Category Archives: violence

On Boston

[This post by request from Mike, my lovely boyfriend, and also a response to this prompt.]

In my perfect world, no one would cover terrorist attacks. Oh, sure, the local news would tell people what had happened and what they need to do to stay safe (stay inside, be on the lookout for people that look like the suspect) and help others (house displaced runners). But national news? No. 24-hour news coverage to the point that you can’t get away from it and have to take a social-media break until it’s over? Fuck no.

The average person cannot do anything about public violence. Donating blood doesn’t help, because the blood needs to have already been donated to go to patients; blood banks will simply have an oversupply the week after the disaster and possibly an undersupply once the blood expires and the people who donated blood once haven’t been cleared to donate yet. Other than that, our options are mostly just being sad and scared, and spreading news so that more people can be sad and scared.

Overcoverage of public violence leads to dumb policy. Because of the availability heuristic, it’s easier for people to remember shootings and terrorist attacks than less-covered things like heart attacks or infectious diseases. That means we think that shootings and terrorist attacks lead to more deaths than they really do. We spend billions of dollars on law enforcement and security theater to prevent shootings and terrorist attacks, instead of relieving poverty or scientific research or literally anything else. (The TSA alone costs eight billion dollars a year, or approximately ten thousand grants to study snail sex.) We start calling for gun control or more mental health treatment or national registries of mentally ill people or an end to immigration or a war in Afghanistan, not because these policies are supported by evidence and in our best interests, but because they might have prevented this one flukey thing that we think is more common than it is because people keep covering it.

It also leads to discrimination. Any act of public violence is inevitably blamed on people of color, Muslims, mentally ill people, or some combination, and then people of color, Muslims, and mentally ill people have to put up with people being assholes against them because they assume that we are going to commit violence. (I feel bad for mentally ill Muslims of color. They just have the deck stacked against them.)

I think my biggest grudge against news coverage of public violence, though, is that it makes people afraid. Perhaps because I have an anxiety disorder, I am pissed off at people being made afraid of something that they shouldn’t have to be afraid of.

Let me be clear: I am not policing your response to public violence. I was scared too. It is perfectly natural to be scared when people are covering some shocking act of public violence 24/7; that’s just how brains work. It’s as if the news decided to have 24/7 coverage every time an orphaned puppy got brain cancer. It is perfectly normal to be sad when orphaned puppies have brain cancer; it is also perfectly fair to be upset that the news is making a bunch of people sad for no reason.

I know why people cover this kind of violence. It’s because it’s interesting, it makes people feel things, and it drives clicks. But I look forward for the day when the media says, “giving this attack attention is exactly what the attacker wanted” and turns away.

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Intro To Rape Culture, Or, Ozy Fangirls David Lisak

My boyfriend is confused about the concept of rape culture, which means I need to explain what rape culture is. Again.

For what it’s worth I don’t think it’s necessarily good to use the word “rape culture,” because people who aren’t feminists tend to respond to the word by saying “…but rape is illegal in our culture, everyone hates rape!” and then wander off assuming that feminists are rape-obsessed and probably hate sex.

The Problem

According to very respectable national research done by the American government, about 18% of women and 6% of men are raped over the course of their lifetimes. According to peer-reviewed psychological research, between 6% and 13% of men have committed rape. (As far as I’m aware no one has done similar research on female rapists.) That is a lot of rape.

Rape is also a really big problem. For instance, let’s take PTSD rate as a proxy for severity of trauma. Rape survivors have a higher PTSD rate than combat veterans, which suggests that being raped is actually more traumatizing than fucking combat.

Rape culture is the term for “the cultural forces that make the rape rate so fucking high.”

Why Rapists Rape

Nearly all the evidence about why (male) rapists rape is correlational– “huh, rapists seem to have Trait Y more than the general population, let’s try to reduce that.” (This blog post is a pretty good summary of the research. Yes, I could really replace this entire blog post with “go read the Yes Means Yes archives.”)

Rapists are more misogynistic than non-rapists (angrier at women, more likely to want to control them); therefore we stigmatize the hell out of misogyny, particularly those forms (like the treatment of women as machines that you get sexual gratification from) that seem likely to lead to rape. Rapists tend to have “toxic masculinity” traits such as lack of empathy, impulsiveness, and antisociality; therefore we advocate for a wider definition of masculinity. (I am not aware of research on how these apply to female or queer rapists because people tend to totally ignore female and queer rapists.)

Rapists are more likely to have rape-supportive beliefs, like “if a girl is raped when she’s drunk it’s at least a little her fault for letting things get out of hand” and “guys don’t intend to force sex on a girl, but sometimes they get a little carried away” and (presumably, there has not been research on this one) “if a man gets hard he’s consenting.” That is why we’re against victim-blaming: not just because it’s horrible to survivors (which, Jesus, isn’t that enough of a reason?), but because rapists believe victim-blaming ideas and it is reasonable to believe this is a causative factor in rape.

Rapists tend to test boundaries to see what people will assert them and what people will give in. There’s this whole idea that women need to be polite and kind and not make a fuss when their boundaries are violated, until they’re raped, at which point it’s “why didn’t you fight back? Why didn’t you say no loud enough?” (The linked Fugitivus post, btw, was my click moment about rape culture.) A lot of people also seem to have difficulty with the concept that men get boundaries at all. Therefore, feminists need to assert that boundaries matter and they matter everywhere– not just during sex, but during kissing and hugs and cuddling and tickling and conversation and what food you fucking eat. And that if someone does not respect your boundaries, they are not a good person and it is perfectly reasonable to be pissed.

Rapists tend to believe that their behavior is normal: that most men commit rape, or want to. That’s why we’re against things that normalize rape, including most rape jokes. Because Pat Not-A-Rapist thinks the joke is funny because haha it’s so absurd that anyone would think they and their friends are rapists, and Robin Rapist thinks it’s funny because that’s how they think the world actually works.

After a Rape

I have a friend who was raped fairly recently at our nice liberal-arts college full of hairy-legged feminists and dirty hippies. (I have her permission to tell this story.) She reflected that the worst part wasn’t the rape– it was that she can’t be friends with anyone who’s friends with her rapist anymore. They might invite him over to hang out and, well, if she told anyone that she was raped– even just to say “so please don’t invite my rapist over while we’re hanging out”– it would instantly spread everywhere and turn into a referendum about whether she was a lying whore.

See, everyone believes that rapists are evil! Rapists are horrible monsters. They probably have fangs or something. It’s just that people don’t like considering their friends horrible evil monsters. So a lot of people are going to hear “your friend raped me” and respond with “it was probably a misunderstanding” or “you just regretted it the next day” or “you’re a lying whore.”

This means that a lot of rapists experience no negative consequences for their rape whatsoever. It means that repeat rapists– who commit most rapes– continue to have access to a social group where they can rape people. It means that rape survivors don’t get the support they need.

This is why feminists are dicks about affirmative consent (other than the boundary stuff above). Because if the norm is “you don’t have sex with someone who doesn’t obviously want to have sex,” people cannot be like “well my friend probably just misunderstood the situation” and justify the commission of rape. Because we are the 95%, we are capable of telling when our partner does and does not want sex, we are not rapists, and we should not be giving social cover to rapists.

–A related but distinct kind of social cover for rapists, which I would be remiss to end the post without mentioning, is that of prison rape. A lot of people seem to accept that rape is a reasonable punishment for crime, which makes it harder to get political will to end prison rape. Some people even seem to believe that rape is a reasonable punishment for rape, which you would think would lead to this weird recursive thing where rapists are raped by people who are now rapists and have to be raped, and so on and so forth ad infinitem.

(I’m kind of dodging the justice system issue here, because I’m not a legal expert, and because while our justice system often treats rape survivors horribly it’s hard to imagine a justice system that simultaneously protects the mental health of the survivor and the rights of the accused. Anyway, we are not going to lock up ten percent or so of the male population. The solution to rape culture has to be a cultural change, not a legal change.)

Because it is apparently necessary that I link to every post on Yes Means Yes, I want to signal-boost this as a really good case study of rape culture in a particular community– namely, the BDSM community. The BDSM community is a really interesting group to look at because it’s about sex, so a lot of the dynamics that are hidden in other communities are out in the open.

So What Do I Do?

  • Don’t rape people. Okay, this shit is obvious, but I feel like it needs to be said anyway.
  • Respect people’s “no.” All the time. For everything. Without fussing about it.
  • Don’t say “no” when you don’t mean “no.” Again, I can’t believe I have to say this, but apparently some people are going about saying “no” when they don’t mean it and then everyone else is like “women! Sometimes they say no, but they don’t mean no, therefore I am totally justified in having sex with people who have said no!” So seriously, if you pull that shit, stop ruining it for everyone else. (You can do rape play if you want, but use a safeword.)
  • “Ask before touching people” is a really really good social norm. So is “ask before sex.” (I know this is stigmatized in some social groups– which is horrible and rape-culturey itself. But it’s still a good thing to do.)
  • Make it clear that you are part of the vast majority of people who are not rapists and that violating people’s consent, victim-blaming, misogyny, and so on are Not Okay. You do not have to lecture people about rape culture– I mean, I do, but that’s less anti-rape activism and more being a boring one-trick pony. But you can be like “dude not cool” when someone talks about how funny prison rape is or about getting women drunk to have sex with them.
  • Check in and, if necessary, rescue people if it looks like something skeezy or abusive is happening. (Examples of “skeezy or abusive”: person looks creeped out; one person is getting another person very drunk; someone has said “no” and the other person is trying to get them to do a thing anyway)
  • Believe survivors. I know, I know, some unknown (but small!) percentage of accusations of rape are false rape accusations. But like. It is not that hard to not invite a survivor and the person they accused to the same party, or to keep an eye on people accused of rape to see if they seem to be repeating it, or to provide support to a survivor, or to bluntly talk to someone about their behavior. And if someone has been accused of rape multiple times or has a history of being a gigantic boundary-violating creeper… seriously, you don’t have to be “innocent until proven guilty” on being friends with someone. Not being invited to parties is not a goddamned death sentence.

I mean. Nearly everything on this list is stuff that people I know– even people who aren’t super-aware of rape culture– do anyway, because they’re not douchebags and they’re not rapists. Because… really if there’s one takeaway point here, it’s that we are not rapists, we don’t approve of rape, and we need to stop fucking acting like we do.

Kinky Sex Is Fucking Beautiful

I’m friends with one of the founders of Harvard College Munch, and he recently showed me this about how Harvard College Munch is literally the worst thing that ever worsted. Mostly he just wanted to know if he should get “sexual anarchist” on his business cards. (Sources say yes. God, no one has ever called me a sexual anarchist. So upset.)

Now, there are lots of objections that one can have to this article. For instance, what “wide-ranging impact, profoundly effecting students’ daily lives”? I go to a school that has an official school Violet Wand, and yet there are no discernible effects except “lots of students, even vanilla ones, have been electroshocked just to see what it’s like.” I wouldn’t call that profoundly affecting students’ daily lives.

But the objection I want to have is to the sentence “we have always been eager to discuss with these other groups our competing views of how best to honor the dignity and beauty of sex, but we do not even share this much common ground with Munch, which instead seeks to associate sex with violence, humiliation, and oppression.”

(Note: below the cut, I talk about my sex life! If you don’t want to hear about it, here’s Cute Roulette.)

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Why I Don’t Care About The Sandy Hook Shooting

Twenty-seven people died at the Sandy Hook shooting. To put it another way: a number of gun deaths equivalent to the Sandy Hook shootings happens in the United States about every seven hours.

It is absolutely ridiculous to make any sort of decisions about policy related to gun deaths based on Sandy Hook or other mass shootings. Less than one percent of gun deaths in the United States are related to a mass shooting; mass shooters are less than two-tenths of one percent of people who commit homicide related to guns.

And yet the national conversation about mental health and gun policy (as well as a few also-ran issues like school prayer and whether we should make more men be teachers) will once again be about how we prevent Sandy Hook, as if that is somehow more important than preventing the other 99% of gun violence.

Not to mention that trying to prevent Sandy Hook leads to stupid fucking policy. For instance, the NRA’s armed guards in schools idea. Even assuming for the sake of argument that armed guards would prevent deaths related to school shootings… how the fuck is that not a tremendous waste of resources? Thirty-three people died in school shootings in 2012, not counting suicides (which armed guards aren’t much help with). You know how many died in 2010 and 2011? None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. 

Great plan, guys. Seriously. Great plan. 

I think there are a couple reasons people think about Sandy Hook more than other kinds of gun violence. For one thing, you literally couldn’t escape news of it for about three days, whereas you can usually escape news of gun violence via not reading your newspaper’s Local page. (And since newspapers are going out of business, it’s getting even easier.) For another, the victims at Sandy Hook were innocent, mostly white, mostly middle-class children, whereas typical victims of gun violence are often people of color, poor, drug addicts, sex workers, those who “had it coming,” and other people that our culture basically considers expendable. 

In short, if there is one policy change I recommend in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, it is this: stop covering mass shootings. Don’t give the perpetrators glory or the copycat shooters ideas. Leave the people of Newton alone to grieve. And stop giving people stupid-ass ideas about how gun violence works. 

Mental Health Awfulness In The Wake Of The Newtown Shooting

I am this close to declaring that unless you are mentally ill, a person with a degree in psychology or a mental-health-related field, or a major part of the support network of a mentally ill person, you are not allowed to talk about mental health. The only thing that’s stopped me is that a lot of members of those groups are saying terrible things too.

General memo: if you only care about mental health care in the wake of a shooting, you seriously need to question yourself. There are far more mentally ill people who hurt themselves than mentally ill people who shoot up a school. Mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Only talking about mental health after a shooting implies that you don’t care about mental illness when we’re being hurt; you only care about it when we’re hurting neurotypicals.

Furthermore, there’s a certain cluster of disorders that people tend to conclude turns people into monsters: personality disorders, schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar disorder, autism, probably a couple I’m forgetting. In the wake of incidents like the Newtown shooting, people will always talk about people with these disorders as if they’re Scary Alien Monsters Without Empathy Who Will Probably Hurt You.

First of all, we don’t know what mental illness Adam Lanza had, or even if he had a mental illness at all, so it’s a bit inappropriate to be demonizing people. Second, most people with these illnesses are not violent. (In fact, even the link between psychosis and violence is muddy.) Third, does it not occur to anyone that talking about how people with certain mental illnesses are Scary Alien Monsters Without Empathy Who Will Probably Hurt You makes it more difficult for people with those illnesses to get the support and care they need? If you think being diagnosed with schizophrenia will make you a Scary Alien Monster Without Empathy Who Will Probably Hurt People, you are going to drag your feet about getting diagnosed… and that means you’re not going to get the help you need.

To talk about some specific examples of fail (warning: these are really, really horribly anti-people-with-mental-illnesses. Read at own risk)…

I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother: No, you aren’t. I understand that it can be really frustrating and occasionally terrifying to deal with a child with mental illness, particularly one as virulent as Michael’s. But seriously, who the fuck compares their child to a murderer and talks about their “evil eyes”? And then fucking includes a picture of their child and the child’s name? (For reasons of preserving my faith in humanity, I’m going to hope it’s a pseudonym.) Why would you do that? I really don’t have a hell of a lot to comment on this that hasn’t been said better by Sady Doyle  and Thursday, so go read those posts instead.

Piers Morgan’s Awful Guest: Okay, look, dude, preferring to be by yourself can be a sign of Asperger’s, but it can also be a sign of everything from social phobia to Avoidant Personality Disorder to just being a fucking introvert okay. Autism does not mean that you’re “lacking empathy,” it means that you are bad at reading social cues and intuiting things about others. You can still feel bad that other people are in pain even if you’re bad at telling when people are in pain. Autistic people might be lonely and anxious and even suicidal sometimes, but that probably has something to do with gentlemen like you assuming that autism can help explain why someone shot up a school. Also, I have no idea how you leaped from suicidal depression to shooting up a fucking school, but I’ve known a lot of fucking suicidal people and it has not occurred to one of us to shoot up a school, so maybe there is a different factor here.

Gunsville, USA: Apparently, a lot of shooters are on different kinds of medication, including SSRIs, tetracyclics, tricyclics, benzodiazepines, sedatives, Benadryl, and pain medication. This is sort of like saying “look! Some of the shooters took cough syrup, some took antibiotics, some took Vitamin C, and some took Viagra! Therefore cold medications cause shootings!”

I mean, Jesus. Who would expect that a disproportionate number of mentally ill people are on meds, or that discontinuing or switching medication might cause problems for some people?

The author diagnosed Adam Lanza and Holmes with “Medication Eyes,” which combined with the I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother person above, is starting to make me wonder if the DSM-V should include Ocular Delusional Disorder, the delusion that you can figure out someone’s psychiatric history by looking at their eyeballs.

It also includes the following sentence:

He said he thinks the main problem is that “crazy” people are no longer institutionalized because all of a sudden hey have “rights” to live under bridges and be as schizoid as they want to be. 

1) Does… does this guy know how expensive mental hospitals are? Who is going to pay for locking up all the mentally ill people? I thought that the conservatives were all about Fiscal Responsibility and Not Universal Healthcare, but apparently that goes out the window when there’s a possibility of locking up mentally ill people.

1a) Takimag, aren’t you supposed to be libertarian? What exactly is libertarian about lifelong imprisonment of people who have done nothing wrong?

2) How is this going to work exactly? There are shooters who never had contact with the mental health care system… are you going to give everyone a complete mental health workup at age eighteen, repeat it each decade, and lock up the people who fail? Who are you going to lock up? Just people with psychosis or schizophrenia? All mentally ill people? People with mental illnesses that you believe turn them into Scary Alien Monsters Without Empathy Who Will Probably Hurt You?

3) Of course the prospect of being involuntarily imprisoned for life will not remotely make people reluctant to seek mental health care or more willing to lie about any symptoms that might get them locked up.

4) I don’t think “care in the community” was particularly well-implemented either, but that’s not because it’s a bad idea. It’s because they kind of forgot the “care” bit and just left people to their own devices. Caring for people outside of mental hospitals whenever possible is a good plan; not caring for people at all is not.

5) WHAT THE FUCK WHY DO YOU THINK IT IS OKAY TO LOCK UP PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T DONE ANYTHING WRONG WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU

International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers

MASSIVE trigger warning for violence against sex workers.

This year we mourn:

15 women in Rwanda
4 women in Mexico killed in mass shooting at club
Amy Soule, 26, USA
Ashton John, Guyana
Bharati Devi, 42, India
Brandy Sheppard, 33, USA, body found near club
Brenda Chumbi, 22, Malawi
Brianna Gardner, 22, USA, gunshot wound to the head
Brittany McKinley, 25, USA, shot to death
Camille, Cameroon
Carolyn Marie Sinclair, 25, Canada
Cassandra, 39, France, strangled and burned
Celeste Fronsman, 29, USA, raped, tortured, burned, and left for dead with a rope around her neck by the side of a rural road
Chastity Starr, 27, USA, strangled.
Cherice Gordon, USA.
Dare Odumoye, Nigeria.
Demesha Hunt, 24, USA.
Fernandes Olufemi, Nigeria.
January Marie Lapuz, 26, Canada.
Jaren Lockhart, 22, USA, stabbed to death, dismembered.
Jennie Banner, 32, UK, strangled with belt by client.
Jessie Anne Wilson, Australia.
Julia, Ukraine.
Julie, 45, India.
Juliet, 25, Nigeria.
Kalisha Madden, USA.
Karima, France, suicide.
Keisha Powell, 42, USA, shot.
Kevin Ogwu, Nigeria.
Lau Suk-king, Hong Kong.
Liu Shuqiong, 49, China.
Mamata Sikari, 25, India.
Maria Felix, Antigua and Barbada.
Marland Anderson, 39, USA, unknown cause of death following altercation with the LAPD.
Mati Nhamo, 20s, Zimbabwe.
Mike, Canada.
Natasha Curtis, 29, USA, body burned beyond recognition.
Olga Potapchyk, Ukraine.
Pamela Will, 49, USA.
Patricia, France, fell from a window to escape a violent client.
Rachel Wilson, 19, UK.
Renisha Landers, 23, USA.
Robyn Few, 53, USA.
Roger Sturck, Sweden.
Rosita Hidalgo, stabbed to death.
Salma, Dubai.
Sasha Lee Gordon, South Africa, stabbed to death, no one has been charged.
Sheila de Silva, 24, Brazil.
Shelley Hilliard, 19, USA.
Solange, Cameroon.
Svetla Fileva, 30, Italy.
Tamara, 19, Peru.
Tiffany Nelson, 20, USA, stabbed to death
Troy Moe, Guyana.
Tyrell Jackson, 23, USA, shot to death.
Unidentified trans woman, 41, USA, stabbed but survived.
Unidentified trans woman, Kenya.
Unidentified woman, 46, France, raped and strangled.
Unidentified woman, 19, USA, shot in the face.
Two unidentified men in South Africa.
Another unidentified person in South Africa.
Vernithea McCrary, 28, USA.
Yannick Ouimet, Montreal, stabbed but survived.
All the sex workers who have been attacked, raped, or murdered and whose names are not on this list.