Predator Redux

Meet The Predators, which featured a 2002 study co-authored by psychology professor David Lisak, has attracted a lot of attention and links in the last few weeks. To all those who have picked this up and discussed his findings, thank you. I think what he was able to show, and what McWhorter’s Navy study replicated, is very, very important stuff and the more exposure it gets the more difference it can make.

Lisak is not new to rape and interpersonal violence research, however. It is a major topic of his career-long body of work. Melissa McEwen at Shakesville (who linked Meet the Predators) has posted about Lisak’s work before, and I’ve been doing some more reading.

The last time I discussed Lisak’s work, I focused on the proportion of the population are the serial predators: a limited group within the population who are recidivist rapists, and who account for the overwhelming majority of rapes, and for a large portion of the child abuse and molestation and the intimate partner violence.

Cara (my fellow Yes Means Yes blog and book contributor), over at her regular blog The Curvature, noted important qualifications to Lisak’s 2002 results, which is that they only capture the undetected rapists who fall within the four questions of his survey. I agree with that, so this is an undercount and a limited set. There are methodological limitations that are going to fail to capture some rapists in any survey, and so the 2002 study should be read with its limitations in mind.

That said, Lisak has other important work out there. He has analyzed who these men are in some depth. Like the population figures, I suspect his analysis will come as confirmation rather than new information to many of our readers here.

[Trigger warning -- discussion of rape including modus operandi]

Sex Work Is Not An Invitation To Rape

Sex work is not an invitation to rape.

[Trigger warning -- news story contains description]
There is a range of feminist opinion on what role sex work ought to have. But there can’t be a range of opinion on sex workers: they are people. No means no. Stop means stop. Whatever services they sell — cam shows, penetration, BDSM or whatever — do not and cannot be seen to invalidate their humanity. And ignoring a person’s right to say, “stop penetrating my body” is the most basic denial of humanity.

The problem with a jury system is the same as the problem with judges (recall this awful shit): they reflect first and foremost the biases of the society they operate in. Here, there wasn’t a real question about what happened:

No Chosen People

Some people will consider this an outrageous understatement, and others heresy: the BDSM community (such as it is, or communities, such as they are) is far from perfect. Because kinksters tend to have discussions about limits in overt ways and make communication a norm, lots of people sort of talk about BDSMers like we have it together on the sex and communication front. And for my part I think there’s some truth to that. There are a lot of positives. I certainly know feminist women who say they have found that they are more respected and listened to within BDSM communities than anywhere else, though individual experiences and particular communities vary. And in general my view is that there’s a sense of respect to self-definition that can be very useful, and a broader sense of body positivity — specifically sexual body positivity, than one sees most other places.

The things that folks who are not BDSMers most often note as positives about BDSM are the communication aspects. Having the tools to communicate about what people like to do and how they ought to do it so that it’s reasonably safe and everyone enjoys it is a big step, practically, from how a lot of sexual interaction goes in the general population.

However, as I hope a lot of people learned from the trainwreck of fail that was Open Source Boob Project (thanks, er, I think, to the terrific YMY contributor Latoya Peterson for reminding me), merely making the process of communication explicit, when the underlying dynamics are still coercion, commodification and cis- and heterosexism, is not progress. Explicit communication is a tool. It can enable progress, but it isn’t by itself progress, and it does not even always lead to progress. So BDSMers have some good tools to work with and some stuff that could help the general population move forward. But they are not some infallible chosen people (and I don’t believe there is any perfect community anywhere).

Couldn’t Give It Away

Some time ago, I wrote about virginity (which is a meaningless concept with no value) and about the premium placed on it, something I discussed in Towards A Performance Model of Sex, in Yes Means Yes. Jessica Valenti also discusses it in detail in Purity Myth. However, neither of us spent much time with the reverse dynamic: how the culture treats women as abnormal if they don’t fall in line with the compulsory sexuality as expected. Some folks have raised that issue in response to things I’ve written in the past, though I can’t find the references now, and then recently Salome wrote eloquently about it in comments here.

Remembrance

Today is Transgender Day Of Remembrance. Whether by nature or culture, people tend to feel sympathy and empathy with individuals and personal stories. The one symbolizes the many, however incompletely, because the many do not stick with us in the same way.

So many trans folks have been killed. The one that stares out at me, the person whose photos stare back at me, is Gwen Araujo, murdered in Newark, California on October 3, 2002. She was just 17.

Gwen Araujo was a lot of things to a lot of people. She was a No Doubt fan and a daughter and a Californian. But she wasn’t killed for being any of those things. She was killed because of her history. And in death, she has been largely been reduced to that one fact.

In life, she was not one thing or one identity. None of us are. We live in the world as whole people, individuals from the way we brush our teeth in the morning to the way we lay our heads on our pillows at night. Our medical history and our gender presentation and our orientation are part of us, but so are our ethnicities, our communities, our achievements, intellects, abilities and relationships. In life, she was a whole teen girl, but that all gets lost. In death, she is a collection of snapshots and a dry biography of a woman who left the world at age 17, because a group of men couldn’t coexits with one small fact about one small facet about a woman that they knew, and were attracted to.

Anyway, there’s more to her than “trans and dead” and there’s more to TDoR than “Gwen and many like her,” but while we can think about the many we tend to feel about the one, and Gwen Araujo is the one on my mind today.

Meet The Predators

A huge proportion of the women I know enough to talk with about it have survived an attempted or completed rape. None of them was raped by a stranger who attacked them from behind a bush, hid in the back of her car or any of the other scenarios that fit the social script of stranger rape. Anyone reading this post, in fact, is likely to know that six out of seven rapes are committed by someone the victim knows. It has been clear for a long time, at least since Robin Warshaw’s groundbreaking “I Never Called It Rape,” which used Mary Koss’s reseach, that the stranger rape script did not describe rape as most women experienced it. It’s easy to picture the stranger rapist: a violent criminal, not much different from the violent criminals who commit other violent crimes. This guy was in prison before, and he’ll be back there again, though not for rape because reporting and conviction rates are so low. (See, generally, Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will.)

But who commits the vast majority of rapes, the nonstranger rapes? The acquaintance rapes?

TMI

I’m about to overshare personal information:

I have a deep affection for the furniture of the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Also, Harry Chapin. My father loved his music, and I can probably still sing every track on Greatest Stories Live.

But that’s not what we mean when we say “TMI,” is it?

Lisa Miller Is A Dupe

I’m about to be unfair. The Democrats threw women under the bus and made the already pathetic state of access to a medical procedure that is a constitutional right and that one in three women will have even worse than it already is. Because mainstream Dems don’t care about women. I’m so angry, and so much has been said about the Stupak Coathanger amendment that I don’t feel I have much to add. So I’m looking for a target for free-floating antimisogynist anger, and Lisa Miller presented herself by saying something appallingly stupid. So … I’m taking it out on her. If it’s any consolation, I’ll stay mad for a long time; probably as long as I have a daughter, a wife and a sister living in this world. I’ll be unfair to lots of other people who say stupid antifeminist things.

What did Miller say that was so stupid?

I Don’t Talk About Topping Much

Partly, that’s because while in practice I switch, I identify more as a bottom. Partly, it’s because, even writing pseudonymously, my spouse prefers that I not talk about what I do with her as a top. What I do as a bottom is personal to me, and I can talk about it as I see fit; what she does as a bottom is personal to her, and she doesn’t want to see the details in the blogosphere.

People who top in various aspects of BDSM play do so for a variety of reasons, and I’m not going to attempt a typology of topping. Since our experiences are highly individualized, it’s tough to say much more than, “this is what I do, this is how I feel about it.” And my freedom to do that is limited, so I tend instead to talk about my experiences bottoming.

I did, however, run across someone saying a lot of things about topping that resonated with me, and that I will share for that reason.

The Right To No

In response to Kathryn Holmquist’s execrable notion of “too late to say no”, Amanda Hess at the Washington Citypaper has already done a full takedown, but I felt compelled to add what I think ought to be a basic bottom line:

Anyone ought to be able to refuse to be sexual, in any way, with any other person, at any time, for any reason, or for no reason.*

The whole concept of “Yes Means Yes” is to move past “No Means No” to a more thoroughgoing and positive sexual ethic. But that is not to say that “no” becomes unnecessary or unimportant. In fact, without “No”, there is no “Yes.”

*I’m consciously leaving aside the question of consensual nonconsent among BDSMers — whether I can decide ahead of time that a later decision to change my mind won’t be binding — because it is the most narrow and deliberately separate kind of special case. Discussion of c/nc is O/T on this thread.