First, h/t Clarisse Thorn, who brought this to my attention.  Camille Paglia, the ur-concern troll of academic feminism, is apparently still writing for publication.  I suppose I had assumed as much, since concern trolls of a certain kind are never really out of a job.  What she purports to do here is review three books.  That’s not fair.  She actually reviews three books.  Then she departs from reviewing and begins pontificating, ending in the sort of embarrassing faceplant that Pee Wee Herman had the comic timing to pull off with a snarky “I meant to do that.”

The books she reviews are:  Dr. Staci Newmahr’s Playing On The Edge;  Dr. Margot D. Weiss’s Techniques of Pleasure; and Dr. Danielle Lindemann’s Dominatrix.  I’m familiar with some of this material.  I read Newmahr’s book and I’ve had a few conversations with the author (I could be called biased; while we’re not buddies, I’m a supporter of her work and we have friends in common.)  Weiss’s book is an adaptation of her dissertation; I have not read the book version but I tracked down the dissertation online after reading something else she wrote for academic publication.  I relied heavily on both of their ethnographic accounts in writing my Domism post, one of the more linked and discussed things I’ve written specific to kinky communities.   Lindemann’s book differs from the other two, as Weiss and Newmahr do participant ethnographies, while Lindemann’s observation of prodommes is as a more detached observer.  I have not read it, though I might at some point.

What does Paglia think?  First, she thinks that all three books try to hard too fit a certain theoretical mold to the observations, and it takes some of the life out of the writing.  Second, she thinks everything to come out of Foucault, especially Butler, is awful.  Third, she thinks that She Knows Better, in fact, she knows what It’s All About. 

It’s tempting to dismiss everything Paglia says because she’s such a shit sandwich as a person and a scholar, with a side salad of sour grapes and green envy dressing. But she’s quite bright. I think it’s her curse to be able to see bullshit clearly because it’s all she is capable of. Her critiques, that these books try to cram their observations into an ideological framework necessary to get academic credit but that doesn’t either fit well or do justice to the descriptive integrity the subjects deserve, is not wrong — while I think that’s less true of Newmahr, there are places where the attempt to fit sadomasochism into an academic model of serious leisure seemed … constraining?  Certainly only part of the story.  With Weiss, I felt this was even more a good criticism.  To be fair to Weiss, I read it in dissertation form, where grounding the observations in the theory can be expected to take precedence, and the book version might be a bit different.  I can’t speak to Lindemann’s. 

Of course Paglia hates Butler and Foucault and post-structuralist thinking blah blah they wouldn’t let her sit at their lunch table. She acknowledges herself that she’s been grinding that axe so long she’s running out of metal.  

It’s when Paglia stops saying what a thing isn’t and starts trying to say what it is that she fails — always fails, inevitably fails. I know best (as do most of us) that someone’s full of shit when they’re on about something I know about. And when she’s on about BDSM, she’s full of shit.  Here’s how she starts:

“Once confined to the murky shadows of the sexual underworld, sadomasochism and its recreational correlate, bondage and domination, have emerged into startling visibility and mainstream acceptance”

Emphasis mine.  Those are her opening lines.  So, she’s telling us right away that she does not have a grasp of the basic terminology.  She goes on to make far more interesting incorrect assertions.  For example, she describes what she wrote in Sexual Personae, her first book:

My conclusion, after wide reading in anthropology and psychology, was that sadomasochism is an archaic ritual form that descends from prehistoric nature cults and that erupts in sophisticated “late” phases of culture, when a civilization has become too large and diffuse and is starting to weaken or decline. I state in Sexual Personae that “sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted,” and that its “primitive urges” have never been fully tamed: “My theory is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind.”

Again, emphasis mine.  This contains an actual idea.  If one were to immerse one’s self among actual BDSMers, and observe or participate in their actual play, and make cross-cultural comparisons and come to this conclusion — well, I might or might not agree with it, but it certainly would be an interesting idea.  How does Paglia come to this conclusion?  Not, she insists, by starting with a bunch of deliberately obscure shit written by frogs like Lacan and Derrida, which is her persistent critique of academic feminism and her problem with the three books she reviews.  She says:

“In researching sadomasochism, I did not begin with a priori assumptions or with the desire to placate academic moguls. I let the evidence suggest the theories.”

So where did she play, and with whom?  (I mean, details, people!  I know some of these folks.  Tell me enough that I can put a face to the pseudonyms by shaking the gossip tree!)  Seriously, folks, communities and the kinksters in them differ, certain venues and organizations have a culture and reputation of their own, and lots of us — a large majority — do what we do only in private.  Are her informants bedroom players or the public club scenesters?  Older and hetish or younger and queerish?  Older and queerish? East Coast or West Coast?  Old guard influenced or not?  “I speak simply as a student of sexuality: I have had no direct contact of any kind with sadomasochism”.

Come again, Camille?  Am I to understand that everything you’ve concluded about us … no, let me personalize it. Everything you’ve concluded about ME and how I practice MY sexuality and what it means to ME, you’ve concluded without actually talking to any of us, or watching us do what it is that we do?  Can I possibly have that right?  Yes, that’s what she says.  And she goes on for five paragraphs — interesting paragraphs — about cultural representations of BDSM from the 1700s to the recent past. 

Let me use an analogy here.  I loved the Gary Oldman version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (some LeCarre fans did not).  I like spy fiction as a genre well enough.  I also have more than a passing familiarity with the journalistic and historical writing on the subject.  Now, one can look at some of the fiction and say, “that’s pretty accurate.”  The Good Shepherd is almost a biography of James Jesus Angleton, and from what I know about Angleton (a good working familiarity), gets the sense of it.  Some of the fiction is accurate in many respects (LeCarre), some of the fiction is wildly fanciful (the Bond subgenre), but none of it is a substitute for the real thing.  If you want to learn about spying in the Cold War, you read Trento’s book CIA: A Secret History, from Angleton’s actual papers, and Legacy of Ashes, which is all from internal histories, and maybe Peter Wright’s controversial MI-5 memoir Spycatcher.  Because they are not fiction.  Because they report the actual things done by the actual spies. 

But these books are not perfect!  They are biased (especially Wright, who accuses a former head of MI-5 of working for the Soviets).  They are controversial.  They are only pieces of the puzzle and can’t hope to represent the whole of the intelligence community through the whole of the period!  And that”s life.  Nonfiction is imperfect.  But it’s nonfiction.  Fiction is fiction.

Art is an interesting mirror through with to view the human condition.  The possibilities for mining it are endless.  But it can only tell us so much.  And the farther the artist from the subject, the more it tells us about the artist and the viewer and the human condition; and the less about the subject.

In the art and literature of BDSM, our cultural footprint, the problem of representation is huge!  These people whose work symbolizes us, supposedly, are they even a member of the group they purport to represent? To be fair, some are. Love them or hate them, Madonna and Mapplethorpe were clear that their representations were internal. But others like Anne Rice and E.L. James present us without saying that they are presenting themselves (or possibly while saying they are not and lying like rugs).

When we look past the individual artist to the more directly commercial work, like, say, advertising, the vision presented is meant to serve a particular goal, which skews the presentation hopelessly. So how does a world of symbols allow someone to understand my sexuality without fitting me into an a priori construct? It doesn’t. It just doesn’t. In that sense, Paglia has a lot in common with Evolutionary Psychology. She postulates an underlying truth, that we don’t have access to, but which she asserts she can access through “rigorous” analysis of the phenomena that it supposedly gives rise to. She ends by asserting (though she’s an atheist herself) the importance of the religous or spiritual quest.  Well, the project of divining the meaning of a sexual practice solely from how it is presented, often by people who don’t engage in it, that sounds like a religious quest to me.  It’s an act of misplaced faith.

The substance of Paglia’s analysis is that what we do … let me personalize it again, for added dudgeon: that what I do is the reassertion of some older tribal norm.  If so, then what one would expect is that the ways it expressed itself would be widely varied, but the things we look for in it would be fairly uniform. Instead, my observation is that the opposite is true. We are not a monolith.*** We have people bringing a panoply of wants and needs to the table, trying to extract different things from BDSM, and if anything, the thing that is contrained is the superficial aspect: that we have social norms within a subculture about how people look a certain way and how they symbolize these practices, a common universe of imagery that brings us together when we are in fact very diverse in how we structure our relationships, which kinds of the whole universe of BDSM practices appeal to us and move us, and what we seek to get out of it. Now, there’s a lot of theorizing to be done about why that is, but Paglia can’t do it because she’s just as attached to smooshing the observations into a model (Biological! But also, religious! And pre-industrial and tribal! Like alternative spiritual beliefs for people who are ostensibly materialist in metaphysics!) as the people she decries. Look, both “blah blah late capitalist form of leisure consumerism purchasing quasi marginal edgy hobby” and “spiritual experience vision quest search for meaning woo” is a valid observation of some of us, sometimes.  Neither is THE explanation, and people who think it is, have missed a lot.

I’m in part indebted to the estimable sex work writer Calico Lane for helping me fill out my thinking on this in a facebook thread.

*Steel Magnolia reference.  I am not ashamed of that.

**I am borrowing this phrase from both disability and sex work activists.  While I don’t think it’s a complete analysis and it’s hard to accept it as a rule, it is IMO a powerful lens through which to review outside critique.

***Again, I’m indebted to sex worker activists for the phrase.

There are several ways to read this.  One, of course, is that since the US armed forces have such pervasive problems with rape, rape reporting and rape prosecution, it isn’t particularly noteworthy.  If you assume that the armed forces are basically a pack of rapists and rape-apologists, then it even a completely random selection of people to staff anti-rape positions would end up with a lot of rapists and rape apologists.  Weighing against that is that psychologist Stephanie McWhorter, studying US Navy entrants in 2009, found rates of undetected rapists and repeat rapists not too different from a similar study of a civilian population.  (As an aside, I hope someone on Senator Gillibrand’s staff has a well-thumbed copy of this.  It would seem to me to be an indispensable piece of information in dealing with sexual assault in the armed forces.)

Another way to read this is that the people in sexual assault prevention positions get there because many commanders are rape apologists and they want to put people who share their attitudes in positions to control antirape work within the armed forces.  That is supported somewhat by the history of commanders reversing jury convictions for sexual assault (see the end of the first linked article, which recounts in brief the stories both about Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin in Aviano, Italy, and Lt. Gen. Susan Helms, whose appointment to Space Command is being held up by Sen. McCaskill for just this reason.)

There’s a third way to read this, and perhaps I’m being uncharacteristically charitable to the brass by saying it’s plausible, but it’s a real problem.  Anyone who has read a spy novel knows that the safest place for a mole is to be tasked with finding the mole.  This isn’t just in fiction.  Remember Robert Hanssen?  In the 1980s, he gave the KGB the names of three of its agents that the FBI had flipped; two were executed.  He was then tasked with figuring out where the leak came from; he was supposed to find himself.  His spy career lasted 22 years.

To bring this from the realm of spy versus spy back to sexual assault, one thing that those of us who write about and work on sexual assault issues in kinky communities discuss is that some of the predators seek to clothe themselves in as much “social proof” as possible.  Some of this is just the prosaic stuff of being a joiner and a presenter and having lots of friends.  As M. Lunas at Disrupting Dinner Parties recently wrote, looking at data from one anonymous database of allegations of consent violations among Fetlife accountholders (the tool I wrote about here, all caveats apply), that paid supporters appeared to be significantly overrepresented among those with complaints against them.  This is itself evidence that can mean a lot of things; but it is a piece of the overall puzzle.  I’ve talked at some length about scene reputation and social proof and the predators’ use of it in the There’s A War On series, particularly Part 3. 

But more than just general social proof, the folks who have a pattern and practice of various kinds of predatory conduct might specifically seek to portray themselves as the biggest opponents of the predators.  We’ve seen that before.  See also the long cautionary tale epitomized by this person.

It’s a grim and mistrustful thing to say, but when someone says, “I really want to guard the henhouse,” it is necessary to evaluate whether they’re the fox.  To the extent that’s what is at work, I can’t particularly fault the armed forces, because it’s a social reality that catches us unaware in so many aspects of human life.

Interviewer Chris Cuomo basically says he’s about to be a creep, and then does it anyway, knowing it’s creepy.  This isn’t just because he’s a nasty guy.  If it were, I probably wouldn’t write a post about it.  It’s a larger social phenomenon.  Actually, like so many things, it’s several, and they intersect.

The Scarlet A

If we’re looking for stories about women whose sexual behavior violated social strictures and who paid a terrible price for it, we could probably go back forever.  Certainly, there’s no shortage of cultural tentpoles.  Think about the “great books” of the 19th century — Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Scarlet Letter.  (Hawthorne particularly pushed back, making Prynne essentially a paragon, but that’s a longer conversation …)

Since these are fictional, the label is always at least factually accurate. In reality, people tend to have incomplete and misleading information about each other’s sexual behavior.  As such, we don’t really sanction violation of sexual norms. 

There’s sort of two ways a culture can go when it has sanctions for a thing that it has only an indirect ability to observe.  One is to try to find a way to investigate, estimate, screen – to figure it out.  When working as they should, which never seems to be the case for whole sections of their populations, that’s what criminal justice systems are supposed to do.  The other thing, though, is to turn the causation around: to decide when to apply the label, and then simply presume that the underlying facts are true.  Like an old Stalinist show-trial, the accusations are not based on fact, the tail wags the dog, the function of the accusation is social instruction and reaffirmation of a community condemnation.  (I’m cribbing Tony Judt’s Postwar here, which I recommend.)

There are a few books out there that examine the social construct of slut as it exists in US adolescent life.  Among the better known are Leora Tenenbaum’s Slut!  Growing Up Female With A Bad Reputation, and Emily White’s Fast Girls.  I have read reviews and discussions of a lot of this stuff, though both of those books are still on my to-read list.  This review of Fast Girls gives a sense of the point I need it for here.  As I understand it, the anthropological and sociological work that has been done, though mostly qualitative, shows that the label “slut” isn’t really related to actual sexual behavior, i.e. it isn’t applied to the most sexually active girl or the one with the most partners, but rather is based on a lot of other things: came into a school system late and therefore lacked an existing base of support, physically matured early, spoke up often, refused to recognize the primacy of a popular clique, etc. 

So basically, it’s what gender theorist Judith Butler and others would call an “abject identity.”  I’ve written about sluthood as an abject identity , along with the male adolescent abject identity “fag”, before: 

C.J. Pascoe explained this dynamic with respect to “fag” in her ethnography of high school masculinity, Dude, You’re A Fag, which I raved about here. I quoted her as follows:

“Examining masculinity using Butler’s theory of interactional accomplishment of gender indicates that the ‘fag’ position is an ‘abject’ position and, as such, is a ‘threatening specter’ constituting contemporary American adolescent masculinity at River High.”

[Dude You're A Fag p. 14.]

In Dude, You’re A Fag, the boys police each other’s masculinity by the ever-present weapon of “fag” — it gets assigned to any boy who steps out of rigid, approved gender performance. Likewise, “slut” is an abject identity constantly held over women’s heads and assigned if they express sexuality or engage in sexual behavior outside a narrow, approved norm. (Patriarchy being what it is, there’s no “right” way for women to behave, because in avoiding the “slut” label, women are always threatened with the “prude” abject identity; there is not safe middle ground between the two, and that’s not accidental.)

The threatening specters of abject identities are a form of blackmail.

(Bold italics above are new emphasis for this post.)

Since “slut” is an abject identity, it is immune from factual refutation.  It is not meant to label actual behavior.  It is meant to make an example, pour encourager les autres.

Some of this theory is dense, and I’m neither really a scholar of Foucault nor Butler.  However, Butler, consciously applying Foucault, talks in Gender Trouble about the “abject” as a process by which a whole is divided, tenuously so and in need of constant policing; that by a process of first “expulsion” and then “repulsion,” some are made the “other.”  This idea is typically called the “constitutive other” – that the identity of what is inside is constituted by what isn’t, by the “other.”  What Butler means by an “abject” identity is one that is part of the “constitutive other,” not just outside the mainstream but rather a failed identity, one the avoidance of which is definitional to the hegemonic norm.  See generally Gender Trouble at pp. 77-78, 133-34.

In reading Pascoe’s take on this and in thinking about how these identities work in talking about abject identities and applying them, I keep coming back to this idea of abject identity as threatening specter; that its boundaries are not inherently stable, but are just a bunch of social conventions that have stability only through constant policing that involves pinning labels to people to send a terrifying message.  That’s how I think we should understand the allegation, apparently supported thinly or not at all, that Amanda Knox was in some sense promiscuous or slutty: not even as untrue (in the sense that mathematicians will sometimes call something “so bad it’s not even wrong”), but as having no bearing on the underlying facts, an allegation leveled at a woman because there is a desire to take her down for some reason, and having no connection to actual sexual behavior.  The imagined construct of the sexual promiscuity is applied because of the label, by the label, rather than the label applying to the behavior.

D is for Deviant

There’s another aspect of this, and it’s easiest viewed through the lens of “abject identity.”  That’s the construct of the “sexual deviant.”  Deviance itself is a perfectly useful term.  In math and engineering it has technical meaning and generally describes measures of distribution.  In sociology the meaning is inherently more political, but it’s a broad concept and not an epithet.  “Sexual deviance” however, doesn’t really exist as a means to describe the distribution of human sexual behavior, more and less common.  It exists to proscribe and to discipline.

Let’s start with this: sexual normality and sexual deviancy are not assertions about what people do.  They are political claims about what people “should” do.  Homosexuality was characterized as a mental illness in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual until 1973, at which point the governing body that issues it, the American Psychiatric Association, decided they were wrong about that, but hung onto an escape clause, “ego-dystonic homosexuality,” which meant it was still a mental illness if you were not happy about it.  Let’s contrast this with diagnoses in physical illness.  “Normal” in the physical body isn’t completely objective and apolitical either as anyone who deals with disability or trans or aging issues will usually concede.  But there isn’t this kind of blank slate.  We knew in the 1940s that a lot of people had same sex partners, but people — learned professionals! — continued to be guided by their preferences rather than the facts on the ground in determining what was “normal” for decades, until after Stonewall when this became untenable within the political environment of the profession.  Physical normality is not completely, but is much more, moored to objectively determinable physical standards.  Whether someone has an infection is a hypothesis testable by, for example, temperature and white blood cell count.  In turn, while there may be some variation in “normal”, these baselines are real baselines, and not simply “what we think they should be.”  Doctors are pretty unlikely to just agree that people with Type AB blood don’t exist because it becomes politically desirable to hold that view.

So “normal” is what the people with the power to define “normal” say it is.  This boundary is maintained only by constant policing.

In the clip, Chris Cuomo accuses Amanda Knox of being a “sexual deviant.”  He doesn’t say he’s accusing her.  But she says she’s not, and he says, basically, that it must come from somewhere.  And she clarifies that it doesn’t come from witnesses or evidence in the record, just the prosecution’s unsupported theory.  And he keeps asking if she really is a sexual deviant who just can’t admit it.  That’s accusing.

And that’s what you’d expect from an abject identity:  it gets attached to someone who the accusers are out to get for some other reason, not derived inductively from the available information.  Once it’s said, the labeling conveys a kind of “truth” such that those who want the label to attach view it as applying even when no support is available.  It cannot be refuted, in their minds, by evidence.  That’s how “slut” works, too.

This idea of the “sexual deviant” interacts extensively with but isn’t coextensive with gender and the construct of the “slut”.  “Sexual deviant” as an abject identity for “sexual minorities”, to the extent the latter term has utility as an umbrella, which I think it does.  I think that one of the principal ways that “sexual deviant” interacts with social position in gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, race and class is that being on the disempowered end of any of these axes makes the label much more likely to apply.  An educated, affluent het married white middle-aged male who also does BDSM (I know this for sure) is in a position to make statements about his sexual practice and sexual identity, and still enforce boundaries, and he faces risks of labeling, but only so far.  The queerer, the less gender-conforming, the less educated and less affluent, the less white one is, the more likely labels and social sanctions are to follow, or even anticipate, any disclosure. 

The Injunction To Speak

And for those of us who are kinky, we live with a Foucaultian injunction not to remain silent but to speak. There is a sense of mainstream entitlement that sexuality is not private but public: but unequally so; for the mainstream, the demand is only to declare one’s self conforming, as religious dissenters have been required to do in some times and places, whatever the underlying facts.  However, for the nonconforming, sexuality is a matter of public concern, the be brought into discussion so that it may then be scrutinized and subject to discipline.

Once they learn of our status, whether voluntarily or not — and whether true or not — the mere specter of it gives them the right to examine all the details. The way Cuomo doubles and triples down on the demand for details is precisely the product of the demand that the alleged deviants offer themselves up for examination and public judgment.  It reminds me not long ago of a poll where CNN actually asked a mock jury if now-convicted murdered Jody Arias was a “sexual deviant.”  In fact, the mock jury was pretty emphatic that she was not — a good thing, since the “evidence” for that proposition amounted to things as banal as the purchase of lubricant.  But this only underscores how divorced from any objective understanding of “deviant” the abject identity of the “sexual deviant” is.  CNN asks, in all seriousness, if a person — a woman, not to put too fine a point on it — can be labelled a sexual deviant for purchasing a product so widely used that it can be found in just about every pharmacy in America.  The label does not derive its meaning from evidence of conduct.  The label is attached for reasons having to do with the exercise of social power, and then looks for or invents justification, whether in facts, or “facts.” 

In a way, this isn’t Chris Cuomo’s fault – though it god damned sure isn’t Knox’s either.  Cuomo knows the questions are creepy, he knows he’s being a jerk, and that is his fault.  I don’t know whether he thought he had to ask because the viewers demand answers, or if he thought it would draw eyeballs and sell ads, or if he even distinguishes between those two things.  But I do believe he at least thought he was asking a question.  He was even wrong about that, and that isn’t his fault.  The way “sexual deviant” works, there is no question.  Merely to apply the term to someone, however qualified, is to apply a label; either to point the finger, or to brandish it as a threat.

Gabba gabba We accept you We accept you One Of Us

They say sticks and stones can break your bones but words can break your spirit.  Abject identities have power, and they are hard to deal with because they have power in more than one way.  They have power in the way that they get inside their target’s head and, even when consciously rejected, graft themselves onto self-definition.  In that sense, they are a “free your mind …” problem.  But they have the other kind of power, too — the kind where a high school full or jerks, or a hiring committee full of jerks, or a break room full of jerks, or a holiday gathering full of jerks, can take action based on them.  Freeing your mind won’t keep you from getting fired or beaten up. 

And this crossfire of power makes any way to deal with the labeling highly imperfect.  To reduce the power of the labels to damage the self, adopting it is a valid and sometimes a brilliant strategy.  Take Slutwalk.  Many have said, but I’ll attribute it to Jaclyn Friedman because I think she was first, that Slutwalk is “I Am Spartacus,” that by volunteering to take on the label, the participants are dividing it and conquering it, refusing to let it be focused on anyone who gets singled out.  But the powerful critique of Slutwalk is the one mounted by women of color.  The best expression of it I’ve seen is from the letter to the Toronto Slutwalk from a lengthy and impressive list of folks, which I’ll quote briefly but which I recommend reading in full:

As Black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves “slut” without validating the already historically entrenched ideology and recurring messages about what and who the Black woman is.  We don’t have the privilege to play on destructive representations burned in our collective minds, on our bodies and souls for generations.  … It is tied to institutionalized ideology about our bodies as sexualized objects of property, as spectacles of sexuality and deviant sexual desire. It is tied to notions about our clothed or unclothed bodies as unable to be raped whether on the auction block, in the fields or on living room television screens. The perception and wholesale acceptance of speculations about what the Black woman wants, what she needs and what she deserves has truly, long crossed the boundaries of her mode of dress. … Black women in the U.S. have worked tirelessly since the 19th century colored women’s clubs to rid society of the sexist/racist vernacular of slut, jezebel, hottentot, mammy, mule, sapphire; to build our sense of selves and redefine what women who look like us represent. Although we vehemently support a woman’s right to wear whatever she wants anytime, anywhere, within the context of a “SlutWalk” we don’t have the privilege to walk through the streets of New York City, Detroit, D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, L.A. etc., either half-naked or fully clothed self-identifying as “sluts” and think that this will make women safer in our communities an hour later, a month later, or a year later.  Moreover, we are careful not to set a precedent for our young girls by giving them the message that we can self-identify as “sluts” when we’re still working to annihilate the word “ho”, which deriving from the word “hooker” or “whore”, as in “Jezebel whore” was meant to dehumanize.  Lastly, we do not want to encourage our young men, our Black fathers, sons and brothers to reinforce Black women’s identities as “sluts” by normalizing the term on t-shirts, buttons, flyers and pamphlets. 

That’s not the only critique in that letter, and I can’t say it’s a representative example of all critiques, but one point that it powerfully illustrates is that pushing back at an abject identity by reclaiming it isn’t a cost-free tactic — and often, it isn’t a tactic where the costs are shared equally.  Often, it looks like a good idea to those with the most space for resistance, and a terribly risky one to people with less.  In my generation, some het guys pushed back against the abject identity “fag” by more or less openly inviting questions about our sexual orientation.  And as callow teenagers, we probably thought we were all so witty and fucking brave.  And as a middle-aged man, it looks a lot messier.  Did I really make space for other guys who were easier targets?  Or did the bigots I deliberately pissed off just make life that much harder for some other kid who had fewer tools to fight back?  I’m not trying to answer that question, just noting how different things can look from different positions.  When Kathleen Hanna performed with “slut” written on her body, did she make things better or worse?  Probably both, by turns.

I don’t know how to wrap this up neatly.  The abject identity of the “sexual deviant” hurts a lot of people, and because of my social position on a lot of axes, me just about least.  There are times when I use the position I’m in to push back in ways that I think will make room for others who can’t easily do so.  And there are ways of pushing back that I think may feel good for me but won’t work out well for others.  Amanda Knox, who isn’t even one of us, may be one of those people who has to live in the crossfire of a fight over terms.  So when I talk about who I am, regular readers may have noticed that unlike some kinky people I tend not to use “pervert” and “deviant”.  That’s why.

They look just like everybody else.

It’s not an easy thing to keep in your head.  Disney movies have taught us that villains look like villains.* But in real life, they look like everybody else.

Once they get caught, and we see a mugshot and they look like they were up all night drinking and then groped a stranger in a parking lot and were driven off by force, it’s easy to see them for what they are.  But in the office, before Jeff Krusinski got arrested, he looked like a normal person.  Someone gave him the job of heading up sexual assault prevention for the Air Force.  In hindsight, it seems like a cruel joke, or a deliberate effort to put the fox in charge of the henhouse.  Rather like putting a pedophile in charge of a program for troubled children.  And given the massive issues the US armed forces have with sexual assault, it’s not absurd to think there are plenty of people who are more or less outright pro-rape.  But just like the proportion of the population that are actually rapists is limited, the proportion of the population that can think both “that guy’s a rapist” and “I’m okay with that” is limited.  I don’t have anything quantitative to point to for the size of that population, but experience teaches me that when people are determined to make excuses for a rapist, they first deny he’s** a rapist.  Even the rapists don’t say they’re rapists.

Men’s power advocates (the guys who call themselves “men’s rights activists”, which is not a little like calling one’s self a “white rights activist”) get all wound about the term “rape culture,” making really facile arguments like we can’t have a rape culture if rape is a crime.  But if you have a crime that perpetrators routinely get away with, where people defend even those duly convicted, then isn’t it a crime the culture offers a lot of support to?  I think we’d all agree that we have a culture of corruption in politics, even though every once in a while one of the scoundrels gets hauled off in handcuffs.  It’s illegal, but it’s common, it’s both decried and laughed at and to way too large an extent tolerated.  Rape culture is like corruption culture:  we all know it happens, it’s a crime, it’s sometimes prosecuted; but efforts to stop it are ineffective and lots of people who know about it find ways to make believe it isn’t what it i,s or convince themselves that the people who do it are justified; especially when it’s their friend.

I’m not saying that outright, self-serving human venality isn’t a significant reason that people look the other way.  If we look at Sandusky, certainly for some people at some point there’s a more or less conscious thought process: I know what he is, I know what he does, but I’m putting the interest of the program and my self-interest first.  If we look at Polanski, some people are simply calculating that supporting him is important in Hollywood and calling him what he is just isn’t in their self-interest.  Even someone whose primary public reputation is as a feminist will call a rape a “model sexual negotiation” when necessary to appeal to a target market.

But people don’t have to be making consciously self-interested or rape-supportive choices to participate in rape culture.  All that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.***  People participate in rape culture when they choose not to see, refuse to believe, reject evidence that leads to painful conclusions.

So when General Franklin overturned Lt. Col. Wilkerson’s conviction by a military jury for rape, he may have been thinking, “rape is awesome, and I’m in a position of power and I can help the rapist, so I will.”  There certainly are people who think that.  They even form groups on Facebook (which Facebook will not take down because they’re engaged in that good people doing nothing thing).  Or maybe he believes all kinds of victim-blaming shit.  Maybe when a victim’s story varies in any way from the script he has in his head for the “real rape” story, he decides he doesn’t believe it or it doesn’t count.  Maybe that decision to disbelieve isn’t really a conscious one, but a gut feeling based on a mythology about how the world works that he has internalized, and never really examined.  I’m thinking that’s a lot more common.

And then there’s the all-time, number one reason why people look right at a rapist and don’t see a rapist:  he’s their friend.  I excoriated Alyssa Royse for her piece about how her friend is a rapist and also a nice guy.  I stand by that.  The reason I went after her personally so hard (as opposed to the Good Men Project, which I view as essentially a failed project) isn’t that what she said is so rare, but (in part) because it’s so common, and she of all people should recognize that by doing that “but he’s a nice guy” stuff she’s part of the problem.  It’s what Whoopi did with Roman and what Naomi did with Julian and what some fans did with Kobe and Mike and Ben.  We know him, they think, he’s our friend.  It must not be true, it must be more complicated.  What was unique about Royse’s piece was that instead of trying to dodge the word and concept of rape and explain it away, she acknowledged what it was and still said the things she said.  Usually, the way people manage cognitive dissonance between values (“rape is bad”, “this rapist is my friend”) is to keep the contradictory facts as vague or obscure as possible, to avoid dealing with the conflict by not looking at the conflicting facts side by side, as it were.  As Upton Sinclair put it, it’s hard to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on not understanding it.  It’s a special kind of messed up to be able to just confront the fact that a friend is a rapist and still do all the victim-blaming that people do when they’re trying to weasel out of the conclusion that their friend is a rapist.

This week, a woman escaped from years in captivity.  It’s not the first time.  She wasn’t alone, either.  And now, some people are sending around video of Charles Ramsey, the neighbor she ran to, who called 911.  This guy did the right thing, obviously, and anyone whose reaction to the interview he gave is to mock him is being an asshole.  But here’s the part that has my attention: he is talking, I think, Ariel Casto (or maybe one of his brothers) who is now under arrest for keeping the women captive, and he says they were buddies.  They ate ribs together.  They saw each other daily for a year.  And when Ramsey saw Berry trying to escape from that house, he helped her.  He believed her.  It sounds so simple, and it should be, but people’s capacity to wish away all evidence in favor of maintaining their good opinion of their friends is vast.  Ramsey’s willingness to do the right thing is, sadly, something we really can’t take for granted.

How normal did Ariel Castro seem?  When Amanda Berry disappeared, he helped pass out fliers.

They don’t wear hats that say, “Rapist.”  We have to get our heads around the reality that we can’t tell who they are just by looking at them.  Try this: imagine that you were a serial rapist or maybe a child molester.  I’m not asking for emotional connection here, just a logical thought experiment.  If you were a serial rapist and didn’t want to stop being a serial rapist, what skills would you see as your mission-critical skills?  Here’s what I came up with:

(1) Seem normal, the sort of person that people don’t think is a serial rapist;

(2) Learn to pick victims who are less likely to talk or be believed;

(3) Learn to use tactics that tend to make prosecution or other accountability less likely.

The villains are the ones who do the villainous things.  Castro is now alleged to have had a history of beating his wife and kidnapping his own kids.  Which is exactly what the Lisak & Miller research says we should expect from a serial rapist. 

Here’s another thought experiment:  assume that a serial rapist has mastered all three of those those rapist skills.  How could we know that he’s a serial rapist?  Not just by looking at him, and not necessarily because he says creepy things; he may have a good sense of his audience and calibrate what he says to not seem out of place.  What we would expect, though, is:

(1) A string of victims.  And all of them will come with “problems”, reasons to disbelieve their account, because that’s part of picking the victim.

(2) Use of tactics that undetected rapists use, or could use, to keep from being detected: boundary testing, isolation, choice of alcohol and drug facilitation over overt force unless the victim or circumstances offer cover for other tactics.  You can actually see this in operation sometimes. 

This doesn’t come naturally.  The culture tells us to look at the surface.  If we want to revoke rapists’ social license to operate, we have to learn to look for different things.  Because they don’t wear hats that say, “Rapist.”  They hang out in the back yard, work on their car and eat some ribs with the neighbors.  Just like they were normal.  Even while they have captives in their homes.

* The linked bit is in my view very problematic for its failure to contextualize what constitutes conventionally attractive.  Disney villains are not ugly, they’re “ugly”, which means older and/or darker skinned and/or fatter, sometimes disfigured and often with exaggerated facial features.  This isn’t exclusive to Disney, though.  The over-representation of all these characteristics among villains is a broad cultural tendency.

**Or she or they, because when we talk about the rape of adult victims we’re largely talking about something men do, but if we include the rapes of children, men don’t have a monopoly on molestation; and actually I don’t believe anyone has good numbers of rape by (or of) non-binary gendered folks, but it has happened.

***Versions of this are almost universally, and wrongly, attributed to foundational conservative Edmund Burke.  The real origin of the saying is, as far as I know, unknown, and it’s probably closest to something J.S. Mill said.

Make Consent a Mandatory Part of Sex-Ed in Public Schools.
There seems to be a huge misunderstanding concerning what consent is when it comes to sex. And yet — when discussed with teenagers — the idea that “unless someone says ‘yes’, it’s not consent,” is easily accepted. It’s not a hard conversation: Unless you get a “Yes,” assume “No.” Uncomfortable, maybe, but difficult? Hardly.

Please make the line between a clear “Yes” and anything else — whether it be someone drunk, asleep, or otherwise unable to say “No” — something schools must cover in health or sex ed.

If STI information and methods of contraception are standard fare, consent should be, too.

That’s it. For most regular readers of this blog, there’s nothing to dislike about that. But one might ask, what good would it do? That’s a serious question, and it deserves a serious answer.

Here’s the root of the question: are rapists confused about consent, or do they know what they are doing is rape? Well, my view based on the research is that they know they are raping, at least the vast majority of them. Some of the most widely referenced and linked posts in this blog’s history are on just this subject. Some of those review the research of Dr. David Lisak and others about who the rapists are and how they operate, which I refer to as Predator Theory:
Meet The Predators

Predator Redux

Predators Again: NPR Cites Lisak

And one post discussing communication analysis and its implications for claims that rapists just misunderstand:

Mythcommunication: It’s Not That They Don’t Understand, They Just Don’t Like The Answer

Long story short, there is a percentage of the population who are rapists because they like to rape, they are very bad people and they are not making mistakes. They plan to rape, they plan to rape is ways that won’t get them punished, so they rape victims who have the least ability to do anything about it and use tactics, like intoxication instead of violence, that make it tough to prosecute or even get people to see what happened as rape.

So we’re having this national moment after Steubenville, and I’ve already said that this wasn’t some confused and horny guy, but rather a decision that it would be awesome to subject the drunk girl to a series of sexualized humiliations.

Recently, the amazing Zerlina Maxwell went on Sean Hannity’s show and said that we should tell men not to rape, and what she got for trying to have a serious conversation was a series of racist and misogynist threats and mockery. But because Zerlina Maxwell is amazing, she reacted by completing the thought that the right wing tried to shut down, writing for Ebony.  I’d prefer folks read it there, but short version of her five ways is as follows:

1. Teach young men about legal consent

Some things will be different.  I think it is less likely that the defense will try to drag the victims through the mud.  Mostly, as a legal matter it won’t do them much good.  In Connecticut, it’s a Class B felony for a person more than three years older to have intercourse with a person between thirteen and sixteen; the story says the players were 18 and 17; the 18 year olds I would think will be charged as adults, and the 17 year olds may (I don’t know Connecticut juvenile procedure well enough to discuss the possibilities intelligently).  But the ages alone make out Class B felonies; to not go to prison, they’ll need to raise a reasonable doubt as to the fact of intercourse, which is a lot tougher than raising a reasonable doubt as to consent. 

Still, the Steubenville trial was a bench trial, before a judge who wasn’t swayed by attempts to portray the victim as a drunken slut; juries seem shockingly willing to be persuaded by that.

In terms of basic moral expectations, too, one would think this case presents an extremely low bar.  Don’t have sex with a thirteen year old.  Even if she jumps up and down and says she wants to.  Because she’s thirteen.  We have statutory rape laws for a reason, and while maturity varies, there is no viable alternative to having a numerical limit, so that’s what we have.  There’s number, when in doubt, it’s on the older person to verify, with absolutely no tolerance for error, and so it should be.

I say this presents a low bar, and there’s nothing to talk about, but then people make excuses for Roman Polanski.  Samantha Geimer was 13 also.  And she didn’t jump up and down and say she wanted it; even though he got her alone at Jack Nicholson’s house and plied her with booze and a quaalude, she still said no.  And he forced her.  And even after all that, people who appear otherwise sensible say utterly ridiculous things in his defense.  So there’s no depth of victim blaming some people won’t stoop to, if the rapist is important enough to them.

Still, I confess, I am a grim and qualified optimist, and I believe what Dr. King said, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  The next time always happens; until it doesn’t, and maybe the way this one is handled will be just a little less sickening to watch than the last.

The answer is, it is completely easy for that to never be you.  You can make sure you never end up in Trent Mays’ position in three easy steps.  But first, there are some things you should know.

High school is still a place where, if folks know not everyone is straight, the social world revolves around the assumption that folks are straight (when I’m writing for a different audience I use the term “heteronormative.”) It’s also, like almost everywhere, cisnormative: folks assume that everybody is and wants to stay the gender they were assigned at birth and that everyone’s okay with binary gender.  Some folks are not.  In most high schools there are a few folks who are openly or sort of openly gay or lesbian or bi or pan or queer, and there may even be people who are openly gender nonconforming.  But for the most part, the social world revolves around guys and girls whose gender is what they were assigned at birth and who mostly hook up with members of the opposite sex- or try to and fail, because almost nobody gets as much sex as they’d like.  Anyway, because addressing how high school life is for folks who are not trying to have sex with members of the opposite sex is a pretty different conversation, I’m just going to write within the heteronormative framework for now.

So, how to not be Trent Mays and get locked up:

First, Trent Mays isn’t a good guy who gave in to temptation to get off.  What they did, over the course of a few hours, was a long series of doing stuff to that girl and then documenting it in pictures and video, not really for their own sexual satisfaction, but because they thought that humiliating her in sexual ways when she was too out of it to do anything about it was funny.  You can read more here.

Second, most rapes are not rapes committed by strangers.  Maybe 80% or 85% of rapes are by someone the victim knows.  Most of them don’t involve any actual force; they involve alcohol, and the victim is either passed out or too drunk to know what’s happening.  Sometimes other drugs are involved and sometimes the victim gets slipped a drug they didn’t mean to take, but mostly, the real “date rape drunk” is plain old alcohol.  Why?  Well, mostly because guys who rape girls who are drunk usually get away with it.  Her memory is usually impaired, prosecutors and juries look down on her for being drunk, and she may be too embarrassed to even tell anyone.  So guys who want to rape know what to look for.  And there are guys who like to rape.  In fact, most rapes are not about confusion or miscommunication, they are planned by a small percentage of guys who are complete dicks, and like to take advantage of drunk girls, by which I mean, to rape them.  You can read more here, here and here.

Okay, so are you ready for the foolproof plan not to get charged with rape?

(1)  You’re probably not that guy.  The guy who gets girls drunk on purpose or looks for the really drunk girl at the party, planning on them being basically too messed up to stop you or even to say “no.”  If you are that guy, STOP IT.  STOP IT, they are human beings and you are doing a terrible thing, and someday you may get caught and sent to prison, or someone might beat you into a bloody pulp, and if you believe in hell this is the kind of stuff that sends people there.

You probably know that guy.  If you care about the women he may rape, you can and should cockblock his rapey ass.  I should do a post on that, but this one’s pretty close.

(2) If you’re not that guy, you may be worried that you miss or misinterpret signals.  What if you’re with someone and she seems into you, and then you’re fooling around then she sort of seems like she’s not into it anymore?  Well, there’s a huge difference between “she didn’t say no” and “she said yes.”  And what you want is the yes.  Some folks call that “enthusiastic participation” and some call it “affirmative consent” which sort of sounds more technical, but when you’re getting busy with someone, it sounds like “Yes!” “Take your cock out” “I want to touch it”, “I want to suck it.”  Which is way hotter than just laying there, right?  So how do you get that?  Ask.

Adults who should know better talk about asking for and talking about consent like it’s a mood-killer, and that’s ridiculous.  Checking in and making sure your partner is into it just goes right along with good hot dirty-talk.  If you want to know if your partner wants to do something, suggest it.  If they say yes or they do it, there’s no misunderstanding!  They’re into it!  If they don’t want to, saying one thing invites them to suggest something else.  And if what the really want is to put their pants on and go home, well then that’s what has to happen.  It’s natural to be disappointed when someone you want to get naked with decides halfway through that it’s just not working for them, but there’s no such thing as too late to stop, and you don’t want to have sex with anyone who isn’t into it, right?  Only that guy wants to do that.

(3) so you’ve got a partner who is into you, and there’s no mistake about that.  But she’s been drinking all night and is pretty hammered.  Look, take a raincheck on that.  Alcohol is a disinhibitor, with means it makes people throw out good judgment, but it doesn’t create sexual desire where none exists.  The person who wants to fuck you when drunk will still want to fuck you sober.  The person who doesn’t want to fuck you, but would if they got drunk enough because they’re making bad decisions … that’s the person you need to not fuck, because the best that can happen is really crappy sex followed by a lot of awkward, and it goes downhill from there.  The law varies from state to state, and it’s hard to say exactly how drunk is too drunk, but the moral standard is pretty simple:  if you say, “I’m totally down, but can we do this later when we’re both sober” will your partner bail, or will you get a raincheck?  If they’ll bail, then that’s what needs to happen.

Finally, you may have friends who tell you that certain things just don’t happen without alcohol, whether it’s anal or threesomes or whatever, that sober girls just don’t make those decisions.  Well, I’m from your future and I’ve come back to tell you that’s bullshit.  I had scenes in college so wild that I had to borrow an extra mattress from the room down the hall, and everybody was stone cold sober.  I know the women you want to fuck at age 30 and age 40, and she totally wanted to do all the wild stuff you wish she would when she was your age.  The stakes are higher for her, because of bullshit slut-shaming culture and pregnancy and infections, so she has to think harder about it and she has to trust who she’s with, and that’s why the girls your age who are doing the most interesting stuff are not the ones there are rumors about, are not the ones wearing the least clothes or drinking and getting high the most.  Remember, I’ve had decades to talk to them about what they really did in high school, and the ones who did the most interesting stuff usually had a steady partner who knew how to shut the hell up.

The more sexual you are, and the more you want people to be able to be sexual how they like with who they like and with no negative consequences, the more it’s in your interest to change the culture.  Right now, teens get all sorts of sex negative messages, and most of them sort of start with the worldview that in sex, a guy “gets some” and a girl loses something she can’t get back.  That’s not the only way to look at it.  In fact, it’s a messed up and wrong way to look at it.  For a powerful alternative, I recommend this video.

But that’s not a complete answer.  The truth is that some people do want sex with someone who isn’t participating - who is actively resisting, or who is too out of it to respond.  And who those people are tell us a lot about rape and why it happens.  In particular, it tells us a lot about gang rape and why and how it happens. 

I’ve been struck by the similarities between this case and both the Glen Ridge, New Jersey rape in 1989 and the Haidl case in Corona Del Mar, California in 2002.  All three produced convictions, all three involved high school boys, several of them and one female victim, and all three involved extremely privileged boys — in Steubenville and Glen Ridge, football players, and in Corona Del Mar, a really rich local politico’s kid.

One other thing they have in common:  nothing about them seemed like they were oriented around physical sexual stimulation for the boys.  The key, driving dynamic was a shared group experience of sexual humiliation of the girl.

[Content note here -- graphic descriptions of three gang rapes]

Glen Ridge

In Glen Ridge, the girl was not drunk or passed out.  She was mentally handicapped, and she specifically had great difficulty saying no to people who said they were her friend; she had an overwhelming need to please.  So a boy she had known her whole life offered her a date with his brother, who she had a crush on, if she’d go down to the basement with them.  When she got there, the chairs were all arranged to watch a show.  And of the thirteen boys in that room, six very quickly decided that what was going on was wrong, and left.  Of the ones who stayed, four were convicted of sexual assault, and a trial of two others was cancelled because the first trial was so traumatic for the victim that the prosecution dropped the charges.

What did they do?  Did they all line up and put their penises in her and thrust to climax, like one would expect if they were primarily concerned with getting to orgasm?  No.  That’s not what they did.  They talked her into going down on one boy, but in the main, what they did was to stick things in her vagina, including a practice bat with a bag over it and a dirty stick.  It’s not clear to me from what I’ve read on it, which includes the best book on the subject, Our Guys, that any of them even ejaculated.

Then, they tried to get her to come back for a repeat performance.

It shouldn’t be terribly surprising, since when they were in their single digits, some of the same boys talked the same girl into eating dog shit.  Yeah, you read that right. They got the mentally disabled girl to eat dog shit, then a decade later, they raped her.  Who was surprised?

Corona Del Mar

She’ll tell you who she is now.  Her photo is in OC Weekly because she refuses to act as though she’s the one who should hide her face.  She’s done being humiliated by what they did, especially because humiliating her was the core of what they were after:

they threw her limp body on a pool table and, in a despicable coup de grâce, repeatedly shoved a Snapple bottle, apple-juice can, lit cigarette and a pool stick into her vagina and anus.

They filmed the whole thing, twenty-one minutes of video proving (to the satisfaction of the second jury, though somehow the first jury hung) that she was passed out cold, completely nonresponsive.  And then, the defense team sent investigators to school and put up flyers, trolling for dirt on her, in effect continuing the rapists’ work for months and years, through two trials, alleging that the whole thing was a porn film that she orchestrated.  The entire judicial process, both trials, were part and parcel of the assault on the victim’s dignity.

Steubenville

There was video of Trent Mays shoving his fingers in the victim in a car (before it was deleted).  There is a picture of both convicted defendants carrying her by hands and feet.  One defendant tried to put his penis in her mouth, but she was completely nonresponsive.  There is a picture of her completely out of it with what looks like ejaculate on her.  She had vomited on herself.  Nothing about this says, “hot and sexy” as those things are traditionally constructed.  What attracted them then was not the promise of sexual fulfillment, but the opportunity to humiliate a girl too drunk to defend herself.

Now, look at the infamous Nodianos video, where Steubenville alum Chris Nodianos holds forth for more than ten minutes on how “dead” she is and how much they “raped that girl.”  Here we have three gang sexual assaults in three states in three different decades by three different groups of entitled teen males, and in each, the sexual activity is mostly not things that can cause them to climax, but mostly things that make a spectacle of the humiliation of their helpless victim.

Looking back on it, here’s the awful conclusion: the social media blitz, and pictures, the video, the bragging, the guy who raised the idea of paying people to urinate on her — these were not byproducts of the exercise.  Humiliating her wasn’t something that happened because they raped her.  Humiliating her was the reason they raped her.  That was the exercise.  Humiliating her was the point of the whole thing. 

They didn’t get caught because there was an audience.  If they wanted to rape her in secret, they could have found a bedroom and locked the door.  They wanted to do it and celebrate it.  They wanted to put on a show.  They didn’t get caught because when they raped her there was an audience; they raped her because there was an audience.  The whole thing was for the attention.  They thought it was funny.  Nodianos could barely contain his laughter, and his glee, and he wanted everyone who saw that video to laugh along with him, laugh at the helpless victim and how completely she had been mistreated.

Who and Why

Gang rapes need ring leaders.  There are a lot of people who will go along with a lot of really wrong stuff in the right circumstances, as the world learned from Milgram Experiment.  But a bunch of people who go along will not start a gang rape.  There has to be at least one or more who really, really want it to happen.  For example, in Glen Ridge, Chris Archer was the one who talked her into that basement.  He was the brightest of the bunch, the only really good student.  And there is some evidence that he had sexually molested her on other occasions.  And according to Lefkowitz’s book, he sexually assaulted another women between his arrest and the trial and she swore to it in an affidavit for prosecutors, though the jurors never heard that.  There are a lot of unanswered questions about Steubenville, and there have been allegations about the involvement of at least two of the witnesses who were immunized in exchange for testimony; I think I’ll wait to see the book-length treatments of this one before I draw a conclusion about ringleaders.  I already have my suspicions.

Deliberate humiliation for the sake of spectacle, orchestrated by a guy who is really invested in making it happen, bringing the followers along with him down the road to depravity, not getting off on the sexual aspect so much as using the sexual aspect to get off on the victimization.  That’s the grim reality of what happens, what these gang rapes by privileged man-children look like up close.  It’s not succumbing to the urge to be sexual.  It’s a ritual degradation. 

(It’s “We saw your boobs” drawn to its logical conclusion.  Rape culture has its towering peaks, and its little foothills.)

Now think about this and the media narratives about boys, drinking, temptation and bright futures.  Think about the kind of man or boy who goes out of his way to create a tableau of degrading and sexually victimizing a helpless girl, not to get off, but because it’s funny, it’s just so funny, it’s just hilarious, side-splitting, riotous fun to sexually assault the passed out girl, the stumbling drunk girl, the girl with the cognitive powers of a second grader.  That guy … that’s not a nice young man who gave into temptation.  That guy is an overgrown crab louse on Seth MacFarlane’s ball sack, perhaps so much that even MacFarlane himself would shiver and say, “dude, that’s not funny, she’s a human being.”

And that guy will make someone, somewhere very miserable so he can laugh.  He’ll do it, and he’ll get as many people as he can to go along with him as far as he can, and he’ll act like it’s normal and he’ll try to get you to do the same.  And he’ll keep doing it until someone makes him stop.

I’ve watched you much of your career, and I have not always agreed with you, but I always took you seriously.  I am very troubled by the way you and your network reacted to the juvenile convictions of Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond in a sexual assault trial in Steubenville, Ohio yesterday.  It might seem overly harsh to say that things like this happen because of reactions like yours.  It may seem overly harsh, but it is sadly true.  You would do well do develop an understanding of this. 

Obviously you didn’t make Richmond or Mays sexually penetrate that teenage girl, and you didn’t make Mays take pictures of her.  You didn’t raise them, you didn’t coach them, and you didn’t follow them from party to party that night last August.  But you did far more to shape the culture they grew up in than most of us non-celebrities.  Yours is a household name; you speak with the voice of authority in people’s living rooms, and what you say about these juvenile offenders, after their conviction at trial, shapes how teen boys and parents and school administrators and the whole culture interpret what happened.  You called it a tragedy, but you came within a whisker of calling it a travesty, and by doing that, you’re part of the problem.

We know a lot more about rapists than we did twenty years ago.  Particularly because of the research of David Lisak at the University of Massachusetts, and of Stephanie McWhorter, who studied Navy entrants, what we know now is that a lot of sexual assaults are committed by a very few men, that those men do it again and again, and that they are responsible for lots of other violent and antisocial conduct. 

How could a society let these people operate?  If maybe one in twenty or twenty-five men is such a bad actor, such a repeat abuser, why don’t those men stand out, get excluded and shunned, suspended and expelled, arrested, incarcerated?  Ms. Crowley, that’s where you come in.  When the allegations that such men committed rape are first revealed, there is an endless supply of people to normalize and excuse what they did; to doubt that the victim says, and also to blame her own behavior for whatever happened to her (usually  under the guise of “well-meaning” rape prevention advice.)  When they are tried, CNN and other media outlets qualify every statement about their culpable conduct with words like  “allegedly,” and while this is necessary for liability reasons it subtly but surely conveys the impression to the audience that CNN doesn’t believe her. 

The justice system so rarely works in the victim’s favor.  Rape is the least-reported major crime because rape victims fear for their own mental health if they submit to a process that interrogates every aspect of their conduct — and often their past — and leans so heavily on their credibility.  When reported, their stories are often rejected as unprosecutable.  When tried, jurors’ biases often result in acquittals that are facially unjustified.  And sometimes, particularly with celebrities like Kobe Bryant, the victim’s name becomes widely known and death threats from fans literally force her to withdraw her complaint.

One might think that in the case of a gang assault, the victim might face less headwind.  Not so!  In the famous Glen Ridge case, the town rallied around the young football players who molested a mentally disabled girl, and though the first case ended in conviction, the process was so traumatic for her that the second trial was cancelled and Richard Corcoran walked free — only to kill himself and another soldier years later in a domestic violence incident at Fort Bragg, just as we might predict from Dr. Lisak’s research.  In the Haidl gang rape in Corona Del Mar in California, there was a lengthy video of the assault on a girl who was absolutely unconscious and nonresponsive, yet the first trial resulted in a hung jury due to the  defense’s full-court press on the victim’s credibility — which is to say they set out to prove that she was a bad girl, and it worked, at least the first time.

When, as in Steubenville, the justice system works and puts the rapists behind bars, I understand that you may feel that balance requires you to say something about the convicted juveniles’ side.  But if it was balance you were after, you would also have said something about the victim’s side:  she found out what they did to her when it became public information on social media.  Witness testimony demonstrated that she was stumbling, slurring her words, at times completely nonresponsive, and throwing up, including on herself.  When she learned what had happened, she also learned that she had been turned into an object of public mockery on social media.  She was publicly defamed in her community.  How did it feel to be her?  How did it feel for her to finally hear, after six months of living with this, that the State of Ohio declared that what was done to her was wrong, was a criminal act, and that those who did it deserved to be in juvenile detention as sex offenders?  How did it feel to be vindicated?

Ms. Crowley, you lamented the lost futures of these young men.  But did you say a word for the future of this girl?  CNN isn’t identifying her, and I agree with that.  But the limitations on discussing the details of her life surely don’t keep you from talking to viewers about how the sixteen year old victim of a very public sexual assault and a very public trial goes forward.  Where does she go from here?  Does this close a chapter for her, or will she need to watch the continuing grand jury proceedings, follow the inevitable appeals? 

You didn’t say a word about her.  As far as your viewers know, you don’t see her as a person at all, just a cypher, some theoretical construct that these boys did those things to.  If you humanize the boys and not the girl, if you feel for the boys and not the girl, what does that tell the viewers?

What does it tell the parents of the next girl who dumps vodka into slushed ice and heads out to a high school party?  There were many last weekend and there will be many this weekend, and no amount of warning them will entirely change that.  If you didn’t drink to get drunk in high school, you had friends who did, and so did we all.  That’s not an offense deserving of rape.  That’s not behavior that causes rape.  If this girl got staggering, vomiting drunk with a different group of people — say, with the boy I hope my son grows up to be — she would have found herself delivered to her parents’ door with a blanket over the vomit-stained shirt.  “Mr. Doe, I’m sorry to wake you, but your daughter had quite a bit to drink and passed out at the party, and the folks she came with were not taking care of her, so we brought her home.  We couldn’t find her phone …”  Isn’t that what we expect of our young men? The reason that, instead of a ride home, she got sexually assaulted, filmed and mocked was because the people around her failed a basic test of moral fiber.  The bystanders failed to intervene, and the peripheral participants failed to walk away, and Mays and Richmond failed even the baseline legal tests.  They sexually penetrated a girl who was so inebriated that she didn’t understand or participate in what they were doing to her. 

What you told that next girl and her parents is that even if what happened to their daughter is a crime, even if it is prosecuted and proved, you’re still on the side of the rapists. 

What you told the next young bystanders at the next party is that the rapists are not really doing anything wrong by molesting the drunk girl, nothing repugnant, nothing reprehensible, nothing shocking.  You could have told CNN’s viewership that what Mays and Richmond did was disturbing, or upsetting, or wrong, but you didn’t.  Instead, you implied that it is normal, understandable, and that the real tragedy is that they are being punished for it.

What you told the next Mays and the next Richmond is that, in the unlikely event that they are reported and arrested and the coach doesn’t succeed in covering it up (as Mays evidently expected Coach Reno Saccoccia would here), and the prosecution results in a conviction, you’ll still be on their side.  You see, Mays and Richmond thought, right up until the conviction and maybe even now, that it wasn’t a big deal and certainly wasn’t a grievous wrong they did. 

Mays had his chance to say something.  He could have apologized to the girl, and to his teammate who as Quarterback he might have offered some moral leadership, and to his team and his town who by his conduct he let down, to his parents who surely at least thought they raised him better.  And to the girl.  I know I already said that.  Without compromising his appeal, he could have said that he looks back every day and wishes he had thrown a blanket over her and piled her into someone’s back seat for a ride back across the river to her home when it became clear she was too drunk to know what was happening to her.  And he could have apologized to the girl.  I know I already said that twice. 

He didn’t say any of that, though.  I have no reason to believe he thinks any of that.  For all we know, what he thought is that girls like her don’t matter, and if it hadn’t been for national media attention this all would have gone away.  It might have.  It almost did. 

Ms. Crowley, these boys have done nothing to deserve your sympathy except to be young and have promising futures, that through their own conduct they squandered.  This girl has done nothing to deserve your dismissal except to drink to get drunk, like too many high school students do. 

I believe that guys like Mays and Richmond are fairly set in their ways by the time they are in their late teens.  If they are in Dr. Lisak’s and Dr. McWhorter’s group of repeat offenders, and I suspect they are, they won’t change.  But the environment they operate in can.  There were boys, some of them witnesses, and one of the infamous Nodianos video, who understood the moral wrong that happened.  But they lacked the courage and numbers and the support they needed to make it stop.  It shouldn’t have to be an extraordinary act of bravery to tell the rapists, “leave that girl alone, she has no idea where she is or what you’re doing to her!”  Every person, every single person except a hardened serial rapist ought to do that, ought to do that together as a single voice, the voice of the community.  And if they did, the rapists would have a very hard time operating.  That it isn’t like that is a cultural battle we’re fighting every day.  You need to think about that and decide which side you’re on.

This.  This is terrific.  Everyone should see this.