In Airport Security, “the Same” Is Not “Equal”

When the TSA is questioned on its procedures, its first go-to excuse is that they’re keeping us safe. If you press harder, a favorite second-line rationale is that they need to treat everyone the same – even toddlers and the elderly – because the alternative would be “racial profiling.”

Sure, the TSA may be treating everyone the same. That doesn’t mean they’re being treated equally, however. Some people are more vulnerable than others. I’ve already touched on the likelihood that a grope search would trigger a rape survivor’s trauma. Newsweek has a good in-depth analysis of this issue.

I’d argue that children are also vulnerable to being traumatized. Two nights ago, in response to an adult conversation that in retrospect I wish I’d postponed until after the kids were in bed, my eleven-year-old son, the Bear, said: “Do you remember when the security guy searched inside my waistband in Belgium? Are they going to do that to me again?” His eyes welled up. Granted, he cries easily – a trait he inherited from his mother – but he seemed deeply upset at the prospect of a replay.

Now, imagine a child who’s actually been sexually abused. How will she or he react to being groped, no matter how officially and “professionally?”

Today, TSA head John Pistole (is that a pistole in your pocket? … oh never mind) told an NPR interviewer that children twelve and under would be exempted from the enhanced pat-down:

We did not do frankly a very good job of communicating initially that there would be an exemption, if you will, from the thorough pat-down for children 12 and under.  That was under review when the policy came out, and so we have clarified that.  It does not apply to children 12 and under.

(You can hear the interview at NPR.)

Frankly, I don’t think that this exemption existed until today. Goldblog cites an incident about ten days ago where an eight-year-old boy was selected for secondary screening after he went through the metal detector. Yes, the boy’s genitals were checked, and his father was appalled. I suspect Pistole’s volte-face (or flip-flop, for the Francophobes still out there!) is a reaction to the public anger about subjecting children to intrusive groping. I think he and Janet Napolitano realized that anything smacking of pedophilia could doom their program. Hence the age of thirteen, when, apparently, children are no longer children. But pray tell how, exactly, a thirteen-year-old will process the experience differently than a twelve-year-old?

While there’s been an upswell in outrage about children being groped, there’s been almost no public attention to another group that will suffer disproportionately: people who are trans or intersex, or who for whatever reason don’t conform to sex/gender expectations. A couple of days ago, GallingGalla left a comment here that vividly highlighted the real dangers and humiliations awaiting her:

Apparently, TSA considers us to be terrorists simply by our existence, as they have issued directives indicating that people dressing in what they, the TSA, perceives to be the “wrong” clothing are more likely to be terrorists. I guess, since they think that trans women are “really men”, we must be hiding bad things in our lady clothes.

Along with that, I shudder to think about the harassment and sexual assault that is *sure* to follow the discovery of “non-standard” genitals.

It is because of back-scatter machines and pat-downs that I do not fly. I don’t have the privilege to “opt-out”; I simply *cannot* fly, as my very person will be in danger.

How long will it be before photos of people stripped naked by back-scatter machines wind up on 4chan or local “she-male” porn sites?

(I quoted most of it; the whole comment is here.)

Of course, the TSA policy both taps into and reinforces the trope of the “deceptive” trans person. It sets trans passengers up for public humiliation and violence. TSA personnel are not even trained to search a child with sensitivity. What are the odds that they will react calmly and reasonably to non-standard genitals?

Trans men are worried too, as evidenced by this anonymous comment at BoingBoing:

I’m a trans man (FtM transsexual), and I’ve NEVER packed when I go to the airport b/c I’m sure my dick would show up looking like plastic explosive in my pants. My home airport only has the n00dscanners, so now I am not entirely sure what I should do. Either way, it looks like I’m destined for molestation at the airport. Pack, and be singled out for a pat-down based on what shows up on the scanner, or not pack and have the TSO end up concerned/confused when the “enhanced” pat-down turns up the fact that I don’t have any balls for “resistance”.

I have a flight planned in January. I’m pretty nervous about it.

Those are pretty terrible choices. And in case anyone was reassured by the blurriness of the naked-scanner images that had been stored at a Florida courthouse and leaked yesterday by Gizmodo? The resolution on those is much lower than the machines are capable of delivering. The TSA has told the New York Times that the machines are able to image a sanitary pad. They weren’t able to say, however, whether the pad would trigger an enhanced pat-down.

Update 11/17/10, 11:10 p.m.: Edited above to add the material from Goldblog, where he notes that the war on terror is colliding with the war on pedophilia – and so far, terror is winning.

Update 11/22/10, 10:40 a.m.: See also this post by Rebecca at The Thang Blog on how the new procedures have effectively grounded her as a trans woman.

Update 11/22/10, 3:30 p.m.: … and similarly, this piece by Bridgette P. LaVictoire at Lezget Real, who stresses the humiliation and danger to which she’ll be exposed. The mainstream media remains (predictably) silent.

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How “Enhanced Patdowns” Feel: Hearing Victims’ Voices

(Trigger warning for descriptions of sexual violence and violations of bodily autonomy.)

In the face of TSA claims that the new “enhanced patdowns” don’t constitute groping, what do actual passengers have to say?

Predictably, most people are sheeple, and many apparently are willing to believe that losing our civil liberties are the price we have to pay for protecting our freedoms. But a few people – mostly women – have spoken publicly about feeling terribly violated. I’ve collected a variety of their voices. You’ll notice I’ve drawn on a wide variety of sources, including some you might consider fringy. Yet there’s no reason to discount these people’s stories. This post attempts to foreground their stories and voices rather than my analysis. We would do well to listen to them.

Rosemary Fitzpatrick, a CNN reporter, was subjected to a private grope screening after her underwire bra tripped the metal detector:

According to Fitzpatrick, a female screener ran her hands around her breasts, over her stomach, buttocks and her inner thighs, and briefly touched her crotch.

“I felt helpless, I felt violated, and I felt humiliated,” Fitzpatrick said, adding that she was reduced to tears at the checkpoint. She particularly objected to the fact that travelers were not warned about the new procedures.

Unsurprisingly, former victims of sexual assault are finding their trauma triggered by being violated in a place ostensibly devoted to their safety! Celeste, a survivor of rape, is quoted at the Pagan Newswire Collective:

“What they did to me, in full view of everyone else in line, was like being sexually assaulted all over again.  I was in shock.  I hate myself that I allowed them to do this to me.  I haven’t been able to stop crying since.” …

Coming back from Chicago, Celeste, like increasing numbers of travelers, was forced to make a difficult choice – either allow strangers to see her naked or allow strangers to touch and squeeze her breasts and groin in full view of other travels and TSA agents.  “This was a nightmare come to life,” Celeste says, “I said I didn’t want them to see me naked and the agent started yelling Opt out- we have an opt here.  Another agent took me aside and said they would have to pat me down.  He told me he was going to touch my genitals and asked if I wouldn’t rather just go through the scanner, that it would be less humiliating for me.  I was in shock.  I couldn’t believe this was happening.  I kept saying I don’t want any of this to happen.  I was whispering please don’t do this, please, please.”

Since Celeste didn’t agree to go through the scanner, the enhanced pat down began.  “He started at one leg and then ran his hand up to my crotch.  He cupped and patted my crotch with his palm.  Other flyers were watching this happen to me. At that point I closed my eyes and started praying to the Goddess for strength.  He also cupped and then squeezed my breasts.  That wasn’t the worst part.  He touched my face, he touched my hair, stroking me.  That’s when I started crying.  It was so intimate, so horrible.  I feel like I was being raped.  There’s no way I can fly again.  I can’t do it.”

But a history of sexual violence is not the only intersection with the TSA violations. Disability is also amplifying the trauma in some cases, as a 49-year-old woman wrote to libertarian blogger John W. Whitehead:

I was subjected to a TSA rub down in Pittsburgh in September. There is no patting happening. The officer ran her hands over every square inch of my body, firmly pressing into my flesh in every area when I declined to have myself irradiated. Being a recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome, I am extremely aware that my body needs protection from anything that is unnatural or unnecessary, and excess radiation is on my list of things to avoid. Unfortunately, the rub down elicited some trauma issues, and when I got upset and started crying, they started the “pat down” all over again.

Whitehead definitely has an anti-state, anti-Obama agenda, but I see no reason to doubt the first-person accounts he has collected; this issue seems to be rousing people who are right, left, and libertarian, while the mushy middle marches through the scanners without a peep. He also heard from a flight attendant:

They didn’t tell me it was a Full Body Scanner. I was not made aware that I even had an option to be patted down instead. After the scan, I was still patted down on my breast area because I was wearing my flight attendant wings. I truly felt molested. As a female traveler, I already have to deal with personal safety issues. In the past, when I have gone through the security line, I have experienced two of the TSA men standing staring at me, and I could overhear them deciding whether they thought I was attractive.

Understandably, flight attendants’ unions are urging them to insist on a private screening with a witness, and they report that a number of flight attendants are in contact with the ACLU, lodging complaints, and even preparing lawsuits. The leaders of two pilots’ unions, Mike Cleary and David Bates, have urged their members to avoid the radiation involved in body scanning, but each of them also noted the violation involved in the enhanced patdowns:

One pilot described his experience as “sexual molestation,” according to Cleary’s letter. Bates wrote, “There is absolutely no denying that the enhanced pat-down is a demeaning experience.”

We’ve also got oral interviews with a couple of women who’ve had bad experiences – one of whom submitted to the patdown, another of whom refused. The first comes from an interview by Alex Jones. Yes, he’s a Truther, but that doesn’t disqualify this woman’s testimony:

(Posted originally at Jones’ PrisonPlanet.)

Note that Michelle, this mother of two was not automatically given a same-sex screener, and she had to insist on having a woman screen her daughters, an 8-year-old and a young toddler. Her story starts at about 04:00: “They touched. And it was not back of hand. … It was a male officer that patted me down.” (Jones argues that this is sexual assault, for what it’s worth.)

A young libertarian gal, Meg McLain, had heard that the procedure routinely requires breasts be squeezed and twisted (“it hurts!”) and she refused to “let them touch me in ways that I’m not comfortable with.”

Around 2:15 on the clip, she says, “Its getting to the point where I feel more physically molested than if some random guy actually came up and molested me. It’s more intrusive than that.” Meg demands to see a manager, and within 30 seconds there are five or six TSA agents and a dozen cops. They wouldn’t let her touch her stuff. She kept posing questions, and one of the officials yelled at her whenever he doesn’t have an answer. They cuff Meg to a chair. One of the agents rips her airline ticket in half. She’s sobbing and can’t even reach her face to wipe it. They deliver a thirty-minute lecture on terrorism.

So maybe we should all just cave in to the strip-search machines? Well, it’s not so simple. Consider  this woman’s report of the groping she got after a TSA body scanner erroneously showed her carrying something (she never learned what) under her clothes. Yes, she docilely went through the scan and still wasn’t spared the humiliation of a full-on grope.

Michelle’s 8-year-old gets the last word: “Mom, why did they do that?”

Update, 11/17/10, 12:20 p.m.: Here’s another story of groping, this one from a young mother who was traveling with her baby. I’d say if the agent can feel your individual labia, they’ve definitely gone beyond any definition of a “reasonable” search.

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TSA “Enhanced Patdown” – a Form of Sexual Assault?

On the surface, government-authorized TSA groping seems like it falls on the spectrum of sexual assault. Ethically, it definitely violates consent. Legally, the situation is murkier.

In my jurisdiction (Ohio), “sexual imposition” (Ohio Revised Code 2907.06) seems applicable, if you read it in isolation from the rest of the code. Its definition begins:

(A) No person shall have sexual contact with another, not the spouse of the offender; cause another, not the spouse of the offender, to have sexual contact with the offender; or cause two or more other persons to have sexual contact when any of the following applies:

(1) The offender knows that the sexual contact is offensive to the other person, or one of the other persons, or is reckless in that regard.

I think it’s hard to argue that the TSA and its officers are not acting recklessly. It should be obvious to any sentient person that groping of breasts and genitals is will be experienced as offensive.

Furthermore, you can’t really make the case that no assault is occurring because passengers freely consent to the procedures. The only way I can travel from Ohio to California to visit my family next month is by air – period. I need to see my dad. The TSA is presenting people with a “choice” of being stripped naked by the body-scan machines, or undergoing an “enhanced patdown,” which amounts to groping by a stranger – or not getting on the plane. That is no choice at all. Moreover, as of October 21, signs at the security checkpoints in the Columbus airport said nothing about what alternative screening would entail. They most certainly did not warn passengers that their genitals would be touched. Passengers are being taken completely by surprise when that occurs. Thus, ORC 2907.06 (A) (3) would apparently apply:

(3) The offender knows that the other person, or one of the other persons, submits because of being unaware of the sexual contact.

But here’s a wrinkle. Ohio law defines “sexual contact” in pretty narrow terms:

ORC 2907.01(B): “Sexual contact” means any touching of an erogenous zone of another, including without limitation the thigh, genitals, buttock, pubic region, or, if the person is a female, a breast, for the purpose of sexually arousing or gratifying either person. [my emphasis]

In other words, the law has a mens rea requirement that limits it to cases where the perpetrator is getting off on the touching.

The TSA will of course argue that there’s no sexual intent or arousal and thus the procedure doesn’t amount to sexual assault. In fact, that’s exactly what TSA minion “Blogger Bob” has been asserting at the official TSA blog:

Also, there is no fondling, squeezing, groping, or any sort of sexual assault taking place at airports. You have a professional workforce carrying out procedures they were trained to perform to keep aviation security safe.

No “groping”? That’s an outright lie.

Does professionalism and training eliminate the possibility that at least some TSA employees will get a sexual kick from their groping? Of course not. Problem is, we can’t know who’s secretly getting some jollies and who isn’t. Unless a TSA officer makes crude comments in front of witnesses, you’ve got no case under Ohio law.

But here’s another wrinkle. Federal law takes a broader view of “sexual contact.” Here’s how U.S. Code Chapter 190A, dealing with “sexual abuse,” defines it in Section 2246 (3):

the term “sexual contact” means the intentional touching, either directly or through the clothing, of the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to abuse, humiliate, harass, degrade, or arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person

Note that humiliation, harassment, and degradation all fall within the law’s definition. As Jeffrey Goldberg reports, the intent of the TSA is that “enhanced patdowns” will humiliate and harass flyers so that we’ll all march docilely through the body-scanners:

I asked him [the TSA officer] if he was looking forward to conducting the full-on pat-downs. “Nobody’s going to do it,” he said, “once they find out that we’re going to do.”

In other words, people, when faced with a choice, will inevitably choose the Dick-Measuring Device over molestation? “That’s what we’re hoping for. We’re trying to get everyone into the machine.” He called over a colleague. “Tell him what you call the back-scatter,” he said. “The Dick-Measuring Device,” I said. “That’s the truth,” the other officer responded.

So the intent to humiliate, harass, and degrade is definitely present – as a matter of policy! The problem here is that (as far as I understand it) federal law only applies to certain highly-circumscribed locations, including an airplane in flight or federal prisons. Even though the TSA is a federal agency, it wouldn’t necessarily be subject to this definition.

But why don’t state laws take on this broader definition? I’d love to see it adopted in every state. We can all think of instances where it’s not clear whether a groper is getting a sexual buzz or is just power-tripping. Your average public-transit groper might fall into this gray area. (And while we’re at it, some cases of medical assault – in childbirth or otherwise – could fall under this expanded definition, too, as long as they involve intent to humiliate or degrade.)

Broadening the definition to include “an intent to abuse, humiliate, harass, and degrade” wouldn’t eliminate a mens rea requirement. It would simply update the law to acknowledge that the motives behind sexual assault are a muddy mixture of power and sex.

In short, I don’t think we can make a case, legally, to try TSA officials (be they policymakers or lackeys) on sexual assault. We can make an excellent case for reforming definitions of sexual assault.

So do we have any legal recourse when it comes to TSA groping?

Well, I’d argue that routine molestation of passengers is unconstitutional. To me, it’s blindingly obvious that “enhanced patdowns” violate the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

There’s no probable cause. No warrants have been issued. I guess some people might consider groping a “reasonable” response to terrorism. If so, why not permit cavity searches as well? Surely they’d be more likely to catch the next would-be bomber.

I really hope the ACLU will take this on. So far, they’re just considering possible action.

[Standard disclaimer: I am not trained as a lawyer! This above represents my best understanding as a layperson.]

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More Reason to Be Crotch-ety about the TSA

When I flew out of Columbus a few weeks ago, I was stunned to see the new machines arrayed at the checkpoint. Ours is a relatively podunk airport, and I’d hoped the body scanners would come either late or never. I eyed the machines queasily, calculated how much time I had to squander on security, and decided that I wouldn’t miss my flight if I stood on principle.

When I got to the front of  the line, I bravely announced to the TSA personnel that I chose to opt out of the body scanners. I walked through the metal detector. “Now where do I go?”

“Huh?”

“I don’t want to go through the scanners. I’m opting out. That sign over there says I’m allowed to. So where should I go?”

“You just went through the metal detector, right?”

“Yes, but … don’t you want to pat me down?”

“No, you’re done.”

I grabbed my computer, wiggled into my shoes, and hightailed it for the gate before anyone changed their mind.

But that’s not how every airport is handling the opter-outers. Indeed, Columbus may have to change its policies. Here’s what happened when, faced with the new body-scanners at Baltimore-Washington International, Jeffrey Goldberg opted for a pat-down instead.

When I made this request, a number of TSA officers, to my surprise, began laughing. I asked why. One of them — the one who would eventually conduct my pat-down — said that the rules were changing shortly, and that I would soon understand why the back-scatter was preferable to the manual search. I asked him if the new guidelines included a cavity search. “No way. You think Congress would allow that?”

I answered, “If you’re a terrorist, you’re going to hide your weapons in your anus or your vagina.” He blushed when I said “vagina.”

“Yes, but starting tomorrow, we’re going to start searching your crotchal area” — this is the word he used, “crotchal” — and you’re not going to like it.”

“What am I not going to like?” I asked.

“We have to search up your thighs and between your legs until we meet resistance,” he explained.

“Resistance?” I asked.

“Your testicles,” he explained.

‘That’s funny,” I said, “because ‘The Resistance’ is the actual name I’ve given to my testicles.”

He answered, “Like ‘The Situation,’ that guy from ‘Jersey Shore?’”

Yes, exactly, I said. (I used to call my testicles “The Insurgency,” but those assholes in Iraq ruined the term.)

(Read the whole thing. It’s trenchant, highly entertaining, and right – as in “correct,” not “neocon right,” although that’s Goldberg’s usual beat.)

Whoa. I have never linked to Jeffrey Goldberg, and I may never do it again. But sometimes, even proponents of bombing Iran write something that’s so eminently sensible – and so funny – that it deserves a nonpartisan audience.

All of this leaves me wondering what my husband and I should do the next time we fly with our kids. Up ’til now, I thought the answer was obvious: opt out with the kids and spare them indoctrination into the creeping-fascist security state (not to mention exposure to superfluous radiation). Now, I’m not so sure. I picture them in a future therapists’ office: “Mama? Oh, she wasn’t all bad. Sure, she had her impatient moments, but we always knew she loved us. If she just hadn’t let the TSA molest us …”

(This is one of those occasions where I resort to sarcasm because the alternative is molten rage. Most of parenting consists of moments lost in the surging river of time. One moment that is still present and razor-sharp for me? When a Belgian airport security official subjected my Bear – then aged 9 – to a search that involved reaching inside the elastic of his sweat pants.)

I’m starting to wonder if we should all opt out of “the Dick-Measuring Device,” as Goldberg terms it. What would happen if we filmed the ensuing searches and put them on YouTube? Could we completely overwhelm the system if even a third of us opted out? (Yes, we’d all miss our planes, which is why this would probably never work.) What if apparently harmless moms like me started to yell, “Get your paws of my ladyparts!” when TSA agents failed to meet, um, Resistance?

Or we could take a page from Goldberg and just repeat “vagina” until TSA officials give up out of sheer embarrassment. I have no problem talking about the “crotchal area” (best whacko neologism since “refudiate”!) until the proto-fascist security state waves us through. For good measure, I think a carry-on full of sex toys might amplify the guards horror. But don’t worry – I won’t try that if the kids are flying with me.

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Homophobia: Now in Child-Sized Portions, Too

The New York Times reports that anti-bullying programs are already under fire from opponents who fear our wee children will catch The Gay if teachers present LGBT folks as, well, fellow human beings:

Some districts, especially in larger cities, have adopted tolerance lessons with minimal dissent. But in suburban districts in California, Illinois and Minnesota, as well as here in Helena [Montana], the programs have unleashed fierce opposition.

“Of course we’re all against bullying,” Mr. DeMato, one of numerous pastors who opposed the plan, said in an interview. “But the Bible says very clearly that homosexuality is wrong, and Christians don’t want the schools to teach subjects that are repulsive to their values.”

The divided Helena school board, after four months of turmoil, recently adopted a revised plan for teaching about health, sex and diversity. Much of the explicit language about sexuality and gay families was removed or replaced with vague phrases, like a call for young children to “understand that family structures differ.” The superintendent who has ardently pushed the new curriculum, Bruce K. Messinger, agreed to let parents remove their children from lessons they find objectionable.

(Read it all here.)

Message sent: We’re all against bullying, except when it comes to kids who are gay, or might be gay, or dress up as Daphne on Halloween even though they’re male. (If that last story doesn’t ring a bell, follow the link, stat!)

Opponents of bullying-prevention spew predictable condemnations of people who have “chosen the gay lifestyle.” I know a few lesbian parents in my town, and believe me, they are leading the “mom lifestyle.” Yes, it can be twisted, but they have chosen it! We see each other at music lessons and soccer. When it comes to carpools and practices, though, there’s not a heap of “choice” involved. (So sorry to disappoint the homophobes). Non-hetero moms and dad are supervising homework  just as painfully as the rest of us parents.

So go right ahead, you sanctimonious Christianists. Let us who’ve chosen the “mom lifestyle” hear just how depraved we are – just how repulsive! We can take it.

Just leave our beloved children out of it. My elder son’s favorite color was purple up until about second grade. I don’t think either of my kids are actually gay, but if they were – so what? So fucking what?

No kid deserves bullying, period. As long as wingnuts and ignoramuses act like gayness is a communicable disease and marriage equality is the death-knell of Western Civilization, kids who step outside the norm will continue to be bullied. Some will despair. Some will take their lives in their despair.

What kind of “family values” justify the lethal bullying of children? (Maybe Jerry Falwell will reach out from his grave and enlighten us?)

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Pro-life and Pro-porn?

Yesterday at 1:29 EDT, I was lecturing on fundamentalism in my religion class, listing some of the phenomena fundamentalists generally condemn as symptoms of moral decay – among them, abortion and pornography.

Yesterday at 1:29 EDT, someone using the server of the Pro Life Action League in Chicago accessed an older post of mine, “Feminist Porn: Where Are the Men?”

I made the point to my students that people aren’t as simple as their ideologies might sometimes imply. Here’s a great case in point.

I’m not even sure that one should call this hypocrisy. I think I’d rather regard it more charitably as an instance of people perhaps being creative and flexible in their ideas and behavior – a case of refusing to conform to stereotypes.

Of course, it’s also possible that this reader was looking for ammo to prove how sexually depraved feminists can be. He or she might have a guilty relationship with sexuality that projects one’s shame onto the abjection of women that appears frequently in industrialized, mainstream porn.

But I’d prefer to imagine this reader as embracing his or her desires – not least, because it’s impossible to sustain a hard line against abortion if one regards sexual pleasure as a birthright for women and men alike, part of a full and fulfilling human life.

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Hookup Culture, Seen through the Lens of the Duke “Sex List”

As I’ve written before, I’m not in any way opposed to casual sex. Still, I think there are real problems with hookup culture. The Duke “sex list” that I wrote about yesterday gives some clues to what’s wrong with it.

First, too often the sex is  just not very good for women. Karen Owen, the list’s author, raves about one guy – Subject 12 – who made sure she came first. This speaks volumes about what was likely lacking in her other encounters. But it’s not just her. I’ve heard innumerable stories from students who hooked up with (or refused) guys who were basically out to get serviced. Even if the guy is interested in mutual pleasure (and I think the majority of men are), he’s going to have to make a serious effort to get it right with a new partner if it’s only going to be a one night stand. He’s up against the orgasm gap, which is especially pronounced in younger women, as I wrote last spring.

Second, most of her hookups are drunken. She’s astonished when she discovers that sober sex can be pretty great. On “Subject 7″:

My second hookup with Subject 7 was an entirely new experience for me: a 100% sober booty call.

She enjoys it enough that they do it again. And again.

I don’t see anything wrong with having sex tipsy, some of the time. I’m not talking about the sort of inebriation that can result in sexual assault charges, just enjoying a drink or two – or at least having a pre-existing agreement, as a couple, that you’ll get drunk together and get naked. It’s hard to forge such an agreement if there’s no communication outside of bars and bedrooms, and it’s even harder in a one-night stand.

At any rate, it’s sort of sad if sober sex is a novelty. Here, too, I see a lot of students stuck in the same rut. Everyone relies on liquid courage. As long as that’s your only mode of interaction, you’re going to miss out on a lot of fun. (Maybe that’s where a Powerpoint presentation is useful – in jogging one’s memory?)

Owen also seems to view sex as being about conquest to a degree that feels highly transactional to me. The “subjects” are always described in terms of their alpha status. Lacrosse/baseball/soccer player. Good looking. Aggressive. While Owen also talks about who manages to be entertaining, these various status markers overshadow their personalities in most instances. Again, this is unsurprising. Because of its emphasis on surface traits, hookup culture is far better suited to assessing (and advertising!) status markers than it is to promoting mutually joyful, rewarding sex.

I do think it’s possible to have casual sex that’s not transactional. The obvious prerequisite for this is respect, an ability to see your potential partner as a full-fledged human being, and a sincere interest in your partner’s pleasure as well as your own. This is easier to achieve if you’re at least acquaintances before you begin.

It’s telling that Owen’s best sex was, apparently, also the least transactional, with the aforementioned Subject 12. He’d floated under her radar because he’d been in a relationship. Also, he evidently wasn’t her physical type, because the few times he’d been out to the bars she hadn’t noticed him. Significantly, they didn’t meet in a bar; they were hanging out with friends.

There’s some real sweetness in this story. Yes, they were hungover in the morning, but they hadn’t been sloshed, and they had no regrets by daylight – just more helpings of what they’d had the night before. What if hookup sex routinely ended this way? Well, most likely, there’d be a lot more hookups that segue into other sorts of relationships. For sure, there’d be fewer people just using their partner to get off, and a lot more having good, real sex.

Owen’s out in the “real world” now, beyond the comfy nest of Duke, and lying low while the hubbub over her list dies down. But for all of my students, male and female alike – I hope they’re having fun this weekend. I hope they’re being safe. And I hope, for those who do hook up, a “Subject 12″ experience, brimming with mutual lust, good humor, and a sense of truly being appreciated.

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What’s Not Being Said about the Duke “Sex List” Incident

I can easily imagine the impulse to chronicle one’s sex life in a diary. I can’t imagine turning it over to one’s friends. That’s what Karen Owen, a recent Duke grad did, except she framed her sex list as a mock honor’s thesis and sent it as a Powerpoint to three of her friends. One of them wasn’t much of a friend and forwarded it to, well, the whole world.

It’s amazing to me how an otherwise apparently intelligent person can still think that anything in electronic form is likely to stay private. Even I, who came of age when Facebook wasn’t capitalized and was a literal book, know this. Of course, it wasn’t just Owen’s privacy that was violated. Half of the baseball and lacrosse team had their privacy violated, too, through no fault of their own. She was utterly reckless with their privacy.

You can read all about it at Broadsheet and Jezebel, if you want the salacious details. I’m more interested in what’s not being discussed. First and foremost, Owen writes of an encounter (“Subject 5″) in which she was completely blacked out. This is normally considered to be sexual assault. Under North Carolina law, it appears to be second-degree rape:

A person is guilty of rape in the second degree if the person engages in vaginal intercourse with another person … Who is mentally disabled, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless, and the person performing the act knows or should reasonably know the other person is mentally disabled, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless.

It’s odd that neither Broadsheet nor Jezebel is calling this rape. Broadsheet doesn’t even mention it. Jezebel breezes past it:

With one subject, the author blacked out and doesn’t remember having sex, but doesn’t seem troubled, by her own account.

Owen doesn’t have a duty to prosecute it. However, a feminist website surely ought to call it by its rightful name. A situation where one partner is blacked out isn’t some “gray” situation. It is not marginal or borderline. It is sexual assault, period. That doesn’t change just because Owen seems to boast that “I had somehow, in my black out state, still managed to crawl into bed with a Duke athlete.”

I’m also surprised (though I shouldn’t be) at how gender is affecting the way people interpret this incident. Imagine if the genders were reversed. There’d be more feminist outrage at how the “subjects” were exposed to shame, instead of Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet saying the guys were “pantsed.” There’d be less unfeminist outrage – as expressed on the Today Show – that a girl did this. There’d be a lot more shaming of the “subjects,” who would also be at higher risk for desperate acts. We’ve all heard of young women and gays who’ve committed suicide after their sex lives were broadcast without their will; I haven’t yet heard of a heterosexual male doing the same. That still doesn’t make it okay to treat a guy’s privacy like a dirty tissue. Not even if he’s an alpha male!

To be clear, I don’t want anyone to be shamed. I don’t want anyone’s privacy to be violated. I’m just struck by the hypocrisy, and how it’s toxic to everyone involved.

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Christine O’Donnell: The Sound of One Hand Clapping

And she knows where your other hand is, of course.

I’m a little late to the snarkfest. I’ve been toying with – oh, playing with! – a post on how hard it must be for a politician like O’Donnell to glad-hand a crowd, knowing where their hands have been. I’ve been flashing back to the precious scene in The Education of Shelby Knox where the youth pastor earnestly tells the very young Shelby that you can catch HPV from just a handshake. But I just can’t find the right way to approach that post without sounding like, well, a wanker.

Worse yet, I nowthink the snark might be a bit premature. Andrew Sullivan explains how O’Donnell’s anti-masturbation campaign isn’t an outlier, but integral to a much larger theoconservative project.

O’Donnell’s stance against masturbation is related to the new natural law that is central to the theoconservative project that Douthat endorses and believes in (and that is at the core of the Republican party base). It is rooted in the notion that any sex that is not self-giving in a lifelong marital bond between a man and a woman is destructive of the human soul and also of the community at large. (See “The Theoconservative Project” chapter in The Conservative Soul for a longer treatment of this.) And theocons are not classical liberals – they see all this as interwoven with society at large and central to what the Pope sees as modernity’s core sexual and spiritual problems.

They do not believe that masturbation can be a truly private act, no more than gay sex or homosexual relationships can be. The way in which jerking off divorces sex from procreation and marriage is as repugnant to them as is same-sex marriage and for the same reasons. O’Donnell, in other words, believes that masturbating has social ramifications, because it reduces sexuality to what used to be called self-abuse, and this itself corrupts society as a whole and weakens the family. This is exactly and explicitly the same rationale for the thoecon refusal to acknowledge gay relationships, their opposition to contraception and pornography, and, in part, to abortion.

(Read the rest here.)

Now the good side of this is that when the theocon agenda is exposed, most Americans recoil from it. My mom (who’s a sort of mushy liberal and a devout Presbyterian) says that O’Donnell is a nut and she’s doomed to fail. Mom hangs out with a lot of nice older ladies who are probably a pretty accurate political barometer. If she’s right, then the Dems get to keep Joe Biden’s seat. Sure, Mom’s just one data point, but Nate Silver agrees.

So let’s say O’Donnell goes down in flames. The theocon agenda won’t spontaneously combust along with her. It has leaders who are less obvious than O’Donnell or Sharon Angle. They may not be what I’d call nuanced, but at least they haven’t been blathering out loud about the evils of self-abuse. Some of them will win. Gradually, they’re becoming part of the “normal” U.S. political scene. Every theocon who wins a primary emboldens the Tea Party and lends new legitimacy to the fundamentalist oppression of women and LGBT people. (Yes, I realize that not every Tea Partier is a theocon, but there’s a substantial electoral overlap.)

I’m afraid that after November 2, we won’t be clapping at all. Okay, that frees up our hands for other things. Cold comfort, indeed.

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Of Tofu, Pop-Tarts, and Boobs

Addressing a proposal in Australia to make baby formula a prescription-only product, Spilt Milk strikes the perfect balance between breastfeeding advocacy and respect for women’s individual situations, experiences, and autonomy.

As a lactivist I obviously have a problem with the marketing of infant formula and any implication that it is as good as, or better than, breast milk. But as a human being I also know that people are hurt, seriously hurt, when they feel judged and shamed and when they are exhaustedly holding a hungry, crying, baby at 2:30 am and it feels like no one can help them.

Removing systemic barriers to breastfeeding certainly may require improved measures to reduce the popularity of formula – popularity which can be attributed to decades of marketing not only to the public but to health professionals. A big part of that marketing is about convenience: huge displays in chemist shops and regular sales at the supermarket of products in familiar-looking tins add to the impression of ease of use and the normalisation of artificial feeding. But whether we like it or not, formula and its ready availability is important to many families. Removing that now feels like a stick where a carrot should be.

Give parents the tools to make sound decisions that benefit them and their babies. Give parents not only choices, but supported, realistic choices. Don’t tell a woman who has to go out of the home to work, or who has other children to look after and little support, that the choice to dedicate perhaps days to increasing her milk supply through frequent feeding and skin-skin contact to avoid supplementing with formula is an easy one: it clearly is not. Education and information are hugely important but they are only part of the picture when practical barriers still so often interfere with breastfeeding relationships.

Adding practical barriers to formula use, as I think this proposal would, isn’t a particularly kind way to help parents. Being caught between a rock and a hard place doesn’t make the rock seem any easier to budge: it just makes it hurt more to be stuck there.

(There’s lots more where this came from.)

I want to zero in on the problem of shaming. It’s illuminating to shift the focus away from infants and toward the choices that we adults make about our own bodies.

For instance: I had a super healthy dinner tonight: baked tofu, locally-grown Carola potatoes, locally-grown watermelon, and sliced golden tomatoes that I grew from seed. (I had been trying to grow these ‘maters, Aunt Gertie’s Gold, since I read rave reviews about them on Garden Web, but managed to kill them on the first attempt by mixing in too much organic fertilizer when I planted them out. Another year, they failed to germinate. This year – success!) I added a dab of butter to the potatoes and marinated the tofu in teriyaki sauce. I was in late-summer heaven.

But last night? Late after the kids were in bed? I ate a strawberry Pop-Tart. And damn, was that good too.

What if someone had decided to shame me about that Pop-Tart? Would that have caused me to ascertain that those potatoes were also organically grown, instead of just sustainably? Might I have foregone the butter? (Admittedly, if I’d been feeling well instead of ushering out a nasty GI infection, that pat of butter would have blossomed.)

Hell No!

I would have had a Pop-Tart for dessert.

Now, luckily people have not often shamed me for my Pop-Tart weakness. We don’t eat them regularly. My kids love them precisely because a Pop-Tart is a pink unicorn in their world, and a yummy one, at that. Most crucially, though: I am NOT FAT. And therefore I can only shamed along the “bad mommy” axis for keeping Pop-Tarts in stock; I’m pretty impervious to fat-shaming. (Fat-shaming would surely be worth a whole ‘nother post, and this post would be a whole lot different if not for my thin privilege.)

Of course, “bad mommy” shaming is the main tactic used against women who don’t conform to the loftiest ideals of breastfeeding practice. They’re told in no uncertain terms that their child’s survival depends on what they feed him or her. And they’d better feed mother’s milk, but then the true shaming begins. The new mother is eating all wrong! At least, this must be true, or the baby would settle better, sleep longer, give up his eight-hour crying jags. And so they’d better watch out for garlic! Peanuts! Soy! Cow’s milk! Eggs! That dejected bottle of prune juice, purchased solely in the hope of warding off postpartum constipation? Might as well dump it, dear; no one else in your family will go near it.

Through all this, the mother is trying to suss out her child’s new and changing needs. If she’s poor and/or not white, the “well-meant” advice may well come wrapped in a thick wrapping of paternalism. How’s she supposed to develop her sense of mastery and competency in this hullaboo of “Yer doin’ it rong!”

Really, what new mothers need is respect for the fact that they still are humans, and that their body remains their own. The baby has a moral claim on breastmilk, sure; the mother has a moral claim on being an autonomous person. In most cases, she also is willing to make very significant sacrifices for her baby – her sleep, bodily fluids, her illusion of invulnerability,  the very minerals from her bones. Shame her, though, and you’ve shortcircuited her chance to figure out what combination of sacrifices (because there will be sacrifices) could help her child thrive without eviscerating her as a woman – as a person.

And darn it – sometimes every mother needs a Pop-Tart. Mine was strawberry. Toasted. And I haven’t breastfed since spring 2003, so how much more do new mothers need a Tart? I don’t believe food should have to be earned through moral machinations, but I do tend to think that I’ve got a lifetime entitlement to Pop-Tarts. I’m certain that there’s still one box of brown sugar/cinnamon in the basement. I will eat it with utter lack of shame. Next morning, with nothing but a Tart headache, I will help my kids get their reasonably healthy breakfasts and lunches. They are growing. I’m pretty sure we’re doing something right. Quite possibly something that deserves a Pop-Tart and champagne celebration.

I’d be interested in your metaphorical Pop-Tarts – and that goes for non-parents, too. What small self-indulgences keep you afloat? How do you gird yourself against scolds?

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True Biblical Marriage

Clarissa posted this on her blog a few days ago, and I just loved it. I don’t quite think I can use it in my religion and sexuality class (it’s a bit too flippant) but I may yet change my mind.

In the meantime, enjoy some theologically accurate apostasy! Oh, wouldn’t NOM just love to teleport us all back to the Old Testament?

(Click here if you can’t see the video.)

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On “Birth Rape”

(TMI alert, especially for the medically squeamish, and trigger alert for medical violence.)

The story of how I birthed my first child is a far cry from the dimly-lit, romantic scenarios pictured in hospital brochures and natural birth guides alike.

The Bear got stuck before his head was even properly engaged. I was in Germany, so you can’t blame what happened next on medicalized childbirth, American-style. I did have an epidural (at my own request, nay, demand!) and enough Pitocin to deliver a small elephant. My midwife tried acupuncture. We tried every possible position: all fours, squatting, draped over an elevated bed with my head hanging down. I even swallowed some homeopathic remedy. This was Germany, after all.

Still, he was stuck. After seven hours (!) of being fully dilated – which is four or five hours longer than a U.S. ob/gyn would tolerate without a c-section – my midwife had to turn me over to a doctor. Even then, he didn’t go straight for the knife. He proposed trying vacuum extraction, with a c-section as backup. Three tugs, three giant pushes, and three mighty shoves on the top of my uterus – out came the Bear.

I was grateful my son was healthy, and glad I’d avoided a cesarean. I thought I’d gotten off easy. The recovery proved me wrong. I’d lost a lot of blood and my healing was difficult and incomplete. In the long run, I probably would have been far better off with a c-section. The pushing on my uterus (“fundal pressure”) did a lot of damage to my pelvic floor, which persists a decade later. I was given a lengthy consent form that explained the risks of a potential c-section, but it said nothing about the risks of fundal pressure and vacuum extraction, particularly an extraction from so high in the pelvis.

In other words, I had no crack at informed consent for what was actually done to me. And I don’t want to hear that none of it matters since my baby was healthy. The violence of my delivery severely affected my ability to be an effective mother. Try hauling around a 13-pound infant six weeks postpartum, feeling as though your viscera are about to fall out. Then try it again with a 19-pounder at four months. The Bear was not a sleepy, contented baby. He was irked at the world. He needed to be walked around. I couldn’t do it. Not on the scale he demanded. For optimal healing, I shouldn’t have been lifting anything heavier than ten pounds. I felt utterly trapped.

Many women have traumatic childbirth stories. Many are uglier than mine and revolve around disrespect by medical personnel, which sometimes edges into outright violation. Over the past few years, some birth activists and feminists have started to label such stories “birth rape.” The term struck me as wrong when I first saw it (which I’m pretty sure was this post at the F Word). So I was glad to see a flurry of criticism ripple through the feminist blogosphere over the past few days, starting with Irin Carmon at Jezebel and then spreading to Amanda Marcotte at XX, Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet, and Lindsay Beyerstein at Big Think. Even my friend figleaf has weighed in against using “rape” to characterize traumatic birth experiences.

In discussions of sexual violence, it’s not unusual for women who’ve actually experienced the trauma in question to use their experience as a trump card against anyone who disagrees with them. Ditto for childbirth experiences. In actuality, experiences vary, as do our interpretations of them. One woman may feel violated by a c-section, while another might feel relief.

So far, none of the feminist bloggers who’ve criticized “birth rape” have actually experienced childbirth in their own flesh. Their opponents may well say that this disqualifies them. I’m weighing in to support them, partly as a mother (and partly as a professional historian of childbirth and critic of medicalizaiton) who has in fact experienced a failure of informed consent and a traumatic birth (and who has studied some truly egregious instances of it in the past). Of course, my labor experiences don’t give me the right to trivialize other women’s feelings of violations, and I would never want to do that. At the same time, the trauma women experience doesn’t justify the inflationary and misleading use of “rape” to describe violations of medical consent.

It’s important that we can talk about birth trauma. We need a language of childbirth that will help us protect women’s autonomy. But it’s hyperbolic to call incidents of unwanted vaginal exams or artificial rupture of the membranes “rape.” It does an injustice to victims of actual rape by conflating two different phenomena, thus watering down the meaning of “rape.” It’s not as bad as the trivialization that goes along with saying, “Man, that test really raped me,” but both uses are on a continuum, because they’re both metaphorical, not literal.

I realize that proponents of the term say that a speculum is no different than a penis. Here’s how Amity Reed expressed it at the F Word:

A woman who is raped while giving birth does not experience the assault in a way that fits neatly within the typical definitions we hold true in civilised society. A penis is usually nowhere to be found in the story and the perpetrator may not even possess one. But fingers, hands, suction cups, forceps, needles and scissors… these are the tools of birth rape and they are wielded with as much force and as little consent as if a stranger grabbed a passer-by off the street and tied her up before having his way with her. Women are slapped, told to shut up, stop making noise and a nuisance of themselves, that they deserve this, that they shouldn’t have opened their legs nine months ago if they didn’t want to open them now. They are threatened, intimidated and bullied into submitting to procedures they do not need and interventions they do not want. Some are physically restrained from moving, their legs held open or their stomachs pushed on.

These things happened commonly in the past, and they still occur today. A commenter at Salon wrote:

Once, while still a nursing student, I heard a nursing supervisor inform a screaming patient in labor – “maybe you should have yelled like that 9 months ago and you wouldnt be here”. Later, during my own labors, I remembered her remark and it made me smile.

She smiled? Boy, I’m glad she didn’t attend one of my births. And it gets worse. A self-identified midwife commented at Salon:

The quickest example I can come up with is the time a doula friend of mine heard the OB say while a VBAC mom was pushing (pretty much under his breath, I don’t even think the mom heard this): “It’s the LEAST you can do for your VBAC” and he put one end of the scissors in her vagina and one in her anus and cut her a 4th degree episiotomy. No fetal distress, no reason beyond what I guess was his irritation at not just doing a repeat cesarean?

(Her whole comment was terrific, if you can stand to wade through the morass of misogyny that is Salon’s comment section.)

Stories like these are appalling. I feel sick and angry when I read them.

And yet, this is not rape. There’s nothing sexual about it, even though the assault is perpetrated on a woman’s genitals.

Let’s take a look at the legal definition of “rape.” It requires, as Amanda Marcotte points out, intent to violate someone sexually against her will. This is what the law calls “mens rea,” or awareness that one is committing a crime. If a prosecutor fails to demonstrate mens rea in a rape case, it’s still possible to convict on a lesser count of sexual assault (e.g., gross sexual imposition). “Rape,” however, is off the table.

The intent of this OB was to hurry the birth along. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that he was also high on his own power, getting off on his dominance. But he wasn’t getting off sexually. Nor was he intending to commit a sexual act. What he perpetrated was neither rape nor a lesser form of sexual assault.

“Birth rape” is not just an exaggeration, though. It also does not say enough. It fails to specify what makes such violations of autonomy in labor reprehensible in their own awful way. First, doctors and nurses enjoy a high degree of trust. The minority of them who break our trust deserve contempt. Similarly, the discourse on medical ethics has been hammering on the importance of informed consent for the past few decades. We rightly expect medical professionals to have internalized this. Most of all, a woman in labor is extremely vulnerable. I don’t know of any situation where I’ve felt comparably exposed, defenseless, and liminal. To receive abuse from the very person charged with expecting you and your child has got to leave emotional scars.

What should we call these violations, then, if not “rape”? Well, “medical battery” works for me. (“Medical assault” would be more satisfying because of the parallel to “sexual assault,” but legally the correct category, as far as I understand, is battery, not assault.) I would also distinguish between situations where real bodily harm is perpetrated, as opposed to assholish behavior such as slut-shaming women in labor, and also as opposed to neglect of informed consent, such as I experienced. (I’m not speaking here of outright malpractice, though some cases of abuse may also constitute malpractice too.)

Medical battery in childbirth ought to be treated as a criminal offense. That’s not a stretch, legally. For instance, except in an emergency, a physician who performs surgery against the patient’s will is guilty of battery, and is subject to both criminal and civil law. Even failure to obtain informed consent is already subject to criminal penalties. In cases of assholish behavior or flawed consent (as in my own experience), medical professionals should be sanctioned by their peers. In those cases where professionals protect their own and refuse to discipline offenders, patients should go public with their stories.

The law already supports a woman’s right to autonomy in labor, just like it does for any other patient. Actually enforcing that right in court is tricky. Doctors may argue that they were forced to act due to an emergency. Proving otherwise may be difficult. But just the awareness that medical battery carries penalties could work as a deterrent to battery and lesser forms of abuse. In addition, it might serve as a counterweight to the pressure OBs often feel to take action – any action, even if it’s not supported by evidence – to avoid a later malpractice suit.

To avoid failures of informed consent, obstetrical doctors and nurses could do much more to enlighten expectant mothers on possible interventions, their justifications, and their risks. I would have been better off if I’d been provided any information on the risks of vacuum extraction. I knew a lot about forceps because they were used in the period of history I study. Vacuum extractors are newer, and so I was flying blind, even though I was an exceptionally well-educated parturient. I didn’t even know that vacuum extraction carries a significant risk of damage to the baby’s brachial nerves. Most women would’ve known less. This is just not necessary in childbirth, where there’s usually nine months to prepare and become truly informed. And yet, neither doctors nor nurses nor midwives nor childbirth educators are really preparing the women whose bodies and children are at stake.

I don’t imagine that these potential solutions would be a panacea. I do think, though, that they’re closer to the mark than the tactics that a notion of “birth rape” would suggest.

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To My Promiscuous Readers

And yes, you likely are promiscuous, even though you may not think of yourself that way. At least, that’s the implication of a quiz that appeared at Big Think this week. Now, you know I’ve got a soft spot for internet quizzes, but it usually runs toward Hello Quizzy (aka OK Cupid) and similar silliness. This quiz purports to be serious! scientific! and will tell you about your “sociosexuality.” Blogger Marina Adshade at Big Think found it incumbent upon her to translate “sociosexuality” as “promiscuity.”

Whatever you call it, I found the results shocking – and not because the quiz branded me a slut. I am shocked at the shoddy methodology that’s trying to pass as “science.”

Go take the quiz and tell us how you came out, ‘kay? I will wait below the LOLcat.

(Shocked, shocked kitteh from ICHC?)

I’ll come clean: I landed in Finland, which according to Adshade is the #1 mecca for the promiscuous. Funny thing, though. I answered that I’ve been with just one partner over the past year and expect to stay with him, and only him, for the next 30 years, should we be so blessed to both live that long. I ‘fessed up to the one-night stand, though that’s a real definitional tangle. Does oral sex count? What does it mean when your “casual” partner is never a rank stranger, but always a friend or someone in your larger social network? What about friends with benefits, where the benefits were infrequent and very much subsidiary to the friendship? What about one-night stands that morph into several nights? What about “casual” sex that leads into a years-long relationship? (All of these questions hint at my classic MO until I met my husband.)

I like to see how quizzes spit out different assessments, so I varied my responses some – keeping my truthful answers to the first two questions, and also holding fast to my tolerant (but not really celebratory) answers toward casual sex. I also copped to some fantasies but not to daily ones, and held that answer constant, too. But I played with the number of “one-night stands,” and see here: I stayed in Finland until I claimed (okay, lied) never to have had one. That moved me down just one rank – to New Zealand.

I suspect study-abroad applications will spike for Finland and New Zealand, if this “research” gets out to the general public.

But seriously: what a way to view promiscuity! I don’t like the term anyway, because it almost always leads to slut-shaming. I’d prefer to stick with “sociosexuality.” Whatever you think of the terminology, it seems silly to brand a fortysomething, married, monogamous gal with a handful of youthful adventures “promiscuous” just because she refuses to condemn the pursuit of pleasure, youthful or not. Or because she fesses up to fantasies – which I suspect is what drove my score sky-high. I’d love to know how Jimmy Carter (he who famously “lusted in his heart) would stack up.

I enjoy silly quizzes, but sometimes the line between science and internet meme is very thin indeed. Not to mention, there are also some very good reasons for people to engage in “casual” sex, as Monica Shore reminds us at Alternet (originally at Carnal Nation). Shore’s article is buttressed by a few preliminary stats from Heather Corinna’s much more scientific survey on “casual” versus “committed” sex. I’m eager to hear about Heather’s results once they’re made public, because I think she asked the right questions here and here.

See y’all in Finland? If not, where will I find you?

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“Dropping a Baby?” Oops, Someone’s Dropping the Ball

I’ve been bowling. I didn’t really bowl. I just sort of dropped the ball.

I’ve played softball. Right field. I ran from those long pop flies. Ran away, just to be clear. If, by some odd twist of magnetism the ball landed in my glove anyway, I … just sort of dropped the ball.

But dropping a baby? Nope, I haven’t done that yet, though I birthed two of ‘em and hauled them from Germany to the U.S. and back, multiple times. The worse I ever did was to donk the two-year-old Bear’s head on the car as I tried to wrestle him into his carseat.

And so I find this just incomprehensible (via the Nation):

Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, the father of SB 1070, has a new target in his cross hairs: “anchor babies,” the ugly epithet used to label children born of undocumented immigrants. The senator’s newest legislative provocation would allow Arizona “to refuse to accept or issue a birth certificate that recognizes citizenship to those born to illegal aliens, unless one parent is a citizen,” as he recently explained to his supporters. Crudely labeled “anchor baby bills” by the media, similar efforts are brewing in California, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Congress. On July 28, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham became the latest to join the assault on birthright citizenship, calling it a “mistake” and announcing that he may introduce a constitutional amendment to deny automatic citizenship to the children of immigrants who “come here to drop a child.”

(The rest is here.)

I am trying to picture where said immigrants are dropping a child. In the supermarket? In the middle of a busy intersection? In right field? Personally, I’d recommend that last option, as no one is likely to notice.

You know who’s really dropping the ball? Our media. Bless the Nation – but honestly who else is even reporting on this critically? And who (outside of a marginal cat-themed blogger) is criticizing this awful “dropping” metaphor?

It sounds like the Cabbage Patch Kids. We should be so lucky. No one’s talking about deporting a Cabbage Patch Baby.

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Erasing Children in the Public Sphere

The worst plane flight of my life was a transatlantic hop in which a baby cried pretty much uninterrupted from takeoff to landing. To make it worse, the child was really too old to be a baby anymore. He was a chunky twenty-month-0ld! His parents appeared to have no strategy able to calm him! Things got so bad, a nun offered advice at great length to the obviously hapless parents.

Yes, that was a long flight. Numerous passengers would have happily pushed the eject button on that child, even if it had landed him in the Arctic Ocean.

Did I mention the “baby” in question was my own beloved Tiger?

And short of a direct appeal to the Ceiling Cat, we tried everything to calm him. He was just pissed. To keep his ears from clogging, we’d given him a sippy cup during takeoff (one piece of advice that the well-meaning but ostentatiously helpful nun shared with us, after the fact). We’d packed a few toys. We tried walking the aisles with him. We tried rocking and singing him to sleep. Nothing worked.

At twenty months, the Tiger had no stable words. None. Not even “no”! We had no way of knowing why he was so upset. We couldn’t reason with him. Short of wrapping a gag around his mouth, we couldn’t “control” him. We were seasoned travelers with kids by then. My husband had just completed a grueling round of chemotherapy in Germany, and we weren’t traveling on a whim. We were just trying to get home after an eight-month unplanned stay in Germany that began as a brief vacation and reached its zenith months later in the ICU. We were lucky my mate survived. And now we were doing our darndest to comfort the Tiger and let everyone sleep.

So when discussions of “childfree spaces” on a feminist blog (Feministe) quickly jump to saying that sharing a plane with kids is tantamount to a “hostage situation, I’d like to know exactly who’s the hostage here? I’m fairly sure only two people suffered worse than I on that flat: the Tiger and his dad. Well, maybe the nun, too.

We’re in the midst of another shitstorm in the feminist blogosphere, this time about parents’ rights to take their kids anywhere, anytime. The post that touched if off (by guestblogger Mai’a at Feministe) framed it in absolutist terms: We parents should be able to take our kids to bars where the patrons are inebriated and watch the sun come up. Obviously, this is risible. What kid will benefit from spending the whole night out with a parent, sidestepping being trod upon by drunks? Karmithia at Alas sagely pointed out the obvious: late nights at bars are good for neither parent nor child.

It’s unfortunate that Mai’a chose such an extreme example, because I can’t recall seeing a child at a bar – ever – as opposed to a relatively family-friendly bar-restaurant. Had she chosen a less silly example, her post would have still attracted the virulently childfree, but her main argument – that excluding children also marginalizes their mothers – would have been much more defensible. The central question she raised – are children an oppressed class? – also deserved more nuanced discussion. What happened instead was the far more predictable volley of accusations against “entitled” parents. (Much of the incivility came from people who’ve raised kids themselves, so this wasn’t merely a debate between mothers and non-mothers).

Most of the gripes raised in that comment thread addressed strawmen (or strawkids?): the presence of kids in adult-only bars, the ubiquity (?) of kids in upscale restaurants, and the notion that most (maybe all) parents just let their kids run wild 24/7. I have sometimes seen the last problem in family-friendly restaurants, and I’m not here to defend the fairly small minority of parents who seem unconcerned about their child tripping up a server laden with drinks and burning-hot food. I’ve rarely seen kids in pricier places, but I’ll be honest: I prefer to stick to family-friendly restaurants for everyone’s peace of mind. (Or, rarely, go out for a nice meal while a sitter watches our kids.) And bars? Seriously, I don’t get around much anymore, but I have yet to see swarms of kids at cocktail bars or at any grow-mutt party.

There’s just one area where I’ve seen systematic parenting fail: dragging wee ones to PG-13 and R-rated movies. I first noticed this a decade ago, pre-parenthood, when my husband and I took in a matinee of the first X-Files movie. The theater was full of tots who really, really didn’t belong there. Sure, they were loud, and that was annoying, but the real failure impacted the kids. Maybe they weren’t overtly disturbed. I don’t care! I have deep qualms about desensitizing small children to violence, which is what happens when they’re fed a steady diet of violence as preteens and even preschoolers. Yeah, a babysitter costs money. So do cinema tickets. Prevail upon your friends and relatives if you must keep up with Scully and Mulder.

But even the bad judgment of a few parents at the movies is red herring. Judging from the Feministe discussion and perennial nasty Internet comments about kids, the real issue is not R-rated movies, upscale restaurants, grown-up bars, or parties where you can gleefully drop the F-bomb.

Here’s the real problem: Some folks aren’t willing to accept kids in public, period. People really hate sharing airplanes with kids. Too many resent kids in downscale restaurants. Feministe commenters complained about kids on the subway – and oh boy, you need to keep your kids close on the subway as a safety measure, but I have never seen kids run wild on any form of public transit in Berlin. Sometimes, like my Tiger, they like to twist around and kneel on the seats to peer out windows, but they are not posing a public danger. Yet, even when they perch on their seats like little Victorian dolls, they’ve still gotten the evil eye. I thought this was just a Berlin issue, but perhaps U.S. coastal cities are even worse? Feministe commenters pissed and moaned about kids making noise in Target and supermarkets. I mean, really – supermarkets? Who has the cash to hire a babysitter while we buy the food we need to survive??! And does this mean Target’s now off bounds for me, but Wal-Mart is okay?

Basically, anytime people feel they can’t quickly escape, a few of them insist that children better not make a peep. At the same time, these same folks systematically ignore the drunken passengers lurching through the subway car, or the couple on the transatlantic flight who carry on loud conversations in the aisles from Halifax to Ireland. (Actually, I suspect some of them are the drunken and chatty passengers.)

I understand their irritation. I remember feeling similarly at times before I had kids, but if I could see their parents hadn’t fully checked out, I got over myself. I recall only one time when the parents were obviously slacking: yet another transatlantic stretch with a Gameboy turned up to 11 and no headphones in sight. (The parents read and slept while the Gameboy beeped cheerfully all across the ocean.) Nowadays, when a child starts to wail in the plane or grocery store, I feel a nanosecond of irritation, followed by a massive wave of relief: Hey, that’s not my child anymore! And then I feel empathy with the parent and child. If we pass each other, I’ll flash a smile, unless the situation seems too far gone.

I do agree that there are a few places where kids categorically don’t belong: nightclubs, sex clubs, extremely upscale restaurants, and yes, bars while the sun is rising. Heck, parents need a few kid-free spaces, too, for those times when we get to escape! Kids shouldn’t stay any longer in a university library than their desperate parent needs to pick up a few books and leave again. (My little town has a great city library that’s welcoming to them.) Concerts, theater, and hospitals may be perfectly appropriate places, depending on the kids and the circumstances. (I will note that once my mate escaped the ICU but was still in the hospital, the Tiger behaved like a little angel, confined to his stroller and fed continuously with Butterkeks, the German equivalent of graham crackers.)

Parents are responsible for discerning how well their sprouts are able to behave. And yes, I do think kids need to learn to be civil, unlike a few Feministe commenters at the other extreme, who decried that as authoritarian. Civilization happens by gradually stretching the limits of what kids can gracefully handle, and by giving them clear boundaries that gradually expand.

But geez, we shouldn’t have to lock ourselves inside Chuck. E. Cheese until all our children have left for college. I’ve read extremists who say parents should just avoid all air travel until their kids are young adults. Parents remain people, too (often with family four times zones away). And kids are people. I really like how Sierra put this at Strollerderby:

I’m a mom who believes that the well-being of our children is a shared responsibility of everyone. My kids are not an exotic hobby, or a bizarre lifestyle choice. They are little people with all the rights and privileges people are entitled to. Their emotional and physical well-being is in your interest as well as mine.

One of the most important points to be made here about kids being people is that their parents, particularly their mothers, are not their puppetmasters. If my kid starts wailing and throwing boxes of cereal in Aisle 7, I can’t just apologize and turn the volume off the way I can if my cell phone goes off in a crowded theater.

I can do my best to help her behave well; keep her well-rested and fed and entertained. But if she’s losing it, she’s just like any other person with a problem. What she needs is help. You’d never go up to a 25-year-old sobbing two tables away from you at a restaurant and tell them to be quiet; you’d either stay out of it or offer help. Kids deserve to be treated the same way.

Similarly, if a kid crosses a line with you, the thing to do is to gently hold the kid accountable. Politely ask her to quiet down, return your toy or get off your foot.

Generating a culture of fear around moms in public, that they’d better get those kids to shut up and act sweet or else, only serves to make us more fearful as parents. Frightened moms are stricter, less flexible and ultimately less able to handle stressful situations that crop up with their kids. Ease up a little, and the kids will have fewer meltdowns to begin with. Everyone wins.

(Read the whole post here.)

Also: They will pay for our Social Security someday. Now might be a propitious time to start treating them kindly. If we do that, they might actually grow up to be nicer than the commentariat at Feministe (or heaven forbid, the even nastier trainwreck on Jezebel).

In my own life, I’ve been nothing but lucky to have friends and family who’ve embraced my kids, even whey they’re stinkers, and even when said friends have chosen not to spawn. I honor their choices, and they honor mine. My boys are surrounded by love. It’s really just a few strangers who’ve made it hard at times. Hmmm … is that what they mean by “stranger danger”?

By now, the Tiger is a pretty good flyer. We had one more horrid flight (Minneapolis to Columbus, just me with the two boys) where he howled for most of it. My husband met us at the airport. He’d already heard that the Tiger had been a terror. One of his colleagues had been sitting in one row ahead of us. I didn’t spot her, though I knew her casually. She sure didn’t identify herself; it was far more fun to report on my child’s misbehavior, with great relish, after the flight. I’m sure my husband was the first to know, but certainly not the last.

I’d like to credit my parenting – or even the global village – for the fact that on every flight since, people have complemented us on our kids. But when I’m out with kids among strangers, that global village scarcely, except to meddle and gossip. As for our parenting – well, it’s been eclipsed by the invention of the portable DVD player.

(From ICHC?)

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The Troubles with “Rape by Deception”

In my last post, which discussed the racism behind the conviction of a Palestinian man, Sabbar Kashur, of “rape by deception”, I promised to address the fundamental problems of “rape by deception” in a separate post. I deferred this for two reasons: First, I wanted to address issues of racism and purity separately (insofar as possible). Second, I intend the present post to be the second in a series exploring the issues around defining rape and sexual assault. Last winter, I began this with a post on the spectrum of sexual assault and the limits of the law, in which I concluded:

the law is a necessary but not sufficient instrument for transforming sexual relations. We need a feminist sexual ethics as well. To that end, I teach my students about the importance of enthusiastic consent. If they take it to heart, their chances of committing a crime ought to be nil.

And yet … there’s an area between sexual assault and enthusiastic consent. I don’t want to call it a gray area, because I don’t want to endorse the notion of “gray rape” (which is just a euphemism for defining acquaintance rape out of existence). Still, people are going to continue having sex under conditions of consent that’s defective or problematic or just lukewarm. We need to find ways to discuss this problem without either trivializing it or calling it “rape” or “assault.” In other words, we need a feminist sexual ethics that recognizes the complexity of social and sexual relations, affirms pleasure and autonomy, and emphasizes compassion and communication. “Yes means yes” is a good start, but it’s only a start.

(The whole post is here.)

After I wrote that post, life and work intervened to keep me from tackling the problems of defective consent, but I’d like to pick it up again now that I’m off from teaching and neither of my offspring has broken any bones lately. I think it’s crucial to find ways to talk about sexual violation that both respect the integrity of people who feel violated while also ensuring that the terms “rape” and “sexual assault” aren’t used in such inflationary ways that they become meaningless.

Jill at Feministe circumscribes “rape by deception” in a way that I thought (in my little non-lawyerly way) made loads of sense. She too remembered that case where a man impersonated his brother to extract sex from his brother’s girlfriend. The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled it wasn’t rape because no force was involved. This incident, which occurred in a dark room where the woman couldn’t recognize the man, strikes me as precisely the sort of gross violation of consent where the law can and should intervene. The facts are clear-cut, the man’s intent was obvious, and the woman had no opportunity to offer or refuse reasonably-informed consent. So I agree with Jill that there is some place in the law for “rape by deception” or “rape by fraud.” Maybe you wouldn’t categorize it as a first-degree felony, but such conduct deserves to be criminalized.

However, once you move from cases such as impersonation to cases where someone tells a garden-variety lie, you’ve just criminalized 95% of the population. (Or maybe 99.999%)  I do not think it is noble that people lie and misrepresent themselves in pursuit of romance, sex, and love. But neither is it felonious. It shouldn’t even be a misdemeanor, legally speaking.

On the Feministe thread, a few people argued that since lying to a potential sexual partner undermines enthusiastic consent – or really, consent period – it should be criminalized. One commenter who’s a lawyer argued that it should be treated as a misdemeanor, since such lies are more serious than commonly-prosecuted crimes such as trespassing. I agree that lies – even glaring lies of omission – diminish consent. Where I disagree is on the proposition that the criminal justice system could offer appropriate remedies for this. (And as for the trespassers – can we stop prosecuting them too, in the absence of other crimes?)

In part, the problem is simply a matter of numbers: the prosecution of liars would give the U.S. a chance to build more prisons than schools (if we’re not already there yet). Some of the commentators at Feministe echoed Dr. Gregory House’s line: “Everyone lies.” A couple of people protested that they, personally, were always honest, but by and large, I think House is right. Consider online dating. Whether it’s OK Cupid or eHarmony or Adult Friend Finder, people misrepresent themselves. They exaggerate their height, play down their weight, puff up their job titles. They post a photo that’s a year old – or ten. Perhaps the only reservoir of honesty is on Chatroulette, where the naked dudes look pretty much exactly like themselves. ‘Cept they’re not looking to date you. I guess that, too, is refreshingly honest.

And it’s not just men who lie, exaggerate, misrepresent. Take your humble blogger, for instance. I know that when I met the man I eventually married, I didn’t say to him, “By the way, I’m still sort of messed up from my last boyfriend.” In my sexual past, I’ve misrepresented a few other things, including multiple failures to indicate clearly when I was not interested. These days, I’m not even on the market, and yet I own a couple of bras that overplay my actual assets. And that’s just me – a generally honest gal from North Dakota.

Of course, what’s at stake are lies and distortions that could be dealbreakers for a potential partner. Even there, the list is infinite. Would you rule out Republicans? Or only go for Republicans? Do you require gainful employment? Upward mobility? A yacht in the Mediterranean? Are you open to coupling with a trans person? Or would you freak out if your potential partner wasn’t cisgendered? Would you only sleep with someone with long-term potential, or would you rule out anyone seeking a relationship?

A law that criminalized garden-variety lies to potential partners would hit certain groups especially hard:

• people of color – see the “War on Drugs” for millions of precedents
• trans people, whose murder is still sometimes excused under the “trans panic defense,” and who already suffer from being branded “deceptive”
• women whose partners assumed them to be virgins (as Alara Rogers argued compellingly at Feministe)
• people with STIs, who do have a duty to disclose (in my view), but who would be discouraged from even getting tested
• pickup artists (okay, my sympathy is lukewarm, but I still don’t want to toss them in jail)

So if we don’t turn to the law, then what? And how are we to respond to the very real feelings of violation that people feel when they’ve been deceived – feeling that are not limited to women, by the way?

I don’t think it’s wrong to spread the word to one’s friends and acquaintances about someone who has told a materially important lie. Politeness often stops people from doing this. Women, especially, are also likely to be deterred by the fear that no one will believe them (which runs parallel to the fears of rape victims), and by fear of slut-shaming. But if someone has behaved like a first-class jerk, we have no obligation to protect his or her reputation. I’m lukewarm on public shaming (as apparently occurs sometimes on Facebook, for instance), but in private conversations, there’s no reason to hold back one’s experiences.

We also need to educate young people – boys and girls alike – on the importance of asserting themselves with a potential partner and asking about those potential dealbreakers before they have sex. The major roadblock here is the difficulty people have in talking about sex, period. From my students, I get the impression that this is slowly improving, certainly compared to my generation. And we need to expose kids to enthusiastic consent as an ideal. Enthusiasm is a pretty impractical legal standard, but it’s an excellent social norm.

Actually, we need to get all those messages out to those of us in our middle years and beyond, too. (It’s just easier to reach kids, since they’re often a captive audience and they’re still more malleable.)

Finally, we also need to propagate the hope that more honesty in sex and courtship will help dismantle rape culture. We’re never going to get rid of lies. We can, however, hope to increase honesty. One way to do that is to reframe sex as a duet instead of a game of conquest.

As for how we respond to the sense of violation when a person has been deceived – well, there I diverge from most of the discussants at Feministe, including Jill, who said the woman in the case ought to be able to define her experience in whatever terms ring true to her. If that means she gets to call it rape, then I disagree.

First, if every person who feels violated or just emotionally hurt can call their experience “rape,” we move into the realm of metaphor. I’ve already argued that “rape” ought not to be used that way. It diminishes the actual offense. It also leads to sloppy thinking and to an elision of the difference between the legal realm and ethics. And frankly, ethics can help in these cases, where the law simply cannot.

Second, if a person claims the label of “rape,” she or he may seek legal redress. That quest will be doomed to failure if their experience has no correlation with the legal standard of rape.

Third, the bad guy in this scenario certainly deserve to have his (or her) reputation smudged. She or he does not deserve to be called a rapist, with all the attendant emotional baggage and social harm. That stigma is nearly as damaging as being convicted in court. (And no, this isn’t “what about the menz,” because women tell plenty of sexual lies, too, and anyway this is about basic fairness.)

So what can we do to honor those who’ve been lied to? Those who’ve seen a partner climb off them, post-coitus, and run straight for the door? Those who’ve placed faith in a faithless partner, or trusted their own heart too hastily?

We need new words. Maybe some of the old ones can be repurposed. In my last post, I described the accused as a “cad.” While “asshole” works pretty well, too, it doesn’t capture the specifically sexual aspect of assholishness that “cad” does. Some of the related words – scoundrel, fraud, even creep – don’t have particuarly sexual connotations. I’m curious if any of you have any better ideas.

Perhaps we need a notion of “sexual violation” to describe situations where dishonesty significantly interfered with a partner’s ability to consent. This wouldn’t be a criminal offense. It would be an ethical category. It would give the victim a way to understand her or his experiences as real, and important, and worthy of a caring response.

And we need to offer victims of sexual violation sympathy and support, instead of slut-shaming. I’m not so sure I could do that for the woman in the Kashur case. Her sense of violation was rooted in her racism. But most men and women who fall victim to liars and manipulators in sex do deserve our support. They should get it.

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“Rape by Deception” and “Race Defilement”

Most likely, you’ve already heard that an Israeli court last week convicted a Palestinian man, Sabbar Kashur, of “rape by deception.” He met a Jewish woman on the street outside a Jerusalem grocery store. They struck up a conversation. She assumed he was Jewish due to his nickname, “Dudu,” which apparently is common among Jewish men. Within 15 minutes, the two adjourned to a nearby building and had sex. Afterward, he took off before she even was dressed. She believed he was a Jewish bachelor who was seeking a long-term relationship.

The woman then filed forcible rape charges. Later, she stated that the sex had been consensual but on false premises, and the charge was downgraded to “rape by deception.”

I’d prefer to table the fundamental problems with “rape by deception” to another post. Here, I just want to say that the notion of purity expressed by the presiding judges in this case is deeply troubling. As Haaretz reported:

In the verdict, deputy president of the Jerusalem district court Tzvi Segal, along with fellow judges Moshe Drori and Yoram Noam, wrote that although this wasn’t “a classical rape by force,” and the sex was consensual, the consent itself was obtained through deception and under false pretenses.

“If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated,” the judges wrote. …

“The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls,” Segal wrote.

“When the very basis of trust between human beings drops, especially when the matters at hand are so intimate, sensitive and fateful, the court is required to stand firmly at the side of the victims … otherwise, they will be used, manipulated and misled, while paying only a tolerable and symbolic price,” he wrote.

The parallel that pops into my mind is one that I realize may be offensive to some folks: the charge of “race defilement” in Nazi Germany. No, I’m not equating these judges (much less all of Israel) with the Nazis. But there’s a notion of racial purity behind this verdict that is reminiscent of Nazi ideas about racial purity as expressed in the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor (the Blood Protection Law, for short).

Under the Blood Protection Law, only men could be charged. That went for both “Aryan” and Jewish men, though the primary targets were of course Jewish. Women were interrogated and their privacy and reputations destroyed, but “Aryan” women were also viewed as victims. This legal practice followed Hitler’s bilious depiction of male Jewish sexuality in Mein Kampf:

The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people.

(p. 270 in the James Murphy translation of Mein Kampf that’s freely available on the Web)

Compare this with the language in Segal’s opinion:

The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls.

In both instances, men in the out-group are envisioned as predatory and deceptive; they’re sexual beasts, but they’re also terribly clever. In both instances, women belonging to the in-group are portrayed as passive, innocent, and unsuspecting. In neither case are women conceived – or even conceivable – as sexual agents. In both cases, women will be despoiled if the state fails to protect them. In both cases, community, honor, and racial purity are at stake.

You see the assertion and protection of honor, too, in Segal’s insistence that the woman would not have consented to sex with Kashur if she had not imagined him to be 1) Jewish, 2) a bachelor, and 3) interested in a long-term relationship. While it’s crucial not to slut-shame women (and that includes the woman in this case), let’s not forget that insisting on protecting purity enables slut-shaming in the first place. And when it comes to protection, the racial element in Segal’s reasoning is clear: He didn’t object to Kashur’s failure to disclose that he was married. He only emphasizes that the women was deceived into thinking Kashur was Jewish. (Never mind that Kashur apparently never made such a claim.)

Just for the record, I’m not defending Kashur’s actions as ethical. Not at all. He behaved like a complete cad toward the woman who brought charges, and he was an even bigger asshole toward his wife. I’m just trying to tease out the racial implications of his conviction.

Israel was born out of deep historical oppression and trauma. It’s not surprising that some Israelis overcompensate for this. It’s sad and disturbing, though, that any Israeli would support a rape conviction that rests on notions of race defilement similar to those used historically to oppress Jews.

Fortunately, some Jewish jurists are voicing their dissent (again via Haaretz):

Elkana Laist of the Public Defender’s Office yesterday said the Jerusalem District Court had gone too far in its application of the approach of the High Court, “opening the door to a rape conviction every time a person lies regarding details of his identity. Every time the court thinks a reasonable woman would not have had sex with a man based on that representation, the man will be charged with rape. That approach is not accepted around the world either.”

Laist needs to go further and condemn the racist aspects of the verdict (and perhaps she did but Haaretz didn’t quote it). Here in the U.S., Michelle Goldberg says all that needs to be said:

If such a verdict is allowed to stand, it will be evidence of the deep and corrosive racism menacing Israel. Earlier this year, Haaretz reported on a poll showing that 56 percent of Israeli high school students would ban the country’s Arab citizens from election to the Knesset. “Around half the respondents say Israeli Arabs should not receive the same rights as Israeli Jews,” the story said. We’ll soon see to what degree they get their wish.

(Her whole post is terrific – read it here.)

Like Goldberg, I too support Israel’s right to exist. But as she says, “It’s getting harder and harder to be a liberal Zionist.” If Israel is to continue to exist as a democracy, its leaders, judges, and citizens need to repudiate racist notions of blood and honor and reaffirm the humanity of everyone living within its borders.

Note to anyone who’s not a regular reader: My Ph.D. is in modern German history. While most of my teaching is in women’s and gender studies, I just taught a college course on the history of Nazi Germany. That’s why I happen to be acquainted with Mein Kampf - I’m not a neo-Nazi in disguise!

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Boneheaded Ev Psych “Explanations” for Why “Older” Women Like Sex

Via the Daily Dish, here’s some rank foolishness from evolutionary psychology. Time magazine has a woefully uncritical recap:

A new journal article suggests that evolutionary forces also push women to be more sexual, although in unexpected ways. University of Texas psychologist David Buss wrote the article, which appears in the July issue of Personality and Individual Differences, with the help of three graduate students, Judith Easton (who is listed as lead author), Jaime Confer and Cari Goetz. Buss, Easton and their colleagues found that women in their 30s and early 40s are significantly more sexual than younger women. Women ages 27 through 45 report not only having more sexual fantasies (and more intense sexual fantasies) than women ages 18 through 26 but also having more sex, period. And they are more willing than younger women to have casual sex, even one-night stands. In other words, despite the girls-gone-wild image of promiscuous college women, it is women in their middle years who are America’s most sexually industrious.

So far, so good – or so I thought, until Time noted one of the most egregious failings of this “study”: the older women (or “cougars,” as Time repeatedly calls them) were recruited from Craigslist! Dudez!!! Has anyone explained to Buss Easton & Co. that folks on Craigslist – even the women – are mostly looking for one thing, and it ain’t quality used furniture? Did they even stop to make sure that the Craigslist participants weren’t offering paid erotic services? And did they notice that there’s no section in Craigslist for “women not seeking anything”? No rubric for “not interested in sex”?

I’m willing to believe that women do gain interest in sex from their late twenties through menopause, but the authors haven’t even proved this. Also, they’re comparing apples and oranges. The other one-quarter of participants were students at UT Austin, who presumably participated for extra credit and weren’t actively advertising for sex partners.

But let’s grant Buss Easton at al. their facts. Their interpretation (again via Time) is still complete bunk:

Why would women be more sexually active in their middle years than in their teens and 20s? Buss and his students say evolution has encouraged women to be more sexually active as their fertility begins to decline and as menopause approaches.

Here’s how their theory works:

Our female ancestors grew accustomed to watching many of their children — perhaps as many as half — die of various diseases, starvation, warfare and so on before being able to have kids of their own. This trauma left a psychological imprint to bear as many children as possible. Becoming pregnant is much easier for women and girls in their teens and early 20s — so much easier that they need not spend much time having sex.

However, after the mid-20s, the lizard-brain impulse to have more kids faces a stark reality: it’s harder and harder to get pregnant as a woman’s remaining eggs age. And so women in their middle years respond by seeking more and more sex.

(The rest of the Time article is here.)

First, why conclude that seeing children die would always spur women to have more babies? An alternative would be to invest more resources in a smaller number of children. Women also regularly saw other women die in childbirth. By the authors’ own logic, this trauma would have motivated women to avoid excessive pregnancies.

Also, jumping from individual psychological trauma to species-level hard-wiring of our lizard brains? They might as well leap over the Grand Canyon.

And then there’s the idea that just because we have some procreative hard-wiring, our sex drives can be reduced to our lizard brains, even today. Again: Dudez!! Lots of us lizard-brained women will not have sex with partner unless we’re confident we won’t get pregnant. A few years have passed since the advent of paleo-women. I do not think the same as a woman 200,000 years ago. (I wonder, though, if she’d reject the Pill out of hand. I kind of suspect she wouldn’t. After all, she would have known numerous women who died in childbirth.)

Interpreting the “data” is confounded by researchers’ age categories, which are incoherent and puzzling. For many women, there’s a huge developmental gap between 27 and 45. We become different people, changed by our work, our romantic relationships, and (often) motherhood. All of those changes also impact our sexuality.

There are also major issues with the way that age group is characterized. By whose calculus is a woman in her “middle years” already at age 27? Sure, paleo-women were lucky to live past menopause. So were my great-grandmothers. Today, the only people who consider 27 to be “middle years” are middle-aged men who think they’re entitled to a 20-year-old girlfriend. (I’m sure they’re prowling Craigslist, too).

But even in terms of biology, 27 is not past a woman’s supposed reproductive prime. Fertility undergoes a gradual decline. It’s still pretty high until one’s mid-thirties. It only plunges steeply past age 40.

(Source: Management of the Infertile Woman by Helen A. Carcio and The Fertility Sourcebook by M. Sara Rosenthal, via BabyCentre UK)

The arm of biology that’s relevant here isn’t evolutionary psychology, it’s endocrinology. Women’s hormonal levels do contribute to libido (though in ways that aren’t yet well understood; otherwise, testosterone would offer an easy fix to women troubled by low desire). Hormones begin to fluctuate in the run-up to menopause. For a few women, hormonal changes become noticeable in their late thirties. Others notice them in their forties. Some women note a drop in sexual desire during perimenopause, while others feel it surge, and still others see it fluctuate.

But even granting hormones their due, it would be silly to think they’re the only – or even main – factor in shaping women’s desires. A recent study (via Charlie Glickman’s sexuality blog) found that even at menopause, social and psychological factors matter at least as much as hormones when it comes to sexual desire and activity. Science Daily summarizes the findings of Dr. Sharron Hinchliff et al. in the Journal of Health Psychology (15:5):

Almost all [study participants] had experienced some form of change but the findings indicated that these were down to a number of external factors such as providing care for a relative, partner´s low sexual desire and the quality of the relationship, alongside biological factors such as perceived changes in levels of hormones. The findings therefore concluded that women go through many lifestyle changes during mid-life which are also contributing factors.

(The full summary is here.)

This study  further found great variability among women, with a minority actually reporting a resurgence of desire post-menopause. It’s easy to imagine social and psychological reasons for an uptick in libido: Kids leave home and empty nesters can romp with abandon. Menopause frees women from fears of unwanted pregnancy. Birth control is no longer a hassle. Experience and self-knowledge beget better sex. A great follow-up research project would be to identify those women who get more enjoyment from their sexuality after menopause, and figure out why their mojo has increased. This study suggests that looking at women’s relationships with their partners would be the obvious place to start.

Similarly, anyone with an imagination bigger than an earthworm’s could cook up more convincing interpretations of the Buss Easton et al. data. (Again, we’re overlooking that little Craigslist issue.) Past their mid-twenties, most women are more likely to be in a stable relationship than during their college years. Stable relationships lead to more opportunities for sex. We’re more likely to feel at home in our bodies. With more confidence, we find it easier to let our partners know what warms us. Not least, experience makes sex more fun, not less.

I’m not asking for rocket science. I only expect researchers to remember that we’re more than our reptile brains – and that even our reptile brains might be driven by more than just the drive to reproduce. Like the drive to feel pleasure. Or the desire for intimacy.

In other words, I’m looking for plain old science. The Buss Easton et al. study is LOLscience. Too bad I’ve stopped laughing. (Except for the Craigslist brainfart – that still tickles me.)

Note: I haven’t taken the time to read the original journal article by Buss et al, as its problems are on such a macro level that a closer look doesn’t seem necessary. I did look at the Hinchliff piece, whose major limitation is its small size (twelve in-depth interviews). Still, it suggests interesting avenues for future research.

Update, 7/21/2010: Upon being challenged by a commenter, I did go dig up the original journal article by Easton et al. (This commenter also pointed out – correctly – that Easton is listed as lead author, though it’s clear that Buss – as the only investigator with a Ph.D. – bears ultimate responsibility for overseeing the three graduate students on the project.) Here’s how I revised my assessment.

I read the original journal article closely and carefully. And I don’t think Time was unfair to this study at all.

In their original article, the authors never explain or defend their use of Craigslist to recruit study participants. That’s a massive omission. It boggles.

The full-length article raises other methodological issues, too. For instance, menopausal women made up only 6.2% of study participants (51 out of 827). This calls into question the robustness of any statistical conclusions drawn about the menopausal group – and this is a quantiative study, so sample size does matter.

Perhaps more damningly, the pool of respondents in the 27 to 45 group skewed very heavily toward the younger end of that range. Average age within that group was just 32.86. In other words, women over 35, whose fertility was beginning to decline more steeply, are not underrepresented within that group.

With respect to the researchers’ interpretation, Easton et al. do admit that sexual experience could play a role in women wanting more sex, but they immediately discount it because desire typically drops after menopause, when women have even more experience. Yet they don’t consider obvious confounders: the hormonal and social changes that accompany menopause. That makes their dismissal of experience awfully unconvincing.

Also, nowhere do they acknowledge that women’s material lives (children, relationships, homes, jobs) and psychological outlooks often change quite drastically between 27 and 45. This age group is drawn entirely from their hypothesis that declining fertility is the driver in making women more horny. It does not allow for any other distinctions to be made. (For instance, in the real world, I’ve known very few women in their late twenties who were worried about their fertility, while I’ve known quite a number of them in their late thirties. This matters crucially – unless we’re prepared to believe we’re merely automatons responding to the evolutionary pressures that existed many millennia ago.)

Finally, in actually reading through the study, I am dumbfounded by how teleologically the researchers proceeded. The women in the 27-45 bracket (those Time so cutely branded “cougars”) appear in the study as “reproduction expediting” women. In other words, something that the study ought to be testing for (are these women really seeking to become mothers?) is completely short-circuited and posited as fact by labeling these women as seeking to reproduce as fast and as often as possible. Once it’s assumed that sexual activity is identical with trying to maximize fertility, you no longer have to prove it. It becomes a background assumption. And yet, this is a massive logical leap.

Now, you might argue that women today are still just following the same program their foremothers did, back in the hunter-gatherer age – the so-called environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) – and that even when we think we don’t want a baby, we actually do, because our evolved hard-wiring says so. Fine. But women today overwhelmingly break the link between sex and reproduction. Most of us quite consciously pursue sex lives that will allow us pleasure – to the point that many women (and men!) find it odd when they actually, intentionally try to conceive. The authors completely ignore the convulsive changes that effective birth control has wrought in women’s desires and their willingness/ability to pursue them.

Humans continue to adapt. We didn’t stop adapting in the EEA. Birth control is a monumental adaptation. Easton et al. would be far more convincing it they took it into account. Same goes for other social factors, such as slut shaming, which affects young women most acutely, and would tend to inhibit sexual behaviors. I’m not arguing that we’re blank slates. We have some biological hard-wiring (but with tremendous variation – not all women want children!). I’m even willing to say that some of that hard-wiring is a result of the EEA. However, when science dabbles in teleological thinking and unsupported assumptions and assertions, we might just as well discuss theology instead.

Mixed flowers in Berlin’s Rose Garden. I took the picture but can’t speak to their evolved psychology. The blossoms on the right appear to be hardy geraniums. The lavender flowers are not actually lavender, as far as I could tell. The dried foliage on the left may be post-menopausal?

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Camille Paglia’s Nostalgia for Ye Bad Olde Days of Sex

It’s one thing to be contrarian; it’s another to be just plain ignorant. Or, as Nigel Tufnel says in This Is Spinal Tap, “There’s a fine line between clever and stupid.” Camille Paglia had an op-ed on sex in Sunday’s New York Times. Guess on which side of the line she fell?

Paglia’s pretext for the op-ed is the failure of flibanserin (aka “pink Viagra”) to gain approval from the advisory panel of FDA. Really, though, this is just a platform for her to rant about a supposed “sexual malaise” that’s plaguing the U.S.:

The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety. As respectability became the central middle-class value, censorship and repression became the norm. Victorian prudery ended the humorous sexual candor of both men and women during the agrarian era, a ribaldry chronicled from Shakespeare’s plays to the 18th-century novel. The priggish 1950s, which erased the liberated flappers of the Jazz Age from cultural memory, were simply a return to the norm. …

In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.

… The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left.

(More of the same here.)

Ahem. For a scholar who wears her erudition so gaudily, Paglia shows an abysmal grasp of the history of gender and sexuality. First, anyone who’s read Foucault’s History of Sexuality realizes that the Victorian era wasn’t only about repression. Discourses of sexuality proliferated, creating new identities (“the homosexual”) and planting lots of naughty ideas in people’s minds.

Those “intriguingly separate worlds”? They were a product of the self-same industrial revolution that made men and women virtually interchangeable in the factory before we made the shift to mind-based work. Separate spheres were only ever achievable for a small minority of middle-class, white men and women, anyway. Within those middle classes, mystery didn’t reign so much as a discourse of shame that demonized both men’s and women’s pleasure, as Richard Jeffrey Newman persuasively shows at Alas! a Blog:

Sexual pleasure undermined a man’s ability to compete in this marketplace of manhood in two ways: First, as Graham, Kellogg [of the crackers and cereal, respectively] and others made clear, such pleasure constituted unadulterated self-indulgence, a characteristic precisely antithetical to the kind of man a self-made man was supposed to be. Second, the expenditure of sperm—and the thinkers of the nineteenth century saw ejaculation quite explicitly as a form of spending—was a waste of energy that a man could have, and should have, been putting to more productive uses elsewhere.

(Do read the whole thing; unlike Paglia, Newman won’t waste your time.)

For the working classes circa 1850 or 1900, never mind separate spheres – they were lucky if they could have separate bedrooms. From the children, that is. I don’t know about Prof. Paglia, but I don’t know too many people whose notion of a sexay time includes a bed full of children on the other side of the room. For a real bonus, throw in a boarder or two, no running water, and perhaps a few resident species of rodentia.

Ironically, the most recent apogee of separate spheres was the 1950s, which Paglia denounces for their priggishness. Plenty of couples who steamed up their car windows at the drive-in theater might beg to differ. To the extent people managed to get in on in the back seat, it was in spite of the ostensibly separate spheres of men and women – not because of them.

As for pre-industrial sex? Well, there was oodles of mystery in the “agrarian” world, as long as you perceive a lusty  difference between plowing a field (men’s work) and mucking out a stall (usually women’s work, at least in early modern Europe). O ho, that’s what the postmodern American libido lacks: the erotics of cow manure!

The farther back we go, the rosier Paglia’s nostalgia. Shakespeare’s era certainly was ribald, as we know from his plays. We also know from Norbert Elias’ The Civilizing Process (vol. 1: The History of Manners) that folks were also much more relaxed about bodily hygiene. And by “relaxed,” I mean that Europeans of the 1500s and 1600s would deliberately make their body odor more pungent. Also, pooping anywhere was okay. It was doubtless a super sexy era if coprophilia is your thing.

And then there’s one little detail that changes everything. You don’t need to be a historian to suss it out, either, because its advent falls within Paglia’s lifetime, and mine: women’s prerogative to say no. Paglia must be intentionally obtuse in failing to mention it. Echidne parodies this brilliantly in her take-down of Paglia’s op-ed:

Instead, give me the old Italian countryside, with haystacks and a violent rape of a peasant woman who really does like it after the bruises fade. Because sex is violence and violence is sex and all women like to be at the receiving end of that violence.

Except, of course, Camille Paglia.

(Another post to read in full, srsly.)

Exactly. Paglia can have the chastity belts, crowded beds, and literally shitty hygiene of the past. I’ll take the twenty-first century, which, for all its ills, offers birth control, hot showers, and the chance for a passionate yes – precisely because I’m free to say no.

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Elena Kagan, Woman of Mystery: What Do We Deserve to Know?

First, my very serious answer is that we deserve to know a whole heck of a lot more about her judicial philosophy, etc. than we already know. On this, I’m 100% on board with ballgame. (I’m on board with Greenwald, too, and you really should read his analysis of why Diane Wood was the better choice. But only ballgame gives you the link to serious batshittery á là Ann Althouse.) Compared to Wood’s robust record, we have only a teensy bouquet of tealeaves from Kagan. Leaving aside my usual “I’m no lawyer” disclaimer, I don’t think SCOTUS members should be picked that way. Tarot might serve us better. Or if we’re talking bouquets: I know a source of four-leaf clovers down by the river. Yes, they’re mutants, but they might be as informative as anything on Kagan’s judicial philosophy.

My less serious answer? I don’t really think we need or deserve to know Kagan’s sexual orientation. We do, however, have a right to understand how she’d approach DADT and the approaching Olsen/Boies juggernaut on gay marriage. I do not care if Kagan is as boringly straight as I – or if she keeps a harem of 30 lovely ladies – or has a long-term partner and a couple of dogs. I only care about where she stands on questions likely to come before the court. Yes, the political = the personal and all that jazz, but my goodness! People deserve some privacy, especially when the Judgie McJudgers of America are going to be quick to condemn a public figure’s personal life.

Greenwald makes the compelling point that her sexual orientation is not, primarily, about her sexual desires, tastes, or potential peccadilloes. It’s about who she is. It’s about her identity. And that identity may have an impact on how she’d rule on, say, marriage equality.

I agree that it’s important to separate these things out analytically. Even my straight little self might have fetishes involving marshmallows, silk scarves, and cat costumes. (I do, in fact, own all three of these items. Make of that what you will.) Those hypothetical fetishes have nothing to do with the fact that I basically identify as straight. Well, maybe I’d lean more toward large, broad-shouldered dog costumes, were I lesbian. Or Marlene Dietrich get-ups. But really! Sexual orientation is only very loosely coupled to the sexual acts people enjoy. (See also figleaf on this.)

So I agree with Glenn up to that point. Where we part ways is on the significance of sexual orientation as a component of one’s identity. To take a less loaded (?!?) category: I am a mother. I identify as a mother. In many social situations, that makes my life simpler. There’s no one asking when I plan to have kids. Other times, someone’s demanding to know if I was the mom of the small person playing with his penis on the soccer field, and, um, yes, that was indeed me. (A long, long time ago, I hasten to add – just in case the kids ever read this!)

But there are also scenarios where being a mother is stigmatized. Applying for high-powered jobs? Better make sure your wallet won’t flip open to that photo of your adorable nine-month-old. Hmm, you might want to leave your wedding ring home, too. Your future employer doesn’t have a right to know that you have sprouts at home that might render you less than a 24/7 salaried slave. Maybe you don’t want to risk sabotaging your chances before you’ve even answered the first interview question.

Of course, compared to being a mama, being non-hetero is considerably riskier in the ordinary job market, and I would imagine the Supremes take that risk and put it on steroids. So why should Kagan come under the gun to disclose a potentially stigmatized identity? Why shouldn’t she expect to be judged by her merits, instead of on who she tends to love?

More pointedly, to Andrew and Glenn: Why shouldn’t Kagan be able to pick and choose her battles? (Personally, I’d like to know much more about what she hasn’t helped dismantle the unitary executive.) Why do we evem assume there is a battle to be fought? Yes, there are rumors, but all this media attention is only fanning them. They might be plain wrong. After all, Kagan might be straight, bi, or asexual – or just very, very busy at work.

I have the feeling Andrew Sullivan is jonesing for a high-powered pol to come busting out of the closet and break down a few more doors. Sure, it would be awesomest to have an out-and-proud Justice. But that person – whoever she or he will be – gets to decide. Not Andrew. Not Glenn. Not your humble pundit, Sungold.

Honestly, I can see just two scenarios where I’d warm to Kagan being questioned about her orientation in full Senate hearings:

1) The nominee gets to flip around the questions and direct them back at some of the oafs posing them.

I personally would like to see David Vitter grilled on his orientation. “How long have you been straight? What evidence is there fpr your 100% straightness? How would you categorize your alleged diaper fetish? Doesn’t that sort of kink render you queer?”

“Senator Craig, we all know that you’re on record as being unimpeachably straight. Can you demonstrate your famous wide stance and explain how it embodies your heteronormative manhood? Also, isn’t it messy to pee that way? Do you consider that a bug or a feature?”

Unforntuately, neither of these illustrious lawmakers sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Craig is now out of office, such luck!) And I just don’t have the heart to pick on Lindsey Graham, who does sit on that committee, and who hasn’t persecuted gays from the security of his (alleged) closet. Heck, Daisy can hardly stand to needle Graham, and she lives practically down the road from the man.

2) Kagan proudly embraces a lesbian identity – and America yawns.

The folks who froth at the mouth at the mention of “them homos” – why, they’ve largely gone the way of the Edsel, and of the people who knew firsthand what the Edsel was. Sure, there are still lots of haters, but their ranks are thinning, especially among the younger crowd.

I’m afraid we’re not yet at the point when a declaration of proud out-ness will leave Americans reaching for the snooze alarm. But we’re within a decade or two of it, I think. I hope James Dobson and his cronies will still be around to watch their lifework melting, melting, melting.

Still, even now I find myself fantasizing: What if Kagan is lesbian? What if she made a public announcement to that end? And what if neither Glenn Beck nor Bill O’Reilly is able to froth up a mob mentality? What if America were to say, “Oh, that’s interesting,” (in the vaguely disparaging way that phrase can be used in the Upper Midwest), and then we all turned the channel?

Because if a post is about sexuality – especially female sexuality – there’s gotta be a flower from my garden! This is a columbine I grew from seed last year. This is its first year flowering. You see that leaf miners have besieged this plant, but it’ll probably muddle through just fine.

I am inordinately pleased with how this perennial turned out – from seed!

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