Fraternity Roofie Conspiracy

This.

In some corners of the rape denial universe it is popular to say that this doesn’t happen, that all reports of drugged drinks are merely voluntary overconsumption.  There are two kinds of people who say that: (1) those who have chosen to believe it, because they don’t believe anything women say anyway and because it’s convenient for them to believe it; and (2) those who know first-hand that it isn’t true, but want to protect those who deliberately and involuntarily intoxicate others.

When people say, “rape culture,” some people say that there isn’t one.  Even some people who should know better say that. Everyone agrees that rape is bad, right?  But they don’t.  In the comments and threats that assail women who speak out about rape on the internet, when the trolls know people are unlikely to uncover their identities, they say what they really think.  They approve of rape.

These allegations admit of no possibility of accident or miscommunication. Instead, this required a conspiracy of the bartender and the doorman, at a minimum, and probably at least the silent complicity of several members. Someone said, “let’s roofie a bunch of girls …” and someone else thought it was a great idea.  As it became clear that someone wasn’t joking, but was actually planning and preparing, nobody, nobody, said, “no, actually that would be a felony and we cannot do that.”  If you want to know what “rape culture” is, it’s a culture where someone could raise this idea and instead of a chill falling over the whole room, the other people either strain to pretend it’s a joke or gleefully join in.  If you want to know what “social license to operate” is it’s that the idea that women at fraternity parties are targets to be intoxicated and sexually molested is so powerful that the guy that thought this up not only had friends willing to defend his idea, they agreed to help, and they believed that they would get away with it.

As a general moral proposition, to hell with loyalty. If you are ever so loyal to any person that, when that person says, “let’s rape someone,” it even occurs to you that going along with it is a viable option, your moral compass is shot and you need to cut all ties with every single person you know, pack up and walk as far as you can get into the most desolate wilderness until the ruinous effects of your social environment wear off and you once again develop the ability to hear your conscience.  You.  If you’re reading this now, and you’re thinking, “well, I don’t know, I might …”  Stop.  Stop, turn off the computer, and pick a spot on the map where nobody is, and go there.  Until you do, you’re a danger to us all.

Off To College Is Too Late For The Consent Talk

I am a fan, and a friend, of both Amanda Hess and Heather Corinna, and it should come as no surprise that I think this piece in Slate is really useful.  However, the preface to Amanda’s interview situates it with college back-to-school season.  From a news standpoint, this makes sense.  The US media is belatedly and rightly focused on colleges mishandling sexual assault (Emma Sulkowics’s performance art activism at Columbia is the latest story to get broad coverage). But from a parenting perspective, it’s an easy, comforting and wrong way to analyze it.

Heather Corinna, who has been down this road more times than I can count with interviewers much less savvy and receptive than Hess, positions consent and bodily autonomy as a lifelong process and a part of parenting that starts in the diaper stage.  Hess had the good sense to let Heather get her ideas out.  In my own parenting, I reached the same conclusion, and I started talking about consent with my own kids as toddlers, something I wrote about in this old post that recently went back into circulation after a Facebook page picked it up.

Good News/Bad News:

• By the time kids are off to college or college aged, they may have established patterns and expectations for consent and communication that have already shaped their relationships and sexual development.
• But getting in front of that curve doesn’t have to be uncomfortable, as it’s easy to make a fairly seamless transition from the kind of broad consent-and-autonomy discussion I wrote about in If She’s Not Having Fun You Have To Stop, to the kind of more express advice teens will need to navigate their own needs.

It’s Better To Be Early Than Late

I think it’s fair to say that a lot of young people experience a lot of partnered intimacy, kissing and more, years before they finish high school (though for various reasons big, public studies focus on penetrative sex and it’s hard to find good data on how kids develop to that point).  They’re working out on their own who kisses who, who puts their hands where, and even if they are not having intercourse or oral sex, they are forming expectations and patterns.  If we let them absorb a culture that boys initiate and girls gatekeep (the heteronormativity! The penetrocentrism! Do we even have a pop-culture paradigm for same-sex adolescent partners? For nonpenetrative intimacy that is a goal in itself and not a waystation? And we definitely don’t have pop-culture paradigms for anyone too far outside the mainstream … trans, non-binary, etc.) then it’s just blind luck whether they find the wherewithal to question that.  Of course as a parent I hope my kids will keep developing and changing right into adulthood, so maybe they can make use of things that I say in their late teens and twenties even if those things might have been more useful earlier.  I hope that, but I’d rather be out in front.

I think part of the reason that some parents don’t want to talk about consent and sexuality with their kids, or about reproduction and STIs with their kids, is the view that bringing it up sends the message that the parents think they are ready.  I think that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — to the extent it sends that message, it means I didn’t start early enough!  Kids are going to hear and see references to things like pregnancy and condoms all through their lives.  If they hear, “you don’t need to know what that’s about” until their mid-teens, and then their parents suddenly say, “okay, I guess you’re old enough to hear this now,” well, they may take that as an indication that they’re the right age to make use of the information. I understand why that becomes fraught for a lot of parents.  If these things are treated as a matter of scientific inquiry, like why the sky is blue and why some birds nest on the ground, suitable for an explanation in age-appropriate detail at any time, then it sends no such message.

Folks with a certain set of cultural leanings seem to be integrating the notion that the one “big talk” model doesn’t work with sex, biology and safety.  Well, it doesn’t work with sexuality, relationships and consent, either.  A “big talk” will never time it right.  It will always be too early, or too late, or both.  I think in the age of the internet, kids less often live in an information vacuum.  Once, if a kid didn’t get an answer from adults, the only other option was friends, who were generally clueless.  Now, there’s an opposite problem: too much information, widely varied in quality and accuracy, slant and agenda.  Parents can’t keep their kids from getting information by refusing to answer questions.  They might as well say, “go look for the answer yourself and don’t tell me what you find,” because it has exactly that effect.

The Shallower the Slope, The Smoother the Ride

The way our children integrate consent into their lives has a learning curve.  I don’t know of anyone who thinks we should start teaching our kids about consent by talking about sex.  As Heather points out in the Slate interview, the first lessons in consent are about kids, privacy, autonomy and their own bodies.  We can teach them that they don’t have to give their uncle a kiss if it makes them uncomfortable, and that they can bathe themselves alone when they’re able.

Our children’s first experiences of negotiation don’t happen in the sheets; they happen over dolls and toys.  It’s a lot better to learn what’s making your needs known and what’s bullying your partner when the question is “do we play school, or alien robot attack.”  It’s a lot better, and it’s highly transferable.  The kid who thinks, “I have to play the space game that I don’t like because the other kid wants to” is not going to suddenly act differently with a prom date, and the kid who thinks, “anything I do to make them play my game is fair, because what I want is all that’s important” will think exactly like that after prom, too.  They will, unless we step up as parents.  I don’t believe it’s “helicopter parenting” to talk to our kids about how they play with each other.  I believe it’s helicopter parenting to jump in and direct them.  That’s counterproductive.  Giving them the solution keeps them from ever developing the skills, and it’s the skills that are the point.  But neither is a “life is tough on the savannah” approach good for all kids, and talking to them and guiding them about how they interact with their peers has always worked for me.

I think the way we can teach this stuff is to think about the big picture early, and start teaching the general principles long before our kids are thinking about dating and intimacy.  It’s easy to connect it back.

Think about what I might want to say to my kids about consent as teens.  Things I want them to know:

• Yes means yes.  You should affirmatively make sure your partner is good with what you’re doing.
• You have to be able to communicate about what you and your partner want in order for everyone to be happy and have fun.
• There is no such thing as “working out a yes.”  Just because you can get someone to say, “okay, I’ll do what you want,” doesn’t mean they are into it or enjoying it, and it’s not fun unless it’s fun for everyone.

I don’t have to wait until they’re having sex to teach those values.  We don’t even have to be talking about sex for me to teach those values.  I can teach those values to kids old enough to ride bikes and play Minecraft.  I told my kids at two,  “it’s not fun unless it’s fun for everyone.”   I’ve already said,  “it’s not right to guilt-trip your friends into playing Minecraft because that’s what you want to do.” The moral principle doesn’t really change, so I’m dealing with the day-to-day of having friends over and having elementary school relationships.  But at the same time, I’m laying the groundwork for the conversations I’m going to have with them as teens:  whatever you do with your partners, it’s not okay unless it’s good for everyone.  If someone’s not having fun, you want to make space for them to say they want to stop, and you have to listen and respect that.  You have to talk to each other about what you want to do so you’re both having fun.  Just because you can get someone to say, “okay, I’ll do what you want” doesn’t mean they’re really into it.  The principles are basic life lessons about being fair to other people, and expecting that people are fair to us.  Only the details change with age.

Values Are Inherited

Our culture makes a big deal about adolescent rebellion, and by doing so convinces people it’s the norm, when in fact people generally adopt their parents’ values to a large extent.   Popular culture focuses on the exceptions mostly to give voice to parents’ fears.  But what usually happens is that your kids pay more attention to what you believe than you appreciate at the time.  They hear everything you say … including “put away your laundry” and “clean your room.”  (Getting them to do it is beyond the scope of this post.  And, sometimes, my capabilities.)  They see what you do, they hear what you say, and they integrate it so much that, whether they adopt it or reject it, it’s part of them.

And there’s the problem.  They see us more clearly sometimes than we see ourselves, and if we’re full of shit, they feel it even if they can’t articulate it.  If the way somebody thinks about sex and consent is that boys will always push for whatever they can get and girls are either the “good kind” or the “bad kind,” they are going to have a hard time communicating something different to their kids.  People who think that “some girls” are “asking for it,” raise daughters who can’t tell their parents if someone does something they didn’t agree to.  People who think that girls say no when they mean yes, at best, will teach their sons to ignore anything that is a soft refusal right up until they’re sure they’ll get in trouble.  Those attitudes pop up in the comments on anything about rape.  Those trolls are not all antisocial teens or loners living in isolation.  Some of those comments are from parents who show up at my school’s PTA meeting; that’s what they say when they don’t have to stand by it, and that’s what their kids will sense, and my kids are going to have to deal with that.

Protect Yourself At All Times

Feminists call out almost any attempt to shift a discussion of rape onto what the survivor could or should or might have done as victim blaming.  Because it is.  And feminists usually jump on every discussion about how women should restrict themselves to “prevent” themselves from getting raped, because it takes the focus off the rapists, and because it’s not effective, and because it’s not fair.  That’s correct.  And people sometimes respond by saying, “are you saying there’s nothing we can do?”  Well, I do know something we can do.  And it’s not teaching my daughter self-defense (though there are other reasons to do that, and the physical confidence that comes with it is a positive, etc.)

The most important thing to teach our kids is to respect their own boundaries as much as they respect others’, and respect others’ as much as they respect their own.  The way the culture works to create victims, the most effective way, is by gradually telling some people that they have to go along with things they don’t want.  There’s more to it, of course.  Abusers have ways of finding kids who lack supportive adults, who are cut off and vulnerable and won’t be listened to; all that is complex and not what this post is about.

This classic from Harriet J. says it best:

[W]omen are raised being told by parents, teachers, media, peers, and all surrounding social strata that:

it is not okay to set solid and distinct boundaries and reinforce them immediately and dramatically when crossed (“mean bitch”)

it is not okay to appear distraught or emotional (“crazy bitch”)

it is not okay to make personal decisions that the adults or other peers in your life do not agree with, and it is not okay to refuse to explain those decisions to others (“stuck-up bitch”)

it is not okay to refuse to agree with somebody, over and over and over again (“angry bitch”)

it is not okay to have (or express) conflicted, fluid, or experimental feelings about yourself, your body, your sexuality, your desires, and your needs (“bitch got daddy issues”)

it is not okay to use your physical strength (if you have it) to set physical boundaries (“dyke bitch”)

it is not okay to raise your voice (“shrill bitch”)

it is not okay to completely and utterly shut down somebody who obviously likes you (“mean dyke/frigid bitch”)

If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.

And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.

Our culture bombards our girls, especially, with lessons that they can’t set boundaries and expect them to be respected.   We shouldn’t be surprised when many rape survivors say they froze and just tried to shut down and hope it ended soon, or that afterwards they didn’t know what to call it or what to do about it – not making a fuss is the demand so much of our culture makes on girls and women.    Calling it rape, treating it like a violation, when it’s about to happen, or while it happens, or in the immediate aftermath, is an act of will that many survivors can’t just tap into.

Our culture teaches boys some terrible lessons, too, and I don’t just mean the ones about ignoring what their partners say or do.  I mean the ones boys learn about ignoring what they want, about putting the culture’s expectations about how they “should” be ahead of what they themselves want.  I mean the messages that cause people to ignore the sexual abuse of juvenile inmates when the abusers are women, the ones that allow women who molest boys to tell everyone, including probably themselves, that it’s okay because boys always “want it,” I mean the messages that make it hard for grown-ass men to say to their partners that they’re ever not in the mood.  That’s real, too, and it’s really about the same thing, when you get right down to it.  It’s about boundaries and whether we have a right to them.

We can do better with the next generation.  No matter how overwhelming the culture around us seems, there is a time in our kids’ lives when their parents are the most important people in their world and we can teach them — if we believe it, if we commit to it — that their boundaries mean something, that they don’t owe anyone access to their bodies, that if something feels wrong it’s okay to want to stop, it’s okay to need to stop, it’s okay to say stop, and it’s okay to expect to be listened to.  We can teach that.  If we tell them, and if we believe it, they’ll believe us.

The kind of self-defense I can give my kids is the belief that they have a right to set their boundaries, and that so does everyone else.  If they feel wrong, if they have the sudden urge to put their clothes back on and leave, then they should and they absolutely can — that’s real self-defense, the kind that matters.  And the great thing is that if they know that for them, they learn it for their partners, too.  I don’t have to wait until they’re packing for college to have that talk.  I started teaching that in preschool.

 

Bagley All Over Again?

Another criminal prosecution arising from abuse in a kinky relationship.  There are so few facts thus far that I won’t write much, but this is on my radar.

I don’t know why the report even notes that she’s trans.  In fact, after the first paragraph, they follow the sensible rule for avoiding shitty trans coverage tropes:  if it’s irrelevant to the story, don’t bring it up.  But that fact, her trans status without more, appears in the headline and first paragraph, perhaps for no reason other than clickbait, or because while the style guidelines say that trans women are women, some reporter or editor couldn’t bring themselves to apply that without an implied asterisk.  At least after mentioning it they left it alone, so that’s progress because the bar of better-than-usual is pretty low.

I’ve said before that the only way kink-abuse cases get prosecuted is if there is hospitalization or video; reading between the lines, I think we’ll find out that video evidence was seized.

There are screeds coming.  In the course of this, as more facts develop, I expect I’ll write about the slave register site and the positioning of 24/7 and TPE within BDSM communities and spaces, like I do.  I expect I’ll write about the application of trafficking laws to situations where people are literally not free to leave.  I expect I’ll write about press coverage of her trans status, though I hope I don’t; maybe if it’s not relevant as the story develops, they could just leave it alone?  Perhaps, but I doubt it.  All these conversations will wait until the factual record is more developed.

I’d rather not write about this.  It’s not exactly fun.  I’d rather not, but the things I expect I’ll say, I’m not counting on anyone else to say.  So I will.

Guys, Can We Please, For Two Weeks …

I blew my stack on Facebook this morning, after reading one of the many threads where women are trying to have a conversation around the Isla Vista shooting and the #YesAllWomen hashtag campaign.  I blew my stack because there are two things derailing these conversations.  One is misogynist men trying deliberately to derail, deny and distract.  The other is men who want to do the right thing, who mean well, but who feel the need to insert their insecurities, their disclaimers and clarifications and make the conversation about their feelings.

Here’s what I said:

JESUS CHRIST SHUT UP AND LISTEN. IF YOU ARE A MAN RIGHT NOW DO NOT TALK OVER WOMEN. AT ALL. SPEAK ONLY AMONG MEN about whatever you think your valid point is that you so desperately need to hear yourself say and just SHUT THE FUCK UP. Why have I not written about Rodgers? BECAUSE MEN NEED TO SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LISTEN. Two weeks. Just shut your fucking facehole for two weeks. NO! Zip! It! If it’s that fucking brilliant, it will be brilliant in two weeks.

But I know, because women who want the same kind of change that I want are telling me, that if you and me and the guys who care duck out of the conversation for two weeks, we’re only leaving the field in possession of the enemy and abandoning the people we want to support.  If you care enough about what I think to follow my example if I decided to stay silent, you’re actually the guy who should stay in the conversation.

But just because we’re talking doesn’t mean we’re helping, and right now I think to help, I have to be willing to do some really specific stuff.  Here’s what I think I have to do:

(1) Not talk about my insecurities when women are trying to talk about their struggle.

(2) Signal-boost the women who are saying important stuff.

(3) Shut down, shout down, and push back at misogynists who are trying to make the conversation not happen.

So if you care what I think, I’m asking you to do this with me.  Women need to let the anger and fear and frustration  speak now, to know that we’re listening; and we need to hear it.  Lots of us are going to have that queasy, “she thinks that might be me, and that’s totally not me” feeling.  Here’s what I want to do:  just lock that down and keep in on ice until June 13.  Don’t do the “not all men” thing, not even a little; don’t say it.  Live the example, stand by the women you support and don’t let your insecurities get in the way.  Let them know you by your works.  If I need to vent about my feelings, I’ll do that in private with friends, not where the public conversations are happening.

Everything I write in public about Isla Vista or Rodger or masculinity, misogyny or entitlement for the next two weeks, I’m going to ask myself, “is this helping my women friends have their conversation?”  If not, I can change it, or I can hold it.

We need men to talk about how we feel about manhood and violence and the reality of rapists and abusers among us and in our social circles and families, out own sexuality and consent and all the nuanced and complex stuff.  We need that, but not today, not right now, not in the immediate aftermath of a guy planning to slaughter a sorority and trying to do it.  The nuances that men’s experiences add will still be valuable in two weeks; women need two more weeks to talk about the things that scare them out of their minds and the shit they have to live with, and they need us to clear the way for them; not engage to qualify, explain and redirect.

I have a small but influential social circle and readership, and I see a lot of really good stuff that’s being said and written right now, especially stuff by women talking about their own experiences, and I’m going to popularize the good stuff and let it speak for itself.

What I’m not going to do is leave the assholes in charge of the conversation.  I’m going to point out their agendas, their distortions and lies.  I know my skillset, and smacking people around on social media, litigating issues, and showing the bystanders that these people are wrong factually and morally; that I can do.  That’s not about me.  That’s about pushing back on their bullshit so the women who are trying to have the conversation in public spaces right now feel our support.

If I have something to say about my feelings and my masculinity and how this affects me, if that’s so damned brilliant that I should share it with the world, it will still be worth sharing later.  I can keep that on ice until June 13.  Two weeks.  It’s not about me for two weeks.  That’s not much to ask.

So I’m asking.  Not about me, not about us, just support and defend the conversation that is happening, for two weeks.

Reporting Rape: More On The “Proper Authorities”

I’ve written more than a little lately about how rape survivors reporting to “the proper authorities” get stonewalled, abused and ignored.  I wish I had said all that needed to be said about that.  I have not.

[Content note, graphic description of the rape included]

Today’s story is about one particular survivor’s experience.  She’s using her name, and she refuses to be ashamed.  She is Emma Sulkowicz.  She took her complaint to the “proper authorities.”

The Administration

First, Sulkowicz went to the Columbia University administration, then the NYPD.  What happened?

• Her best friend and chosen support person was disciplined by the school for talking about the rape in violation of Columbia’s nondisclosure policy- that is, their silencing rule.
• The friend was required to write a “reflection paper” from the rapist’s point of view.
• The university found the rapist not responsible, though she testified that he pinned her down and forced his penis into her anus with no lubrication.

He was found not responsible, so why do I think he raped her?  At least one other woman independently reported the man to the university for sexual assault, according to the story I linked, but other sources say there are at least two other women who reported him.  There’s rarely one roach in the cupboard, and most rapes are committed by serial rapists.

The Columbia Spectator has published his name.  They explained their reasons here.  He is reportedly one of the names that appeared on the fliers and graffiti at Columbia.  Jezebel has also published his name.

The NYPD

So after Columbia’s bullshit process failed her, she reported to the NYPD.  How did they treat her?  The police officer who reported to the scene, according to the Al Jazeera story, told her: “You invited him into your room. That’s not the legal definition of rape.”  

You can read the story for the rest of what the NYPD did, but I want to bold that part.  This is a sworn police officer, making a statement that’s appalling not only culturally, but in its sheer, astounding legal ignorance.  The cop, at least according to the account in the Al Jazeera story I linked above, purported to make a statement about “the legal definition of rape” and just made up some good-girls-don’t moralizing bullshit where rape can only be illegal if it’s done by a stranger in a dark parking lot.  In addition to the cruelty and dismissiveness, the incompetence is breathtaking.

(Just for a grim, angry laugh, I’ll include here the actual statute:

§130.35 Rape in the first degree.

A person is guilty of rape in the first degree when he or she engages in sexual intercourse with another person:

1. By forcible compulsion; or
2. Who is incapable of consent by reason of being physically helpless; or
3. Who is less than eleven years old; or
4. Who is less than thirteen years old and the actor is eighteen years old or more.

I don’t see anything in there about inviting the rapist to one’s dwelling.)

The Columbia Spectator story adds details:  she had had consensual sex with him earlier that night, but then he strangled her and anally penetrated her, which she told the police she did not consent to.

Sulkowics says to survivors, “If you want to go to the police, this is what to expect: You’ll be verbally abused. But at least no one will yell at you for not going to the police and getting verbally abused. Just take your pick.”  But it’s not only survivors like her expressing the view that the system isn’t working for rape survivors.  David Lisak,* the psychologist who started the research into undetected rapists and who regularly advises college administrators on rape, said that law enforcement has hundreds of years of history where any survivor without cuts, bruises or broken bones could expect nothing from reporting.  

I want to be fair to the people in the system here.  What we know so far is that Sulkowics said that her experience was searing and emotionally abusive.  We don’t know that they won’t do anything.  She just reported.  It is possible that the police are investigating, and despite the way Sulkowics was treated, they will find multiple victims, put together a case and prosecute.  It’s early enough to say that the way the police treated Sulkowics explains why many survivors don’t report.  It is too early to say they didn’t do anything.

The Judge

Sulkowics’s complaint, like that of almost all survivors, has never reached the punishment stage.   Columbia had at least two and possibly three reports about the same man but let him go.  The police report was recent, just days ago, and perhaps they will still make an arrest, but have not yet.

But even when a survivor reports to the police, the police make an arrest, the prosecutors file charges, go to trial and the jury convicts, it doesn’t mean that the rapist will actually go to prison.

In Indiana, David Wise drugged his wife without her knowledge, raped her, and filmed it.  Not once, but as a pattern for three years!  You would think that a person capable of this conduct – planned, premeditated, and keeping souvenirs — would be deemed so dangerous that any right-thinking judge would want him behind bars for a very long time.  But the judge, elected Marion County Superior Court judge Kurt Eisgruber, sentenced him only to home confinement.  By the way, he’s up for reelection this November.

Systems Are Made Of People

Police are people.  Administrators are people.  Judges, jurors, prosecutors … all people.  The laws are interpreted and applied by people, who bring to them their prejudices.  In a racist culture, the most perfectly written law will be applied and enforced in racist ways.  In a culture that refuses to take rape seriously, no matter what the statutes say, the actual behavior of the people who interpret and enforce those laws will reflect the refusal to take it seriously.  First degree rape is a Class B felony in New York, a really serious crime.  People in the system are simply not willing to say that that applies to people who don’t fit their preconceived notions, and there is no magic bullet to change that.  Changing the statute, training the police, giving the administrators incentives for transparency, there are lots of things to be done and not one of them alone will make all that much difference.  The rapists’ social license to operate is woven deeply into the fabric of how people think the world works: it is a specific set of threads in a very big and interconnected piece of culture.  Pulling them out, pulling them all out, one at a painstaking fucking time, is the work.  That’s what we have to do, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they’re not serious.

*I’ve done a great deal to popularize Lisak’s research both into the identity and methods of rapists who have not been caught.  It has filtered back to me that some people assume that I think everything he says is right, or that I somehow generally endorse him.  I don’t.  I don’t know him, I’ve never met him, I have not spoken with him, and I don’t have a good handle on what he tells consulting clients when the doors are closed.  He puts on his pants one leg at a time just like the rest of us.

Darren Sharper, People Who Say The Right Things, and How You Can Tell

I’ve written before that when people say they rape people or say they hate women, we should believe them.  But there are some people who say all the right things, and who are rapists.  They say all the right things as a cover,  so that nobody will believe they’re capable of it, and they can get their targets to trust them.

So am I saying that everyone is a rapist?  No.  The research shows that rapists are a small proportion of men, and an even smaller proportion are serial rapists responsible for the vast majority of rapes.  The research on undetected rapists in the population so far is limited to men, and it will be important over time to expand that, but it’s the information we have now.

So if it’s only a relatively few people, but some of them say all the wrong things, and some of them say all the right things, how are their targets supposed to know who the predators are in advance, and avoid them?

They can’t.  This is the point that antirape activists have been trying to make about prevention education forever.  There is no magic prevention bullet.  If it was easy to spot the rapists and avoid them, nobody would get raped.

Is Darren Sharper A Serial Rapist?

The New York Times ran a long story this morning about former NFL standout Darren Sharper.  He had a reputation, not as a misogynist bigot, but as exactly the opposite — a guy who liked women, stood up for women, stood against misogyny in football culture.  He wouldn’t be the first NFL standout to face multiple rape allegations.  I’ve written about Ben Roethlisberger before, and the police who helped ensure there was no meaningful investigation of the allegations in Georgia.   And Dave Meggett is one of the few genuinely well-known sports figures actually convicted of sexual assault against an adult woman.  There was an arrest for an assault on a sex worker in Canada, and then an unrelated misdemeanor conviction before the felony that finally put him behind bars.  But neither of those guys particularly had a reputation for standing up for women.

Not that I’d call Sharper a feminist.  The former All-Pro defensive back, a safety who played with three team over fourteen years and won a Superbowl, seemed to be more about chivalry than equality.  But he sponsored an NFL camp for women, and participated in an NFL dads-and-daughters campaign.

I’ll just summarize the allegations: that he had a pattern of spiking women’s drinks with generic Ambien, causing the women to become completely incapacitated or unconscious, and then raping them.  He allegedly did this to one woman, then when she awoke hung-over and with no idea he had drugged her drink, offered her something to take the edge off her hangover, which he had spiked, and then raped her again.  There appear to be nine women so far saying that Sharper did something similar to them, in different cities including New Orleans, LA, Miami Beach and Phoenix, but who knows how many may come forward now that the story is in the Times.  The Times quotes some prosecutors saying something I’ve long said based on research, which is that the predators pick a tactic that they get away with, usually one involving intoxication rather than overt force, and they do it again and again.

There are two things I want to note here, which are really separate topics that deserve longer treatment somewhere.  (1) It always comes up with celebrities and athletes that they don’t need to rape to get laid.  While the second wave maxim that rape is about power and not sex is oversimplified (for at least many rapists, the two are not separable), it has explanatory power.  A guy like Sharper clearly had plenty of consensual sex options; and if he did what’s alleged (I’m very confident he did given the frequency and commonality of the allegations from different women in disparate locations), he clearly preferred rape to, or in addition to, consensual sex.  There are reasons why, having to do with masculinity and entitlement, but I’ll leave this here for now.  (2) Alcohol is the most common date rape drug.  But I’ve seen MRA propaganda asserting that women who say they were drugged can never show it, that they were always or almost always lying, that the toxicology screens always come back negative, and they really just didn’t realize how drunk they were.  That’s always been bullshit; I’m hoping that the proof in the Sharper cases will provide a highly public, evergreen counterexample to that.

Talking The Talk

Remember Kyle Payne?  Remember this guy? The guy I called Boris in this piece?  That guy led the crusade to put another serial rapist out of action, and I have friends, friends who call themselves feminist and antirape, who absolutely stand by him.

Some of the guys who claim the feminist label, who claim to be against rape and misogyny, do things like try to murder their girlfriends, sexually assault their friends (or just engage in run-of-the-mill sexist mansplaining and shutting down of things women are trying to say).  How can they do that?  Doesn’t the cognitive dissonance cause them to burst into flames?  If does not.  Some of them have Axis II personality disorders — terminology is controversial here, but variously antisocial, sociopathic or psychopathic, and narcissistic personality features cause people to lie with not the slightest discomfort and, when confronted, with absolute comfort to spin another story to cover the lie.  Maybe some of them are tortured by their own consciences, maybe some have powerful rationalizations to excuse what they do, and some clearly have no allegiance to any conception of right and wrong.  I can’t divide it up more than that.  It matters, for purposes of how to deal with them, and I would like to know much more about how they think and how they operate.  I’d like to see research on this that isn’t specific to male predators, too.  We don’t have that.  Yet.

How Can We Tell?

We can’t.  Not reliably.  There is no not-a-rapist seal of approval, not one that can be inerringly trusted.  That means that the option of spotting them before we hear that they’ve done anything horrible isn’t a panacea.  Nothing is a panacea.  The solutions to rape have to be widespread and systemic:

• We have to be on the lookout for people who say they’re rapists or say misogynist things, because it’s essentially propaganda that allows them to normalize what they do, and hide it.
• We have to create an environment that fosters acceptance and transparency for survivors, because unless they come forward we will always lack the data to spot many of the predators.
• We have to publicize tactics and normalize intervention.  If we can’t spot the people, we may still be able to recognize the actions; a pattern of isolate & intoxicate is never really a good thing.

If it was easy, and free, and didn’t cost anybody anything, and didn’t require much of any of us, then we would have fixed this problem already.

 

 

Miley Cyrus, Celebrity Rapist?

Here’s what she said:

“You know, everyone’s a little bit gay,” she told the crowd. “It’s the truth. Everyone’s gay, all it takes is one cocktail. And if that doesn’t work, sprinkle something in their drink. That’s what I always do.”

Publications like The Guardian are giving her tremendous benefit of the doubt, proactively providing her a defense by calling it a “joke.”  I’m not willing to extend that benefit without more.

What she said, what she literally said, is that people should use alcohol to get people to have sex with them, who otherwise would not do so — and that if they doesn’t work, they should drug the drinks.  And she said she does that herself.  She didn’t say she did it once.  She said that’s what she “always” does.

I will not assume this is a joke.  Serial rapists target people they know; they overwhelmingly use intoxication instead of overt force.  They do this because it works, and by “works”, I mean people will supply explanations and defenses.

And the popular culture has already started supplying explanations and defenses.  That it was a “joke.”  That she didn’t mean it literally.  That she is just courting controversy.  Maybe all that’s true.  Or maybe she actually does exactly what she says she does, and the people explaining and excusing her comments are doing exactly what she counts on.

We have not heard any Miley Cyrus victims come forward; at least I have not.  But … would they?  Why would they? Reporting to police even under the best of circumstances is an uncertain proposition.  Look at it this way; what is the track record of rape allegations, by adult complainants, against celebrities?  Dismal.  How about against white celebrities?  Well, as far as I can tell, in the US, the batting average of sex offense convictions for assaults on adults by white celebrities is zero, ever.  No convictions.

Not one.  (I’m being specific here.  There are a handful of convictions for sexual assaults of children, like Roman Polansky.  There are a handful of convictions against black celebrities, including Mike Tyson and former NY Giants standout Dave Meggett.  No white people.  Marv Albert is the closest, I think, but he pleaded mid-trial to misdemeanor assault with no sexual component and did not have to register as a sex offender.)  Think about it.  Every once in a while there is an allegation, but the ones by adults against white famous people always end up a dead end for the prosecution.  Always.

The elephant in the room is that Miley is a woman, and we’ve constructed rape as a thing that only men do, and that only happens to women.  That’s not the reality.

I don’t mean to ignore rapes that happen to men here — they are more common than many people suppose, and that gets too little attention.  In my view, we also have not talked enough about the dynamics of age.  How often rape happens to men is highly sensitive to definition (penetrated versus forced to penetrate) and is very differently distributed by age for men than for women; there is very little discussion of any of this.  See generally this paper, which has gotten some attention lately, but we’re only at the start of that conversation.  You’re not really anti-rape unless you’re against all rape.  There are no good rapes.

Rape of men is not necessarily what Miley Cyrus alleged.  She prefaced her confession (what?  People are calling it a “joke,” based on assumption alone, simply assuming that it isn’t literal, so I’m going to go ahead and treat it as literal and call it a confession) with the remark, “everyone is a little bit gay.”  So she’s talking at least in part about same sex rapes.  When she says, “that’s what I always do,” she may be saying that she drugs women to incapacitate them so she can rape them.  And that doesn’t particularly make it better or worse.  Whether she means that she rapes men, or women, or both, or people who don’t fit on the binary, their gender doesn’t excuse drugging them and raping them.

It seems strange that someone committing a crime would essentially brag that it’s a kind of crime they commit.  But Roman Polansky bragged about raping underage girls, and Woody Allen cracked jokes about orgies with children.  In fact, rapists tend to assume that everyone sees the world the way they do and try to normalize their conduct.  As the inimitable Kate Harding said about misogynist men joking about rape and abuse and getting men to joke along:

you have probably, at some point in your life, engaged in that kind of talk with a man who really, truly hates women–to the extent of having beaten and/or raped at least one. And you probably didn’t know which one he was.

And that guy? Thought you were on his side.

Rapists want to get all of us to nod along and giggle.  Oh you!  Courting controversy again!  Making twisted jokes again!

Miley just said she rapes people.  If we say it’s a joke in poor taste, we’re really just nodding along with it.  What I want is a criminal investigation, but I won’t get that.  At least I’d like us not to all treat it as a joke.  True or made up, it’s a statement of criminal activity.

People who think I need a sense of humor need to get a sense of mission.

Stonewalling Rape: Police Can Investigate, But Will They?

One thing that comes up over and over in discussing rape and how to stop it is the role of the criminal justice system.  Advocates for survivors are adamant that survivors don’t have to report and don’t have to use the system.  Many other people, for various reasons, think that survivors have an obligation to go to the police and prosecute.  Some of these people are well-intentioned, and others really just want to say that any survivor who does not report should be ignored. I’ve written at the greatest length about this specifically with reference to kinky communities, where the “cops or STFU” brigade is not well-intentioned, but rather mostly composed of people who know full well that successful prosecution is almost impossible, that contact with the police will be affirmatively awful for the survivor, and just want a rallying cry to shout down all survivors.

I won’t repeat a general explanation of why the criminal justice system is broken here.  For a lot of people in a lot of social positions, contact with the cops is not likely to go well.  That’s just the reality we have to live with, and anyone who doesn’t see that is neck-deep in their own privilege.  That explains why, for example,  people of color, or sex workers, or trans people might decide the cops are more likely to be a danger to them than to help them, and that’s not specific to rape. But there is another reason even the most privileged folks may not want to go to the police about a rape.  When the rape doesn’t fit the stranger-rape or overt-force storylines that make for the least difficult prosecutions (and sometimes even when it does), there is reason to believe that there may be no real investigation at all. It’s a journalistic convention to start with anecdotes, to humanize the story.  These are systemic problems, and I’d prefer to start with how many rape complaints languish without real investigation, how many cases are dropped without an interrogation of a certain number of witnesses and whatnot.  But that data is spotty or nonexistent; and people being people, it is necessary to start with a terrible story to humanize the problem.  So I’ll do this in the usual way.

[Content note for an ugly story about a woman who was sexually assaulted, then stonewalled.]

Hannah at Howard and the D.C. Police

Hannah (the name Amanda Hess used in her excellent reporting back when she was with the Washington Citypaper) was at a party at Howard — somewhere in the house, and her friends didn’t know where.  Her friends, her wingwomen, were looking for her, worried.  A big guy who said he had been paid to keep people from the second floor physically prevented them from going upstairs to look for her; then he made a show of looking himself, but all the bedroom doors were locked.  He was sweating.  Hannah’s friends thought he looked nervous, like he knew something was wrong.  The women yelled and made noise, ignoring the bodyguard’s and the owner’s orders that they leave, and eventually Hannah emerged from a bedroom: intoxicated, obviously out of it, barely able to negotiate the stairs.  Her friends had been with her much of the night, and she hadn’t had enough alcohol to be that drunk.  Something was wrong.  As they left, they  got half-way down the block before Hannah told them enough for them to figure out that she had been raped.  Then she threw up.  The women stormed back to the address of the house party, demanding to know who had taken Hannah into the bedroom.  The men inside gave a fake name, then slammed the door. Hannah did what the “cops or STFU” crowd insist on.  She went to the “proper authorities.”  Hannah’s friends took her, still throwing up, to Howard University Hospital.  Her friend filled out the intake form, “raped, possibly drugged.”  Then, Hess writes:

“Taking Responsibility” For Getting Raped

I feel sorry for Jonathan Swift. The term “satire” and specifically Swift’s “modest proposal” about eating Irish children gets pressed into service to excuse and defend more offensive nonsense than Swift could have ever predicted. But the art of satire, as Swift employed it, isn’t dead, nor even entirely lost even after being used as the dumping ground for all that sloppy rubbish.*

A Denver-area kinkster and consent activist, Coco Jones (not the radio personality) has graced us with “I’m Taking Responsibility For Getting Raped.” If you’re writing a manual on how to satirize offensive, oppressive bullshit the Swiftian way, by treating it entirely seriously within the four corners of the text and letting it hang itself, you would do well to use this as your example:

I owe everyone an apology. I never expected to write this, I was stuck in a different mindset for a long time. But I think it’s time I accept something and admit where I have gone wrong. I have been pushing away, countering, debating, and made myself an all out controversial figure in the community. And what for? This whole time I just haven’t been listening. I’ve been deflecting and refusing to take ownership for something.

It’s time for me to step up and accept what so many have been saying. I am finally going to take personal responsibility for getting raped. Yep, you heard me. No more of this, ‘stop victim blaming’. I have gotten the message loud and clear. You are right. I did this. You finally broke through to me.

So, this is how I got myself raped and how I will be at fault for a future rape, or perhaps a mere consent violation, should it occur.

     *     *     *

Sharing Stories: Leaving Kinky Communities

I’ll cut to the chase:  a friend and activist is collecting stories and aggregating information about people who have left BDSM or kink communities and their reasons.  I think this is important, and I want to encourage people to participate.  There is a survey form here.  There is a FAQ post about it here, and a follow-up here.  The blogger, Motley Mayhem, has put the project ahead of the personality and I’ll respect that, except to say that I know and believe in Motley from consent culture work on Fetlife and I am really glad Motley is doing this.

The project has grown organically from a call to Motley’s friends to share stories, into a much bigger effort to capture the frequency and commonalities of these narratives.  I don’t have access to any raw data, but I can tell you from the stories I’ve seen and heard over the years that I expect the real news to be the frequency and similarity of certain patterns.  Regular readers will know what I think; what’s more important is to have thousands of accounts to back up the ways in which kinky communities drive off exactly the people who seek them out; the ways they act as power centers for the established members of the community and not as resources to guide or advocate for all the people who are or should be their constituents.

In the last two or three years, consent activism has exploded within kinky communities.  A lot of people can share credit for a revolution in progress, because there is a revolution in progress, or, as I said in my biggest series of posts on this topic, there’s a war on.  This survey is the forging of a powerful weapon in that war, a weapon made of truth.  Please help.  If you have a story to tell, please tell what you can, and if you don’t, please signal boost this so it finds the people who do.