AlterNet.org: Gender

Nigella Lawson Apparently Choked by Her Husband in the Middle of a Restaurant -- and Nobody Stepped in to Stop It

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:02:00 -0700

Society still has a long way to go.

If ever there were a woman who represented the ideal of homey perfection, it’d be Nigella Lawson. This, after all, is the woman who jokingly titled one of her cookbooks “How to Be a Domestic Goddess,” a woman whose television show “Nigella Bites” frequently ended with her triumphantly feeding an eager crowd (or just her two children).

So it came as stunning news Sunday when the Mirror’s People page published a series of photographs showing the British food writer and television personality apparently being choked by her husband Charles Saatchi during a recent lunch at Scott’s restaurant in London. In the series of photographs, the man’s hand is seen extended across a table and around Lawson’s throat. As the Mirror sensationally describes it, “At first he used only his left hand, then both. At one stage he tweaked her nose then pushed both hands in her face. Twice Nigella jerked her head backwards as if in fear.” Strangely, soon after, she reportedly kissed him on the cheek. Another photo shows her apparently crying and visibly upset, leaving the restaurant. Police are now investigating the incident but have not launched a formal investigation.

Saatchi, a renowned advertising executive and art dealer, has insisted the photographs don’t tell the true story. In a conversation with the Evening Standard, he says, “About a week ago, we were sitting outside a restaurant having an intense debate about the children, and I held Nigella’s neck repeatedly while attempting to emphasize my point. There was no grip, it was a playful tiff. The pictures are horrific but give a far more drastic and violent impression of what took place. Nigella’s tears were because we both hate arguing, not because she had been hurt. We had made up by the time we were home. The paparazzi were congregated outside our house after the story broke yesterday morning, so I told Nigella to take the kids off till the dust settled.” Hint: If you can acknowledge that you were having an “intense” argument and that during it you put your hands around a woman’s throat “to make a point,” there’s going to be a whole lot of serious question as to how “playful” your actions were, sir. Next time you’re looking for “emphasis,” try it a little further away from an artery. The 53 year-old Lawson, meanwhile, has only confirmed via a spokesman that she and two her children by her late first husband John Diamond have moved out of their London home, with no further comment. Her rep told Us this week, “We will not be commenting on the images.”

Lawson has said in the past of her marriage that “I’ll go quiet when he explodes, and then I am a nest of horrible festeringness.” And last year, Saatchi was photographed at a restaurant conspicuously clamping his hand over his wife’s mouth. Lawson, who has lavishly recalled her late mother in her books and television shows, has admitted that she would threaten,“I’m going to hit you till you cry,” and once hit her brother so hard she hurt her hand.

What exactly led to that hand around Lawson’s throat – a moment captured by a photographer skulking outside – is unknown. What is known is the conservative MP and all around dirtbag Nick Griffin quickly took the opportunity to tweet that “If I had the opportunity to squeeze Nigella Lawson, her throat wouldn’t be my first choice.” What is known is that a member of the paparazzi made money selling the images. What is known is the unbylined Mirror staff were able to find onlookers who said the incident was “utterly shocking to watch,” that Lawson “had a real look of fear on her face,” and that “He was being intimidating, threatening” and “abusive, frightening and disrespectful” – and yet they couldn’t find a single person who’d intervened in the slightest while a woman was being “attacked” in broad daylight.

What is known is that a woman who is beautiful, who is wealthy, who is successful, who is over the age of 50, can have a man reach out and grab her by the throat during an “intense” debate just as easily as a woman who is poor or young or uneducated – and that regardless of who the woman is, it’s a lot easier to find some mansplaining troll willing to laugh it off or be dismissive about it than it is to find somebody who will actually stand up and ask what the woman herself in the holy hell is going on. Or to ask simply, “Are you okay?”

That’s why organizations like Ring the Bell, which encourage men and women to speak up and speak out about violence against women, matter so much. That’s why if anything good can come of this, let it be a reminder that whether we’re in a fancy London restaurant or a trailer park or a dorm, maybe we don’t know the whole story, maybe we don’t know what’s going on between that couple arguing over there. But when it becomes physical, it’s not the time to look away, and then later primly declare how very “shocking” it all was.

White Suburban Soccer Moms Love NSA Surveillance

Falguni A. Sheth, Salon — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 17:49:00 -0700

Why should they care if the government has their data? They don't fear becoming innocent targets of persecution.

A frequent response of those untroubled by the revelations of the National Security Agency program is: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Perhaps we need to translate that phrase, along with the relative colorblindness through which the entire series of revelations has been scrutinized, as: “If your last name isn’t Khan, and you have no family in Pakistan/India/Iran, etc., you have nothing to fear.”

The revelations of NSA’s collection of “metadata” — as cybersecurity expert Susan Landau explained on “Democracy Now” — is, in fact, even more invasive than actual content collection. She gives an example of how that can be the case: Even if all the NSA does is trace the one or more calls from your home to your doctor on a day when you would normally be at work, followed by one or more calls from your phone that is now located at the doctor’s office to your family, that information strongly suggests that the content of the call was bad news.

Similarly then, if the NSA collects metadata of all calls and online traffic in the U.S., they are probably much less interested in a person living in New Paltz, N.Y., who calls Barcelona eight times a week than they are in biweekly calls from an Indo-Pak restaurant owner in Edison, N.J., to a “terrorist-heavy” locale in Pakistan — say, Waziristan. Clearly, in both cases, the pattern reveals the obvious: that both the New York and New Jersey residents have some connection to folks in the receiving nation. But what does it tell the NSA about who they are? To judge from the NSA’s data-mining project, the intensity of NSA surveillance is heavier in Pakistan than in Europe. Thus, even if the calls from New Paltz are to a terrorist cell in Barcelona, it seems more likely that the calls to Waziristan (say, to the restaurant owner’s mother and brother, and his family) will be more suspicious — of course due to the U.S.’s framing of where the War on Terror must be waged. Still, the latter would be, as Marcy Wheeler discusses in a related issue, “false positives.”

What is the starting framework that informs the NSA to target your call? That folks with close/frequent connections to Pakistan should have their calls monitored? That these same folks have an increased likelihood of being terrorists/sympathizers? Or, alternately, that if one is an Iranian migrant, from a family that left sometime around the Revolution, yet retains close friends who work for the Iranian state (even as low-level civil servants), then their calls should be the subject of targeting (because as Dianne Feinstein has now announced, Iran is a terrorist state)? Or, as she has also stated, it allows the state to keep records of people who become terrorists later (à la “Minority Report”)?

I can hear the liberals now: “Of course, there she goes, making it all about race again.” Um, no. The NSA is making it about race/religion/ethnicity – as these are uniquely combined in the conceptual category of “Muslim Terrorists.” Other branches of the state have long established that terrorism is a unique category that, while defined race-neutrally as having to do with international or domestic political violence targeted against the U.S. government or its citizens, is almost uniquely and singularly applied to Muslims. We’ve seen evidence of this at other levels of government, as in the case of the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims (in New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and internationally). Most recently, we saw this with the immediate rush to assume that a Saudi national that fled the Boston bomb blasts must have been the person who set them — before he was cleared the next day.

If this is the framework that underlies the massive dragnet, then I’m hardly the one making it about race. Meanwhile, as is so often the case, Marcy Wheeler and Rayne (writing at emptywheel.net) have each been presenting some of the most careful and detailed analysis of these programs. While the PRISM program is limited to collecting data from non-U.S. persons — and what that means is still unclear; does U.S. persons include non-citizen residents from India/Pakistan/Iran, etc., residing legally? — as Rayne asks:

Does this mean that all communications between individuals who do not have an Anglo-Saxon name are likely to be sniffed if not collected?
Does this sketchy “(foreign) + (less than 3 hops)” approach executed by humans explain known false-positives? Could the relationships between the false-positives be as tenuous as shopping at the same store? What happens in the case of targets possessing a highly common name like “Ahmed” — the equivalent of Smith in terms of frequency among Arabic surnames — in collection so large it could be called a dragnet?

As others have pointed out, some of these details are hardly new, although the names and scope of the program have changed. As far back as 2005 (yes, under an order signed by then-President Bush), USA Today was reporting details of the NSA’s data collection, warrantless wiretapping, and telecom companies turning over data to the feds. It’s also true that there was hullabaloo about it (though not as loud in mainstream media) by those who are labeled hardcore “privacy freaks” — folks like the ACLU, etc. At some level, we may not have heard that much “new” information, but between Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill and Glenn Greenwald, we now have unquestionable, tangible proof that the intelligence dragnet has been extensive and long-standing even after Bush’s executive order was rescinded.

Ultimately, the political celebration of NSA’s surveillance programs appears to rest on the same old tired flackery parroted by Sen. Lindsey Graham: “I don’t care if the NSA collects my data.” Of course, Graham doesn’t care. Of course, DiFi thinks NSA data collection is crucial to catching terrorists. Of course, white suburban soccer moms are more interested in the intrigue of Snowden’s (ex?)girlfriend. Why should they care? They don’t worry that they will awake some morning and find themselves on the wrong side of the state — and certainly not because “they’re not doing anything wrong,” but rather because they’re not the wrong color, the wrong religion, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong family. (Remember former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on 16-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki’s death? “He should have been born to a far more responsible father.”) But of course.

That’s why Lindsey Graham, DiFI and the white burbie housewives think that NSA surveillance is a great idea. They’re not politically vulnerable (OK, that’s an understatement). They’re officially in favor of the War on Terror. And certain under this administration and the previous one, their calls to the doctor and to family (or even Graham’s hypothetical call to Waziristan) are not registering as the “suspicious” activity that the NSA is looking for.

As I’ve said before, this all comes down to a familiar form of American privilege:

“[T]he privilege of not having to know (or know about) foreign nationals or feel particularly obliged to them, or know about the harms done to them, simply because the wars, jingoism, and aggressive foreign policy of the U.S. empire won’t affect you.”

The other side of the NSA leaks has to do with what we know or can infer about the profiles of people who get top-security clearance. If the NSA’s dragnet is designed to look for “suspicious” activity, then besides being directed toward foreigners and foreign threats, it should also be looking for people like Snowden (of course I’m not endorsing this; just considering the logic of the hunt): seeming “one of us” kinda guys — conservative, a believer in American ideals as decided and executed by the U.S. government, a former troop, a “regular guy” with top national security clearance. Who, as it turns out, doesn’t like what he is coming to learn in the course of his work, and is beginning to take serious issue with the size and scope of the project. Except that all the national security surveillance in the world didn’t catch him before he flew to Hong Kong to meet with reporters and turn over evidence of these secret slides that document an out-of-control surveillance program. Whoops.

Male Menopause? Scientific Study Says It's Possible—If 'Cougar' Women Have More Kids

Anna North, Salon — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:06:00 -0700

Study authors note that if women preferred to have kids with younger men, female menopause would be reversed—men would go through it instead.

Scientists have long wondered why women’s fertility declines after a certain age. Now researchers have a new theory: It’s all men’s fault. And over the long haul, older moms could have a solution.

Biologists Richard Morton, Jonathan Stone and Rami Singh have created a statistical model they say could explain how menopause evolved. If men choose to mate only with younger partners, Stone told Salon, this preference “allows mutations that otherwise would be removed by selection — because the mutations cause negative effects like reduced fertility at older ages — to accumulate in a population.” Essentially, if women were all bearing children early in life, they were able to pass along these age-related mutations to their offspring — they never got weeded out by natural selection. Over time, mutations conferring infertility may have built up in the population, leading to menopause for all women.

The study authors note that if women preferred to have kids with younger men, this trend would be reversed — men, essentially, would go through menopause instead.

And if menopause developed over time, maybe it can be eliminated over time also. This would mean not just extended fertility, but also a lower incidence of various conditions that can come along with menopause, from hot flashes to bone loss.

At least in the United States, births to older women are now on the rise. As more older women reproduce, will natural selection start to eliminate the mutations that historically made them infertile? Said Stone, “In societies like we find in North America, I think that a trend has emerged for women (and men) to reproduce at later ages (compared to even the recent past). If that is true, then, in the context of our computational genetic research, perhaps this would effect a later age for menopause.”

Older mothers have come in for lots of criticism lately, getting blamed for autism and other ills. But Stone’s research suggests that in one way, older moms could be doing the human race a favor: Over the very long term, they could have a hand in pushing back menopause for everyone else.

Stone also noted that individual people shouldn’t worry too much about their effect on humanity’s fertility patterns. “The effects that we observed in the computer simulations would take tens of thousands of years, perhaps more, to manifest,” he said. “I hope that we don’t ruin anybody’s Father’s Day!”

Major Push to End Sexual Assault Epidemic in Military Turned Back in Senate

Adele M. Stan, RH Reality Check — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:48:00 -0700

Defense authorization bill won’t include Sen. Kristen Gillibrand's measure to remove reporting of sexual assault from chain of command—despite having bipartisan support.

As the Senate Armed Services Committee meets Wednesday to take up its version of the Defense Authorization bill, senators will likely devote at least as much verbiage to discussion of sexual assault in the military ranks as they do to the finer points of the Pentagon budget that is the bill’s main focus. But missing from the committee’s final version of the bill will be the one measure that advocates for survivors of sexual assault and rape say is critical to ending the crisis that grips the military: removing the reporting and prosecution of sexual assault cases from the chain of command.

Despite its bipartisan support and 27 co-sponsors, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), the committee chairman, struck from the bill a measure offered by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) that would have moved the adjudication of all serious crimes (such as murder, rape, and sexual assault) into the hands of independent prosecutors in order to create a safer environment and more impartial judicial process for those who have been the targets of assailants in the military ranks.

Levin made the decision Tuesday, replacing the provisions of Gillibrand’s Military Justice Improvement Act with a measure that simply requires that any command decision not to prosecute a sexual assault case be reviewed by a high-ranking officer. But as demonstrated in at least one recent case—the overturning of the sexual assault conviction of Air Force Lt. Col. James Wilkerson by Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin—the top brass often exhibit the same deference to defendants as commanders lower in rank.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has condemned Levin’s decision. “They basically embrace the status quo here. It’s outrageous,” she told the New York Times.

As Gillibrand and others noted in a June 4 day-long hearing on sexual assault in the military, victims often don’t come forward because of well-founded fears of reprisal by their commanders. Testimony by victims’ advocates laid out a picture of a landscape on which retaliation against those who report sexual assaults—including being drummed out of the service on the basis of mental-health diagnoses made by military medical personnel—seemed almost as common as the assaults themselves.

Citing a recent Pentagon report that estimated some 26,000 incidents of unwanted sexual contact experienced by members of the military at the hands of others in the ranks, Gillibrand addressed a panel of top military officials: “Of the victims who did report … 62 percent said they received retaliation.”

Of those estimated 26,000 incidents, only 3,300 were reported, and fewer than 200 went to trial.

Most U.S. allies, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Israel, have altered their command structure to reflect the kind of change that Gillibrand and co-sponsors of her bill seek in the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). But the Joint Chiefs of Staff don’t want it, and Levin is not disposed to make them do it, despite the fact that the Constitution places control of the military under the leadership of civilian elected officials.

Among the measures attached to the bill, which allocates the annual budget for the whole of the armed forces, will likely be several that aim to aid members of the military who survive rape and other sexual violence at the hands of their colleagues, measures that victims’ advocates applaud but that only deal with the aftermath of assault.

Proponents of Gillibrand’s measure contend that because it would encourage rape survivors and assault victims to come forward, and would likely result in a higher number of prosecutions, it could change the current military culture marked by rampant predation on lower-ranking members by their superiors.

On June 5, the House Armed Services Committee included in its markup of the bill some 11 amendments designed to address, in some measure, the crisis of sexual assault that has plagued the military for the last 25 years. They include measures to provide services to victims and to prevent commanders from overturning convictions made by military courts. But a change to the chain of command structure, proposed by Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA), was not among them.

Wednesday morning, news came that a measure co-sponsored by Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) that would form a Special Victims Counsel—a special military lawyer tasked with assisting sexual assault victims throughout the process of adjudicating their reports—in all branches of service had won a thumbs-up from Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Where Are the Women?

The day before the House committee took up the authorization bill, in a grand but sparsely-populated hearing room on the other side of Capitol Hill, four people took their seats at the witness table for questioning by members of Senate Armed Services Committee on the epidemic of sexual assaults in the military. On the press tables, a mere smattering of laptops was present; most reporters had already left the day-long hearing to file their stories.

Out of a total 20 witnesses questioned by committee members that day, the two women on the panel, Anu Bhagwati of the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) and Nancy Parrish of Protect Our Defenders, were the only advocates called to appear before the committee to represent the tens of thousands of individuals estimated to have survived sexual assault by colleagues while serving in the armed forces. Absent from the witness list were any current or former members of the armed forces who had suffered sexual assault by their comrades.

“I have not met a woman in the military yet who has not experienced some form of discrimination or harassment,” Bhagwati, a former captain in the Marines, told the committee. “When that is … the average experience of a woman in the military, a culture of harassment is created, and sexual predators will thrive in that culture. These serial predators that are entering the ranks, they’re hitting a target-rich environment.”

Nancy Parrish shared the stories of several assault survivors, including some who were pushed out of the service, tainted with a mental-health diagnosis after they reported assaults—a pernicious form of retaliation, since it often deprives victims of benefits they would otherwise be entitled to through the Veterans Administration, and leads to the revocation of security clearances required in the victim’s area of vocational specialty.

Both Parrish and Bhagwati cited this sort of retaliation as common.

Unit Cohesion?

Parrish read part of a statement her organization collected from a woman soldier serving in a combat zone who said she had tried to file a rape report several times against a higher-ranking member, only to be rebuffed at each turn. The soldier’s immediate supervisor told her not to speak ill, Parrish said, of the man she said had raped her, and when she took her complaint to the next commander in the chain, the soldier said she was told that she would be charged with adultery if she tried to file an official report.

The woman was a truck driver, Parrish said, tasked with moving supplies over terrain laden with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the homemade bombs that have killed countless soldiers and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Parrish then quoted a snippet of the soldier’s first-person account, where she tells of how, after being raped by a higher-ranking member of the force, her rapist continues to seek contact:

He comes to my truck as I’m getting it ready for another mission. I shut down inside. I’m the lead driver in our convoy, and I kept hoping to hit an IED after that.

Parrish paused for a moment, and then asked, “Unit cohesion? Good order and discipline? This young soldier tried four times to report her assault. And what was her thinking at that time when she was getting ready to get in her truck to lead the convoy? ‘I hope I hit an IED.’ What would that do for mission readiness and unit cohesion? It’s undermined every day by disbelieving the victim.”

Asked by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who is sponsoring a measure that would prevent military commanders from overturning sexual assault convictions rendered by courts martial, whether women rape survivors were being offered emergency contraception at base hospitals, Parrish responded, “Not in our experience.”

“So you’re saying, Ms. Parrish, that in the medical facilities on bases, they do not have a rape protocol?” McCaskill asked.

“Well, if they do, the victims that we’ve talked with don’t know it,” Parrish replied.

The Senate hearing was prompted by Gillibrand’s proposed Military Justice Improvement Act, as well as number of other measures proposed by lawmakers to address various aspects of the problem, all spurred by a spate of recent news reports on assaults in all branches, just as the Pentagon released its report on sexual assault.

Those news reports included the arrest of Lt. Jeffrey Krusinski, then head of the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention unit, for sexually assaulting a civilian in a shopping mall parking lot; the investigation of an Army sexual assault prevention officer for allegedly running a prostitution ring at Ft. Hood; the alleged rape of a woman midshipman at the Naval Academy; and the surreptitious videotaping, by a male sergeant, of women cadets in the shower at West Point.

Stripes and Ribbons (or Where Are the Women? Part II)

The late-afternoon panel on which Bhagwati and Parrish spoke was a markedly different scene from the one that took place earlier the same day in that very room. Then, a witness table of epic length was graced with the dress-uniform sleeves of every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with the those of the top lawyers of each branch of service, in addition to the commandant and judge advocate general of the U.S. Coast Guard.

Every member of the 12-member panel, save one, was a man.

Throngs of photographers clicked their shutters in flurried bursts and reporters bumped elbows at the press tables, as each ribbon-bedecked witness declared that to deprive commanders of the right to adjudicate sex-crimes cases would lead to the breakdown of “good order and discipline” in the ranks, a breakdown that Gillibrand and other women on the committee concluded had long ago occurred, given the statistics offered in the May Pentagon report.

“It is imperative that we keep the chain of command fully engaged and at the center of any solution to combat sexual assault and sexual harassment,” said Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, chief of staff of the U.S. Army. “Command authority is the most critical mechanism for ensuring discipline and accountability, cohesion and the integrity of the force.”

As Odierno faced often-withering questioning from the senators, his jaw hardened. He was hardly alone among his colleagues, who, like Odierno, conceded that a terrible problem plagued the military in the form of sexual assault, but bristled at the notion that commanders should give up their jurisdiction over such crimes in order to make it safer for victims to come forward.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) reminded Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, chief of Naval Operations, that the military services of the United States’ closest allies had changed their military justice codes along the lines that Gillibrand proposed, and suggested he confer with his counterparts in those services to see how removal of sex crimes from the chain of command was working for them. “Thanks for the tip,” Greenert said, flippantly.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Shaheen he hadn’t had time to confer with his counterparts in the United Kingdom or Israel or Australia, where serious crimes committed by service members were no longer handled through the chain of command, but through independent military prosecutors. He said he’d get right on it, though.

That led Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) to label the brass’ answers to Shaheen’s question as “stunningly bad,” and seemed incredulous that they made their case against Gillibrand’s bill without knowing how similar measures undertaken by U.S. allies had affected the operation of militaries in those countries.

When asked by Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) how many commanders had been held accountable for allowing sexual assault to proliferate in their units, most of the military chiefs drew a collective blank, except for Odierno and Coast Guard Commandant Robert Papp. Odierno said more than 20 Army commanders had been relieved of command or discharged for not punishing sexual assault, and Papp remembered having the same done to one commander in the Coast Guard. Later, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos and Air Force Chief Gen. Mark Welsh corrected the record to note relieving the commands of a total of three commanders, though it seemed from the commandant’s description that the commanders relieved under Amos’s leadership were for sexual misdeeds of their own, not for failure to punish others.

But military brass are said to have supported the overturning of Lt. Wilkerson’s sexual assault conviction by Lt. Gen. Franklin, and when asked by Stars and Stripes for a reaction on Franklin’s decision to throw out the court martial verdict, Welsh refused to comment. Welsh also made waves last month when he blamed the military’s assault problem on a “civilian hook-up mentality” that recruits brought into the service with them.

All About Power

The one last option Gillibrand has for getting her chain-of-command measure into the final Defense Authorization bill is to renew it on the floor of the Senate. It would be an audacious move for the junior senator, but one that observers are betting on.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, while standing their ground on maintaining a commander’s power to adjudicate sexual assault claims, seem willing to accept a prohibition on overturning court martial convictions, a measure also supported by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

But given that the United States’ closest allies have made the kinds of chain-of-command changes that Gillibrand and her allies seek, one has to wonder what it is the generals and admiral fear.

In Israel, Gillibrand noted at the hearing, reports of sexual assault have increased by 80 percent since reporting and prosecution of those crimes were taken out of the chain of command.

Watch the video here.

Catholic School Fires Teacher for Being a Domestic Violence Survivor

Steven Hsieh, AlterNet — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 09:05:00 -0700

“I mean that’s why women of domestic violence don’t come forward."

A San Diego Catholic school fired a teacher and domestic violence survivor due to her ex-husband’s “threatening and menacing behavior,” KNSD-TV reports.

Second-grade teacher Carie Charlesworth said she received notice of her termination after an incident in which her abusive ex-husband followed her to Holy Trinity School, where she worked. Charlesworth had been teaching in the district for 14 years.

"They’ve taken away my ability to care for my kids,” she told KNSD. “It’s not like I can go out and find a teaching job anywhere.”

Charlesworth went on leave after in incident in January that forced her to call the police on her husband three separate times. As KNSD reports, she went to Holy Trinity the next day to warn the principle “to be on the lookout for her ex-husband,” who “has a trail of restraining orders and 911 calls.”

Sure enough, Charlesworth’s abuser showed up at the school’s parking lot, sending it into lockdown. The next day, she received a letter informing her that she and her children were put on “indefinite leave.” And three months later, the teacher received a letter from Holy Trinity informing her that the school “simply cannot allow”her to return to work.

It didn’t matter that Charlesworth’s ex-husband is currently behind bars for his crimes, as the school has “no way of knowing how long or short a time he will actually serve.”

Sadly, Charlesworth’s story is part of a larger pattern of employees losing their jobs after incidents of domestic violence. As KNSD reports, a 2011 study shows that “Nearly 40 percent of survivors in California reported being fired or feared termination because of domestic violence.”

Charlesworth is telling her story to raise awareness of this problem, saying: “I mean that’s why women of domestic violence don’t come forward, because they’re afraid of the way people are going to see them, view them, perceive them, treat them.”

h/t Raw Story

Do Women Have Less Fun Than Men?

April M. Short, AlterNet — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:42:00 -0700

A new study shows a leisure-time gender gap that favors men.

Men spend an average of 34.7 hours per week on leisurely activities like watching TV, playing games, participating in sports and a series of other recreational enterprises, while women spend only 29 hours on the same activities according to a Pew Research Center analysisof pooled data from the American Time Use Survey of 2003 to 2011. The gender gap in leisure is about five hours per week.

The analysis reveals that while women work 10 paid hours less than men each week, women spend about six hours more than men in household work and about three additional hours in child care, bringing the total work time to 45.6 hours per week for men and 45.2 hours for women.

Among working parents in particular the difference in leisure time is slightly smaller, but working fathers spend three more hours of official relaxation time than working mothers each week—28 and 25 hours, respectively.

As the Pew analysis shows, women are less likely to spend their time between activities on leisure, so the gap among couples with children could be explained by the ways in which parents of each gender spend their free time. According to the analysis, mothers’ free time is often interrupted, which might make it more difficult for them to relax during that time.

The Pew report further notes: “...mothers tend to spend more time than fathers in multitasking; the additional hours spent on multitasking are mainly related to time spent on housework and child care.

Why All Vaginas Are Beautiful and Labiaplasty Is Such a Scam

Tanya Lee Markul, Rebelle Society — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 10:26:00 -0700

While we're at it, pubic hair is making a comeback, too.

Have you seen the documentary film, The Perfect Vagina? It’s certainly not for the faint of heart.

I sat through the entire thing feeling squeamish, legs crossed tight, one hand over my eyes and a little curious about the look of my own undercarriage. Why all the tension and peculiar interest?

The film is about vaginal cosmetic surgery, and according to this film, it’s growing in popularity. So what is it about the vagina that’s causing a ruckus? Ladies and gentlemen, meet the labia minora.

According to Wikipedia: The labia minora (singular: labium minus), also known as the inner labia, inner lips, or nymphae, are two flaps of skin on either side of the human vaginal opening, situated between the labia majora (outer labia, or outer lips). Inner lips vary widely in size, colour, and shape from woman to woman.

Labiaplasty (930,000 Google search results), also known as vaginal rejuvenation, labia minora contouring, labial reshaping, female genital surgery or labial reduction, is the surgical procedure of reducing the length of the inner labia or inner flaps.

(I have also learned of a procedure called vaginoplasty that tightens the vagina and muscles surrounding it.)

There is one profound question one cannot help but to ask: Why?

As if we need another item on our already massive list of things to stress over, or another body part to obsess about. Why is it now a big deal if our inner flappage is a bit longer than the outer bits?

According to the film, women who want this surgery are seeking a more ‘youthful’ appearance and/or want to balance out the appearance of their labia minora with the surrounding tissue.

Some women have claimed to be embarrassed of the length of their labia minora. Some say they’ve been ridiculed or teased by family members or partners. Others claim the length has caused them to have problems doing certain activities or from wearing certain clothing articles. Others say that it has caused (psychological) difficulties in the bedroom.

The influence/pressure for wanting a more ‘balanced and youthful’ appearance is said to come from the aesthetic vah-jay-jays featured in pornographic magazines and films or the skilful yet deceitful technique known as beauty magazine airbrushing.

Some also blame plastic surgeons for developing such a procedure and the women who have the money to pay for it (the average cost ranges between 5,000-10,000 USD).

I also can’t help but to ponder, when did waxing and shaving become a part of our beauty routine?

According to sex researcher Dr. Debra Herbenick, young women’s pubic hair has been steadily disappearing over the past decade and that younger women tend to shave it off while older women choose to wax.

What happened to good old-fashioned ‘maintenance’ where we left a bit of the forest intact? Trees do look naked without leaves. Is a bit of pubic hair just not sexy anymore?

Anyways, I tried to find some statistics about large labia minora cases (also known as labia hypertrophy) and unsurprisingly could not find any solid numbers. In all honesty, I’m sure this number is huge.

But, just because your labia minora peaks out from your labia majora, does it really mean you have a problem?

According to the documentary the typical size of the labia minora ranges from two to ten centimetres (0.8 to 3.9 inches).

Supporting this range, a study by the Department of Gynaeology in the UK in 2004 shared the length of the labia minor of women between ages 18-50 to be 0.78 to 3.9 inches.

The fact of the matter is, the labia minora comes in varying symmetry, sizes and colours and are influenced by things such as genetics, childbirth, hormones and age.

What are the risks of the surgery?

I’ve read that some of the risks can include temporary numbness, bleeding, pigmentation changes, pain, decreased feeling in that area, asymmetry between the inner and outer labia, excess scar tissue buildup (that can appear as lumps), hematoma (broken blood vessels or blood clot), puckering of the skin and sexual dysfunction.

It is also important to note that there has not been any substantial findings or research as to the long-term consequences of such a surgery.

If you really love me, don’t you also love my dangles and bobs?

What exactly is the idea of the perfect vagina anyway? Not too tight? Not too baggy? Or in the words of this film “hairless, neat, pink and tucked-in”? If you ask me, the perfect vagina is a myth.

I asked ten random guys ages 25-35, if they thought the size of the labia minora matters. Here are their responses:

1. “It does not matter. What’s important to me are a woman’s curves.”

2. “I don’t think this matters. I don’t think men are that fussy.”

3. “For me it doesn’t matter at all. I actually think it’s quite sexy if you can see them.”

4. “I think it’s a total misunderstanding that any female would get this surgery. I think it’s a total minority of guys that would wish this for a woman. This part of the body is like the ears, it’s a part you cannot judge by prettiness and it doesn’t make sense to me to alter it. This type of surgery, if done just for looks, is a waste of money. Genetically we are coded to be turned on by a woman’s vagina pretty much however it looks.”

5. “All labia minora are created equal.”

6. “I for one, don’t care at all.”

7. “I’d much prefer that she is comfortable with herself versus being neurotically insecure enough to get surgery.”

8. “I don’t think vaginas were meant to look ‘pretty’.”

9. “Couldn’t give a damn.”

10. “I’m sure a guy is just happy to be there.”

There we have it.

Perhaps we should stop reading/watching so much porn, stop perusing beauty magazines and comparing our vaginas. We could also save ourselves a lot of pain and/or money by bringing pubic hair back.

Making love, looking good, feeling great about who you are doesn’t involve being what someone else thinks you ‘should’ be. Of course, it’s a person’s own choice to have this type of surgery or not, but no matter what, a little more self-love couldn’t hurt.

It’s not always easy, but a little bit goes a hell of a long way.

Rachel Kushner’s Ambitious New Novel Scares Male Critics

Laura Miller, Salon — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 09:52:00 -0700

When a woman—not a venerable male auteur—writes the Great American Novel, male reviewers get flummoxed.

In 1963, Esquire magazine’s July issue was about the American literary scene, and featured an essay by Norman Mailer. Titled “Some Children of the Goddess: Further Evaluations of the Talent in the Room,” the piece was a repeat of a survey of his “rivals” that appeared in “Advertisements for Myself.” Few American novelists have ever been more invested than Mailer in the mystique of the Great American Novel, and it’s no coincidence that his list of the authors likely to produce such a work (William Styron, James Jones, James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Joseph Heller, John Updike, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger and Saul Bellow) consisted of exactly zero women.

The deliberate pursuit of the Great American Novel has always been a peculiarly masculine endeavor. It is a book, in Mailer’s words, designed to “seize the temper of the time and turn it.” To attempt to write the Great American Novel is to surmise that you can speak on behalf of an entire, fractious nation. Plus, by all appearances, we’re talking about a game of King of the Mountain: Only one winner allowed, and the competition is bruising. The photograph accompanying Mailer’s piece showed him standing in a boxing ring, poised to deliver his punches.

The presumption and the belligerence embodied in this ideal have put off many American women writers. They weren’t going to be allowed into the Room to begin with, but exclusion gave them the opportunity to discover something important: There’s more than just one room. There are, in fact, an awful lot of rooms in American fiction, rooms in which Mailer contemporaries as brilliant and varied as Shirley Jackson, Eudora Welty, Ursula K. Le Guin and Paule Marshall found ways to flourish creatively and reach many readers, albeit without the prestige accorded to the guys in the Room.

Often the debate about bias against women writers — now regularly revived by the annual VIDA survey and its dismaying figures on the gender breakdown of book reviewers and authors reviewed in prominent literary publications — focuses on genre. Why are some themes (courtship, family life) or forms (the short story) typically regarded as less significant than others (war, adventure, the epic novel)? How is it that purportedly lightweight themes suddenly become momentous in critics’ eyes when the novelist who takes them up is a man (Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides)?

These are legitimate and essential challenges to the values embedded in Mailer’s concept of the Room. It’s also true that chipping away at the fantasy of a rigidly hierarchical aesthetic pecking order — a typological crutch for structure junkies — will open up the literary landscape to more writers and readers. It’s important to challenge both the Room and the supremacy of the kind of novel the Room tends to prize: long, wide-ranging, idea-driven, full of social commentary and concerned with the American dream of self-invention — “ambitious,” as critics often call it.

Given how fiercely American male writers have fought for the Great American Novel laurels, many women authors apparently decided it simply wasn’t worth wading into the fray. Furthermore, there’s a grandiose self-presentation, a swagger, that goes along with advancing your book as a Great American Novel that many women find impossible or silly. Besides, critics longing for a silverback alpha male to declare the leader of the pack are never going to glance at the distaff side. Who wants to play a game whose rules are so obviously rigged against you?

So we don’t have many novels of this type written by American women, even if the women who might have written them (Jennifer Egan, say, or Joyce Carol Oates, to name just two) have done equally impressive work in other rooms, such as composing prismatic explorations of style or exploding seemingly hidebound genres like the gothic. Still, it’s possible to point out that a novel needn’t be “ambitious” to be worthy of the highest acclaim and yet stop short of dismissing the “ambitious” genre entirely. American women writers have been so creative in the other rooms of our national literature that it’s easy to miss the paucity of conventionally “ambitious” novels written by their hands — until that is, a book like Rachel Kushner’s “The Flamethrowers” comes along.

“The Flamethrowers” isn’t a perfect novel — but “ambitious” novels rarely are. Still, it is very good, especially in parts, and above all it is unsettling. It has a seamless confidence in itself and in the significance of what it has to say that you don’t realize was missing from most fiction by American women novelists until you see it exhibited in Kushner. She seems not so much to be defying the masculine prerogative in this genre as to be unaware of it in the first place. As Franzen, a former teacher of Kushner’s, told the New York Times, “I had the sense that she came from a place where nobody had told young women what they could and couldn’t be.” She certainly writes like someone from that fabled land.

“The Flamethrowers” mostly takes place in the late 1970s, in New York, in Italy and a little bit in the salt flats of Utah. It is also mostly narrated by a young woman nicknamed Reno (after her hometown), as she makes her way through the Manhattan art scene. Reno makes films, but her real entree into those rarefied circles arrives thanks to her relationship with Sandro Valera, an older minimalist who specializes in metal boxes. She’s working-class; he comes from an Italian clan that made a fortune in motor vehicles and tires. He insists on his detachment from the Valera dynasty, but she notices that even when he wears the same “work clothes and steel-toed boots” that her cousins did, “on Sandro they added up to something else: a guy with a family inheritance who could use a nail gun, a drill press, a person not made effete by money.” (Or, for that matter, not made effete by art itself. How much of the testosterone bluster of American literature originates in the anxious suspicion that writing is sissy work?)

But the boldness of this novel has more to do with its voice than its subject matter; you get a heaping serving of Kushner’s virtuosity in the opening chapters, which describe Reno’s journey back west by motorcycle, as part of a nebulous art project. I could present samples of her writing here, but better yet, just see James Wood’s nearly gobstruck review of “The Flamethrowers” in the New Yorker; he is the maestro of the representative quote, after all. He does a good job of what may be an impossible task. It is fiendishly hard to nail down and demonstrate the quality that most distinguishes the work of a remarkable author — that is, her authority. Kushner has authority in spades, seemingly without reaching for it, as if she were just born that way.

“The Flamethrowers” is mold-breaking, not only because it is written by a woman but also because its central character is a woman. In the books most often cited as candidates for the Great American Novel, male characters — Jay Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn, Ahab — have played that role, representatives, presumably, of the American experience. But (and do I really even need to say it at this stage?), the notion that a female figure might serve the same purpose undermines the very concept of the Great American Novel. Men are allowed to stand for the entirety of a national identity or for humanity itself, but women are only supposed to stand for womanhood, if in various flavors.

This is not to say that Kushner overtly presents Reno as the quintessential American, although the character’s trajectory is as aspirational in its own way as Gatsby’s and she seeks a rupture with the past as decisive as Huck’s (even if she lights out in the opposite geographical direction). In fact, Reno’s problems are very much a young woman’s problems. She is in danger of coasting on her physical allure and prone to attaching herself to decisive men in order to obtain the forward momentum she professes to crave. Taking a job at a film lab, she poses as a “China girl” on film leaders, one among any number of female faces whose skin tones provide a base line for color correction by technicians, “real but unreachable women who left no sense of who they were.” It’s the worst form of a representative identity: both generic and anonymous, a means to an end, an everywoman who is nobody.

So potent is the voice Kushner gives Reno that many of the book’s reviewers forget that the only character in the novel who can hear it is Reno herself; to everyone else, she’s just Sandro’s long-legged blonde girlfriend. Even the motorcycle she acquires to execute her “art” on the Utah desert is a gift from Sandro, and one Reno promptly totals; she can’t really handle its power. Only late in the novel does she genuinely come to own the vehicle; until then, figuratively at least, Reno is perched in a sidecar, and would be going nowhere if not for the horsepower provided by others.

All this makes “The Flamethrowers” a fascinating litmus test for reviewers, especially the male ones. Wood, whose ideal fiction succeeds in making itself felt as reality, admires the novel greatly, but seems almost spooked by it. He writes of Kusher’s “eerie confidence … which constantly entwines the invented with the real, and she often uses the power of invention to give her fiction the authenticity of the reportorial, the solidity of the historical.”

There is another breed of critic who gets drunk on high style, and will forgive a novel any manner of thematic or narrative stumbling if it offers enough pyrotechnical prose; they could once be seen swooning over Don DeLillo or John Updike. In the New York Times, Dwight Garner tacks toward this giddy camp in his review of “The Flamethrowers,” praising Kushner’s style for its “poise and wariness and moral graininess,” before concluding that by the end of the book, Kushner has “burned down whatever resistance you might have toward her talent or her narrative.” It is hard to hold out against someone who describes Roy Orbison’s hair as “black as melted-down record vinyl.”

But other reviews are warped by the novel’s categorical instability. In a head-patting, plot-summary-heavy piece for BookForum, Christian Lorentzen interjects multiple, irrelevant references to his own past as the son of a truck driver and later a truck driver himself. He also questions the plausibility of Reno’s description of an uncle who watched television naked, lazily ordering his kids to change the channels for him. These seem to be attempts to assert the reviewer’s own working-class credentials, the better to question that “eerie confidence” of Kushner’s, the uncanny, unfeminine authority with which she feels entitled to write about such things. Then he congratulates her for “growing up” enough to write about a reasonably contemporary period and hopes she’ll do even better next time. (Kushner’s first novel was set in pre-Revolutionary Cuba.)

But perhaps the most strident note of “How dare she?” came from Adam Kirsch, in Tablet. Acknowledging that “The Flamethrowers” “implodes all the usual assumptions about what gender means in literature,” Kirsch goes on to complain that it is “full of portentous atmosphere and self-conscious cool” and to accuse Kushner of “mythologizing.” You could say the same of any novel by Don DeLillo — whom Kirsch has rated among the “top ranks of American literature” (along with Philip Roth, John Updike and Thomas Pynchon). I would argue there’s a lot less portentousness and cool in “The Flamethrowers” than in DeLillo’s work, and that Kushner’s novel is far less sterile. When Kushner does it, however, these qualities make for “a macho novel by and about women, which may explain” — ouch! — “why it has been received so enthusiastically by the critics.”

By this rationale, to stand among the top ranks of American literature (that is, make it into the Room) you must write in a certain way, but a woman who does so engages in a form of literary transvestism that may dazzle lesser critics but is not going to pass muster with Adam Kirsch, thank you very much. This Catch-22-style bind recalls a recent episode of “Veep,” in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus, playing the American vice president, Selina Meyer, is groped by the husband of the Finnish prime minister after they sneak off for a cigarette break. Although she’s the wronged party, Selina, as her chief-of-staff warns her, is the one who must strive to cover it up: “Having your tit fondled by a Finn? It would define you. You can’t build a statue on that.” Selina concurs, bitterly, “because this is a man’s world we live in.” She takes a spectacularly venomous draw on her smoke and adds, “because of the Axis of Dick.”

Kirsch also objects to the artifice engaged in by most of the characters in “The Flamethrowers,” who do indeed spin a lot of yarns and do a lot of bits. The most extreme among them is Reno’s first friend in New York, a woman named Giddle, whose “art” consists of taking a job as a waitress, becoming “a girl working in a diner, glancing out the windows as she cleaned the counter in small circles with a damp rag.” Everything Giddle does is art, but only she (and Reno) know the extent of it. “Anyone can be a success,” she explains. “It’s so much more interesting to not want that.”

What the novel lacks, Kirsch laments, is a depiction of “what all its characters are like when they are not aflame, not performing their selves but simply being.” As a result, he finds that instead of offering a “critique of artificiality” the book “ends up reading like a celebration of it.” (This he links to the concept of “mansplaining,” but in a way that seems to misapprehend the meaning of the term.) This statement is oddly reminiscent of something Sandro tells Reno: “You don’t have to immediately become an artist … You’re young. Young people are doing something even when they’re doing nothing. A young woman is a conduit. All she has to do is exist.” Sort of like a China girl — a fleeting, muselike aide to someone else’s creative endeavor.

It’s an easy gig, and Reno takes it, pursuing her own work in a desultory fashion and tagging along with her lover to various galleries and dinner parties. When, on a trip to Italy, she catches Sandro fooling around with another woman, the illusion that such a life constitutes “doing something” shatters and she runs away. (Lorentzen, who interprets this flight as indicating that what Reno really wants is “that middle-class staple: faithful monogamy” misses the point; what she has witnessed is her own easy replaceability.) Hitching her wagon to another man — this one the heavy for a group of Italian militants — Reno will get one final lesson on the costs of her passivity.

An alternative is to be like Giddle, whose being is itself a performance, and vice versa. Giddle’s method is the diametric opposite of Mailer’s Room (“It’s so much more interesting to not want that”), an acceptance of marginalization as a woman’s lot and a rationale for how that acceptance can be a form of victory. It’s an ingenious solution, if recessive one. Really: This novel is so much concerned with the dilemmas faced by women artists, it’s striking that most of the reviews, favorable or not, barely remark on the fact. Giddle has holed up in some small, remote closet in the mansion of American culture — free to do what she likes, but deprived of an audience. I doubt, however, that anything less than the whole house would ever be enough for Rachel Kushner, and thank God for that.

What If Leaving Your Abuser Means Living on the Street? How Budget-Cuts Make Life Even Harder for Abused Women

Tana Ganeva, AlterNet — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:08:00 -0700

Budget cuts have strained domestic violence resources. What does that mean for women who need a safe place to go?

The first time Julianna Martinez's ex-husband hit her in the face, it came out of nowhere. They'd been out dancing, but he left the club early. Later that night she let him into her house and they were sitting there talking.

"He didn't even seem angry. Then wham, across my face." Afterward he cried, so she forgave him, thinking it was a one-time thing.

The second time it happened, they were driving through a military base in Germany when he got pissed off because she hadn't been welcoming enough to a fellow soldier's wife. "He turned around and smacked me," she says. "His reason was, I wasn't sitting with her, making her feel comfortable."

She sat there stunned. When she recovered from her shock she jumped out of the car and ran to the office of the army police. Although they were initially separated, they went to marriage counseling.

It didn't help. Before their son was born, they fought because her husband wanted her to leave the army to spend all of her time raising him. After their son was born, they fought because her husband didn't want her to go to Saudi Arabia with her unit. That fight ended when he stripped off all her clothes and tied her to a weight bench with some T-shirts, which is how she spent the night. The abuse continued through their move back to the US and his exit from the army. They settled in Arizona, where she tried her best to hide the beatings from her children and her friends.

"Of course, he did everything behind closed doors and sneaky," Martinez says. "He used to beat me up and I had black eyes, but once the kids came the beatings were more on my legs, on my torso, on my arms. He stopped hitting me in the face, no more bruises to show, they were all hidden."

That's how she spent 17 years, through what she calls good times and bad times. As long as he just went after her and left the kids alone, she thought that they were all better off staying.

"My mother [had] disowned me, so where would I go? So I just stayed. It was survival for me, where else do I go?" she says.

Her fears were not unwarranted. Many women who flee their abusers end up homeless. One 2003 study found that 25% of homeless mothers surveyed said they'd been "kicked, pushed, shoved or otherwise hurt" in the past year. 63% of homeless women have been victimized by their partners, while 92% have been physically or sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. (Men are also the victims of intimate partner violence, but at far lower rates than women.)

That's just one of the heartbreaking ways poverty and domestic violence are intertwined. If the abuser brings home the money in a low-income house, the choice to send him off to jail may seem impossible. Low-income and minority women, for understandable reasons, may be reluctant to tangle with the criminal justice system, and may be less likely to report abuse to police in the first place. Even the relatively well-off can find themselves in trouble: abusers do not tend to encourage their partners' career aspirations, leaving many battered women financially stuck when getting away can mean poverty.

Everything gets worse in a bad economy. A lost job or foreclosed home, the stress of long-term unemployment (4.4 million Americans have been without work for 27 weeks or longer) can all trigger violent episodes or worsen abuse. Eight out of 10 shelters surveyed reported more calls for help in the past year and the year before that, going back to the start of the financial crisis when the first survey was taken, according to the Mary Kay Foundation.

At the same time that more people are looking for help, state and municipal cuts have gutted the budgets of domestic violence shelters. Private donations are also drying up: 90 percent of the National Network to End Domestic Violence state coalitions reported a drop in private funding. The last thing victims and providers need is an abrupt, arbitrary drop in federal funding, but here comes the sequester.

The cuts, applied across-the-board to federal programs unrelated to the travel plans of lawmakers, are expected to deprive an estimated 106,020 victims of services, according to estimates by the Campaign for Funding to End Domestic and Sexual Violence, U.S. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and others. The cuts imperil everything from shelters, to protective orders to transitional housing. The Violence Against Women Act, which barely survived GOP obstructionism earlier this year, now stands to lose $20 million, according to Justice Department estimates (some groups think that's an underestimate).

"[These programs] are already very much on the edge," says Kim Gandy, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. "The potential of another 5 percent cut, on top of cut after cut after cut—it's the last straw for some of these programs."

According to Gandy, a large majority of NNEDV's state member programs are cutting services and staff in anticipation, and some are in danger of closing entirely. Domestic violence groups in states that don't provide funding are especially panicked because their budgets come from federal grants and private donations.

What does all this mean for a woman who has decided to leave her abuser and needs a safe place to go?

"People will call for emergency shelter and there won't be shelter for them. So they will probably go back to the abusive situation," says Gandy. "If it's just them, they might go sleep under a bridge. But if they've got kids, they might go back to the abuser for shelter and food."

This can mean the difference between life and death, since more than three women are killed by a husband, boyfriend or ex every day.

***

There's a long history of not doing enough—or doing anything—to help vulnerable women and children in the US, with law enforcement and the judicial system disinclined to intervene in abusive households. Alabama was the first state to reject the idea that a man had a right to beat his wife in 1871, and several states tried to tie criminal penalties to wife-beating after that, but law enforcement mostly tried to keep out of it ("It is better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forget and forgive," a North Carolina court ruled in 1874.)

For most of America's history, beating or raping a stranger brought down the full force of law (at least in theory), but doing these things to one's own wife rarely resulted in jail time. When police were forced to mediate a domestic dispute, their primary goal was to calm everybody down and encourage the couple to work it out. Nor was there anywhere for a battered woman to go, a safe place to hide from an abuser who might become even more enraged and dangerous because she ran away.

It took second-wave feminism—and the battered women's movement that grew out of it—to recast domestic violence as a public problem demanding state solutions. Wife-beating was not a thing for cops to throw their hands up in the air and walk away from, but a widespread social blight, an emergency, given the rates of intimate partner homicide, that required a comprehensive public response, from more aggressive policing to state and federal funding for domestic violence resources.

Thanks to the efforts of groups of women who founded the first shelters, often as consciousness-raising groups, there are around 2,000 shelters nationwide that help women trying to escape their abusers.

But the hard work of domestic violence advocates is not nearly enough, especially now. It's no match for lawmakers worshipful of budget cuts at federal and state level, and an economy that drives up need at the same time it cuts down resources. The comforting Lifetime movie myth that the hard part is leaving -- that once a woman has mustered the courage to walk away, she'll be greeted by kindly strangers offering clean beds -- is totally false.

In 2011, the Domestic Violence Hotline was unable to answer 87,000 phone calls that came in. In 2009, 167,069 women seeking shelter were turned away. In just one day in 2011, 10,581 women trying to find a place to stay were told there was no space for them. 43% of shelters have reported a decrease of services offered.

Katheryn Preston, executive director of the Georgia Alliance to End Homelessness, says that as often as once a day, a battered woman will call asking if there is space for her at a homeless shelter. When they're directed to domestic violence services, they often say that they've already tried that.

"A lot of women who call here tell us they've already spoken to a hotline. When we go to give them their number, they'll say, no space right now," she says. "It's one of two things: no imminent danger or no space available."

Space in domestic violence shelters is always tight, so providers must judge whether a woman is in "imminent danger" before giving her a scarce bed. Usually, if she's already left her abuser, particularly if she's in a different state, she won't fit the criteria. (Preston points out that state boundaries do not magically keep out determined abusers.)

Many domestic violence shelters have long waiting lists anyway, and may refer a woman who is in imminent danger to a shelter far away from where she lives, which can be its own nightmare. "It means they have to pull kids out of school," says NNEDV's Kim Gandy. "Quit your job, and now you can't feed them." It's also harder to access benefits or child support.

"Women may experience delays and frustration, and it essentially means that they're more like to give up leaving," says Beth Meeks, one of many Louisiana advocates who spent the year trying to stop Bobby Jindal from dumping millions from the state's budget for domestic violence services.

Julee Smith, who runs a shelter in Utah that is expected to lose 23 percent of its budget, described to KSL.com how heartbreaking it is to turn women away:

"We literally had a lady call, she had four children and begged to get in our shelter," Smith said. "She said, 'I have 45 minutes to get out.' And we said 'We're sorry, we don't have any room.' And then the police call and say that she has been abused again."

A homeless shelter is another less than ideal place for families to end up. Besides the fact that programs aiding the homeless are also perennially underfunded, being around a bunch of strange men may not be comforting to a woman who has just escaped one who hits her. Plus, homeless shelter staff aren't trained in the most important job of all: keeping the victim away from their abuser. Unlike domestic violence shelters, homeless shelters have public addresses.

There have been times, Preston says, when someone has called looking for a woman, and she's been pretty sure it was a relative or friend of the abuser helping to track her down.

Preston knows how important it is to have a safe place to go. When her husband came back from Vietnam, he had a drug problem on top of his already existing alcohol problem."I could tell when he'd be triggered, especially by his drinking. The drunker he got, the more angry he would get at somebody else for something stupid. A car would go in front of us, he'd go off. If I would stick up, then it all turned on me. That's when I began to catch it all."

For 13 years she told friends and family her wounds were from, say, playing softball. "They must have thought I was the most accident prone person in the world," she says. But one memorial day, her husband's Wild Turkey-fueled freakout landed her, her sister, and her sister's husband in the hospital, where a nurse who saw their injuries asked if they'd all been in a car accident.

Now she couldn't hide it from her family anymore, so she left, moving into a new place where he wouldn't be able to find her. She kept the shades shut just in case he tracked her down. One day, he called her at her new place and asked her why she always kept the shades drawn. What was she trying to hide? Did she have a man in there?

"He'd been sitting outside, watching me in my apartment," says Preston.

Right after she left, she decided to kill him to keep herself and her son safe. She went to a pawn shop looking for a gun, but then she realized what would happen if she missed. "About the worst thing that could happen is I'd miss him, go to jail, spend life in jail for trying to kill him, and he'd raise my son to be a batterer," she says.

"There were no battered women's shelters at that time, a woman was out there on her own, doing what she needed to do. I was blessed because I had family, or I'd have been out on the street homeless too."

It's heartbreaking for her to see things get worse and worse as lawmakers callously pull back resources for homeless shelters and domestic violence programs, pretty much everything that America's most needy women and children depend on, sometimes to stay alive.

In 2009, then California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger led the way in using cash earmarked for domestic violence programs to fill state budget gaps. The governor line item vetoed all state funding for shelters, forcing six shelters to close in six weeks and the rest to limit their services. (The funding was restored the next year, after lots of fighting by DV advocates, but around $4 million of previous cuts remained.)

Christine Gregoire's 2011 proposed budget for the state of Washington contained massive cuts to domestic violence funding.

In February, Iowa cut $1 million from domestic violence and sexual assault programs, reported KWQC, forcing shelters across the state to scramble to make up the funds with private support. Twelve shelters were informed they would no longer get funding so the remaining resources could be spent on the bigger shelters, according to local news sources.

What makes the cuts especially galling, Kim Gandy notes, is how little money they actually save states. Earlier this year, Bobby Jindal had proposed cutting $2.4 million for domestic violence services, or more or less the price tag of a soccer field and fishing pier the governor had proposed at the same time.

"In the grand scheme of things that's not that much money for an entire state. It's peanuts," she says. "That tells you how underfunded those programs were to begin with."

"This puts women who are already in physical jepoardy in even greater danger, because of budget cuts. But they found the money to fund the FAA," Gandy says. "Imagine how quickly they found that money."

***

One day, Julianna Martinez's ex-husband turned on the kids. Her son had lost his jacket, and his father slapped him. She jumped between the two of them to protect her son and then it was all over. "He kept pushing me and pushing me and I fell on the floor and he just started beating me." she says. "He screamed, 'That's her problem, that's her whole problem! She'll never be anything, doesn't know how to take care of anybody, or herself, or her kids!'"

Martinez finally left. But she didn't end up in a domestic violence shelter—none of those she called could accomodate her family because her son was too old—but she really wishes she had. It would have given her much-needed time to get her head in order.

"My other friends I made going through this process ... you need that because you are dazed, you're so used to having someone controlling you and telling you what to do."

Instead, she and her kids lived with friends. It wasn't the street, but still: one little room for all of them, living out of boxes; not an easy existence for a traumatized family. Eventually she moved back into her house (without her husband), and then they tried marriage counseling one last time. One day, their therapist confessed that she was utterly terrified of Martinez's husband. She said her job was patching up marriages, but she didn't want to be responsible for the consequences of saving this one.

"If I were you, I'd turn around and run," the therapist said. It was the last, last straw, and Martinez managed to extricate herself for good.

She can't believe she waited for so many years. "What was I waiting for?" says Martinez, who now works as a school assistant. "For Superman to come save me? For lightning to hit me or him? Was I waiting for him to kill me?"

Hacker Who Exposed Steubenville Rape Case Could Spend More Time Behind Bars Than The Rapists

Tara Culp-Ressler, Think Progress — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:38:00 -0700

How's that for justice?

The Steubenville rape case, in which two high school football players were convicted of sexually assaulting a young girl at a party, helped spark a national conversation about consent, victim-blaming, and rape culture. The case gained national attention after the “hacktivist” group Anonymous leaked significant social media evidence implicating the assailants — including tweets, Instagram photos, and a 12-minute video of Steubenville high schoolers joking about the rape. But it turns out that working to expose those rapists may land one Anonymous hacker more time in prison than the rapists themselves will serve.

As Mother Jones reports, 26-year-old Deric Lostutter — who has been known as “KYAnonymous” throughout his role in the Steubenville rape case — could face up to 10 years of jail time if he’s convicted of hacking-related crimes. The FBI raided Losuetter’s home in April. The internet hacker told Mother Jones that he believes the FBI investigation was motivated by Stebenville officials who want to send Lostutter a clear message: You shouldn’t have gotten involved.

“They want to make an example of me, saying, ‘You don’t fucking come after us. Don’t question us,’ ” Lostutter explained. Those type of power dynamics played out over the course of the sexual assault trial in the tiny Ohio town, where many leaders in the community — like the high school football coach — played some role in covering up the rapists’ crimes because that was easier than disrupting the status quo.

The two teens who were convicted of rape, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, face up to two years in a juvenile detention facility. Because they’re both minors, neither of them will spend as much time behind bars as Lostutter potentially faces. Lostutter is preparing for a costly legal fight, and crowdsourcing outside donations to help him fund it.

The site soliciting donations points out that “Deric had the courage to stand up against rape.” And he says he would do it again, despite the potential consequences.

Anonymous continues to involve itself in exposing sexual crimes. After the intense harassment leveled against a Canadian teenager following her alleged gang rape led her to take her own life, Anonymous stepped in to demand justice, claiming their hackers were quickly able to identify the assailants.

Lesbian Myths, Debunked

Jodie Gummow, AlterNet — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:06:00 -0700

Gender stereotypes about the lesbian community distort gay women's experience.

For a gay woman, it can often be a struggle to determine where exactly she fits in the spectrum of gender identity in both the lesbian and heterosexual communities. Many lesbians are faced with having their sexuality evaluated purely on the basis of their looks, as if sexuality is something that can be “seen” on the body to warrant approval, while others are not “accepted” for failing to act in a certain way. Such narrow-minded, misguided stereotypes create numerous social problems in advancing gay rights and raise an important question of what gender identity means for lesbians today.

According to mental health counselor Tara Lombardo, of the LGBT psychotherapy center, Institute for Human Identity (IHI), gender stereotypes about lesbians are merely an extension of “internalized homophobia.” In other words, the LGBT community has adopted society’s standard of what it means to be straight or gay based on the only model it knows—heterosexual relationships. In essence, it has had to borrow from this prototype.

“For lesbians, representation appears to be 'owned' by heterosexual attitudes that personify what lesbians are and are not, and this is related to women’s sexuality being invisible and based on attraction. A lot of femininity is based on the male gaze. If you remove the male perspective, you have to figure out the female gaze and at this point we still don’t know what exactly that is in the gay community. It has been a long trek for lesbians to come out and work out where they identify within these pre-determined social scripts that exist,” Lombardo explained to AlterNet.

A growing body of social science research suggests that the proliferation of gay marriage is redefining the way we view gender and specifically gender roles within family life. According to Liza Mundy in her recent article, “The Gay Guided to Wedded Bliss,” research has shown that same-sex unions are happier than heterosexual marriages, with lesbian couples experiencing the most intimate relationships compared with their heterosexual and male gay counterparts.

“Same-sex spouses, who cannot divide their labor based on pre-existing gender norms, must approach marriage differently than their heterosexual peers. From sex to fighting, from child-rearing to chores, they must hammer out every last detail of domestic life without falling back on assumptions about who will do what. In this regard, they provide an example that can be enlightening to all couples,” Mundy said.

While the critics of gay marriage warn of the effects of a “genderless” society, Mundy believes gay marriage can help us to shed ancient, old-fashioned stereotypes by re-evaluating gender norms.

“If a genderless marriage is a marriage in which the wife is not automatically expected to be responsible for school forms and childcare and dinner preparation and birthday parties and midnight feedings and holiday shopping, I think it’s fair to say that many heterosexual women would cry, bring it on! Beyond that, gay marriage can function as a controlled experiment, helping us to see which aspects of marital difficulty are truly rooted in gender and which are not,” she said.

We are certainly making some headway, at least in the eyes of the law, with over 14 nations now having legalized gay marriage. Such efforts have generated extensive media coverage of gay weddings and enhanced the visibility of the many different types of gay couples that exist in the LGBT community. Moreover, such transparency has helped to normalize lesbian identity for heterosexuals and thus paint a clearer picture of society’s evolving gender norms.

Despite the enthusiasm surrounding such progress, hiccups and push-backs remain in the struggle for equality. As we celebrate Pride Month this June, we still find ourselves living in a world where gay people are subject to discrimination and anti-gay hate crimes. While some lesbians are fortunate enough to escape such prejudice by slipping under the radar and not being recognizable as gay, these women face other obstacles such as the effects of “femme invisibility."

According to gay rights activist and writer Megan Evans, the concept of femme invisibility is the lack of recognition and validation that feminine lesbians experience by being perceived as heterosexual as a result of looking feminine. The forgotten "femme," as she states in her article, Femme Invisibility, is the feminine-looking lesbian who goes unnoticed because of her girlish appearance.

“We fall victim to heteronormativity and heterosexism: the notion that heterosexuality is the preferred and normal sexual orientation. We are presumed to be heterosexual by both communities, which leads to the feeling that we don’t belong to either,” Evans told AlterNet.

Sadly, pop culture has not done much to dispel such misconceptions. While femme lesbian characters have risen over the last couple of years on popular TV shows such as “The L Word,” according to Evans, most are either portrayed as “femme” or “butch” with not much diversity of representation of the lesbians who sit somewhere in between.

What’s more, story lines about femme characters tend to involve struggles over sexual identity or a lesbian having relationships with both men and women, which only perpetuates the idea that lesbians can be “turned straight” or “swayed by men."

Evans explains: “Frequent comments that I hear as a femme lesbian are, "But you're too pretty to be gay," and "Who wears the trousers?" We are often seen as a challenge for straight males who think that they can 'turn' us, and lesbians mis-label us as straight fag hags,” Evans said.

Lombardo, who is also the associate director of IHI, echoes this sentiment: “The challenge for the queer community, particularly for women, is that if you identify as a femme, you have the burden of proving you are a lesbian as well. There is a struggle with such classification because femme women have to prove their sexuality to both straight and gay communities,” she said.

The lesbian porn industry also fuels misconceptions about “lipstick lesbians" by centering on two femme women to satisfy the sexual fantasies of men. In porn, feminine couples are constantly objectified and dominated to fulfill their sexualized roles according to what satisfies men.

Last week’s YouTube clip, “Real Lesbians React To Porn," which recorded the reactions of real lesbians watching lesbian porn, shattered the myths surrounding the bedroom antics of lesbians. The comical video showed lesbians poking fun at the use of suspiciously long fingernails and oddly placed stiletto heels. With over 2 million views already, the clip confirms what most of us already know: lesbian porn is made for straight men.

“Lesbian porn only reinforces the view that lesbians are not 'really' gay. It also undermines our relationships, for example, when we're seen to be kissing for the pleasure of men, instead of as an expression of love towards our partners,” Evans said.

Undoubtedly in this day and age, it seems unconscionable that anyone should have their sexuality scrutinized for the simple reason that it does not conform to a misguided stereotype. But how do we go about avoiding such stigmatization? The answer lies in positive lesbian role models in the community who can act as mirror images for society

Lombardo explains: “Those who identify as a lesbian all look and act very differently. Because coming out has changed over each decade, it seems that while acceptance of sexuality is more acceptable today, it is still a challenge. Thus, by branching out, people in the lesbian community can act as mirrors for other women. If there is internal shame in a community, there is a tendency for women to isolate themselves, whereas if you can expand your mind and ideology by becoming more active in the LGBT community, you begin to develop a better idea of who you are,” she said.

Megan Evans agrees: “We have Portia De Rossi and Chely Wright, but there are not many high-profile celebrities that have come out to proudly say that they are a lesbian. Growing up I felt that I did not have a role model to look up to so that I knew I could be feminine, gay and happy,” she said.

In response, Evans launched the Femme Visibility Campaign to combat the invisibility of feminine lesbians and change lesbian stereotypes through encouraging fellow femmes to come forward and have a voice. The campaign was launched as part of Evans’ own website, What Wegan Did Next, a blog about her life with her wife, Whitey, as a loving feminine lesbian couple.

“What I strive for is the day that it will no longer be a shock to be feminine and gay. After all, 'feminine' is not a synonym for 'heterosexual.' I hope that with more lesbians coming out and living their lives proudly, that we will slowly but surely show both the straight and gay communities that our sexual orientation is legitimate and that we deserve to be treated that way,” Evans said.

In Texas, It's OK to Murder an Escort if She Won't Sleep with You

Katie McDonough, Salon — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 07:10:00 -0700

The jury found that Ezekiel Gilbert was attempting to "retrieve stolen property" when he fatally shot Lenora Frago

A Texas jury has acquitted Ezekiel “Zeke” Gilbert in the 2009 murder of Lenora Frago, an escort he met on Craigslist. The defense argued that Gilbert’s actions were “justified” because he was attempting to “retrieve stolen property” when he shot Frago in the neck and back after she refused his request for sex and fled his home with $150 he paid her. The jury, apparently, agreed.

Frago died of her injuries seven months after Gilbert shot her.

Texas law allows the use of deadly force to recover property during a nighttime theft, but prosecutor Matt Lovell argued that a theft never occurred, as the San Antonio Express-News reported in May:

“This case is about a man who got upset about the services he felt he deserved,” [Lovell] said. “He felt he deserved sex.”

In reality, said witness Christopher “Topher” Perkins, who posted ads for Frago and took a cut of her earnings, the $150 Gilbert paid for a half-hour with her did not include a guarantee of sex.

“Lenora normally would do lap dances and hanging out. That was her thing,” he said. “Her regular customers were all quiet, reserved guys and she would hang out.”

“I sincerely regret the loss of the life of Ms. Frago,” Gilbert said on Wednesday. “I’ve been in a mental prison the past four years of my life. I have nightmares. If I see guns on TV where people are getting killed, I change the channel.”

While Gilbert may be trapped in a “mental prison” after killing Frago, Perkins’ testimony seems to better capture the central facts of the tragic case: “For $150, Mr. Zeke opened fire on my car and shot my friend. He took a mother from her daughter,” Perkins said. “The responsibility lies with him. He was the one holding the gun.”

Why the Raw, Animalistic Female Libido Is Repressed

William Hogeland, William Hogeland's blog — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 08:56:00 -0700

A new book by Daniel Bergner rejects age-old thinking about female sexuality.

My friend Dan Bergner has a book out covering recent and in some ways possibly startling research on women’s sexuality, specifically libido. Dan is a journalist, with previous books on the civil war in Sierra Leone and life inside Angola State Penitentiary; in this one, he interviews and brings to life a number of women reporting various kinds of sexual dissatisfaction and distress, as well as a number of research scientists developing new theories of the true nature of female desire.

The book ranges through a wide variety of experience and science, so I won’t try to summarize it or hype it. (A review is here.) What interested me especially in this book are what I see as some of its more radical psychological and social ramifications. It won’t come as news to a lot of readers, male and female alike, I hope, that femaleness involves sexual intensity, or that a woman can possess a sex drive at least as strong as a man’s. What the book really gets into and makes a case for debunking is the widespread idea — which has been advanced partly by conclusions of “evolutionary psychology” — that female sexual drive and intensity are linked, ineluctably, and supposedly in contrast to male libido, with closeness, intimacy, and monogamy.

Some of the research Dan covers suggests that female drive is if anything less discriminating and more promiscuous than male drive. From which I draw the tentative conclusion that if women weren’t restrained by punitive social norms, they’d stop all the “nesting,” and the getting men to nest, and they’d be out relentlessly seeking as much sex as they could possibly get from as many different partners.

And of course, unlike men, when women go out looking for sex, they’re pretty much sure to find it. So we can imagine that without those punitive social norms, families, and thus society, would collapse in a spree of sexual immediacy. When men yield to their libidinous imperatives and go on a spree, there are some self-limiting qualities in play — and anyway, their “good” women are meanwhile keeping the home fires burning and feeling betrayed, hurt, abandoned, and morally superior, as we all (i.e., men and women) evidently think they’re supposed to; sooner or later, the lowlife slinks home. Life goes on.

But if women yielded to urges that might, the book suggests, be at least as strong, all hell would break loose. We’ve long harbored various versions of the notion that women’s sexual connection to monogamy stands as a bulwark against male-induced chaos. But we’ve long wanted to believe that the connection to monogamy is innate to women. This book suggests the opposite: women’s sexual self-restraint in maintaining civilization is far greater than men’s. Because a) the stakes are higher and b) the promiscuity of her libido is greater. [UPDATE: Which goes some way to explaining the roots of patriarchy.]

And the particular kind of discontent demanded of women by civilization is something worse than discontent. It’s dissociation. [UPDATE: I.e., patriarchy is predicated not only on outright suppression but also on an insidious process of female dissociation? OK, maybe we did know this. But I think few have forthrightly connected that idea to the existence of a promiscuous female libido. Once you start thinking of it that way, you realize you may have known it all along -- I only now realize I've known it since high school (!) -- and that's what makes for an exciting book.] Men are allowed and indeed encouraged to feel the pain of restraining a promiscuous libido often described as naturally almost insurmountable. Men can stay faithful and pat themselves on the back for having inner strength and/or fall off the wagon and feel bad; either way, they know how they feel. But women — according to some of the conclusions I draw from Dan’s book — are not supposed to know they’re restraining a massive force. They have to deny it. Because it’s not only that if they gave in to it, civilization would crumble — it’s that even feeling it would have that effect.

And that’s a kind of oppression men don’t know about. That’s punitive on a whole other level.

Now, I’m sure many, many women are fully, consciously engaged with the elemental promiscuity of their own sexual drive. (In fact it even seems to me that back in the early 1970′s, that engagement was alive and well, on the table, within and outside of relationships, and so was its relationship to patriarchy, at least among youngsters counterculturally inclined.) And those women are no doubt channeling their desire as best they can, to their own best purposes. Channeling it into love and work. Even into nesting. Even into sexual promiscuity, which takes channeling too, since for adults, everything does. That’s life. Under those circumstances, society does not crumble; it thrives. But Dan’s reporting reveals a lot of female sexual distress, a lot of stuff not alive and well, and once you’ve started thinking about these issues this way, you can start to see examples of the problem everywhere. We’re not thriving.

Read Sam Tanenhaus’s recent review of Amanda Knox’s memoir. You don’t have to be a defender of the youth party scene in Perugia to note the reviewer’s revulsion not, most saliently, to casual sex but to female initiation of casual sex — reflexively termed “aggression” — with the foregone conclusion that such behavior, especially as then boasted about by the woman (adding insult to injury), damns her a priori.

What gives with the prude-prurience, all these years into the 21st century? I think Dan’s book starts getting at some answers that are not, shall we say, pretty.

GOP Senator Inadvertently Explains Why Women Are Better Suited For Combat Than Men

Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 19:47:00 -0700

Are young men just too hormonal for the battlefield?

On Tuesday, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) helpfully explained that young men are so hormonally driven that they can’t act rationally. Cursed with a “hormone level created by nature,” they are just wired to lose control of themselves and rape.

Addressing the subject of military rape, the Georgia Republican offered a briefing on biology to his colleagues on the Senate Armed Services Committee:

"The young folks who are coming into each of your services are anywhere from 17 to 22 or 23. Gee whiz, the hormone level created by nature sets in place the possibility for these types of things to occur. So we've got to be very careful how we address it on our side.”

Well now! For a long time, conservatives have argued that it was women who were too hormonal and irrational for combat. But Chambliss has set them straight. It’s really young men who can’t be relied upon to control their emotions and urges under pressure.

It's true that Chambliss doesn’t have first-hand experience of combat because he got a medical deferrment during Vietnam, so he wasn't exactly tearing it up on the battlefield. But still, it seems like he’s onto something here. Do we really want people who are prone to violent hormonal outbreaks doing a job that requires concentration and steady nerves?

I think not. Female troops have already been unofficially serving in combat for decades, and they have distinguished themselves on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan as pilots and in military police units. One hundred-fifty-two have been killed, and nearly 900 wounded. Tanya Biank, author of Undaunted: The Real Story of America’s Servicewomen, explains that women soldiers have exceeded all expectations, despite particular challenges that men don’t face, such as wearing armor that was not designed for their bodies: "They have performed phenomenally. They have done more than just pull their own weight.”

Perhaps they could perform even better without dealing with the hazard of young men who can’t control their irrational impulses.

The stakes are pretty high, so we had better look at the science, too. It turns out that scientific evidence supports the Chambliss theory that compared to women, men are irrational. According to a study from Arizona State University, for example, women demonstrate an evolutionary trait of being superior to men in not letting passing moods influence their “rational decisions.” Can we afford to let people whose mood swings rule their behavior operate dangerous equipment and deploy weapons? It just doesn’t seem safe.

Violent crime experts have suggested that people who rape may be particularly emotionally reactive, insecure and have difficulty dealing with anger. That kind of mental instability really doesn’t belong on the front lines. Performing critical tasks in stressful situations requires strong coping mechanisms, maturity and self-discipline. As Chambliss reminds us, young men just don’t seem to have what it takes.

Combat also requires teamwork and loyalty toward fellow soldiers. And yet in Iraq, women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. How we expect our military to have functioning, cohesive units when young men naturally harbor urges to attack other troops? We should probably just get rid of them and let them do something useful, like maybe answering the phone or sorting the mail.

Research has shown that women may have superior collaborative skills as well as communication skills. There’s even a study showing that when a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises. All this would be pretty handy in executing a complex mission, wouldn’t it?

For once, Saxby Chambliss has actually advanced the national conversation. The implications of his perspective are crystal clear. Nature has rendered young men unfit for combat, so we’d better leave that serious business to people who can handle the job: women. And maybe some men who have passed their hormonal "rape" years.

With their cooler heads, more women running the show might mean less need for combat in the first place.

The Truth About Female Desire: It’s Base, Animalistic and Ravenous

Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 12:54:00 -0700

A new book on women's sexuality turns everything we think we know on its head.

There is a conspiracy theory at the heart of this book. Even to the most casual observer of human history, it isn’t news that women’s sexuality has been feared, suppressed and lied about. But “What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire” by journalist Daniel Bergner uses groundbreaking sex research to show the ways in which our supposedly enlightened society still has female sexuality backward — completely, utterly, profoundly.

In accessible and entertaining prose, “What Do Women Want?” details everything from individual women’s fantasies to the search for a “female Viagra.” More important, though, it represents a complete paradigm shift. The book, which grew from a much-discussed New York Times Magazine cover story in 2009, reveals how gender stereotypes have shaped scientific research and blinded researchers to evidence of female lust and sexual initiation throughout the animal kingdom, including among humans. It reveals how society’s repression of female sexuality has reshaped women’s desires and sex lives.

Bergner, and the leading sex researchers he interviews, argue that women’s sexuality is not the rational, civilized and balancing force it’s so often made out to be — that it is base, animalistic and ravenous, everything we’ve told ourselves about male sexuality. As one researcher tells Bergner of all the restrictions put on female sexuality: “Those barriers are a testament to the power of the drive itself. It’s a pretty incredible testament. Because the drive must be so strong to override all of that.”

“Women’s desire — its inherent range and innate power — is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times, when all can seem so sexually inundated, so far beyond restriction,” he writes. “Despite the notions our culture continues to imbue, this force is not, for the most part, sparked or sustained by emotional intimacy and safety.” In fact, he argues, “one of our most comforting assumptions, soothing perhaps above all to men but clung to by both sexes, that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale.”

The implications are huge. As Bergner puts it: “What nascent truths will come into view, floating forward if these faiths continue to be cut apart?”

This book — how do I put this without sounding hyperbolic? This book should be read by every woman on earth. It should be handed out to pubescent girls right alongside “Our Bodies, Our Selves” and be required course reading for Human Sexuality 101. It is a must-read for any person with even a remote erotic interest in the female gender. It deserves to be listed on bridal registries — gay and straight. It could single-spine-edly replace at least a quarter of the sexual self-help section and the world would be better for it. It is a revelation, a story of redemption. I laughed, I almost cried — with joy. I was turned on, even. You want a female Viagra? This book is as close as we have to it.

I spoke to Bergner by phone about everything from monkey porn to rape fantasies.

What are the main bits of wisdom about female sexuality that you took away from writing this book?

Well, I guess the first thing to say is how struck I was by the distance between reality and the fable that we’ve been taught most recently by evolutionary psychology, that is, that men are driven to spread their seed and women, by comparison, are more driven to find one good provider, and that, therefore, while men are very poorly suited to monogamy, women are much better suited to monogamy. But that just really doesn’t stand up when you look at the science. The science behind that is flimsy, circular. And the science, when you look at it clearly, that stands in opposition to that is actually fairly strong — still emergent, but fairly strong. And so, that was the first thing that was so striking to me.

You point out some remarkable ways that scientists have ignored evidence suggesting that women — and female animals — are far from passive when it comes to sex and are in fact often initiators. Do you have a favorite example of this?

I really do. Deidrah, a rhesus monkey, a member of the species that we sent into space in the ’60s as our doubles, to see how well we would survive, is one of my favorite characters in the book. I went down and spent a while at a primatology center with a scientist who was trying to take the blinders off the way we see the sexuality of our closest ancestors. And what I learned was that for decades, despite evidence to the contrary, scientists had painted primate sex as male dominated. Males are the initiators; females the sort of almost indifferent receivers.

But standing next to this scientist Kim Wallen, it was clear that that was not at all true — almost comically so. We spent a day following Deidrah, a relatively tranquil, low-key female monkey, who was nevertheless relentlessly stalking — sexually stalking — her object of desire. If there’s any objectification going on in the monkey kingdom, it’s the females objectifying the males, chasing them, and sort of all but forcing them. It wasn’t just Deidrah, of course — it was all the female monkeys that we were following, and it was just alarming how we could be so sure of this other reality, and blind to the truth that was just staring us right in the face. So that was one example of our blindness to female sexuality and, ultimately I think, our fear of it.

Quickly, back to women for a second, a quick example, if we can get a little graphic for a sec, about understanding the size and reach of the clitoris. We’ve been doing dissections of bodies for centuries, pretty effectively, but it wasn’t until very recently that there was any acknowledgment of extensions right underneath the surface of the skin — very rich in nerves, very primed for pleasure, reachable there through the vaginal walls — that rival the size of the penis; probably are greater than the size of the penis. One of the scientists, who was really influential in calling attention to the size, put it this way: the reason we’ve ignored this is because we’ve managed to convince ourselves that one gender is all about reproduction and the other is all about sex. That is, women are all about reproduction and men are all about sex. Again, a complete distortion.

At one point in the book, researcher Marta Meana shows you a pair of joke control panels — one with an on-off switch, the other with tons of knobs. These were meant to represent male and female desire. Is female sexuality really that much more complicated that male sexuality?

I’m glad you framed it that way, because sometimes I think back to that moment and wonder if the answer isn’t, no, it’s not that much more complicated —biologically, innately. I think it’s important to make that distinction, because the force of culture can create all kinds of complications. Of course it does for all of us, men and women.

But I do wonder whether that metaphor has much more to do with the force of culture and if, fundamentally, female desire might be quite straightforward.

Then again, and there’s always a “then again” — probably because I spend so much time thinking about this, but also because we’re human beings and there are lot of “then agains” — I think that most of the researchers I spent time with would caution against sort of the direction of the question you just asked and the direction of what I just said, and say, “Well, wait.” There might be an element of truth in sort of seeing the straightforwardness underneath it all, but there’s also a tremendous subjective quality to the way we live and experience things.

Some of the evidence suggesting that female sexuality is stronger than is typically suggested is based on plethysmograph (a tool used to measure vaginal blood-flow and lubrication) studies showing that women become physically aroused to a much wider array of visual stimuli than men (even as they subjectively report a much smaller range of arousal). But what of the hypothesis presented by researcher Meredith Chivers, that vaginal lubrication might not be a reliable measure of female desire, that it is a separate system, an evolutionary adaptation, meant to protect females from sexual violence and bodily harm? If this proved to be true, what would it mean for all these plethysmograph studies?

Now you’re at the most complicated part of this whole field, I think. So, let me pause and try to be coherent. OK, so, if that were true — underline if –that were true, that is, if there really are two separate sexual systems, one represented by these physical responses and the other represented by the very subjective sense of desiring, then [these plethysmograph discoveries] would be less relevant to understanding desire. But, I think that both Meredith and I have started to wrestle with a simpler interpretation: that the physical responses, registered in the plethysmography, really might well be a measure of being turned on, being in a state of desire. So, with the range of things that she’s exposed women to in the lab — that would be straight women watching two women together, two men together, men and women, and of course, famously, two monkeys having sex — both straight and gay women have consistently responded very powerfully and immediately, physically, to all these kinds of images. And I think, in Meredith’s mind, that really does represent something about desire.

On the subject of rape and sexual assault, and the fact that, also in the lab, women are responding generally to scenarios of sexual assault. Here’s where we get into a really tricky space, so I hope you have space for this when we’re talking about desire. No one, no one, no one — not Meredith, not Marta Meana, and not me — is in any way retracting “no means no.” That’s number one. Number two is, there are different levels of desire and of fantasy, and you know, fantasy and sexual assault in one form or another are pretty common, but does that mean that any of us want to go out and be sexually assaulted? No, it doesn’t. The realm of arousal and the realm of fantasy can tell us something about ourselves psychologically without indicating that we really want to experience that thing, far from it.

Since we’re on the topic of rape fantasies, can we talk about why they are so common among women?

I mean here, again, I want to be careful because, number one, I’m a man. You know I’ve listened a lot at this point and asked a lot of relentless questions, but my answer is going to be inherently a fallible one.

The force of culture puts some level of shame on women’s sexuality and a fantasy of sexual assault is a fantasy that allows for sex that is completely free of blame. So that’s one reason. Another, which Meana brings up, and which I think is very compelling, is this idea that the feeling of being desired is a very powerful one, a very electrical one. And I think at least at the fantasy level, that sense of being wanted, and being wanted beyond the man’s self-control is also really powerful.

That brings up another theory, which is that there’s something “narcissistic” about women’s desire. Can you explain the thinking behind that idea?

Yes, it’s important to underline here that I don’t think Marta Meana, who first introduced that to the conversation, meant narcissistic in a condemnatory or critical way at all, just in a descriptive way that a really powerful engine for female desires is being desired, is being wanted. It’s both — it is a powerful feeling, I think, to have that level of desire coming at you, and an electrifying one.

Is this narcissistic desire innate or is it a cultural byproduct?

I think that was one of the things I wrestled with most in the book, and I can still visibly remember wrestling with it as I was turning in final chapters. I kept thinking back to Deidrah, our monkey, and thinking, OK, that is not a sexuality that seems to depend on being desired. She has a desire; she is going out and getting what she desires. I can’t describe to you how clear that drama was as we watched it. If you’re talking about innate patterns of sexuality, how do you get from that to us? One of the answers is that the force of culture has, to some degree, inverted things. And, you know, maybe that’s the only wise answer, if you want to talk about innate factors.

Culturally, I think there’s all kinds of other ways to look at it. We’ve very strongly eroticized women’s bodies and, of course, women are going to feel that as well as men. And then all the other forces that have, not only allowed, but encouraged men to be the aggressors in all kinds of ways, and constructed femininity around the very opposite kind of characteristics are going to play into this. Then there’s Freud — and no one likes to talk about Freud, he is problematic, but he’s also awfully wise in some ways. He and his protégé Melanie Klein, who eventually sort of split off from Freud in some ways, write about the intensity of an incest relationship with the mother’s breasts, and how much power that breast has, how much erotic power that begins to set up in our psyches. We don’t want to think about the culture; we’re very squeamish thinking about childhood sexuality. But of course to talk about the psychological loops and things, I think we better think about that, and so both Freud, but even more so Melanie Klein, emphasized the influence of the breast on the way our sexuality forms, and so it makes sense to me that, not only men, but women, would still be feeling that erotic influence as adults, both directly, as an attraction to other female bodies but also in wanting to have that power that the mother’s breasts once had. So, being desired with that intensity, puts women back in that sort of omnipotent place that their mothers once had for them as infants.

You write that one of your researchers views monogamy as a “cultural cage” that distorts women’s libido. Is monogamy more suited for men than women?

Certainly, women are no better suited for monogamy than men are. That, I think, is clear. It seems possible, if you look at some of the data, that women are even less well-suited for monogamy than men. It’s important to distinguish between the sexual level of desire, and what we choose in our relationships for all kinds of reasons. But on a sexual level, women are even less suited to monogamy.

Partly, I do think that, ironically, has to do with the force of culture. Now that would take us to a really complex part of neuroscience that maybe is best left for another time. I do think that men who’ve been blessed to happily think that it’s only they who are having trouble with monogamy, and that their wives or long-committed girlfriends are more or less just fine with it, they may have a lot to worry about.

It did strike me while reading the book that some parts might be fairly alarming for male heterosexual readers.

I think maybe it should be. I just had two funny conversations—one with a male writer, a friend of mine, who said that reading the book had inspired deep concern, and another from an editor who said that it had scared the bejesus out of him. [Laughter] I laugh, but I think that maybe it should, and I hope that it at least lets us look past the blinders that we’ve had on.

This is the question you’re probably most resistant to answering, but are there any lessons in your research for couples attempting long-term monogamous partnerships?

It’s nice of you to acknowledge that I might be resistant to the self-help approach. That said, two things. I think there’s real wisdom in what I discuss in the book, which is finding ways to, not only acknowledge, but reinstall the kind of distance in relationships. Our culture has somehow absorbed, or idealized, the merging, the “you complete me” line from “Jerry Maguire.” The idea of unconditional love within couples. And I think we’ve probably way overdone that.

The simple thing is, I sometimes think we have to be a little braver about just caring more. Caring, and being open about caring about sex, with one’s long-term partner sounds like it should be easy, but I think often it’s not because you can fail and you can feel hurt. And so I do think that candor and caring are important and then signing up to welcome distance back into relationships might well be the root to maintaining passion.

AlterNet.org: Gender

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