In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: July 2007

137 comments in…

And a whopping one answer:

The answer is relatively simple– which law would be broken?

If the woman pursued the abortion with malice towards the unborn, then it would be murder one. It is possible, although unlikely, that this would be brought. It is, however, likely that the doctor would be brought up on murder one charges for “murder for hire” as the action was taken against the helpless by someone without an emotional connection to the victim.

The woman is likely in a highly emotional state, so the likelihood that she is charged with murder two or manslaughter. What I would expect to see most often is the charge of murder 1 or 2 pled down to manslaughter.

IMHO, in cases of rape and incest, the abortion should come without penalty, but the rapist should then be charged with murder two and added consecutively to his crime. As it is, the charge for rape is far too lenient…

There you have it. The pro-life perspective.

Read More…Read More…

why do I fuck thee? let me count the ways

All 237 of them. Although they simplify the hundreds into 4 meta categories, researchers Cindy M. Meston and and David M. Buss have attempted for the first time to catalogue all of the reasons that humans have sex. (You can read the original article here. WARNING: PDF) By breaking motivations for sex into 4 huge categories (physical, goal attainment, emotional, and insecurity), Meston and Buss endeavor to explain the complexities of what was originally thought to be a pretty simple question. Researchers long assumed that there were three basic reasons that people have sex: to reproduce, to experience pleasure, and to relieve sexual tension, but no more. Their list includes things that seem incredibly obvious (I was attracted to the person) to the things that never would have occurred to me (to give my partner an STD). And some of them seem really, really redundant. What’s the distinction between “I was sexually aroused and wanted the release” and “I was ‘horny'”? Or “I wanted the pure pleasure” and “I wanted to experience the physical pleasure”? Hell, what even really distinguishes those four? I have no idea.

As it is, the article has some significant rejoinders to conventional wisdom. For example, the authors refute what one might call the gold digger myth: that women have sex to obtain resources and to sink their claws into an unsuspecting man’s wallet. Men were far more likely than women to admit to having a sexual relationship for purposes of getting a promotion, a raise, or a favor. They were also far more likely to cite the importance of proverbial arm candy in explaining why they were having sex.

While Tierney focuses on the points that either confirm or deny conventional wisdom, I find both the authors’ explanations of their results and possible sources of error to be the most fascinating part. (I mean, was I really supposed to be surprised that people do have sex because they feel obligated to do so? Or because they want to express affection for a partner?)

A gender-role perspective might explain this finding in terms of differences in the gender appropriateness of sexual constraint (i.e., females should be more restrained than males). If having sex (and lots of it) is something that society and evolution* have deemed successful men do (i.e., agentic, powerful, competent), then acting in this manner would be consistent with societal expectations for men. For women, however, endorsing reasons for having sex other than love, commitment, and reproduction would be inconsistent with societal expectancies. Thus, in order for a woman to do so, and to report doing so, she would necessarily need to be less concerned about social dictates and this might reflect an underlying cold and dominant personality style. In support of this explanation, disagreeableness (a trait linked to coldness and dominance) was strongly associated with each of the subfactors for having sex.

As with all self-report studies about sexual behavior, there is always the question as to whether or not your respondents are being truthful or conforming to expectations, and I think this part of the authors’ analysis is spot on. Questions about sex are loaded with cultural expectations and it can be difficult to get people to admit that they’re not within the acceptable range of behavior. The authors go on to point out that women who score higher on personality tests for disagreeableness and unconscientious are more likely to report more sexual partners, which at first makes it sound like only mean and irresponsible women have lots of partners, but really just illuminates the fact that if a woman doesn’t care what people think, she’s far more likely to buck expectations.

As far as reporting issues go, I am also concerned about the article’s discussion (or lack thereof) of rape. The article uses the word rape one time in the body of the paper and the term wasn’t included in the survey itself. (There were several choices: “I was afraid to say no due to the possibility of physical harm”, “I was physically forced”, “The person demanded I have sex with him or her”, “I was pressured into doing it”, “I was verbally coerced into doing it”.) Further, when talking about rape, the authors specifically only mentioned the two responses which address physical harm or threats. Given the overall significance of rape, particularly in their study population: mostly undergraduate and graduate students, I would have thought that this point required more inquiry.

And then there’s this, which made my stomach turn:

Men showed significantly greater endorsement of having sex due to physical reasons, such as “The person had a desireable body”; “The person was too hot (sexy) to resist”; and simply because the opportunity presented itself: “The person was available”; “The person had too much to drink and I was able to take advantage of them.

(Emphasis added)

It’s a little jarring to read an admission of rape in a scholarly article, but there you have it.

*One: this shouldn’t be phrased as a hypothetical. Two: evolution doesn’t “deem” anything. It’s not an agent.

From Clash to Civilization

Ari Melber has a post up at HuffPo today about a panel he’ll be moderating at YearlyKos. I’ll be speaking, along with Glenn Greenwald, The Politico’s Mike Allen and Time magazine’s Jay Carney.

The panel is Blogs and the MSM: From Clash to Civilization. It will address issues like:

Which conventional criticisms of blogs and the MSM are valid and why? Who should set the media’s agenda? How can bloggers and reporters make public discourse more relevant, factual, enlightening, inclusive and participatory? Can they work together on those goals? Should they?

I’m still mulling over these questions. I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions.

A Question for Pro-Lifers

I know there are at least a few regular readers who self-identify as “pro-life.” So here’s a question for you: How much time should she do?

One goal of the anti-choice movement is to outlaw abortion. But, as Anna Quindlen points out, anti-choice activists are almost never able to identify what the legal consequences should be for women who terminate their pregnancies. So, pro-lifers, tell me: What should the penalty be? How much time in jail should a woman face for abortion?

Anti-choicers emphasize that a fetus is a person, invested with all the same* natural rights as you or I. Life begins at conception. That fertilized egg has all of its DNA, making it just as human as all of us and endowing it with the right to live. Ok. But if a fetus is a person, and abortion indisputably kills a fetus, then abortion is murder — deliberate, pre-meditated murder. That certainly isn’t a new concept for anti-choicers — the “abortion is murder” line has been around for decades now. But we punish people for murder. We sentence them to long prison terms, often for life. Sometimes we execute them.

Do you support executing women who have abortions?

Do you support jailing them for life? For a few decades?

What if they have multiple abortions? What if they had access to all the literature and information that anti-choicers believe women considering abortion should be required to receive? What if they acknowledge that they know exactly what they are doing and they feel no guilt or shame for terminating their pregnancies?

Quindlen writes:

Lawmakers in a number of states have already passed or are considering statutes designed to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. But almost none hold the woman, the person who set the so-called crime in motion, accountable. Is the message that women are not to be held responsible for their actions? Or is it merely that those writing the laws understand that if women were going to jail, the vast majority of Americans would violently object? Watch the demonstrators in Libertyville try to worm their way out of the hypocrisy: It’s murder, but she’ll get her punishment from God. It’s murder, but it depends on her state of mind. It’s murder, but the penalty should be … counseling?

If women are so infantile that our bad acts toward fetuses must be punished with counseling or left to God, does that apply when our bad acts are directed at born people? If I kill my next-door neighbor, can I simply say that because of my tiny lady-brain and tinier lady-morals, I just didn’t know any better? Can I get counseling or some smiting instead of jail time?

How can it possibly be legally (or even morally) consistent to attach full rights to a fetus and then treat its death as somehow less important, or different, than the death of a born person?

Could it be that when we actually examine the case of a pre-meditated, deliberate murder of a born, living person against the case of a woman who terminates a pregnancy, we see that the two situations feel… different? Could it be that we see that there is a difference between a fetus and a born person?

But that’s not the “pro-life” argument.

To complicate things a little more: If life starts at conception, and from the moment of fertilization an egg is a full-fledged human being with the same rights as you or I, what do we do about calculating the death rate? The miscarriage rate? What do we do about all those embryos in fertility clinics? Do we force women to implant them and carry them to term? If not, how do we justify forcing women to carry naturally-implanted pregnancies to term? If the answer is that no, we don’t force women to be implanted with embryos, but we don’t kill the embryos either — we just let them be — then would it be ok for pregnant women to simply remove their embryos/fetuses without purposely killing them and just hope for the best?

If a fertilized egg is a full-fledged person under the law, what other legal activities — other than abortion — would have to go? Fertility treatments? Birth control? Any medical treatment that could potentially harm a fetus, even if foregoing it meant that the woman would experience severe health complications or death?

What about pregnant women engaging in behaviors that are risky for the fetus? Can she be prosecuted for child abuse or negligence if she, say, drinks coffee while she’s pregnant? If she eats tuna? If she smokes? What about if she goes skiing? What if she didn’t know she was pregnant, but should have known, and she does something risky — like goes binge drinking every night and survives off of Cheetos? Willful blindness? Neglect? What if she miscarries, and perhaps you can attribute it to something she did — negligent homicide?

What do doctors do if they’re faced with a life-threatening pregnancy? Do they force the woman to continue it, knowing it will kill her? I mean, it’s not the fetus’s fault, and it can’t really be construed as self-defense to terminate the pregnancy. And their lives are equal, aren’t they? Do we just let nature take its course, then?

Finally, what about if we’re deciding between an embryo and a born child — who wins out? Lots of feminists have asked this question before and we’ve never gotten a straight answer, so let me try again. Take this hypothetical: There’s a fire in a fertility clinic. Inside the clinic there’s a three-year-old boy who you’ve never met and have absolutely no connection to. There are also 100 embryos in a box. You only have time to run into the clinic one time. You cannot carry the boy and the box at the same time. What do you do? Do you save 100, or do you save one?

These are a lot of questions, but they absolutely must be asked. And those who want to see abortion criminalized need to think long and hard about the consequences of their ideal policies. Because this post is long and I know all your time is valuable, I’ll even let “pro-life” readers off the hook with this one, and I’ll ask that you just answer the first question: How much time should she do?

*This point is highly disputable — after all, no born people have the right to physically attach themselves to someone else and use that person’s body for their own survival, against the will and at the physical expense of the attachee. But that’s another post. Or a Judith Jarvis Thomson article.

dudes declare sexual assault funny as long as the victims are men

Thanks to Jill and the Feministe crew for giving me the opportunity to guest blog this week! I’m excited to be here. I usually write over at saltyfemme.com about queer, feminist, and Jewish things. I recently saw a video that left me disgusted and really confused. Hopefully you smart Feministers will chime in and help me work out some of this stuff. It’s humor so this warning may seem strange – this video is potentially triggering.

I was wary of posting this video for fear of directing more traffic to it. When I saw how many people have already watched it (it has nearly three million views on YouTube and counting), I figured it might be worth the attention. “Bro rape” has achieved mass popularity among (mostly) white college students for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Offensive stuff aside – and I’ll get to that in a minute – I actually just don’t find it funny.

The video is supposedly a parody of Dateline NBC’s programs about catching pedophiles. The Derrick Comedy group, made up of a group of NYU grads, write and perform pretty typical white college student humor, involving alcohol and sex jokes and always tinged with tones of sarcasm and self-mocking.

For those of you who don’t care to watch, here’s the opening bit. After a pretty gross fake rape scene, the fake news announcer jumps in (camera frozen on a “bro” being raped by a fellow “bro”):

It’s a type of rape that’s gone overlooked for decades. And it’s risen 44% in the last year. I’m talking, of course, about bro rape. What is a bro? A bro is an 18-24 year old male who wears Birkenstock sandals, watches Family Guy, plays ultimate Frisbee, and wears an upside-down visor or a baseball cap with a pre-frayed brim. You know, a bro. For every suburban house party, four bros will be raped, and only one in seven bros will tell their boys what happened the next day. As a result, most bro rapes go unreported.

The skit continues with the fake news team luring “bros” on the internet to come to “Chad’s place” to do dudely things. The reporter then rifles through each culprit’s bag, finding dudely items like gamecubes, beer, Axe deodorant and always a big black dildo, at which point the bro is considered caught. If someone can fill me in on why this is so funny that three million people have watched it, please do.

The skit ends with another fake rape scene. News flash to privileged college boys: rape is REAL. Men have been and continue to be victims of sexual assault. This is a pretty ugly contribution to the stigma men face around being rape victims. It mocks and silences male survivors of sexual assault, all of whom deal with the same crap as female victims plus all the feelings around not being real men because real men, straight men, don’t get sexually assaulted. And here’s why this video is silencing male survivors of assault – a group of college boys can make a video mocking male sexual assault that millions of people watch and find hilarious and not feel guilty about it because sexual assault against men is somehow not real. It’s almost as if the reason this sort of comedy is allowed is because it is so far from the realm of possibility. Everyone knows it’s not funny to mock sexual assault against women. Men, of course, are fair game. The reason it’s so funny is because it could never happen, right? A straight man could never rape another straight man. Right, except that most of the perpetrators of sexual assault against men are heterosexual. All of this humor rests on the fact that it is mocking something the creators deem impossible. This is dangerous territory for three million viewers.

Is it possible that they are mocking their own masculinity as a performance in and of itself? The opening lines from the newscaster I blockquoted above are some of the funniest lines in the skit, I think. It is a pretty impressive feat to have a group of boys who possess an overly heterosexual masculinity and style be able to step back and mock themselves. But are they simply reasserting their heterosexuality by mocking the idea of male sexual assault? I’m also curious about what makes this college humor among (mostly) white students. There is also be a bizarre race thread in this skit – why are most of the bros white (with one exception) and all the big dildos black? Mocking rape survivors, racism, homophobia, hints of sexism. And huge popularity with little criticism. What am I missing here?

Crossposted to saltyfemme

arabic hellos; sabah il kheer

Let me begin with a brief introduction and summary of the past 3 months.

I sometimes go by Aaysof.

I identify as an Egyptian-American born and raised in Houston, Texas.
My mother moved from Cairo to the States with her family when she was 18 and in her 20s married a first generation Hungarian man; however, he is very detached from his roots.
Growing up, assimilation was a general theme.
In 2005, I received a BS in psychology and a BFA in photography/digital media. Currently, in Cairo im teaching English and, inshallah, will begin a masters program in gender and women studies with a North African concentration.

On may 1st I moved to Cairo, Egypt.  Texas and Egypt was created to track my journey as truthfully as possible.

The following is an excerpt of a letter/vent written to my father about why I didn’t learn Arabic growing up. It was never sent due to it’s unfair harsh quality.

Growing up, I remember your negative comments when Arabic was spoken in your presence. I remember remarks that indicated how rude you felt it was for mom and her parents to speak their mother tongue with you around.
How is it that you would marry an Egyptian woman then do nothing to embrace her culture?

Read More…Read More…

I am a real grown-up.

I just bought my first living room furniture — as in, a couch, a chair and a table that actually match. Which means I’m moving into my first apartment that actually has a living room. Plus I just got my first real business cards (thanks to everyone who emailed to offer to design them, and to Jim who created an awesome one) and a business card holder. And in four days, I will be solidly in my “mid-20s.” To top it all off, my room mate and I are painting our new apartment actual colors, and we have a decorating scheme that involves more than “Why don’t we hang those pictures that we got from your ex-boyfriend’s former room mate? I mean, they’re framed…”

Kids grow up so fast, don’t they?

Good enough?

I hate it when Post Secret makes me teary. Otherwise, posted without comment.

Updated: if the image isn’t showing up for some reason, click the link and scroll about halfway down. The card is a black and white photo of a woman leaning against a wall and the text begins “my greatest fear…” or you can check it out here.