This blogaround brought to you by footprints in the snow.
Recommended Reading:
Ali: [Content Note: Fat hatred; child abuse] Criminalizing the Fat Child
Lucia: [CN: Harassment; descriptions of sexual/physical violence; appropriation; self-harm] Law and Order SVU's GamerGate-Inspired Episode: Are Real-Life Victims Fair Game?
Kyler: [CN: Homophobia; transphobia] Arkansas Legislature Passes Bill Banning LGBT Non-Discrimination Laws
Aura: [CN: Racism; police brutality] Indian Grandfather Nearly Paralyzed After Police Encounter in Alabama
Daniel: [CN: Racism; police brutality] Washington Official Fears 'Another Ferguson' After Cop Shooting Video Goes Viral
Emily: [CN: Misogynoir] Republicans Delay Confirmation of First Black Female Attorney General
Jessie: [CN: Racism] Race and Online Dating
Angry Asian Man: [CN: Top Chef finale spoiler] Meet the New Top Chef!
Leave your links and recommendations in comments. Self-promotion welcome and encouraged!
The Friday Blogaround
No More, Again
[Content Note: Rape culture.]
In January, I wrote a piece detailing problems with No More, an advocacy campaign that bills itself as an organization seeking to "end domestic violence and sexual assault."
This morning, Lauren Chief Elk noted that No More sent out a press release last week announcing: "GROUNDBREAKING EFFORT LAUNCHES TO INCREASE PRIVATE SECTOR SUPPORT TO END DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT."
Major corporations joined forces this week to pledge millions of dollars in new commitments to help end domestic violence and sexual assault as part of a groundbreaking effort to increase private sector support of these urgent issues. For several of the corporations this is their first, significant and public endeavor to support domestic violence and sexual assault awareness, two issues that many corporations have historically shied away from tackling.Lauren and I discussed some of the problems with this approach on Twitter, which I have Storified and am sharing with Lauren's permission:
This is the basic problem: No More is ostensibly seeking to end domestic violence and sexual assault, but is partnered with Law & Order: SVU, a show whose contribution to rape myths is utterly unforgivable, and boasts about corporate partnerships with companies like Allstate, whose advertising frames female people as "mayhem" who pose danger to men.
(I note that the actor who plays Allstate's "Mayhem" character is also a series regular on Law & Order: SVU. What a fun, ahem, coincidence.)
If No More wants to engage in effective advocacy, they would be seeking a commitment from Allstate to not rely on rape culture tropes in their advertising, along with their donation (which buys them free PR). And they wouldn't be boasting about "a 16-hour 'NO MORE Silence' marathon of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on April 27, 2014 to commemorate National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month," because that show, irrespective of what its cast members may do on their free time, does not promote awareness of the realities of domestic violence, sexual assault, or the criminal justice system.
Throughout the marathon, which will be hosted by SVU cast members, USA Network will air NO MORE PSAs, direct viewers to contact national help resources and highlight NO MORE on social media.Welp.
This is not what anti-rape advocacy needs to look like. Self-promotion and corporate sponsorship. This isn't a goddamn ballsport.
No More
[Content Note: Rape culture.]
Earlier today, Lauren Chief Elk (@ChiefElk) asked me if I was familiar with No More, an advocacy campaign that bills itself as an organization seeking to "end domestic violence and sexual assault." Actually, it doesn't even claim to be an organization, but a symbol, a blue circle with a smaller white circle inside it: "NO MORE is a new unifying symbol designed to galvanize greater awareness and action to end domestic violence and sexual assault."
I guess the idea is supposed to be that making this "No More" symbol ubiquitous will raise awareness around domestic violence and sexual assault, which is a dubious premise for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that giving people the shorthand of a symbol (whether it's a ribbon or the color pink or a share button) doesn't generally create meaningful change as much as it gives lots of otherwise indifferent people the ability to look like they give a fuck about something when they really don't.
(Which is to say nothing about the choice of using a graphic that looks like a target as the symbol of an anti-violence campaign. Though the site explains: "The signature blue vanishing point originated from the concept of a zero—as in zero incidences of domestic violence and sexual assault." Whoops.)
Lauren raised some concerns on Twitter about No More, like PSAs that appear to include no women of color and their (unofficial? official?) partnership with the actors of Law & Order: SVU, a show whose contribution to rape myths is utterly unforgivable.
This heavily corporate-sponsored campaign is also "influencing a lot of things apparently, including policy."
When I clicked through to their website, I was greeted by an image of Jemima Kirk from Girls, a show whose primary male protagonist is a rapist. That was immediately followed by an image of Danny Pino, from Law & Order: SVU.
The third actor featured in this welcome slideshow is Maria Bello. So, two white women and a man of color, replicating the white women + men of color pattern Lauren had identified in the PSAs.
I then popped over to the About page, where I read about the "unifying symbol designed to galvanize greater awareness" and then came to this:
Who is behind NO MORE?Men first. Women of color last. I am deeply concerned about the way this list of partners is presented, which clearly suggests that male allies need their cookies first and foremost, and it's okay to shove the women most disproportionately targeted by this type of violence to the back of the priorities list.
Every major domestic violence and sexual assault organization in the U.S. – from men's organizations like A CALL TO MEN and Men Can Stop Rape, to the National Domestic Violence Hotline and the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, to groups that help teens like Break the Cycle and Futures Without Violence, to organizations that advance the rights of women of Color and immigrants like Casa de Esperanza and SCESA to the U.S. Dept. of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women – all of them and more are behind NO MORE.
And then I came to this:
Why should I care?They are. They are.
The next time you're in a room with 6 people, think about this:
• 1 in 4 women experience violence from their partners in their lifetimes.
• 1 in 3 teens experience sexual or physical abuse or threats from a boyfriend or girlfriend in one year.
• 1 in 6 women are survivors of sexual assault.
• 1 in 5 men have experienced some form of sexual victimization in their lives.
• 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men were sexually abused before the age of 18.
These are not numbers. They're our mothers, girlfriends, brothers, sisters, children, co-workers and friends. They're the person you confide in most at work, the guy you play basketball with, the people in your book club, your poker buddy, your teenager's best friend – or your teen, herself. The silence and shame must end for good.
(Does that construction sound familiar to anyone else?)
THEY ARE. A campaign ostensibly dedicated to raising awareness around sexual abuse is erasing survivors by talking around us. By imagining we are not reading, that we are not there.
And by diminishing our agency by exclusively defining us as extensions of other people who have not been assaulted.
"The silence and shame must end for good." At the end of a paragraph that invisibilizes survivors.
No more indeed.
Lauren and I are wondering how much influence No More has over policy at the White House (and they clearly have some), especially in light of the sexual assault initiative just announced this week. Because, despite the numerous advocacy groups who have signed on-board with No More, there are a lot of red flags that should concern anti-violence activists.
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today!
[Content Note: Profiling] Here is some good news (contingent upon whether the change is actually implemented): "The Justice Department will significantly expand its definition of racial profiling to prohibit federal agents from considering religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation in their investigations, a government official said Wednesday. The move addresses a decade of criticism from civil rights groups that say federal authorities have in particular singled out Muslims in counterterrorism investigations and Latinos for immigration investigations."
[CN: Rape apologia] Another Republican genius on rape: Virginia congressional hopeful Richard Black "opposed criminalizing spousal rape while he served in the Virginia state legislature. His reason? It would be impossible to prosecute a man for rape 'when they're living together, sleeping in the same bed, she's in a nightie, and so forth,' Black said in 2011. He also argued that men should not have to live with the 'emormous fear' of facing a false spousal rape accusation." He sounds terrific.
[CN: Gun violence] Last night in northern Indiana, a man shot and killed two people in a grocery store before he was killed by police: "Elkhart police received a call about a gunman at Martin's Super Market about 10pm Wednesday, Indiana state police sergeant Trent Smith said Thursday. The 22-year-old gunman used a semi-automatic handgun to shoot and kill a 20-year-old employee and a 44-year-old shopper, Smith said. The victims' bodies were found about 12 aisles apart." The shooting appears to be random, and "a large knife was also found near the gunman's body." Fucking hell.
An amazing cat saved his neighbor's life by warning him he was about to have a heart attack. Cats, man.
[CN: Rape] A woman who survived being raped and then was accused of lying by police who subsequently interrogated her into confessing to false charges has been exonerated and awarded a $150,000 settlement. The man who raped her, Marc O'Leary, "is currently serving a 327 1/2-year sentence in Colorado for raping multiple women."
(Just yesterday, I was talking to Lauren Chief Elk on Twitter about how one of the most detestable thing about Law & Order: SVU and similar police procedurals is that they give the erroneous impression that virtually all cops and prosecutors are keen to pursue rapists. This is, unfortunately, not the case.)
A funeral home in Clinton, Arkansas, is training a two-year-old King Charles Spaniel named Mollie to be a grief therapy dog. I love this idea!
[CN: Gun violence] Newtown shooter Adam Lanza reportedly called into an Oregon radio show, "Anarchy Radio," to discuss mass shootings a year before he went on his shooting spree.
Do you want to see Flula beatbox in slow motion? I can't imagine why you wouldn't!
FO, L&O:SVU
[Content Note: Racism; violence; rape culture; appropriation.]
Hey, remember when I wrote back in August about how the putrid Law & Order: SVU was planning a Very Special Episode intended to be a hugely inappropriate mash-up of Trayvon Martin's murder, Paula Deen's racism, and NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy...?
Welp, it aired last night, and surprise! It was contemptible garbage.
That fucking show.
Nope
[Content Note: Racism; violence; rape culture; appropriation.]
In case you are not aware of my feelings about Law & Order: SVU, I hate it. Like, a lot. It is my go-to show when I need to hate-watch something, because I hate it SO MUCH and it gives me ALL THE THINGS about which to scream at the TV.
Also, it is ALWAYS ON, in endless marathons, so I can redirect my rage at it pretty much any minute of any hour of any day.
Anyway.
Check out this shit:
Law & Order: SVU never shies away from keeping up with the cultural zeitgeist."Keeping up with the cultural zeitgeist" is an almost perfect euphemism for "exploiting the most gruesome stories of the harm human beings do to one another that are currently in the news." But I digress.
Wednesday, pictures from the SVU set emerged on BuzzFeed and speculation mounted about whether or not the images might suggest that the show was taking on the controversial George Zimmerman trial so soon. In fact, the SVU writers have taken things one step further and combined two of the year's biggest headlines: The trial of Zimmerman over the killing of Florida teen Trayvon Martin and the Paula Deen scandal.Ha ha sounds terrific! What could go wrong? This show is definitely known for sensitivity rather than sensationalism, so I'm sure it will be AMAZEBALLS, as the kids say!
"[Jeffrey] Tambor is a defense attorney representing a very high-profile celebrity woman chef who thought she was being pursued by a rapist and turned around it was a teenager. And she shot him," said [Executive Producer Warren Leight] in an interview with EW. "There's a lot of stop and frisk elements to that as well."Neat! I hope they find a way to cram in some totally trenchant commentary about the decimation of the Voting Rights Act. Maybe the Paula Deen proxy could fart on the Statue of Liberty. SYMBOLISM.
They won't be shying away from the big questions either, according to Leight. "Is racial profiling justifiable? Can self-defense involve racial profiling? We're diving right into that," he said. "Can that happen in New York? Absolutely."I'll bet! What a fascinating episode it will be for us all.
Be prepared for the episode to divide audiences. According to Leight, it even exposed divisions within the SVU team. "When the script was published it became a litmus test for everybody here," he said. "It was really interesting to see people read that script and have different interpretations about who did what and whether or not they deserved prison for it. It was fascinating."
"Something something the government and privacy."—Munch. JACKPOT.
Gross
[Content Note: Rape culture; violence.]
1. I fucking hate Law & Order: SVU. I hate the way it purports to be a show that condemns sexual violence, yet continually reinforces rape culture tropes with dramatic reversals that contradict everything we know to be true about sexual violence. If everything you knew about rape had been learned by watching L&O:SVU, you'd believe that women and girls lie about sexual violence at an alarming rate, that most rapes are committed by strangers, and that about half of all sex crimes are committed by women.
2. I fucking hate the entertainment industry's rehabilitation of Mike Tyson. (By which I mean the rehabilitation of his reputation, because HA HA let us never even mention the crime of which he was convicted or ask him to reflect upon it in any way.) Tyson is a convicted rapist, an abuser of at least one spouse, and a person who seriously assaulted a man in a professional setting, when he bit off part of Evander Holyfield's ear during a boxing match. But, like fellow violent misogynist Charlie Sheen, there are seemingly unlimited opportunities for Tyson to maintain his wealth and fame.
So you can imagine how thrilled, ahem, I was to hear that Mike Tyson has been cast in an upcoming episode of L&O:SVU:
In his TV acting debut, former boxer Mike Tyson is going for some dark, dramatic stuff with a guest starring role on NBC's Law & Order: SVU. He will play Reggie Rhodes, a murderer on death row whose violent actions may in part be the byproduct of a horrible childhood.HA HA I hope this puts paid the execrable lie that L&O:SVU is not, in fact, remotely concerned with anti-rape advocacy. You don't get to claim to be anti-rape when you're giving a fat paycheck to a convicted rapist to be a guest star. Sorry.
I will never get over this idea that a creep who is rich and famous deserves to be rich and famous once again, once zie's "paid hir dues," and that taking issue with idolizing people convicted of violent abuse is tantamount to saying they don't deserve a second chance at life.
Sure, Mike Tyson deserves the opportunity to make a life for himself. I'm just not convinced it has to be a life in which he regains his fame and fortune.
If you're rich and famous, it appears you can be wicked enough to be sent to prison, but not so wicked as to be sent to the working class. I have a problem with that.
More Law & Order Fail
[Trigger warning.]
Melissa Silverstein's got a must-read guest post by Jennifer Boulanger, M.Ed., the Executive Director of the Allentown Women's Center, an independent abortion and reproductive health care center in Pennsylvania, about last week's episode of Law & Order, which centered around late-term abortion.
There's contact info to register a complaint at the link, if you're so inclined.
I haven't watched any of the L&Os for ages, mostly because there just got to be too damn many episodes of megafail like this one. L&O:SVU is the worst, with so many episodes ending with a SHOCKING TWIST!!!! that totally turns reality about sex crimes on its head just to communicate that women are totes lying bitchez, amiright?
The first episode I've seen of any of them in I-don't-know-how-long happened to be the other night, when I was suffering a bout of insomnia, and it was the episode where Christine Lahti, one of my favorite actresses and so dreadfully under-used, playing the prosecutor, was humiliated by showing up drunk to court.
And not just run-of-the-mill humiliated. Oh no. Humiliated by getting called out by the defendant, a black-out alcoholic who'd raped and murdered a woman, for reasons he couldn't even remember, during a binge. And if that weren't bad enough, he got to go free because of prosecutorial misconduct attributed to her drinking.
Oy.
L&O:SVU
In comments of the Trigger By Void thread, Shaker Kevin Wolf asked about Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which is the series in the Law & Order franchise that deals with, according to its opening narration, "sexually based offenses."
I've been thinking about my Law & Order addiction, which includes L&O Special Victims Unit, a program I am sure you do not watch as virtually every scene is just about every episode would contain a trigger. … Unfortunately, this means that as I think about the program, the very people most likely to have something really important to say do not watch it.(That's only part of his comment; the rest you can find here.)
Well, I have watched L&O:SUV, although I rarely watch it anymore, and it's not because it triggers me, but because it infuriates me. Let me stipulate right up front that I have seen the occasional episode that I thought dealt well with whatever issue it was addressing, so what I'm saying from here on out isn't blanket condemnation, and no one needs to say, "But what about this episode?" and "But what about that episode?" I acknowledge there are some decent episodes.
That said, there are a lot of indecent episodes, in every sense of the word.
The show's biggest problem is that it uses the same formula as the original L&O, which is to regularly take stories "ripped from the headlines" and then present them with a Crazy Twist!!1! to undermine your expectations. (Dunh-dunh!) Except, when you're dealing with a subject like sexual assault, that big subversive twist tends to be making a woman the rapist! Or the rape accuser a liar! Which is not to say that women never sexually assault, or false rape accusations are never made, but both of those things happen in reality at a rate of <1%. I can guarantee you both of those things have happened at a rate higher than 1% in L&O:SVU.
Probably, someone, somewhere, with a lot of time and energy, has compared the sexual assault victims of L&O:SVU to the stats on real-life victims, and the two don't look anything alike. (Ditto sexual assaulters.)
Beyond that, the show just reinforces so many flatly untrue cultural narratives about sexual assault. If all you knew about sexual assault was from L&O:SVU, you'd think stranger rape was more pervasive than rape by an intimate (wrong), you'd think that women were frequently sexual predators (wrong), you'd think that women routinely make up rape accusations (wrong), you'd think that most rape victims look like "rape victims," i.e. black eye, finger marks on wrists, etc. (wrong), you'd think that physical evidence was available in a plurality of rape cases (wrong), you'd think that most sexual assaulters were caught and convicted (wrong), and you'd think that cops mostly side with victims (wrongity-wrong-wrong).
And, by nature of the fact that it's a TV show, and TV shows want pretty people for their audience to gaze at, the victims of sexual assault featured on the show are almost always young and attractive. It's rare that you get an episode where the victim is an old lady, or a fat person, or someone who would generally be considered Less Than Perfect. What's seriously creepy is that even all the child victims are beautiful, flawless children—it's not like there's ever a fat, pimpled, buck-toothed tween who's victimized. All of which ultimately serves to reinforce the meme that rape is a compliment.
The problem with L&O:SVU is ultimately this: If it reflected the reality of sexual assault, it would be a "boring" show. Woman gets raped; it's her boyfriend. Woman gets raped; it's her male lab partner. Girl gets raped; it's her stepdad. Woman gets raped; it's her male date. Girl gets raped; it's her male teacher. Girl gets raped; it's her dad. Woman gets raped; it's her male boss. Woman gets raped; it's a guy she met at a bar. Woman gets raped; it's her male coworker. Boy gets raped; it's his male scout leader. Girl gets raped; it's her male soccer coach. Woman gets raped; it's her ex-boyfriend…
We'd have to go on a long way like that before we got to a female assaulter or a false accusation. It would even be awhile before we got to a stranger rape on the street (or in Central Park, ahem); women are three times more likely to be raped by someone they know than a stranger, and nine times more likely to be raped in their home, the home of someone they know, or anywhere else than being raped on the street.
Further, if L&O:SVU reflected the reality of sexual assault across the nation, much of the drama would be in the sexual assault victims trying to get the cops to believe them and investigate their assault. But it's a show about hero cops, whose infrequent disbelief of their victims either turns out to be well-founded, or evokes in them great shame after they've endeavored to do their job despite their doubts and prove themselves wrong. In real life, cops who don't believe you don't investigate.
Not like Benson and Stabler do, anyway.
Especially not if you have the temerity of being an imperfect rape victim, like having been voluntarily intoxicated at the time, being a sex worker, lacking physical evidence, or appearing more angry and pragmatic or less upset and humiliated than the officer who takes your statement expects a "real" rape victim to be.
Certainly, L&O:SVU has had good intentions toward, and possibly had some success with, de-stigmatizing sexual assault. The show generally does not treat surviving sexual assault as something of which to be ashamed, and, for the most part, doesn't engage in explicit victim-blaming (although there are certainly plenty of episodes rife with the thinly veiled suggestion if only she hadn't been engaged in this illicit activity…). And I imagine there are some survivors of sexual assault who find catharsis in the fantasy of the show, who revel in the simple satisfaction of its frequent justice.
But I'm not certain that whatever positives there are to the show, balanced against the show's faults, calculate to a net positive. Is there enough subversion of the culturally compulsory shamefulness of sexual assault to justify buttressing all the erroneous narratives about rape? I don't know. I suspect not.
YMMV.
