"The Conversation You Must Have With Your Sons"

tw: rape,  rape culture

Carina Kolodny recently wrote a piece for the Huffington Post  titled "The Conversation You Must Have with Your Sons."

I was reminded of this piece earlier today, when I had a somewhat rare opportunity to sit in a church not my own--even a denomination not my own.  While sitting through the service, I noticed the teenaged boy in front of me kept touching the teenaged girl next to him.  Every time, she would push his hand away.  This went on for about ten minutes, and after the third time--with increasing protestation on her part--I started looking for a break in the liturgy to lean over and tell the boy to stop. 

I do not know what this boy's relationship to the girl was.  I suspect his mother was sitting on the other side of him based on their interaction, and so the young(er?) girl may have been his sister.  It really does not matter.  What was going on was one example of the small ways in which consent is overridden and ignored.  Clear 'no's' were disregarded.
 
Even as the piece has the more severe side of the violence spectrum in mind, the central theses and questions have resonance: 

 Your son is coming of age in that culture with those messages swirling around him. You might have raised him in a home that perpetuated that culture without ever intending to or perhaps you raised him in a home that taught values in complete contrast to that culture. The more important question is: did you ever directly tell him to never buy into that culture? Did you ever tell him that culture is unacceptable and WRONG? Did you ever have any of the aforementioned conversations?

And one aspect of that culture--from unwanted teasing and touching in a pew all the way to rape--is the notion that women's bodies do not deserve autonomy, that consent is not important, and that 'no' does not need to be respected.

It reminded me that such a conversation might have benefit  for that teenage boy, and more importantly,  for the women he will interact with in his life.  And as one raising a son, the event was a reminder of my own responsibility for having this conversation.

What does being an ally look like?

These three sites/posts are excellent places to start when it comes to raising consciousness around being a feminist ally.  Much of the advice also carries over to being an ally to other groups who suffer from systemic oppression.

101 Everyday Ways for Men to Be Allies to Women

Resources for Allies from Geek feminism Wiki,which has a lot of Feminism 101 material.

"So You Call Yourself an Ally: 10 Things All ‘Allies’ Need to Know" from Everyday Feminist.

On Nudity, Privacy, and Consent

Last week, nude photos of several famous women were stolen from the "cloud", that nebulous storage facility. It is still not clear whether these photos were hacked from individual iDevices or from the cloud itself, but the photos were certainly obtained without the consent of the women in them, and almost certainly obtained illegally. Most of the coverage of this theft (and subsequent unauthorized distribution of the photos) has thankfully focused the blame where it belongs: on the hackers, who stole these women's personal property and invaded their privacy, and on the websites hosting these photos, who refuse to take them down due to some complicated legal shenanigans that make it harder to take down illegally obtained nude photos than potentially copyrighted material. But some of the media frenzy has blamed these women, stating that they should not have taken nude photos in the first place, or that having taken the nude photos they should not have stored them in the cloud (as if that's easy). Others have said that they are celebrities and should shrug off this involuntary porn as simply one of the challenges they face in their profession (as if only celebrities suffer from the unauthorized distribution of their private nude images).

The Church, whether it publicly condemns this event or not, is in some way responsible for the latter interpretation of this scandal. After all, many women who have been victimized find themselves condemned by the Church for their behavior. The first thing we need to say is that nudity is not, on its own, a sin. After all, Adam and Eve were created and lived in Eden naked, and it was only after they ate the fruit of the tree (that is, only *after* they had already sinned), that they became ashamed of that condition. One could interpret the Scripture as saying that their shame about their bodies was among the sins they invited into their lives by disobeying God and eating the fruit.

So if nudity isn't a sin, is sharing that nudity (consensually) a sin? We know that for at least one of these women, the photos were created within the covenant of marriage. Assuming that there was no coercion involved in their creation, that seems entirely sinless. As for the others, we cannot comment on the quality of the relationship that engendered their creation, nor do we know for a fact that they were intended to be shared with anyone at all. Taking a nude photo for one's own enjoyment can certainly fit within a Christian sexual ethic. Even if they were consensually shared with a loved one to whom these women were not married, is that not a healthier sexual expression for a couple seeking to grow closer than one that involves all of the risks and intimacies of a physical pairing?

Regardless, the proper emphasis for a Christian sexual ethic ought to be on consent. We see in Scripture that God himself has shown us this example. The "power of the Most High" does not overshadow Mary and she does not become pregnant with Jesus until after she has said, "Let it be with me according to your word." It is Mary's consent that initiates the Incarnation of Jesus. Even Abraham - not well known as a particularly sexually ethical man - tells the servant he sends to find a wife for his son that if the woman will not consent to follow him, he is released from his responsibility.

So: nudity ≠ sin. Consensually sharing one's nudity with another = only potentially sinful in certain cases. Stealing private nude images and knowingly sharing them without the owner's consent = definitely sinful. Let's keep the focus where it belongs.

How men benefit from misogyny "free of guilt"

An exculpatory method some men use in conversations around male privilege and misogyny is to say that he or they do not personally contribute to the oppression of women, and so he or they bear no responsibility for the deeds of others. I'd like to address this line of thought.

I’ll approach this point by way of a hypothetical. Suppose there was a man completely free of any misogynistic tendencies. This man goes about his life without incident. But what is happening around him is the ambient level of gendered violence: domestic violence, rape, cat-calling, stalking, sexual harassment, and a number of other overt and unconscious ways other men communicate to women that they are lesser. And women, who know that it’s often safer to give a guy a fake number than refuse to give a number, develop survival techniques because--more often than not--there’s no immediate way to tell the horrible men from the not-horrible men. Women learn that politeness to random men keeps them safe.

In this way, all misogyny is terroristic in that the use of violence seeks to control women individually and as a whole. Women are nice to men in order to survive, because they never know if they will anger the wrong man. (Note: some women act against this tendency, knowing that they do not “owe” men openness to their advances or the time of day. I think that’s courageous on their part.) In any case, the man completely free of misogynistic tendencies benefits from the terroristic violence of misogynistic men because their actions condition women and create the gendered climate around the man free of misogynistic tendencies.

Now suppose the man free of misogynistic tendencies never notices how the patterns of violence color his interactions with women. Technically he is not guilty of any act in particular, but his lack of knowledge keeps him from contributing to the lessening of the misogynistic environment, even as he benefits from it in small ways.

But suppose the man free of misogynistic tendencies discovers how women are being treated, and can connect how women are treated to his own ease in existing in the world and in interactions with women.

Now there is a choice: If we assume misogyny is bad, and should not exist, the man can either choose not to act or contribute in small ways to challenging misogyny. The choice not to act is something I would consider a refusal to do the good when the good is entirely possible.

But that notion of terroristic violence is where I am coming from when I say that all men benefit from the misogynistic violence of a few men. Women do not want to become victims of men, have no way of telling which men are likely to become violent, and act accordingly. Men benefit from this social arrangement, often without seeing it.

However, living in the society we do, this hypothetical man does not exist. And all of us participate in sinful social structures built on the domination of others to some extent. A repudiation of participation in those structures and the active attempt to dismantle them is to turn toward holiness.

NPR is running a series on sexual assault on college campuses

...Which you can hear here.

On the Rules We Follow

TW: rape culture, victim blamimg

Every woman I know has a system. She has worked it out in her head how to keep herself safe. How to protect herself from assault. Each system is different – and sometimes isn’t based in sound principles for actual safety. But it’s often less about actual safety than about being able to prove to the authorities, to our friends, to ourselves that we did everything we could to keep it from happening. That we tried our hardest, that we fought back, that we took precautions, that we weren’t drunk, that we didn’t lead him on, that we didn’t, that we didn’t, that we didn’t – so it wasn’t our fault.

I didn’t always know that other women had this system. I used to think it was only me who arranged for friends to call me and check in when I was alone with a man I didn’t know well in my apartment, whether that man was the plumber or a new friend from grad school. I used to think it was only me who intentionally brought up a married man’s spouse’s name in private conversation, in order to remind him that he was married. I used to think it was only me who made sure a professor’s door was cracked open, that he wasn’t the only one in that hall during our meeting, that someone was expecting me shortly after office hours. Only me who called my fiancé while walking from my parking spot into my building, even though I knew it was riskily distracting, because I wanted someone to hear if something happened. Only me who stopped make-out sessions earlier than I wanted to because I was afraid if we continued he wouldn’t hear my “no” when it came to the point. Only me who only got drunk when with a large group of friends where at least one woman was sober. Only me who rethought that tweet because of the risk of getting “doxed” by some internet troll who decided I offended him so much I deserved to be raped to death.

It’s not only me. I am not especially paranoid for a woman. I am cautious, but I am not alone. My sisters do this too. We talk about ways to check under your car in case someone’s hiding down there to grab your ankle. Ways to hold your keys to jab someone in a soft place. How to escape to the bathroom for an emergency phone call if a date won’t leave your apartment. Who’s going to be the “mom” of the group at the bar, making sure everyone else is safe. And even if we are fortunate enough that we escape harassment or assault, we spend so much of our mental energy thinking about ways to protect ourselves that we can’t think about other things. This system of sexual violence keeps us from living where we want, walking where we want, working where we want, trusting men we date, staying out as late as we please.

Even women who’ve never been raped think every day about what they must do to prevent it. Not only because we don’t want to be raped (though certainly that too), but also because we know that if we let our guard down, even once, and something terrible happens, it will be our fault. Not only in the eyes of the authorities (who prosecute less than 10% of rapes), or in the eyes of the community, but in our own eyes. We’re good girls. We follow the rules.