men can stop rape? OF COURSE THEY FUCKING CAN

I stumbled upon a link to these posters, and loved them SO MUCH. While I'm all about taking self-defense classes (if it makes you feel safer) and making smart choices (although we're all entitled to act stupidly from time to time without horrendous repercussions), let's get one thing straight. Not only is rape not the fault of the individual it happens to, it is definitely not the fault of women as an aggregate group.

Rape is the fault of men. Period. End of sentence.

Not all men. But men as a group. You have the power to influence your friends, your sons, your younger brothers, hell, even to act right yourselves. And this is a deeply powerful form of influence, because according to Transforming a Rape Culture (my light summer reading), 99% of rapists are men.

Let me repeat myself. 99% of rapists are men.

So the title of this campaign, which I deeply admire and love for its actions and intent, is a little comical. Men can stop rape? Who else if not the ones doing the raping can stop it? We women can try, bit by bit, to teach ourselves about self-defense and going out in groups and reading those scary forwards female relatives always pass along about the horrible things that await us in the big scary world. We can work on educating future generations of men about how to treat women as full-fledged fucking human beings, and to counsel each other when rape happens to our friends, sisters, and loved ones. We can do what we can to staunch the bleeding of this eternal wound of the female consciousness.

Or men could stop raping. That would, indeed, also solve the problem.

Much love,
The Sheriff

Hitting on Ladies: The Ultimate Guide to Sleaze

In a recent conversation with a friend, the issue was brought up of how incredibly sleazy most attempts to pick her up have been, coming from either hetero guys or women who have only ever been with hetero guys. The theory here is the women learn about picking up women only from the hetero guys they’ve been with, and that the hetero guy form of “picking up a chick” can be decidedly sleazy.

How many times have you seen teenage boys yelling at women? “Hey honey, nice ass!” “Whens the last time you were with a real man?” “I’d tap that” But it doesn’t stop there – the sleaziness of an attempted pick-up can range from idiotic and confrontational cat-calling to creeperific staring, hovering, etc. Oftentimes, especially closer range, it has a lot to do with drunkenness – but how did this become such a commonplace, thoughtless action? Does it ever actually work?

I’m worried that the sleaze-approach is one that continues because of a cyclical event, reoccurring, as either the low-self esteem of a woman validates the sleaziness of a man or vice versa. This cycle of sexism and emotional violence is one only perpetuated by the media, as well as by the examples that older generations set for younger ones.

This cycle is yet another reason why the term “Think Globally, Act Locally” is essential to just about every movement. Because if you don’t work to fix and educate up from the sexism at home, who will? But on the flip side, how do you combat sexism at home when its confrontational, personal and all sorts of ugly?

As a gender non-conforming person, I don’t get cat-called often, and when I do, it’s usually about my sexuality. For me, this poses an issue of safety in confrontation, depending on the time and place that it happens. We can go with the Sheriff’s tried and true method of flipping the bird and walking away, but what about before or after these actions of overt sexism happen?

How do we find the courage within ourselves to stand up for women, to make the conversation lose its energy while we reprimand someone or try to educate them, how do we find the courage to cat and let ourselves be labeled the angry, unappealing feminist when we leave the confines of our cushy smith bubble?

In a workshop in Internalized Sexism I did in the Spring, we discussed how the judgment that we, as female bodied people, feel most often swayed by is that of men. It is also possible that judgment from men can take a harsher form - a girlfriend might tell me it's not my color, but my gay male friend will give me a novel about the ways my body is and isn't working right now. Why is it our value is swayed towards men, while so little of our comfort is?

Just a little food for thought. Also, feel free to comment for a future post: a collaborative article on how to hit on ladies without making them feel the sleaze.

Over and out,
General Lee

FAME!

I recently read a piece in Bust about this topic, so I make no claims to any new intellectual discussion about this, but it got me thinking about things I've said myself about the nature of fame.

Not long ago, I wrote about why Taylor Swift scares me. For those to lazy to click that link, in a nutshell, I argued that by ignoring the topic of her sexuality and sex in general while singing about men on white horses and other virginity-laden trappings, she misleads her fans for whom she's clearly an enormous role model.

But that phrase "role model" is somewhat problematic. Because it's pretty rare to find famous young men who come under fire for their actions as "role models" as often as it happens to women. Bust compared Miley and Justin Bieber. While Miley has to apologize for her actions (posing sorta naked for Vogue, singing a sorta sexual song with Bret Michaels, pole dancing at some awards show, etc), Justin hasn't really come under that sort of fire. In part, it seems like his mom is a leeetle more controlling than Miley's pops (apparently Bieber has a strict curfew and gets his laptop taken away at 10PM), thus keeping him from doing anything "questionable."

On the other hand, I'm hard-pressed to think of anything branded "morally questionable" for famous young men. Their misbehavior isn't considered news in the way that that of female train wrecks is. Paparazzi live to get an upskirt shot of some drunken star wearing no panties, but no equivalent exists for male stars. The tabloids are covered with stories about women in danger, ranging from drug abuse to eating disorders to sexual exploits. But rarely, except in a case where women of supposed poor moral fiber are involved (Tiger Woods, anyone?), are the details of men's personal lives scrutinized in the same voracious manner. Thanks to the attitude that boys-will-be-boys and the idea that their sex lives aren't grounds for deducing clues about their morality, fame is just another gendered arena for judging women under harsher criteria than men.

So, Taylor, my apologies, for judging you in the same way everyone else does.

Much love,
The Sheriff

PS-I'm back at Smith for good now (well, just for the year since I'm a senior...eep!), so blogging with be more regular, I promise!

deep in the heart of sexism!

The Sheriff just got back from a lovely little jaunt to the Lone Star State to visit a just graduated Smithie and Albrighter in West Texas (speaking of my Sheriff identity, in the DFW airport I spotted a fabulously awful pink cowgirl hat with a tiara on it...damn shame I didn't buy it). Bluntly, I was surprised by how much I liked it: given that I spend most of my time in Northampton (and will be vacationing in Rehoboth Beach, a gay beach town, this week with more FF writers), I thought Texas would be a shock in a nasty way. But aside from a local in a bar who bought us a round and then asked our opinion on the Arizona immigration law, I found most of the people to be extremely friendly, if a little innocuously hyper-religious (our visit coincided with a Christian rock festival called Rock the Desert, and we ran into many Christian rockers clad in skinny jeans and hipster haircuts in the airport. I also found a stunning pair of leopard-print cross earrings!).

One experience that left me angry and ready to post occurred on our last night in town. We saw a show called Summer Mummers, a vaudeville-style show that was absolutely hilarious, and that encouraged audience participation in the form of throwing popcorn, both at the actors and other audience members (once a big fan of Rocky Horror, I love any chance to act unruly in a theatre). A group of older men in front of us noticed our obnoxious Yankee accents (or the fact that we were young, cute women, take your pick) and picked on us flirtatiously for the duration of the night, tossing bag after bag of popcorn at us.

Pretty harmless, except that their wives were sitting right there too. While I was three sheets to the wind and certainly didn't tell the men to stop, their poor wives sat there next to them, watching and laughing with tentative insecurity as their husbands flirted with much younger women and paid us far more attention than they did to their wives. It just reeked of such machismo and disrespect. But clearly, these women had adjusted to it and aside from jokingly calling their husbands creepers, they made no attempts to temper the behavior of their husbands. I found it sexist, disrespectful, and honestly a little sad that these women were so resigned to it.

But am I just judging harshly from my thoroughly Yankee perspective? Is this maybe not as dysfunctional as I'm perceiving? What say ye, dear readers?

Much love,
The Sheriff

fat ass, trick, thunder thighs, whore: insults of the female persuasion

Last night, I had the misfortune of having someone I was once very close to insult me by saying I had a "fat ass" (I don't believe in putting people on blast via the interwebs, so even though this individual in question has a pseudonym here on FF, I'll do my best to maintain their anonymity, despite their ludicrously immature language and behavior as of late). Obviously, given the fact that I have a deep and painful history with eating disorders and hating my body, this person knew this was a particularly potent insult for me.

And while it had (what I'm sure was) its desired effect of making me cry for a few minutes, it struck me strongly that people who are actually happy with themselves don't make such low blows, no matter how tempting. It reminded me instantly of this fable.
A Rabbi and his disciple were walking in the street. A man drove by in a carriage which abruptly pushed the Rabbi out of his way so that the Rabbi landed in a ditch filled with muddy water.
The Rabbi yelled after the man in the carriage, "May you have everything you want!"
The disciple was surprised by the rabbi's response.
“Rabbi, why did you say that to a man with such horrible behavior?” asked the disciple.
The Rabbi replied, “Because a happy man wouldn’t throw a Rabbi into a ditch.”

But personal lessons about maturity and anger aside, it made me reflect on how the perceived best way to insult a woman is to attack either her looks (fat ass, thunder thighs, etc) or her sexual history (dyke, slut, trick, whore, etc). We've been conditioned to put those aspects of ourselves first and foremost, and when someone takes a strike at those, it tends to hurt the most. If this individual in question had simply called me a bitch, or a cunt, or maybe even a liar, I wouldn't have shed a single tear; I'd have laughed and shrugged it off and probably made a crack back at their awful hair or faux-intellectualism. But being called fat or a whore inspires not only shame and hurt but also the desire to prove that person wrong: I initially wanted to fight back, explaining my tiny pants size and other statistics that somehow would quantify that I am not indeed a fat ass. If they'd implied I was promiscuous, I would've done the same thing, breaking down my average number of partners per year of my sexually active life to yield a low overall annual average like a credit card company instead of just owning the number and telling them to fuck off.

So why are these two kinds of insults so effective and so well-perpetuated? To me, the thing they both have in common is a desire to control women. Whether it's the size of our thighs or our sexual expression, both are ways of encouraging women to stay within the box of socially acceptable behavior through pressure to keep our bodies controlled. And that's just stupid. Even if you are the owner of a gut or a high number of sexual partners, those aren't negative traits, nor are they the sole ones defining who you are.

Oh, and for the record: I love my fat ass, so piss off.

Much love,
The Sheriff

maturity

After one month of handling constant urgent-but-not-important (usually) crises, such as "Can I have quarters?" "The printer's jammed." "Why do we have to do zumba?" "I've got bug bites," I am extraordinarily glad to have my life back. While I worked with fabulous people and had a lot of fun, being responsible for 100 kids is simply exhausting. It beat my body like the Congo (that one's for you, J). In short, I finally have the time, energy and privacy to write comfortably about sex and feminism again (yay)!

There are huge differences between high school girls and college age women (I'm talkin' fucking huge). First that I noticed was the fact that the interns and RDs simply looked like women. Even the girls who were more developed still had a childlike lack of hips. I once heard a 23-year-old stripper bemoan her age and that she no longer had her 18-year-old body, and with my voluptuous hips, I'm beginning to understand her meaning. Their delicate bodies made me even more angry at the men who catcalled or checked them out downtown. It was hard to fight the urge to run after their cars, screaming that they were children and to back the fuck off (but I refrained, as that would not be actin' right, and would set a pretty shitty example).

But even more potent of a difference was their complete moral certainty about sexual things. An intern with a class about women's health reported to me (and I heard myself through conversations with a handful of girls who brought this up on their own) that, according to some of the girls, when a woman wears revealing clothing, she is not only asking for attention but also for sex and is responsible for whatever happens to her.

The Sheriff did not like hearing this, but I tried not to push my very liberal ideas on the girls. I let them say what they thought, and added only that "clothing is NOT consent!" But I don't know that they understood my point. I know black and white thoughts about morality and sex, which are tragically tied together in our moral milieu, are easier to deal with at that age than developing a nuanced view of sex and sexuality. It's so much easier and it's encouraged by the media, parents, friends, everything to put all women somewhere on the virgin-whore dichotomy. There's no allowance for ambiguity, or God forbid, a morality for women that isn't based on sex and false ideas of purity (I say false ideas because there is no medical definition for virginity. None. This state of purity and innocence does not exist. Take that, virgin-whore complex!).

And again, I can hardly blame these girls for their immature views on sex. Consider this recent case, in which a judge determined that a woman gave consent for Girls Gone Wild to sexually assault her simply because she was dancing in a bar. Not dancing naked or for money (though that does NOT entitle someone with the right to touch you anyway!). Just dancing. Good to know my body is public property, and if I'm enough of a whore to go out and dance in a bar, clearly I'm askin' for it.

...

It makes me so deeply sad and intensely angry and fearful that these are the messages these girls are being bombarded with. These are smart, gifted girls. And even they're still susceptible to these backward ideas about our bodies and our right to inhabit them fully and simply exist unmolested. But my hope is that as they grow older and begin to encounter sex and situations that fall into the grey area of the black and white virgin-whore dichotomy, they'll develop an ideal of morality for themselves and other women that has nothing to do with their sexual activity, but everything to do with their character. Ya know, like the same criteria men are judged on?

Much love,
The Sheriff

The Secret Life...

I have a confession to make. I occasionally watch "The Secret Life of the American Teenager." (It's an ABC Family show about a 16 yr. old girl who gets pregnant and drama ensues.) During the commercial breaks, the actresses always do a public service announcement along the lines of "too many teens don't talk about sex with their parents until they are telling them that they are pregnant. Don't wait, talk now." And they list a few websites including stayteen.org. This morning, being bored (my internship finished and I have NOTHING to do!), I decided to visit stayteen.org out of curiosity. Unfortunately but not unexpected, I was pretty disappointed with the website. The site includes a bunch of information about abstinence and birth control and a blog (supposedly written by teens). ABC Family definitely has a more conservative agenda, so the show and the websites reflect it. My problem is that the website presents information in a way that completely denies teen sexuality and sexual agency.

Overall, the website (not unsurprisingly) pushes abstinence. The "Sex" subsection of the the "What's your relationship reality" gives reasons that teens have sex. It does not list "I wanted to, sex is fun, I like sex" as a reasons that teens give for having sex. Personally, I had sex at 17 because I wanted to. I never imagined that my relationship with surfer boy would last forever or that we would get married. And we used protection. The website continually denies teenage sexual desire. It ignores the desire that people feel when about to bang.

Abstinence doesn't work (as a national campaign) and nor should it. Throughout human history and around the world, girls got married shortly after their first period. Men had more sexual license, but they also got married in their early 20's. So, this is the FIRST time in history that society has expected people to wait until their mid-20's to have sex. In general, there has always been an expectation for people to wait to have sex until marriage. However, people got married earlier (most girls around 15), and people had still had sex outside of marriage. New research shows that the number of people having sex outside of marriage has pretty much been stable since the early 1900's. Basically, by asking people not to have sex until marriage (currently average age around 25, I believe), we are asking the impossible, in my opinion.

There is nothing wrong fundamentally wrong with teenagers wanting to have sex. (Again, I'm not saying the losing your virginity is always smooth-sailing. Normally, it's not). Wanting to have sex doesn't make you a slut nor is it automatically a poor decision. I think that we need to restructure the conversation around teen sex. Right now, the conversation is not "Let's talk about sex" in a completely open, judgement-free environment. It's "Let's talk about sex," but I'm going to judge your choices. Currently, the conversation alienates teenagers because they ask their peers for information (possibly false) rather than talking to adults who would be able to help them when shit goes wrong. They hide their problems which only creates more. If we created an environment around sex which didn't deny teen sexuality, then I believe that we could more easily address the issues surrounding sex (date rape, abuse, pregnancy, birth control etc).

Lots of Love,
Lady Lola