Category Archives: Gender Issues

by | October 1, 2018 · 5:44 pm

Dear Councilman Grosso: Please Be Our Ally and Support 77

Dear Councilman Grosso,

We’ve met before. I worked at a bar in Chinatown that you used to frequent. We only spoke a few times, but I remember feeling proud to have you as our guest because you had a reputation for being an ally – an advocate for women and for the LGBTQ community. I’m writing to you today to ask you to be an ally to vulnerable workers in Washington, D.C. by supporting Initiative 77, which will raise the wages of tipped employees and help stabilize a flawed system.

The restaurant industry in Washington has afforded me many opportunities as both a bartender and manager. I have a deep respect for my service industry peers, and when my colleagues came out against 77, I voted “no” alongside them. In retrospect, the pressure in the industry was substantial to oppose, and then to repeal. Yet when the voters of D.C. popularly supported 77, I began to realize that our conversation about the initiative had been imbalanced. We had not heard from bartenders who supported 77 and, perhaps most importantly, we had not heard from many of the most vulnerable members of our industry.

In support of these vulnerable workers, I testified against the repeal of 77 after most of the Council had left for the night, dashing from work after last call at 1:00 a.m. and returning to close the bar after my testimony. While I waited my turn, I heard the fears of my colleagues who work in some of the city’s most renowned restaurants. They testified that 77 would catalyze the decline of our vibrant restaurant industry. Many fears reminded me of those I heard when other voices lobbied against paid sick days. Meanwhile, so many whose fears are realized on a daily basis went unheard that night. Once more, I will try to speak for them, as one of them.

I have felt the volatility of subsisting on tips. At that Chinatown bar, our staff sometimes missed a week’s income when bad weather drove everyone away. More recently, while pursuing my graduate degree, I worked daylight hours, which cut my income to a fraction of what it had been. While I earned meager tips off a handful of guests, I meticulously cleaned and prepped the bar for the busy night ahead. The system allowed my hard work to go unpaid.

I believe that Initiative 77 is a step toward professionalizing this industry and giving all tipped workers the stability and respect that they deserve. This is a bill meant to help the most vulnerable in our industry. It is for women who smile through degrading treatment because we need a tip. It is for underpaid immigrants who toil tirelessly to keep things running, often doing double the work for half the pay. It is for the welfare of our residents who are not chosen to work in the city’s highest-grossing restaurants.

I have seen enormous, unjustified disparities in pay. As a manager, I’ve seen the books. I’ve seen what restaurants spend on turnover, and I’ve witnessed the revenue lost from an undervalued and sometimes uninspired workforce. I also know that rising expenses are absorbed through small increases in food and beverage prices. The industry will shift to accommodate a higher base wage.

The Council has repeatedly asked these vulnerable workers to show themselves. It has asked why they have not spoken more loudly. Councilman Grosso, as an ally, I believe you know better. These groups are more dependent on good relationships with management and staff than they are on any city law. And they already voted once. I am asking you to stand for them. I am asking you do what’s right.

Supporting 77 is a way for you to stand for the rights of all tipped workers across our city. With your support of 77, you’re not choosing between restaurants and workers; you’re choosing to create a more just and equitable system for all.

Aubrey DeBoer

Aubrey DeBoer is a bartender and restaurant manager in Washington, DC with nearly 10 years of industry experience. She has been a Ward 5 resident for the past eight years.

Leave a comment

Filed under Business, Gender Issues, Labor, Poverty and the Justice System

Tagged as , , , , , ,

by | January 26, 2018 · 10:59 am

Aziz Ansari, Power, and Sexual Assault

On January 13, online magazine Babe published an article titled, “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life.” The piece alleged acts of sexual misconduct on the part of comedian Aziz Ansari and in the aftermath, folks have been left to grapple with the murky questions of what is sexual assault, why do men fail to see it, and what we can do to stop it. On this week’s episode of Run it Black, David and Mike enter the fray.

1 Comment

Filed under Gender Issues

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

by | October 28, 2017 · 1:49 am

34justice Partners with Run It Black

I’m excited to announce that 34justice is partnering with Run It Black, a podcast on “sports, politics, culture, and the intersection of race” from David Tigabu and Mike Mitchell.  Mike taught me much of what I know about podcasting, and David is no newcomer to 34justice, having previously authored a great piece for us on how the co-option of Christianity helps explain the election of Donald Trump.  Besides being good friends of mine and knowing far more about pop culture than I ever will, David and Mike have awesome insights about the connections between racism and various other forms of oppression.  Often containing fascinating historical context, their episodes are both entertaining and informative.

You can listen to Run It Black episodes directly through 34justice’s new Run It Black widget, which can be found on the top right-hand-side of our webpage on a desktop computer and towards the bottom of the page on a mobile device.  You can also tune in on iTunes.  Here’s a quick overview of the first five episodes (from earliest to most recent):

What to do about the NFL?
Find out why David and Mike are boycotting the NFL this year and what they think of the Floyd Mayweather versus Conor McGregor showdown.

The Politics of Hurricanes
People of color suffer most when natural disasters strike, are often de-prioritized during our inadequate responses to such disasters, and will continue to face disproportionate harm if we fail to address climate change.  David and Mike explain.

Jemele Hill Was Right
Hill’s Black colleagues backed her up when she called Donald Trump a White supremacist, but ESPN didn’t.  David and Mike discuss the Right-wing backlash to race-conscious sports media before delving into some statistics on and possible remedies for the racial wealth gap.

Puerto Rico’s Colonial Disaster
As David and Mike note, our government has treated Puerto Rico significantly worse than it treats US states during times of natural disaster, a problem consistent with a long history of unjust policy towards Americans on the island.  They also comment on the evolution of NFL players’ protests against racial injustice.

The Enduring Significance of HBCUs
While neither David nor Mike attended an HBCU, they’ve thought a lot about the important role such institutions play in improving opportunities for Black Americans.  They note HBCUs’ many strengths, why some criticisms of HBCUs are misplaced, and the curious case of HBCU presidents accepting Donald Trump’s invitation to the White House.

Especially if you aren’t getting enough Run It Black between episodes, I highly recommend following the podcast, as well as David and Mike, on Twitter.  Happy listening!

Leave a comment

Filed under Environment, Gender Issues, Labor, Poverty and the Justice System, Race and Religion, Sports, US Political System

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

by | January 28, 2017 · 6:28 pm

“March for Life” and “Pro-Life” Are Misnomers

Every year since 1974, thousands of people have come to Washington, DC to rally against Roe v. Wade.  Protestors argue that pregnant women should be stripped of the ability to choose whether or not they want to have an abortion.  Referencing the unborn fetuses pregnant women carry inside their bodies, these anti-abortion advocates call their demonstration the “March for Life.”

Politicians who support these efforts use similar language.  Senator and former Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, for example, declared the “simple truth that all human life is sacred” to be the most recent march’s inspiration.

Yet neither Rubio nor the vast majority of marchers can credibly claim to have “pro-life” views.

I do not think fetuses should be viewed the same way as people, but let’s imagine you disagree with me.  Suppose, based on that disagreement, you believe an abortion kills an innocent person.  You think enabling the death of innocent people is wrong, and you thus think abortion must be opposed in all circumstances.  Isn’t that a “pro-life” view?

Well, it depends.  The logic of the ostensibly “pro-life” part of that reasoning is that, because X kills innocent people, and because killing innocent people is wrong, nobody should be able to choose X for any reason.

Here’s the problem with that logic: “X” could be any number of things.  Drone strikes kill innocent people.  More generally, war always does.  So does the death penalty.  And many other policies, while less active and direct than drone strikes, war, and putting people to death, effectively kill people.  Refugees are potentially given a death sentence when the countries to which they’re fleeing don’t let them in.  Thousands of people die each year due to inadequate access to health care.  And societies’ refusal to invest in substantial benefits for poor people both here and around the world leads to preventable deaths all the time.

People who truly have a “pro-life” position, therefore, oppose all of these things.  Those who are anti-war, anti-death penalty, pro-inclusive immigration, pro-universal health coverage, and pro-substantial benefits for the poor in addition to believing that fetuses are people and abortions are wrong may have a coherent, “pro-life” philosophy.

Needless to say, that’s not a description of Rubio.  He, like so many other anti-choice Republicans, opposes aborting fetuses but none of the preventable deaths mentioned above.

That doesn’t mean Rubio wouldn’t offer a justification for his positions.  He’d likely argue that drones, refugee bans, and military actions save more innocent lives than they sacrifice, that the death penalty is reserved for bad people who deserve it, and that providing health care and money for poor people slows economic growth, discourages work, and harms the very people such measures are intended to help.  He’d be wrong about all of these things – the United States perpetrates far more violence than we prevent, there are innocent people on death row, and meeting the needs of poor people, which we have the resources to do, would be perfectly consistent with a strong economy and boost long-term economic mobility – but that’s not the point.  The point is that Rubio does not allow the idea that “all human life is sacred” to guide his policy positions.  Instead, he balances the sacrifice of human lives against other things he thinks are important and decides which he thinks matters more.

In the realm of abortion, Rubio and others have decided that a fetus’s right to be born is more important than a woman’s right to make a personal, intimate decision about her body.  Again, if you believe fetuses are people and that life starts at conception, that may be a defensible position.  But if you also oppose raising taxes on rich people to provide health care and other basic needs to kids after they’re born, or if you support war, or the death penalty, your position definitely isn’t “pro-life.”  If you contend that “human life is sacred” only when that belief deprives women of rights but not when it consigns innocent people to death or cuts a little bit more into your fortune, you don’t really believe it.

6 Comments

Filed under Gender Issues, Philosophy

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

by | June 1, 2016 · 9:29 pm

The Heroines of 34justice

Update (8/29/17): Sadly, Aung San Suu Kyi has not only condoned but helped facilitate the Burmese government’s ethnic cleansing of the country’s Muslim minority population in the time since this post was written. Given this atrocity and thanks to the heads up from Richard Tilley and others, we have decided to remove her from the site’s banner, though the post below still contains the original language from when the banner included her picture.

In case you haven’t heard yet, the United States Treasury Department decided in April to overhaul how our currency looks.  The new $20 bill will feature Harriet Tubman, an amazing abolitionist who, in addition to bringing hundreds of former slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad, was a strong advocate for women’s suffrage.  She won’t be the sole occupant of her new real estate – despite ceding the front of the twenty to Tubman, the bill’s current (and rather despicable) mascot, Andrew Jackson, is just migrating to the back – but Tubman will be one of the first women since Martha Washington and one of the first Black people ever to appear on American paper money.  The qualifier “one of” is only necessary because the Treasury Department will also be adding Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Alice Paul, and Sojourner Truth to the back of the $10 bill and Marian Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr. to the back of the five.

Since the design of the new bills won’t be completed until 2020, White men can continue to revel in their exclusive hold on U.S. paper currency for quite some time.  We try to move a little faster here at 34justice, however, and, thanks in part to a reminder from a Twitter commenter, we’re going to see the Treasury Department’s delayed modifications to the dollar and raise them a change, effective today, to our website banner.

newlogo.png

The new 34justice logo features (from left) Ida Wells, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Keller, Malala Yousafzai, Cesar Chavez, and Aung San Suu Kyi.

Authentically celebrating the achievements of women (or any other group of people, for that matter) requires far more than visual representation.  We are consistently humbled by reminders from our female partners, friends, and family members that women have played a tremendous role in advocating for power-balancing policy while occupying a marginalized position even within their own movements, and we plan to continue to look for opportunities to elevate women’s voices on this blog.

In the meantime, we hope our revamped banner better highlights both the diversity of the people who have fought for social change and the interconnectedness of their respective challenges to power.  History is replete with examples of courageous women who, like the following four newcomers to the 34justice logo, have made vital contributions to social justice movements and left indelible marks on the world.

Helen Keller

helen_keller

Many people know that Helen Keller, despite being a “wild and unruly” child after becoming blind and deaf when she was 19 months old, was very bright, mastered sign language, and eventually learned to speak.  Fewer people know that she was an an active leader of the American socialist movement, a suffragette, an ardent advocate for people with disabilities, and an anti-war activist (not to mention a strong supporter of birth control).  In fact, Keller helped found the ACLU and was a renowned author and speaker on social justice issues, emphasizing the intersectionality of various struggles in her work and earning the well-deserved Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

Aung San Suu Kyi

suu_kyi

In 1988, after spending most of her life in India and England, Aung San Suu Kyi returned to her native Burma to take care of her mother, who had suffered a severe stroke.  That same year, Burma’s longtime military dictator stepped down and a pro-democracy movement – along with backlash from the military junta that killed thousands of protesters – took the country by storm.  Suu Kyi emerged out of the “8888 Uprising” (termed as such because it began on August 8, 1988) as a prominent member of the National League for Democracy (NLD), advocating for “a non-violent movement towards multi-party democracy” as well as “human rights and the rule of law.”  The NLD won 59 percent of the vote in a 1990 election and should have taken 80 percent of the seats in parliament, but the junta nullified the election results and kept Suu Kyi under house arrest for a total of 15 years between 1989 and 2010.

In 2010, the Burmese government finally held an election.  It was unfortunately a sham and the military-backed party won in a landslide, but Suu Kyi was released a week after it took place.  She met with the country’s president and helped facilitate some long overdue political reforms, and in 2012, the NLD won in a landslide in the country’s first “free and fair” elections in over 20 years.  Suu Kyi, who continued her social justice advocacy, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor from the United States and was finally able to collect the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1991.  Burma (officially known today as Myanmar, though there is considerable controversy about its name) is far from where it needs to be, but the NLD, with Suu Kyi at the helm, won another decisive victory in 2015 that sent “a clear message that civilians are now in charge.”  While technically banned from the presidency because of the country’s military-designed constitution, Suu Kyi has assumed the position of “state counselor” – created just for her – and is effectively the leader of the new government.

Ida Wells

ida_wells

In 1884, 71 years before Rosa Parks declined to give up her seat to a White man on a bus in Alabama, Ida Wells refused to give up her seat to a White man on a train in Tennessee.  After being forcibly removed, she sued the railroad and initially won her case, though Tennessee’s Supreme Court overruled this decision.  Wells, a teacher, began to write about that and other injustices.  When she highlighted the unacceptably poor conditions of the schools serving Black students in Memphis, she lost her teaching job.  But that didn’t discourage her; instead, it further invigorated her passion for social-justice-oriented investigative journalism.

Wells began to debunk myths about lynchings; at the time, many people thought they were appropriate responses to rape or some other heinous crime.  She documented how they were actually White supremacist murders of people who competed with White businesses, had consensual relationships with White women, or were even viewed to have looked at White people wrong.  Forced to move north by the anger and death threats her writing provoked, Wells continued to speak out about these injustices, touring Great Britain and successfully drumming up some European opposition to lynching.  She was also a founding member of the NAACP and several women’s organizations.

Malala Yousafzai

malala

The Taliban controlled much of northwestern Pakistan in 2007 and aggressively suppressed women’s rights; girls were banned not just from “cultural activities like dancing and watching television,” but from attending school as well.  That didn’t sit well with Malala Yousafzai, who at age 11 delivered a speech entitled “How dare the Tailban take away my basic right to education?”  Soon thereafter, Yousafzai began to blog and speak out about her experience under the Taliban regime for the BBC, garnering worldwide attention and a nomination for the International Children’s Peace Prize.

In response, the Taliban tried to kill her; she was shot in the head on a bus in October of 2012.  The assassination attempt sparked a massive outpouring of support for her cause and led to “the first Right to Education Bill in Pakistan.”  Amazingly, Yousafzai survived and immediately resumed her advocacy, kicking things off with a speech at the United Nations in 2013 and eventually co-winning the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.  When she turned 18 on July 12, 2015, she opened a school for Syrian refugees in Lebanon and “called on world leaders to invest in ‘books, not bullets.’”

Leave a comment

Filed under Gender Issues

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

by | February 14, 2016 · 2:34 pm

Supporting Bernie Sanders is a Feminist Choice

Lela Spielberg is a lifelong advocate for gender equality. She has worked in the education and social services field as a teacher, policy analyst, and program designer at a local family foundation in Washington, DC.  In this post, she describes how the dialogue about Bernie Sanders and his supporters illustrates some of the problems with a particular brand of American feminism.

Lela Spielberg

Lela Spielberg

Over the last month, as Bernie Sanders has gained popularity in the polls, the media and prominent political figures have ramped up their attacks against him. At first, these attacks were unsurprising to me: “he’s inexperienced;” “he’s too idealistic;” “he’ll never get anything done.” These statements are part of the typical chorus of attacks that Washington insiders and committed capitalists have used against progressive candidates since the beginning of time.  I won’t spend my time debunking these myths, as there have been several articles, including ones on this blog, that have done so already. However, about a month ago, a new strand of attacks emerged that I have found more troubling – as a woman, as a millennial, and as an American. These attacks allege that Bernie and/or his supporters are anti-feminist. Not only are they untrue, but their language also demonstrates the deep sense of elitism and entitlement that pervades traditional American feminism.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. I’m a Bernie supporter. I’ve identified as a socialist ever since I learned about the concept in my eighth-grade world history class, and I’ve admired Bernie’s activism since I moved to Washington over six years ago. Until Bernie jumped into the race, I had planned on casting a rather unenthusiastic vote for Hillary Clinton. While I believe Clinton to be smart and hard-working, her past support for bad trade deals, aggressive war, and welfare reform are not aligned with my values of fairness, peace, and economic equality. Bernie, on the other hand, has spent decades fighting for these values and has a record to prove it.

Moreover, all of these issues are at the heart of what I believe feminism to be—fighting for fairness for all women, regardless of their race, sexual identity, education level, and economic position. Consider, for example, that two thirds of workers who earn the minimum wage are women. While Clinton has voiced support for raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour, only Sanders has embraced and aggressively campaigned for the $15 minimum wage that thousands of women throughout the United States are demanding. Or think about the young women and girls being rounded up and deported by the Obama Administration. Clinton defended these actions six months ago and still won’t commit to ending them. Sanders, on the other hand, has spoken out strongly against the deportation raids and in support of Central American children. To me, feminism is not just about abortion rights and breaking the glass ceiling; it’s also about making sure that all women have access to good, reliable prenatal care and early screenings for breast cancer under a Medicare for All health care system, which Bernie Sanders supports and Hillary Clinton does not.  Feminism is about fighting for the empowerment of disadvantaged women both in the United States and around the world.

Yet powerful public figures, including two “feminist icons,” have called my feminism (as well as the seriousness of my convictions) into question by mocking my choice to support Bernie over Hillary. While they’ve since issued partial apologies for their most egregious comments – Gloria Steinem’s assertion that young women only support Bernie because “the boys are with Bernie” and Madeleine Albright’s statement that “there is a special place in hell for women who won’t help other women” by voting for Hillary Clinton – the fact that they made them at all, and their failure to really own them, propagates an American feminism that isn’t about supporting all women, but is about supporting wealthy, powerful, white women. So do comments by the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who said in an interview with the New York Times in January that she sees “a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided.”

The idea that young women are complacent and don’t have a sense of history is wrong. I appreciate the strides women have made, in politics and in boardrooms across the country. These accomplishments are wonderful, and they should be celebrated and continued. However, in crowing about these accomplishments without acknowledging that most of them only benefit middle- and upper-class white women, it is Steinem, Albright, and Wasserman Schultz who forget the lessons of history. Even with Roe v. Wade, poor and working-class women still lack access to safe, affordable abortions and family planning choices that their wealthier female counterparts have. This deep inequality that has only grown in recent generations is one of the reasons I am voting for Bernie Sanders.

As it turns out, my peers feel similarly – Sanders leads Hillary when it comes to female voters under 45, and he beat Hillary by 11 percentage points among all women in the New Hampshire primary. Yet many media voices continue to paint Bernie supporters as mostly male by using the term “Berniebro.”  Coined in an article in the Atlantic, the Berniebro label originally characterized Bernie supporters as “white; well-educated; middle-class (or, delicately, ‘upper middle-class’); and aware of NPR podcasts and jangly bearded bands.”

Numerous other commentators, including Paul Krugman, have now picked up on this label.  In their estimation, the Berniebro is not only a privileged white man, but a sexist, online harasser, too. In reality, however, the term Berniebro is sexist. When it isn’t accusing women of being “bros,” it’s ignoring the voices of women (and, for that matter, the people of color and working-class people) who support Bernie.

Let me be clear: I am not defending anyone, Bernie supporter or otherwise, who makes sexist, nasty remarks about Hillary Clinton. Nor am I denying that Hillary Clinton encounters sexism that Bernie Sanders and other men never will – she absolutely does. However, I am challenging those writing and speaking about the election, and about Bernie and Hillary in particular, to broaden their thinking and definition of feminism. Kevin Young and Diana C. Sierra Becerra wrote a wonderful piece for Alice Walker’s blog where they eloquently sum up this tension within the feminist community. They write:

In the US feminism is often understood as the right of women — and wealthy white women most of all — to share in the spoils of capitalism and US imperial power. By not confronting the exclusion of non-whites, foreigners, working-class people, and other groups from this vision, liberal feminists are missing a crucial opportunity to create a more inclusive, more powerful movement.

We have a long way to go before we have the truly inclusive, powerful feminist movement that the authors envision. Electing Clinton won’t get us there. To be fair, neither will electing Sanders. But not shaming women for casting a vote against economic, racial, and myriad other forms of inequality is one place we can start.

Leave a comment

Filed under 2016 Election, Gender Issues, US Political System

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

by | April 8, 2015 · 12:09 am

Sexual Assault Prevention Requires More than Well-Intentioned Allies

Update (3/2/2018): Author’s information has been removed due to the author’s request to remain anonymous.

Columbia University student-activist and rape survivor Emma Sulkowicz was raped by a classmate in 2012, and, after the university failed to punish her attacker, called attention to the epidemic of sexual assault on campus through a performance art piece, Mattress Performance, in which she carried her mattress around with her on campus throughout the academic year. Sulkowicz’s invitation to the President’s State of the Union Address this year as the guest of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand shows that the problem of sexual assault is increasingly gaining national attention, and it’s encouraging to see a number of prominent political figures beginning to talk about it. However, trying to address sexual assault is not sufficient to ending sexual assault; the way we address it matters, and we have a long way to go before we do so effectively.

Rape and sexual assault have received particular focus from the Obama Administration. The U.S. Department of Education is currently investigating 95 universities and colleges under Title IX sexual violence violations. The White House has also recently engaged the issue of sexual assault on campus, and in January 2014, President Obama established a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, co-chaired by the Office of the Vice President and the Council on Women and Girls. In April 2014, the Task Force published its first set of action steps and recommendations regarding sexual assault on campus: the initiative “Not Alone” purports to help improve identification, prevention, and effective response to sexual assault on campuses. And in September 2014, the White House Task Force launched a PSA and report to call for bystander intervention to protect victims of sexual assault. Despite well-intentioned efforts, however, these initiatives fail to successfully address sexual assault on campus because they (1) focus on bystander intervention rather than directly addressing individual and institutional misconduct, and (2) subvert female agency.

The misaligned priorities of the initiative are apparent through the title of the Task Force: the “White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault” suggests that it is the Task Force’s job to “protect students from sexual assault”– and not to fight to end the act of sexual assault itself. The Task Force focuses on identifying victims to the neglect of identifying perpetrators, which incorrectly suggests that the act of sexual assault is both inevitable and inherently enmeshed in our culture. The Task Force directs us to protect women, but not to identify and stop rapists. It is a welcome shift from victim-blaming, but it is misplaced to focus solely on bystander intervention (i.e., a third party protecting a “potential victim” from a “potential rapist”).

Michael Winerip noted in the New York Times last year: “The hope is that bystander programs will have the same impact on campus culture that the designated driver campaign has had in reducing drunken driving deaths (to 9,878 in 2011 from 15,827 in 1991)…Both take the same tack: Drinking to excess can’t be stopped but the collateral damage can.” In other words, Winerip identifies that bystander intervention works under the assumption that sexual assault cannot be stopped, but individual instances of victimization can.

This assumption is damaging because, in attempting to shape campus culture to emphasize the protection of women, it instead validates violence against women as an inherent and unchangeable aspect of our culture. Approaching sexual assault prevention in this way puts the onus on the bystander, and removes responsibility from the offender because “it happens.” We need to acknowledge not only the fact that rape occurs, but that we perpetuate rape culture, and consequently rape, through acceptance of its inevitability.

The White House Task Force’s PSA, despite having several commendable features, also inadvertently subverts female agency in its attempt to end sexual assault. The PSA, titled “1 is 2 Many,” features several male celebrities, including Vice President Biden, President Obama, Steve Carrell, and Seth Meyers, urging the audience to “speak up” or “do something about” sexual assault on campus. President Obama ends the message with: “It is up to all of us to put an end to sexual assault. And that starts with you.”

On first glance, there is a lot to applaud about this PSA: it displays powerful men – in politics, comedy, and entertainment, all of whom are stereotypically masculine men – speaking out against sexual assault, and declaring that “if she doesn’t consent, or she can’t consent, it’s rape, it’s assault.” That line is valid and useful to the cause of ending violence against women. Also, it is persuasive to see powerful men taking a stand against sexual assault – but that premise illustrates a significant part of the problem with this campaign.

The implication that these men, and no women, are best able to get across the message to end sexual assault is indicative of a culture in which men’s words have greater weight than women’s, a culture in which gender inequality is evident, and thus a culture in which sexual assault is tolerated as a part of our society. Because there are no women present in the PSA, when the male celebrities urge “us” to intervene to stop sexual assault, it appears that they are addressing only men. The non-presence of women here suggests that women do not have power or agency to stop sexual assault, and this further perpetuates a culture of violence in which women are “helpless” and assault is “inevitable.”

Rape and sexual assault entail the denial of women’s agency – forced or coerced sex denies a woman her right to choose what she does and does not want to do – and so, women’s agency is integral to the effort to end violence against women. It remains important to engage men as allies, but we must do this carefully so as to not take away the agency of any woman in the process. Perhaps we are able to stop specific instances of sexual assault from occurring through bystander intervention, but encouraging bystander intervention will not succeed in ending sexual assault, especially because most men who assault are “repeat rapists” – one study, for example, found that “almost two thirds of [non-incarcerated] rapists were repeat offenders who averaged close to six rapes each.” Bystander intervention programs also won’t rid society of the culture that tolerates rape.

Instead, we need to hold universities, police forces, and individuals accountable for sexual assault, and treat it in a way in which we do not resign ourselves to the expectation of its inevitability. This accountability can include pushing for a policy to expel rapists on college campuses, or even the recent NFL policy, which, although an imperfect policy, moved to banish players from the league for domestic violence offenses (this punishment is currently for second offenses, and players will receive a minimum of 6 weeks of suspension after their first offense).  Calling attention to sexual assault in a way similar to Emma Sulkowicz’s performance art piece constitutes good activism: Sulkowicz both calls attention to the rape itself (in carrying the mattress on which it occurred) and the institution which has the power to bring justice to the survivor (by carrying the mattress on Columbia University’s campus). Mattress Performance emphasizes female agency by highlighting a woman’s choice to take her assault into her own hands.

We can use the White House Task Force and its initiatives as a stepping stone to provide further attention to violence against women and the imperfect policies that address sexual violence. Nevertheless, it is important that we expand on these initiatives, and work to adjust our culture’s tolerance of sexually violent acts by empowering women while holding perpetrators and institutions accountable.

2 Comments

Filed under Gender Issues, US Political System

Tagged as , , , , , ,

by | December 24, 2014 · 7:27 am

Shaming the Victim: The Public Backlash against Jackie and How It Reinforces Rape Culture

In this post, Lela Spielberg discusses the media’s coverage of a gang rape at the University of Virginia and its complicity in American rape culture.  Lela is a lifelong advocate for gender equality and has spent time as an elementary school teacher, education policy analyst, and director at an education nonprofit.

Lela Spielberg

Lela Spielberg

Last month, Rolling Stone published a story by Sabrina Rubin Erdely: “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA.” I’m sure most of you are by now familiar with this story and its central protagonist, “Jackie.” (If not, you should read it). The lack of urgency and transparency with which UVA and other elite universities across the country have chosen to handle allegations of sexual assault and rape on their campuses deserves plenty of comment, but my post is not about this story.

Instead, my post is about the controversy that followed Erdely’s story, and the overwhelmingly negative and unkind reactions towards Jackie from the media and the general public. Allow me to briefly summarize:

Following the release of the story, T. Rees Shapiro of The Washington Post chose to follow up on Rolling Stone’s story, and when he did, he found some inconsistencies in Jackie’s narrative. Several other, less reputable news outlets – including The Huffington Post, The Daily Caller, and Fox News – chose to follow suit. A mere week after the story was published, several holes had been poked in the Rolling Stone article. Every detail of the story and rape was questioned: Why were the alleged perpetrators of the rape not interviewed? Were there five men present at the rape, or seven? Did Jackie have to have vaginal sex with them, or was she “just” forced to perform oral sex?

None of these inconsistencies refute the fact that Jackie was indeed sexually assaulted at UVA, or that UVA was incredibly cagey in its handling of the assault and the story. Yet the ensuing public backlash was enough for Rolling Stone to issue a statement apologizing for the original article and for the media to continue, for almost a month now, to further discredit Jackie, Erdely, and, to some extent, the prevalence of rape on college campuses. These reactions are not surprising to me. Rather, they are symptomatic of a larger problem. The world we live in is overwhelmingly tilted in favor of its most privileged members – in most cases, wealthy, white men – and yet so blithely unaware of the privilege it grants some people and not others that those who challenge this privilege are vilified, impugned, and doubted.

I will not waste my time going tit for tat with The Washington Post and Rolling Stone on the facts of Jackie’s story. I understand that good journalism is about facts, and I regret that Rolling Stone did not do a perfect job checking them. But in a story involving trauma, there will likely be inconsistencies in first-person accounts of events. And those stories still deserve to be told.

What Jackie described to Erdely was a severely traumatic experience. It is a well-documented fact that when people experience an incredibly stressful event (and being forced to perform oral sex, being gang raped by several men, and/or having a beer bottle inserted in your vagina all definitely qualify as stressful), their memories of the event are often incomplete and/or altered. Moreover, most people tend to forget details as time passes. Think about it: if I interviewed you about a sexual experience, even a pleasant one, that happened two years ago, would you be able to tell me everything? Where did your partner work at the time? How long was the foreplay? How long did the sex last? What did you say to your friends afterwards?

(If you think you can recall these details, please email me so we can set up an interview. Then I’ll interview every single person tangentially involved, ask to go through your emails and texts, and print any inconsistencies in your story on the front page of The Washington Post.)

Indeed, that’s why self-doubt and guilt are two feelings that sexual assault survivors often experience. They wake up in disbelief: Did this really happen? Will I remember enough to tell the police? A judge? A jury? What if I forget a detail and I ruin my life, or his? In too many instances, this self-doubt prevents sexual assault victims from confronting their attackers or reporting the crime, which reinforces the idea in perpetrators’ heads that this kind of behavior is acceptable, and creates a new cycle of attacks and secret shame.

When women get the courage to tell the story of their sexual assault, they must brace themselves for a level of scrutiny and character assassination that not even the most saintly citizen could withstand. In Jackie’s case, the media has been quick to impeach her character, and has recently gone so far as to suggest she was obsessive and boy crazy. Behold just a few articles that come up when I perform a basic Google search on Jackie:

Defaming and questioning a woman’s character is an all too common reaction when a woman reports a rape. Everyone from acquaintances to law enforcement officials will ask tacit questions about what she did to deserve it: Was she wearing something revealing? Did she go upstairs willingly? Did she kiss him at the party? Did she drink anything? Did she send a suggestive text message? Not only will they raise doubts about the incident in question, but they will also call into question her general character: Does she sleep around? Does she drink a lot? Does she chase guys? Has she ever sent a naughty picture?

Here’s the deal, folks: even if the answer to every single hypothetical question posed above was, “yes,” it isn’t any less possible that the woman was raped, and it doesn’t make the rape any less of a crime and abomination. Being forced to have sex without consent is a horrific abuse. It is an assault on one’s sense of safety, on one’s physical body, and on one’s mind. Nobody deserves that, no matter who she is and what she did in the minutes before it happened. But yet, in Jackie’s case and the case of so many others, we spend way too much time looking for evidence that the behavior of the attackers was somewhat justified.

It’s no wonder that Jackie waited so long to tell her story. After all, look at what she had to look forward to: reporters harassing her and her family, internet trolls searching relentlessly for her identity, even her alleged “friends” questioning her integrity to reporters.

Zerlina Maxwell wrote an excellent piece for The Washington Post about the high cost of not believing rape survivors. She writes, “The cost of disbelieving women…signals that…women don’t matter and that they are disposable — not only to frat boys and Bill Cosby, but to us. And they face a special set of problems in having their say.”

I want Jackie, and the many women who have been or unfortunately one day will be in a similar position, to know they aren’t disposable. Talking about a sexual assault takes courage. It means replaying the details from an incredibly painful thing you are trying to forget. It means confronting your attacker, at the very least in your own mind, and sometimes in person, even though the thought and sight of him makes you sick. It means listening to the patronizing questions about what you did wrong, and it means bracing yourself for every mistake you’ve ever made, every possible error in judgment you’ve ever had, to be analyzed by people who don’t even know you.

After a story about rape makes national news, it’s a shame that the people on trial the most are the victim and those who tried to help her. But this doesn’t have to be our reality. Instead of focusing on discrediting the victim, let’s focus on her alleged attackers. Why did they do what they did? Have they done it to anyone else? What messages have they gotten from their families, their friends, from their university, and their society about the rightness and wrongness of what happened?

There is a quote I like, by a favorite writer of my father’s, Abraham Joshua Heschel: “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” Regardless of the particular details of what happened to Jackie, and the details surrounding any assault on someone’s body, spirit, and safety, we should not look for reasons to let those who committed these crimes, or ourselves, off the hook.

17 Comments

Filed under Gender Issues

Tagged as , , , , , ,