December 2010 – Page 5

Rest peacefully, Elizabeth Edwards

Very sad to hear that Ms. Edwards passed away today. From the linked article, she left the following on her Facebook page yesterday:

“The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered,” Edwards wrote on her Facebook page Monday. “We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren’t able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It’s called being human.

“But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that, I am grateful.”

Cultural Constructions, Part 2

I want to have a conversation about different ways in which whiteness is figured in different contexts. Whiteness is constructed as the default identity, the proper one, an invisible one, for contexts in which it dominates. Let’s start with my context.

I live in a country in which the population is ninety per cent white. You’d think that Australian whiteness would be a varied and complex thing, therefore, but it’s actually constructed in a pretty monolithic way. I was talking to Queen Emily of Questioning Transphobia about this, and she said that in the United States whiteness is produced from assimilation and sometimes erasure of a range of ethnic backgrounds and associated cultures in exchange for the hierarchical placement of whiteness. On the other hand, in Australia, whiteness is largely constructed from Anglo-Saxon identity and culture, because that is the dominant background here.

So, what whiteness means here is quite different to what it means in the United States and, I imagine, a lot of other contexts. I mentioned Greek and Italian Australians in my last post, and how white status for those groups is very new. It’s also partial: people of those backgrounds are considered as having a particular substrand of whiteness, a whiteness that isn’t quite. Any form of whiteness that isn’t Anglo Australian isn’t quite as properly white. This throws my Greek and Italian acquaintances and I into some odd moments of sympathy and solidarity in a way that, I gather, wouldn’t be possible in a context in which people of those backgrounds are considered to be unconditionally white.

You’re only considered properly Australian if you’re white. I’ve spoken before about the idea of the “Aussie girl” and how she is always figured as a white one. There are similar dynamics going on in France, in the UK, in the US, I don’t doubt a lot of other countries with a majority white population. So, here, whiteness is being used to construct national identities – and national identity is being used to shore up whiteness’ power. There is only one way of being properly Australian, and both non-white immigrants (and their descendants, like me) and Indigenous populations are expected to emulate whiteness and the associated culture. In this country with a strong sense of national identity, there’s a strong, partially obscured sense that whiteness is what advocates of a unified national identity are really going for.

Next time, we’re going to talk about shifts from non-whiteness to whiteness.

Some thoughts on “sex by surprise”

There’s a lot going around in bloglandia and on the interwebs about WikiLeaks honcho Julian Assange’s sexual assault charge in Sweden; commentators are saying that Assange didn’t really rape anyone, and these are trumped-up charges of “sex by surprise,” which basically means that Assange didn’t wear a condom and so days later the women he slept with are claiming rape. Totally unfair, right?

Well, no, I’m not sure it’s that straightforward. The actual details of what happened are hard to come by, and are largely filtered through tabloid sources that are quick to offer crucial facts like the hair color of the women (blonde) and the clothes they wore (pink, tight), but it sounds like the sex was consensual on the condition that a condom was used. It also sounds like in one case, condom use was negotiated for and Assange agreed to wear a condom but didn’t, and the woman didn’t realize it until after they had sex; in the second case, it sounds like the condom broke and the woman told Assange to stop, which he did not. This is of course speculation based on the bare-bones reported description of events, but it’s at least clear that “this is a case of a broken condom” isn’t close to the whole story. (It’s also worth pointing out that the charge is actually a quite minor one in Sweden, and the punishment is a $700 fine).

Withdrawal of consent should be grounds for a rape charge (and it is, in Sweden) — if you consent to having sex with someone and part of the way through you say to stop and the person you’re having sex with continues to have sex with you against your wishes, that’s rape. That may not sound entirely familiar to Americans, since the United States has relatively regressive rape laws; in most states, there’s a requirement of force in order to prove rape, rather than just demonstrating lack of consent. Consent is more often used as a defense to a rape charge, and it’s hard to convict someone of rape based solely on non-consent. Some states, like New York, have rape laws on the books which include “no means no” provisions for intercourse — basically, if a reasonable person would have understood that the sex was not consensual, then that’s rape. It seems obvious enough, but those laws are not used nearly as often as forcible-rape laws; they aren’t on the books in many states, and they’re difficult to enforce even where they are.

Withdrawal of consent gets even trickier. It’s an obvious enough concept for feminist thinkers who have spent more than 10 minutes considering the realities of sex and sexual assault: If you consent to sex but then at some point during sex withdraw that consent by telling your partner to stop, your partner should stop, and if your partner doesn’t stop then that’s assault. It’s not too hard, for those of us who have had sex, to imagine how this works — I have a difficult time imagining any decent human being hearing their partner say “Stop!” in the middle of sex and not, you know, stopping. I can’t imagine hearing my partner say “Stop” and not stopping. And if your partner is saying “Stop stop stop stop!” and you keep going, yes, you are raping them.

But the concept of withdrawing consent seems to be a little tougher for folks who think of sex as something women give to men (or men take from women); it’s definitely a tougher concept for folks who think that sex inherently sullies women. I suspect that the thought process goes, If the damage (penetrative sex) has already been done, then the situation can’t possibly turn into a rape, because the initial penetration itself occurred consensually, and it’s that penetration that’s the basis of the harm in any rape case. Consent, in that framework, isn’t the point. The U.S. is a bit of a patchwork when it comes to withdrawal of consent laws, with some states recognizing that withdrawal of consent is valid and that it is rape if you keep having sex with someone after they’ve said no, and other states either not touching the issue or not recognizing as rape situations where consent is withdrawn post-penetration. Making the Assange story juicier blog-bait in the U.S. is the fact that we’re deeply wedded to the notion of rape as forcible; despite many of our best efforts, a consent-based framework for evaluating sexual assault is not yet widely accepted. So we hear “she consented to sex but only with a condom and he didn’t use a condom and now she’s claiming he raped her” and we go, “say what?”, because that’s so far removed from the Law & Order: SVU sexual assault model. When, really, if you evaluate sexual assault through the lens of consent rather than force or violence, the picture starts to look a little bit different.

Whether withdrawal of consent is what actually happened here is impossible to tell, so I’m not suggesting that Assange is a rapist or that these charges are 100% definitely on-point; I have no idea. But neither do the commentators who are saying that Assange did nothing more than have sex without a condom. And it’s important to counter the “haha sex by surprise those crazy Swedes” media narrative with the fact that actually, non-consensual sex is assault and should be recognized as such by law. Consenting to one kind of sexual act doesn’t mean that you consent to anything else your partner wants to do; if it’s agreed that the only kind of sex we’re having is with a condom, then it does remove an element of consent to have sex without a condom with only one partner’s knowledge. To use another example, if you and your partner agree that you can penetrate her, it doesn’t necessarily follow that she has the green light to penetrate you whenever and however.

I’m not particularly interested in debating What Assange Did or Whether Assange Is A Rapist, and I’d appreciate it if we could steer clear of that in the comments section. Rather, I’m interested in pushing back on the primary media narrative about this case, which is that women lie and exaggerate about rape, and will call even the littlest thing — a broken condom! — rape if they’re permitted to under a too-liberal feminist legal system. In fact, there are lots of good reasons to support consent-based sexual assault laws, and to recognize that consent goes far beyond “yes you can put that in here now.” It’s a shame that the shoddy, sensationalist reporting on this case have muddied those waters.

UPDATE: As greater clarity is brought to these charges, it sounds like it was a lot more than “they agreed he would wear a condom and he didn’t.” According to the Press Association, “The court heard Assange is accused of using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner … The fourth charge accused Assange of having sex with a second woman, Miss W, on August 17 without a condom while she was asleep at her Stockholm home.” Emphasis mine. Kate Harding has more.

Arizona Funding Cuts Cause Patients to Be Dropped From Transplant Lists

In further news that the U.S. residents among us can be unspeakably proud of, the state of Arizona has, thanks to budget cuts, stopped funding some life-saving organ transplants for patients who cannot pay for them themselves. The result is that those who cannot come up with the money to fund a potential transplant — and let’s face it, if one was relying on state Medicaid, one doesn’t have endless supplies of money to pay for highly expensive medical procedures readily at hand — are being dropped from transplant lists. The NY Times reports:

Even physicians with decades of experience telling patients that their lives are nearing an end are having difficulty discussing a potentially fatal condition that has arisen in Arizona: Death by budget cut.

Effective at the beginning of October, Arizona stopped financing certain transplant operations under the state’s version of Medicaid. Many doctors say the decision amounts to a death sentence for some low-income patients, who have little chance of survival without transplants and lack the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for them.

“The most difficult discussions are those that involve patients who had been on the donor list for a year or more and now we have to tell them they’re not on the list anymore,” said Dr. Rainer Gruessner, a transplant specialist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. “The frustration is tremendous. It’s more than frustration.”

Organ transplants are already the subject of a web of regulations, which do not guarantee that everyone in need of a life-saving organ will receive one. But Arizona’s transplant specialists are alarmed that patients who were in line to receive transplants one day were, after the state’s budget cuts to its Medicaid program, ruled ineligible the next — unless they raised the money themselves.

If one can get past the unbearable horror of the situation long enough, they will also find the irony to be quite rich:

State Medicaid officials said they recommended discontinuing some transplants only after assessing the success rates for previous patients. Among the discontinued procedures are lung transplants, liver transplants for hepatitis C patients and some bone marrow and pancreas transplants, which altogether would save the state about $4.5 million a year.

“As an agency, we understand there have been difficult cuts and there will have to be more difficult cuts looking forward,” said Jennifer Carusetta, chief legislative liaison at the state Medicaid agency.

During the debate on health care reform, many on the right-wing used scare-mongering tactics to suggest that a public health care system would result in “death panels” as the government rationed resources. This argument ignored how commonly insurance companies deny medical procedures and how frequently those without insurance are already unable to access care — but they also ignored that if anyone was going to favor balancing a budget over human lives, they were certainly not primarily going to be leftists. If anything in existence deserves to be called a death panel, it did not result from a commitment to public health care, but from the refusal to recognize health care access for people of all income levels as a human right. These cuts are not public health care gone wrong, but the devaluation of public health care systems reaching its logical conclusion.

Oops, I forgot to have babies!

photo of multiple babies — Crap, I knew there was something I was supposed to do last week.

Don’t you hate it when that happens? So does Vanessa Grigoriadis at New York Magazine, who is Very Concerned that the birth control pill means that women don’t realize the biological realities of baby-making… until it’s too late.

The fact is that the Pill, while giving women control of their bodies for the first time in history, allowed them to forget about the biological realities of being female until it was, in some cases, too late. It changed the narrative of women’s lives, so that it was much easier to put off having children until all the fun had been had (or financial pressures lessened). Until the past couple of decades, even most die-hard feminists were still married at 25 and pregnant by 28, so they never had to deal with fertility problems, since a tiny percentage of women experience problems conceiving before the age of 28. Now many New York women have shifted their attempts at conception back about ten years. And the experience of trying to get pregnant at that age amounts to a new stage in women’s lives, a kind of second adolescence. For many, this passage into childbearing—a Gail Sheehy–esque one, with its own secrets and rituals—is as fraught a time as the one before was carefree.

Suddenly, one anxiety—Am I pregnant?—is replaced by another: Can I get pregnant? The days of gobbling down the Pill and running out to CVS at 3 a.m. for a pregnancy test recede in the distance, replaced by a new set of obsessions. The Pill didn’t create the field of infertility medicine, but it turned it into an enormous industry. Inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary side effect.

Um, what? I don’t think “side effect” means what you think it does.

As Lindsay Beyerstein points out, the Pill isn’t creating a collective female brain-fart where we wake up at 40 and wonder why we can’t have kids. Women are pretty aware that when they’re on the Pill, they are probably not going to get pregnant — that is the entire point. And women are pretty aware that baby-making is not a life-long ability. Blaming the Pill for women delaying childbirth takes the women themselves out of the equation. It’s not like the Pill is slipped into the water system. Women are choosing to take it and choosing to delay childbirth, and mostly to pretty positive outcomes — larger numbers of women are attending college and graduate school in the United States than ever before; there are more women in the workplace than ever before; women live longer; mothers spend more time (and more quality time) with their children than they did in the mythical 1950s heyday of the nuclear family; fathers spend more time with their children, too; and couples marry later (and couples who marry later divorce less, are more financially stable and report happier marriages). Are all of these things to the credit of the birth control pill? No. But the Pill certainly played a big role.

Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

Post a link to something you’ve written this week, along with a short description. Make it specific — link to a post, not your entire blog.

Blog tweaks: sidebar widgets

I’ve just added a Most Commented Recent Posts widget to the sidebar under the Recent Comments widget. The idea is that it will help people find those lively conversations from the last few weeks and keep those discussions going after the posts themselves roll off the front page.

The number of links displayed in both widgets can be tweaked. At the moment I have twice as many links in the Most Commented Posts widget as in the Recent Comments widget, in order to encourage people to not only look at the most recently commented posts. Thoughts?

ObGeek: the relevant plugin at wordpress.org

How exciting for us all!

I’m going to be guest blogging at Bitch Magazine for the next eight weeks. You can check out the first post in my series, Iconography, on feminist icons in literature. I’ll be exploring characters and creators as well as unpacking the place of icons in feminism and who gets to be one.

Help the New York Times come up with a new trend piece

Cat attacking baby — Trend among young women today: Wanting babies, having cats.

Inspired by Amanda Hess’s look at New York Times trend pieces — pieces that are usually about such pressing topics as “women are too successful to get married” and “women go to Ivy League schools in order to get married” and “some women have chicken coops” and “some hipsters are fat because they are no longer threatened by women in the work place” and “there are men who own cats” — I think we should give the Times a hand. Clearly, most of their contributors are just writing about their own friends in small-ish New York media circles that revolve around the Upper West Side, the Village and Brownstone Brooklyn, where chicken coops and pet choices are breaking news.

So we should help them out. What stupid, insular things do you observe within your social group that should grace the pages of the New York Times? Here are my suggestions:

-Women: Some of them make “your mom” jokes, while some go with the clearly inferior “that’s what she said.” Conflicts abound.
-Young singles widely entertained by watching YouTube clips of cats attacking babies
-Twentysomethings: Still quoting Adam Sandler movies like it’s the 90s
-Ladies Love Flea Markets
-Brunch the new “it” meal (Lead: As more women enter the workforce, brunch has become the most important meal of the week, and women who perform highly in their jobs dedicate the same diligence to their search for the perfect bloody mary. But in “brunching,” as it is commonly called, are women forsaking the traditional dinner date — and possibly marriage?).
-Gross-out humor revolving around farts and menstruation, as well as wry commentary about touching yourself and then crying and falling asleep alone, all the rage among young single female professionals.
-Antique shops thrive as young women seek to imitate the pages of Domino
-The new sign of responsible adulthood for urban women: Houseplants that you manage to not kill
-Move over, chocolate; cheese is the new female indulgence.

In other news, I have discovered that my peer group has the interests of 13-year-old boys and 85-year-old women.

Leave your ideas for Incisive New York Times Trend Stories in the comments.

Bernice B. Donald nominated to the Sixth Circuit

Bernice B. Donald, a district court judge in Memphis, has been nominated to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Supreme Court nominations are widely covered and discussed in the United States, but it’s really the lower courts that are handing down the vast majority of legal decisions. Federal courts of appeal are of particular importance, because they’re right below the Supreme Court in terms of power and influence (their decisions are binding upon lower courts in their circuits), but they hear and decide many, many more cases than the Supreme Court does. Their decisions shape the law of the land in incredibly important ways. And the influence of circuit courts has not been lost on Republican presidents, who have nominated large numbers of conservative judges to the bench. If Obama wants to have a lasting impact on the legal landscape of the United States, one of the best things he can do is focus on the federal courts of appeal and nominate the best, most fair-minded judges possible.

And Judge Donald is a good pick. She’s a former public defender, which means that she acted as a criminal defense attorney for defendants who couldn’t afford their own lawyer (it also means that she’s seen the hurdles that indigent criminal defendants face, which is certainly valuable experience for a judge). She was Tennessee’s first black female district court judge, and has made it a personal goal to foster diversity among her staff and in the legal profession generally.

Diane Lucas, who is an attorney in New York and an occasional Feministe guest-blogger, clerked for Judge Donald and sent me this story, with the comment that “Judge Donald is an amazing judge who truly is bringing justice in our federal courts. She has been a staunch advocate for the rights of women and people of color, and I am so happy she is ‘moving on up’.”

Indeed. Congrats Judge Donald, and good luck.