October 2009 – Page 7

New Yorkers want sex ed in schools

And most of them wrongly believe their kids are getting it.

A few numbers for you: One in three New York City high school students are sexually active. One in five have had sex with four or more partners. Only two-thirds of high schoolers report using condoms at all. One in five sexually active high school girls report not using birth control the last time they had sex.

Seventy-seven percent of parents believe that sex education is required in New York schools.

They’re wrong. Sexual health education is not mandated in New York City or New York State, despite the fact that 85% of parents want it.

Thankfully, Planned Parenthood is trying to bridge that gap with a campaign to make sure that NYC students receive sexual health education. Head over there, check out their plan and help where you can.

No More Rape By Contract

Senator Al Franken passed a major piece of legislation today, a major warning for the defense contractors hired by the U.S. government and their disregard for their female employees. It’s notable that all women in the Senate, Democrat and Republican, voted in favor of the amendment while thirty Republican men voted against it.

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang raped by her co-workers while working for defense contractor KBR/Halliburton in Baghdad, and was then detained in a shipping container for over 24 hours without food or water and told that if she sought medical treatment “she’d be out of a job.” Afterward, Jones was prevented from taking the case to court because her contract stipulated that any sexual assault allegations could only be heard in private arbitration.

The Franken amendment withholds contracts from these companies “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.”

The Department of Defense opposed the bill. Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama was rather vocal about his opposition, maintaining that “Franken’s amendment overreached into the private sector and suggested that it violated the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution.”

Apparently because companies, not women, deserve due process under the law. And because corporations should be allowed to abuse and aid in the abuse of their employees regardless of all civil and criminal laws designed to protect them!

More power to designing protections for an individual’s rights as a citizen and worker, especially when the taxpayers are footing the bill.

Can someone explain to me

Why this David Letterman thing matters? I hear Melissa’s point that there’s a power dynamic and that there are potential coercion issues, but given the facts I’ve seen, I still respond to the whole story with a resounding “So what?”. Yes, there is an inherent power dynamic between a boss and his underlings; yes, that can complicate relationships. Yes, a series of affairs with lower-level employees is a sign of something odd — narcissism or recklessness, at the very least. I’m generally of the mindset that inter-office affairs are a very bad idea; when the person instigating the affair is a higher-ranking man, they’re often even more problematic, because of the power dynamics Liss points out.

But there’s only so far we can go when it comes to socially regulating peoples’ sexual behavior. And while I would be all in favor of a good public shaming if the women involved in these affairs pointed to coercive, harassing or hostile behavior; if other employees said that Letterman’s actions were creating a hostile and uncomfortable, sexually-charged work environment, I would also be sympathetic. But none of the women who had relationships with Letterman, at least that I’ve seen, said they felt coerced. None of the women said that they felt like sleeping with Dave was a job requirement. There haven’t been sexual harassment claims. Work-place affairs, though often a bad idea, happen all the time. In the better scenarios, they result in long-term relationships. I understand that there are issues inherent to more powerful men having sexual relationships with their subordinates, but why is that something Letterman should have to apologize on-air for — unless, of course, there actually were issues of coercion or harassment?

Powerful men feeling entitled to relationships with less-powerful and often younger women is a problem. Eroticizing power in men and youth and beauty in women is a problem. I don’t think it’s appropriate, in any work place, for a superior to have a series of affairs with a number of subordinates. Certainly Letterman’s actions were questionable, and possibly unethical and wrong. But I guess I’m not just seeing how Letterman’s consensual sexual relationships are cause for national media attention, distasteful as I might find them.

Although perhaps I’m missing something. Admittedly, I find the whole story annoying, so I’ve been avoiding coverage on it, and there’s a good chance there are huge factual gaps in my analysis. Am I just clueless here?

A Case of Morals

I know I said I didn’t have any sympathy for Roman Polanski before, but after finding out that Polanski still couldn’t be troubled to pay the settlement his accuser won in a civil suit twenty-five years later? Ugh.

[via PostBourgie]

Glenn Beck: Sexist.

Certainly not the most surprising news you’ll hear today.

Protests this Saturday to support survivors of sexual violence

Protesters around the country will gather in front of movie theaters this coming Saturday, October 10, to show their support for survivors of sexual violence and anger at Hollywood’s support for Roman Polanski. The effort is being organized by the nonprofit PAVE: Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment.

More information and a list of participating cities is available on the PAVE website. Also, they’re looking for more organizers, so if you’re interested, email PAVE at RapeisRape@gmail.com and they’ll send you their action kit.

The Answer to Your Question is “No.”

The New Agenda founder Amy Siskind asks, “Should Women Back Palin in 2012?” And yes, she appears to be serious.

Siskin argues that Obama hasn’t been all that great for women, so we should take a chance on Sarah. Because, you know, Palin is a woman. And she played college basketball. And this one time she appointed a pro-choice judge.

I wish I were kidding, but Siskind literally says, “I know I’ll hear from critics who claim that Palin would not share my policy views. But what makes them so sure?”

Um… Palin’s own words?

Sarah Palin has made it clear that despite her own success, she has very little interest in promoting women’s rights. She is anti-choice. She favors abstinence-only education. She is a classic social conservative. She is not a feminist; she is not a proponent of women’s rights.

She is also not the only female politician out there. If our goal is to get more women into office — and that is certainly a laudable goal — then why not work for women who actually represent our views? It’s not like there’s a shortage of smart, involved, passionate feminist women out there. Promoting Palin just seems like the worst kind of pandering, since it’s clearly not about her intellect, her integrity, her talent or her progressive values. It’s about her status, simply, as a woman. And when it comes to being dishonest, corrupt, anti-intellectual, anti-feminist and self-promoting at all costs, women are just as capable as men. Sarah Palin is nothing if not proof of that.

When we’re 50 percent of the country, surely we can do better.

Effed Up Post of the Day

Wow, Susanna Breslin, this is a new low: Would You Marry A Man Who Is Morbidly Obese?

At the very least, Breslin’s post is a good reminder that just because something crosses your mind doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to publicly opine on it.

How I wore hijab and how much it sucked for me

Up until recently, I lived in Jordan. I worked. I played. I was in love. I had two cats named Fanty & Mingo. I also got sexually harassed. I got sexually harassed so much that I’d sometimes sit in my apartment after dark and seriously consider not doing an emergency tampon run, because I knew that inevitably, some dudes would wander into my path and have a field-day. Trying to prevent said harassment, I wore hijab for a while. The results of that little experiment were recently published in JO Magazine.

I tried to go for nuance. Hijab, for me, wasn’t a “wonderful cultural experience.” Neither did I emerge from that particular episode screaming about how it’s time to “liberate” Muslims from their headscarves. I tried to apply similar logic to the proposal to ban the burqa in France. I felt I could draw some parallels there, or maybe I was wrong to have done so. You guys can draw your own conclusions.

The saddest part for me today is that while that article hints at a happy ending, the reality is different. I had to leave. I let my ex keep Fanty & Mingo.

Having dealt with assault, I found I wasn’t coping with the aggression too well. It caused too much self-doubt. Like, “wait a minute, for years now, I’ve been telling myself – Natalia, you’re a human being and not a lump of meat, you deserve to breathe the same air as everyone else and walk on the same sidewalks and stuff – but the things in your head that you were running from, they’re now coming out of the mouths of the little kids outside. In the immortal words of Armageddon: ‘Wow, this is a goddamn Greek tragedy.’ ”

I’m in Ukraine right now, and I do miss Jordan. I miss what we had with my ex, I miss my Jordanian friends, I miss the kind of weather that doesn’t give me a hacking cough. I miss the way the people at the mini-market knew me by name. I miss the ancient history beneath my flip-flops. I don’t miss being a fake hijabi – in the end, I simply hated having to pretend to be someone else for a scrap of respect – though I must acknowledge that in Kiev, in the doldrums, it would keep the ears warm.

Study Shows High Rates of Violent Crime Against People With Disabilities

The first national study on crime against people with disabilities has been released by the Justice Department, and it shows that people with disabilities (PWD) are the victims of violent crimes at approximately 1.5 times the rate of temporarily able-bodied people. NPR reports:

The results, just released by the Justice Department, are disturbing. But they come as no surprise to those who work with people with disabilities. For a long time, they’ve known about this particular crime problem, at least anecdotally.

…

But what people in the field had long known, and what the Justice Department report confirms, is that crime is a daily fact of life for many people with disabilities and most of it never gets public attention.

The study, by Michael Rand and Erika Harrell of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, found that, in 2007, people with disabilities were victims of 716,000 violent crimes and 2.3 million property crimes.

Disabled women were the most at risk: They were victims at rates almost twice that for other females. And unlike other women, those with disabilities were far more likely to be victimized by people they weren’t close to. The report found that 16 percent of violent crimes against females with a disability were committed by a current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend. Among women without disabilities, it was 27 percent.

The study also shows that assailants are most likely to victimize people with cognitive disabilities, and people with multiple disabilities (a person with more than one disability was the victim in more than half of all violent crimes committed against PWD).

On the subject of violence against women specifically, while attacks by intimate partners make up a smaller percentage of violent crimes against women with disabilities than those against able-bodied women, previous studies also show that caretakers are the most common perpetrators of sexual violence in cases where women with disabilities are victims, followed by male family members. Thus, unless things have changed dramatically in recent years, the statement that “those with disabilities were far more likely to be victimized by people they weren’t close to” is likely not true, but rather it’s more commonly different relationships that are being violated.

The fact that these crimes so rarely make the news — and that when they do, they are presented as some sort of abnormality rather than a systematic problem — has to be noted a sizable part of the reason for their prevalence. Silence helps abuse to continue, and abusers are most like to choose victims who a) they believe will stay silent or b) they believe will be silenced if/when the abuse is reported. Able-bodied society has erected many barriers to PWD speaking out about abuse, which are heavily connected to wider forms of ableist oppression, and Lauredhel discusses some of the most common ones here. Violent criminals quite logically utilize the abusive systems we already have in place to their greatest advantage. And this we should already know.

Our society rarely likes to acknowledge and address issues of systematic prejudice and violence — indeed, such systems are created because those privileged in them have something to gain — and so these cases, the perpetrators, and the victims are frequently overlooked. That this is being billed as the first ever national study of crime against PWD alone tells us that. Acknowledging the violence surrounding us might force more people to realize that these high rates of violence exist for a reason, and that just like with any other marginalized group that is routinely victimized by others, it has nothing to do with PWD being inherently easy or vulnerable targets. Rather, it has everything to do with how a society structured around the needs and perspectives of able-bodied people marginalize and isolate people with disabilities and otherwise treat them as lesser human beings, unworthy of rights, safety and protection. Such a society only aides and encourages perpetrators of violence.