychological well being of females. And I don’t mean only the females directly hurt by pornography –I mean ALL OF US! Pornography should not be treated as mere “speech.” It must be culturally redefined as HATE. What else is it but sheer unadulterated misogyny? The social crime of pornography must become an illegal hate crime.
On my new campus, here in “safe” rural (extremely white) America, in the second week of classes I had a student who was assaulted in her dorm room by a young man who had been posing as a freshman. Luckily the woman isn’t afraid to press charges. So often victims won’t because they don’t want their parents to find out they were drunk that night, or out “too late,” or whatever they perceive could possibly make others think of them as partially responsible for being victimized.
Yet I have hope. The culture of “woman (and all things feminized) as consumable commodity” is indeed very old, but it is historical, and culturally specific. It too must, and will, die.
16 September 2006, 8:13 pmAudrey:
Adding to lapetrov’s reasons for not reporting a rape … while it’s true that some women don’t want to press charges for the reasons mentioned, many women just don’t see the point of reporting it. Of the rapists that are actually reported to police, less than 16% end up in prison. Trying to prosecute is a whole hell of a lot of work and pain to go through for nothing.
A decision not to report rape does not equate to worrying about what others will think of us. We aren’t blind. We see patterns in what the police follow up on. When my ex’s employer was withholding/embezzling child support money, the police told me they couldn’t help – they issued a bench warrant, but as long as he wasn’t stopped for a traffic violation or some other offense, I was out of luck. But when Monica Legg didn’t return “The Naked Gun†and “The Nightmare Before Christmas†to the video store, they showed up at her house, cuffed her, hauled her off to the station and fingerprinted her (coincidentally within hours of her photo at an anti-war vigil appearing in the Detroit Free Press). When my daughter’s friend was molested by a relative, he was found guilty, but the judge said he was too old to go to jail and he was released. When someone a half mile up the street from me let their lawn grow taller than 6 inches or whatever the ordinance is here, police showed up at his front door with sirens wailing and lights flashing. Child support is a lower priority than overdue videos. Rape is a lower priority than not mowing our lawns.
There is the law, there is enforcement, and there is economics. Unless you control all three, you don’t have sovereignty.
17 September 2006, 8:13 amJulian Real:
De asks why do boys knock over sand castles.
First, not all boys do. And many boys build them first (create them).
But I understand what you are getting at.
I think the answer is somewhere, or partly, here:
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=230
Children are gendered, and some are boyed in ways that create the need to act out destruction, because the psyche and soul have been, to varying degrees, and in different ways (depending on class, culture, era, region, etc) destroyed by patriarchal imperatives.
Boys act out the too-often abusive process of being boyed. That is what a lot of “boys will be boys” behavior is: acting out patriarchal atrocity against small children who are rewarded, to varying degrees, for being inhumane.
Girls are rewarded-while-punished for being inhumane, for being subordinate, for being invisible, for being silent, for being what boys and men want them to be, and what the women who are controlled by patriarchal values want their little girled children to be, by becoming girls.
What’s the mystery? Just look at birthday cards for children under eleven. It’s all there. And just look at all media of children over eleven.
Gendering children, in patriarchal societies, is a form of psychic, physical, emotional, spiritual violence, which gets acted out against the self and others.
17 September 2006, 4:48 pmlapetrov:
Yes, Audrey, so many women conclude that there is no point to following through with reports, etc. of rape. I myself did the same when I was victimized in Spain, many, many years ago. I didn’t even bother reporting it to the police; though I did go to my summer school Spanish language classes and proceeded to warn all the women to be very careful and to not go out at night alone.
Law, enforcement and money is, as you say, key. AND, not that you don’t know this, all of those remain overwhelmingly in the hands of (white) men in this country. There was a gang rape in Madison WI, where I used to live, in which the only suspect caught was released on a signature bond because he was “very cooperative.”
http://www1.wkowtv.com/index.php/news/story/p/pkid/24852
My partner, who is there for a few weeks, was astounded by this. He is black and said that “mexicans” get better treatment than blacks do in, what I call, whitelandia. He may well be very right in that regard, but I promptly told him that the whole system is male dominated and works for men. Period. I think for the first time he truly understood what I meant by that. The rape victim was not only subjected to a horrendous crime by the criminals, but by the justice system too.
Luckily they announced on Friday the arrest of all three suspects with formal charges pending. But, there won’t be an ending happy enough to take away the pain and fear the victim endures.
17 September 2006, 9:08 pmpeggy:
Julian, Lapetrov, and whoever else may be interested -
Has anyone read Nancy Chodorow’s old book, The Reproduction of Mothering ?
Maybe what Chodorow said has all been refuted, but for me, her work answered a lot of questions, in particular why (some) little boys knock down (some) little girls’ sand castles.
18 September 2006, 6:25 amJulian Real:
Hi Peggy.
I came across her work back in the day–when I was a Women’s Studies major.
I think back then, Goddess love her, psychoanalytic theory, stemming still from Freud and what he didn’t say (but knew), had a strong grip on culture. Now meds do. But I think MacKinnon has advanced some of this thinking, placing the institution of motherhood, and the creation of women-who-are-made-to-raise-boys (and girls) (only) in a more radical context of male supremacist force.
That’s where I go from Chodorow, anyway. Thanks, though, for reminding me of where some of these perspectives were generated. Credit to her for her work in this area.
18 September 2006, 2:15 pmGary Goodman:
The US media is controlled by the CIA per Wm. Colby and remarks by Wm. Casey. Look up the ownership and management some time.
Of course this crime against Abeer is horrible, and it DOES have legs. While crimes like this happen randomly in the USA, and while similar acts have been performed by brutal and duplicitous Wahabbis, this act was directly caused by US intervention in a sovereign nation. It’s as if Rumsfeld and Bush participated in that rape/murder, as hitmen who ordered it. The fact that they did not order this crime directly, is a weak defense.
The soldiers were schizophrenically instructed by superiors in the chain-of-command to view Iraqis and non-human animals, disposable props, and at the same time (I assume) they were instructed to follow certain military rules when dealing with civilians. In addition, they have been sideways informed that this family bombed the World Trade Center, when clearly tons of relevant history indicates that it was the CIA who did that. Osama Bin Laden, or someone claiming to be him, told Americans to read “Rogue State” by Wm. Blum, and learn about the history of murder and terror perpetrated by the US govt.
Likewise, ordinary citizens are instructed to absorb violence and mysoginy for entertainment or “news”, but also oppose violence except govt violence, accept gross lies and corruption, act with morality, all by the same corporate institutions. No wonder the American mindset is confused. This is more than “the market”. This is intentional manipulation.
The JonBenet Ramsey extravaganza (which turned out to be fake) was a vicarious child pornography TV special to entertain and to distract from deeper issues, to frighten and demoralize.
There is also an effort afoot by the govt/media to get people to HATE THE TROOPS. Remember what happened in Vietnam when hippie antiwar protesters aligned with the soldiers who were trained to kill and seasoned in the field — and then converged on the Capitol. Were govt officials frightened? No doubt.
Then John Kerry (CIA asset?) got the vets to convert their rage to political theater in Congress, and the War was ended. Be careful who you blame, and consider ALL media to be a psychological operation on all of us. Even seemingly innocuous comedies.
re: Abortion. Regardless how wrong, I cannot think of a worse scenario than to grant government officials territorial rights inside the wombs of women. Practically, they now have territorial rights inside the bloodstream of inhabitants, in terms of blood alcohol levels. BIG MISTAKE. Instead, it’s up to abortion opponents to convince women and girls to NOT have abortions, not to convince the govt to enforce this.
16 October 2006, 8:07 pm