Zerlina Maxwell challenges rape culture on Fox News, receives rape threats on Twitter.
I’m still officially on my Man Boobz staycation, but I felt I needed to mention yet another example of a woman saying that men can stop rape … and getting rape threats in return.
Political analyst Zerlina Maxwell went on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News earlier this week and made the terrible mistake of suggesting to a hostile audience that men aren’t really doing any favors to women by telling them to arm themselves against rapists. Instead, as Salon notes, she said this:
“I don’t think that we should be telling women anything. I think we should be telling men not to rape women and start the conversation there.” She told Hannity, “You’re talking about this as if it’s some faceless, nameless criminal, when a lot of times it’s someone you know and trust,” adding, “If you train men not to grow up to become rapists, you prevent rape.”
Indeed, increased rape awareness has contributed to a dramatic decrease in rape over the last thirty years.
But apparently a lot of men were shocked – shocked! – that a woman would suggest that their patronizing advice was less likely to prevent rape than rape prevention education aimed at the demographic group that is responsible for the overwhelmng majority of rapes. That is, men.
So, naturally, the angriest of these men decided they would show Maxwell just how wrong she was … by threatening her with rape on Twitter.
Here’s just one example:
Rape culture in action.
Maxwell’s supporters have stepped up to defend her and her remarks, and have started a hashtag — #TYZerlina — to continue the discussion. If you’re on Twitter, join in .
Here’s the Fox News segment in question featuring Maxwell:
Posted on March 8, 2013, in harassment, hate, irony alert, men who should not ever be with women ever, misogyny, rape, rape culture and tagged #TYZerlina, fox news, rape culture, Zerlina Maxwell. Bookmark the permalink. 701 Comments.
@katz: Keep in mind, this is only the first in a series of videos. She could very easily do one of those in the future.
@Marie, Yes it looks like marinerachel was responding to your question. Here’s a little more info on HPV and the vaccine.
@katz, Thanks. Good points. And on your analysis of gender in film, I thought you might appreciate this. :D
@Roscoe P. Coltrane: A bunch of people have responded to various aspects your comments already, but I wanted to focus on one point that I think you’ve missed: that people can participate in reinforcing and upholding unjust patterns of social control without intending to, wanting to, or even realising that they’re doing it.
I think this protective instinct is a perfect example of the point.
Understand firstly that I don’t believe that either you or regeya actually want rape to exist, or that the existence of rape makes you all rub your hands together in glee and think ‘oh good, now I have an excuse to control my daughter’. I am sure that when you give your daughters or the other women in your lives advice on how to keep themselves safe, you do so for no other reason than because you love them. However, your protective instinct and desire to prevent her rape – motivated by love as it is – has unintended consequences.
First, advice on what to wear, how to behave, where it’s safe to go at night, etc. (much of it misguided, btw) amounts to control over her. It’s not as though you are using the threat of rape as a means to control her to your own ends, but that will be the outcome of the situation. In the most extreme examples, women are prevented from going anywhere outside the house unchaperoned. Our society is more liberal than that, however the more subtle constraints on what she can do and how she can behave will have the same effect, that it will stifle her autonomy and her opportunities to participate in society and make her full contribution. This reinforces the advantage that men have over women in terms of freedoms, opportunities, and ultimately power.
Second, more perniciously, the advice given (unless it’s very carefully worded and grounded in sound theory) will carry with it a message that if she does get raped, it will be at least partially her fault. This message has an absolutely devastating effect on women who have been raped. They often struggle with issues of guilt, self-doubt and self-blame, so to have society telling them that their rape was their own fault is horrendously unjust. And then there are a whole heap of complicated nasty flow-on effects that I couldn’t do justice in this short comment.
I think it’s great that you love the women in your life and want them to be safe. There are many avenues through which you could usefully direct this protective instinct. For example, it’s already been mentioned that the overwhelming majority of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. It’s my impression that not many people know this fact, and I think that arming girls with that knowledge would not only go some ways to protecting them, but empower them if it does happen to correctly identify what it was that happened to them, and then to feel safe telling someone about it. Maybe the other commenters will have some other ideas.
I watched it and thought it was a good start however I do think she could have gone over why it was a bad thing for women (and men too actually) more at the end. I look forward to the next one.
That make up rant was…weird.
@cloudiah
thanks :) I just couldn’t tell. (and thanks too to marinerachel for responding)
The same thing occurred to me, however I think the decline in rapes has been steady for longer than the reduction in lead in petrol? Based on Pinker’s work with a graph of rape stats here.
Speaking of toppling of the “damsel in distress” trope, I found a Kickstarter for a book of stories of girls/women fighting. That was nice.
The thing to look at is rape as function of ratio (rapes per hundred thousand), and then control for rape as percentage of total crimes of violence. If the numbers for rape are falling faster than other violent crimes it’s reasonable to presume there is a different factor causing that decline.
Certainly, in my lifetime, the general attitudes toward rape have changed. This conversation (that it’s on the rapists to stop rape) would have been very different 30 years ago.
No problem.
We give it to twelve-ish-year-old boys and girls routinely through public health in BC.
The unpleasant sting associated with the vaccine (probably due to the VLPs) seems to be associated with increased risk of fainting. For whatever reason, when I’m administering Gardasil to classes of grade sevens, the boys hit the floor (not literally – I sit them down and support them if they faint) at twice the rate of girls.
The idea of “protecting the wimmin” has ownership overtones which has always bugged me. It also appears to fit neatly into the rugged individualist myth that animates so many anti-feminists and U.S. conservatives. Whereas, telling men that certain behaviors are unacceptable is more of a commonwealth solution and that enrages the anti-feminists and U.S. conservatives.
Getting back to the protecting myth, who chooses the protectors? (“Who watches the centurions?”) For example, police departments have had active rapist police officers. I once knew a respected pediatrician, who was also a wife beater, child beater, and a child molester.
Also, too, if “protecting the wimmin” worked at all, why has rape been such a common occurrence over all of recorded history?
Because “protecting”, like a lot of rape, has been about men owning women, not women being entitled to special treatment.
I was wrong. The data Pinker has (1975-now) only spans the time for which lead was already declining (1970-now, from here).
It’s a good idea, but it’s difficult for us to do here and now using these graphs alone.
The point about societal attitudes might be better. Perhaps cross-cultural studies showing a correlation between aspects of rape culture and rape incidence would be a better place to look.
@nerdypants
Does the graph control for expanding definitions of rape?
@marinerachel
huh. I didn’t know that about the shots. For some reason needles don’t bother me that much, so all I noticed was it itched a little afterward. (and then things I get all the time, like back pain and headaches, bother me so much :( life, why can’t you be convenient?)
I don’t know. It says it’s taken from the FBI National Crime Victimization Survey, which suggests that it’s self-reported, which suggests that the answer is ‘no’, which implies that the decline is a conservative estimate (i.e. declines are in fact steeper than shown).
It’s possible however that corrections were introduced for those factors.
@Some Gal:
Some Gal, sorry, my last post sounded curt. But I don’t think that I’m JAQing off, or do you really think that I’ve asked a loaded or leading question? I also understand that you don’t have to educate me about facts that are easily googled. But that’s not the case here.
@nerdypants
I (obviously) don’t know either, but that would be my guess. And, of course, rape awareness is responsible for expanding the definition of rape, which would make it important even if it had no effect at all of the number of rapes.
I think the reason that we always get trolls on these types of posts JAQing off about how we can’t possibly know that rape awareness campaigns successfully reduced rape are really just trying to make sure that feminists (and the other groups who were/are part of rape awareness campaigns) don’t get credit for actually doing anything.
@Poxy
I don’t have to educate you about anyfacts, easily googled or not. The question you raise has come up pretty much anytime the assertion is made. I think there is a reason for that and so, yes, believe that you are either asking a leading/loaded question or you are JAQing off. You obviously have a reason for asking or you wouldn’t have asked. That you can’t or won’t articulate it isn’t a sign that you are here with good intentions.
FWIW, I don’t believe that Poxy is trolling because the exact same thought came to my mind as well (i.e. that if the lead hypothesis is true, then its effects will be difficult to disentangle from temporal trends suggesting the success of rape awareness).
Though I’d say that rape awareness is good regardless, as at the very least it empowers women to know what happened to them for what it truly is.
I shouldn’t be procrastinating on manboobz right now, but there are a bunch of links on the Wikipedia page for rape culture to studies of the concept. Somewhere amongst them there has got to be a cross-cultural study that would answer the question more directly.
Correction: “it empowers people to know what happened…” :-/ Sorry. I’m working on it.
Going way back to the painful-to-walk-on part of the thread: ball of foot landing on pointy bit of kitty litter while carrying heavy bag of kitty litter. Not in the Lego range but oww anyway.
@nerdypants
Fair enough. I just feel like we’ve had this conversation before, always initiated by people who are trolls, but the trolls might just stick out in my mind more. If you find a study, that would be great and make it a lot easier to deal with it when it comes up again.
Agreed on your point about rape awareness. Being able to name something can be extremely empowering and can help with coping, finding a community of those with similar issues, etc. Definitely a good thing.
@The Kittehs’
What with stealing stuff so we step on it, needing painful litter, nibbling on feet, using claws on them (even when meant nicely), and occasionally running over feet and leaving deep claw marks, cats might be a greater threat to feet than Legos.
(My cat has recently decided that nibbling on my toes when I sit on the toilet is a really nice bonding activity. So I might be a teeny bit bitter.)
I think maybe we don’t even need to go to that much trouble, if the underlying question is ‘do societal attitudes and understanding influence rape incidence?’, we already know that this is true. For example, going way back to the Old Testament, we know that because they viewed women as a kind of property, the idea of rape as a crime against the woman herself did not occur to them. It was acceptable for women to be taken as part of the loot during warfare, and the rape of a betrothed girl was considered crime against her father (the rapist had to pay the father and he was forced to marry her). We’ve got examples from modern religious subcultures where male authority creates a climate where it is easier to abuse children and get away with it. And with the expanding understanding of the definition of rape, it naturally follows, if one doesn’t know that they’ve been raped, they are less able to get help, and if one doesn’t understand that what they’re contemplating is rape, they’re less likely to stop.
Ha! And the funny thing is he’s butting his head against part of the problem. The conventions that female characters usually follow are really boring! But they don’t have to be!
I get shots all the time so I had something very recent to compare the discomfort of Gardasil to. I didn’t faint but I did notice it stung worse than a lot of vaccines. I hate that pre-filled syringe it’s distributed in too. It’s noisy.
But yeah, I’ll take the pain of Gardasil over the discomfort of chronic back pain or nausea or cramping any day. Those are things that get to me. Right now I’ve got wicked piriformis syndrome on the left hand side (ALL my musculoskeletal issues are on the left – my spine twists to the right) and it’s driving me NUTS. I can’t sit on firm surfaces without discomfort. I hate feeling asymmetrical.
Some Gal – I’m starting to think Lego might be a good name for a cat!
Your kitty doing toe nibbling when you’re trapped on the loo is just ebil.
You don’t need to wait for it. Read the classics:
The Female Man, 1975, as well as any work, fiction or non-fiction, by Joanna Russ
Tomoe Gozen (fantasy trilogy), 1981 by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Amazons! (anthology of fantasy short stories), 1979 edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Amazons II (anthology of fantasy short stories), 1982 edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
One of the cats puts their front paws on my knees and stares at when when I’m peeing.
@Some Gal:
The point is, that I don’t have that much faith in educating people. That’s all there is to it. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to give anybody credit who tries.
I admit that I’m not the most informed person if it comes to rape of adult women, but it’s different with child sexual abuse. If I extrapolate from what I know about that, I don’t have much hope. The cognitive distortions those people suffer from are pretty much unimaginable for a normal person. I don’t see anything in western society that could cause such beliefs.
@marinerachel – Hadji loved to come in and watch while we were on the loo. He’d sit and stare, walk around and check the fittings, or sometimes jump onto our laps. We said it was really good to have Help while there, though I’m not sure how the Help was helpful. He also liked sitting in the loo when it was unoccupied.
@Poxy
You don’t think there have been any improvements in how we as a society handle child sexual abuse? You don’t think there have been improvements in how we deal with that aftermath? Do you think child sexual abuse has increased?
@The Kittehs’
My cat camps out on the rug in front of the toilet even when we aren’t in there. It is one of her five favorite napping spots. (She likes the bathmat too, but it isn’t as fluffy so it doesn’t crack the top ten.)
I think the consensus (?) is that paedophilia is an orientation, so it’s not something that can be reasoned out of someone, though I don’t know what proportion of child sex abuse is caused by actual paedophiles (or how many are able to reason past their orientation for that matter).
Though on the flipside, even if the paedophile themselves cannot be reached, the systemic issues that permit them to act often rely upon the mistakes of others in the system, and they are people who can be educated. And the potential victims.
Poxy’s also got a bad case of “people who do bad things aren’t normal people.” You should have a doctor look at that.
@marinerachel
Sorry about your pain :(
Is paedophilia an orientation? I mean, I don’t know much about it. I mean obviously if someone’s a decent person they wouldn’t be abusing kids anyway, but I always figured it was more of a power thing. (disclaimer, I don’t actually know much about this topic, so there’s a chance I’m very wrong).
Everyone’s cat stories are making me envious. Luckily I have my guinea pigs to keep me company, but I just trimmed one’s toenails/claws, and she was biting me the whole time.
@nerdypants
That coincides with my experience, though that is only a single data point. The child molesting pediatrician I mentioned earlier had a habit of teliing other people that baby girls mastrubated and even told his mother-in-law that his baby daughter enjoyed mastrubating on his knee. No one took any action until someone saw him molest an infant in the ICU and even then the only action taken was to tell someone else, the end result being one of his partners started beating him in the hospital lobby.
If the issues of molestation had not been so underground in american society in the 1960s, perhaps action would have been taken earlier based on his public statements.
Some Gal – LOL! That fits right in with the cat thinking of “most desirable napping spot = one that inconveniences humans most”. Smack in the middle of a doorway is Mads’s favourite with that trick. Choosing the toilet mat is a very impressive effort.
Nerdypants – I read an unfortunately brief discussion in an old thread here of whether pedophilia could be called an orientation or more of a fetish. I think part of the problem (if I’m reading my Wiki correctly) is that not all child abusers are pedophiles in the strict diagnostic sense. Not that it makes much difference: the object of desire is a person unable to give consent, there’s an end to it. I made the mistake of looking at Paraphilia forums and the self-justification in just a few comments there was nauseating.
Paedophiles don’t necessarily engage in paedophilia, do they? Just those who are rapists in addition to being paedophiles? I imagine there are people who rape children who aren’t paedophiles but use it for the sake of achieving power over someone vulnerable.
@Poxy – you really should read up on this subject before posting again or asking questions. When you flat out say “I don’t know anything about this” while commenting, it comes off as “educate me!” RAINN is a good place to start, FYI.
@moreorlessdan – A Colorado rep was attempting to make the point that arming all women in order to prevent rape meant a much higher risk of women shooting people by accident, and said it very, very badly (and also demonstrated some serious ignorance of the “most rapists are known to the victim” reality):
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/02/joe-salazar-rape-guns-colorado.php
Granted, I give him the benefit of the doubt because he’s a Democrat, and because he wasn’t denying rape happens, just was wrong on information. I’m drawing a blank on what state the other one was in and frankly, Googling without it scares the crap out of me.
Men fighting rape culture is mostly about calling out other men who perpetuate it. In general, men listen to other men very differently than they listen to women. A woman who complains, even politely, about something being misogynist will not be heard. A man who turns to his buddy and says, “Dude, not cool” will be. One man telling another one to knock off the comments has (unfortunately) much more impact than all the dissertations women can and have delivered on the subject.
If direct confrontation isn’t your thing, feigning ignorance is a good tactic, especially when jokes that dehumanize other people come up. When everyone else laughs, frown and act confused. “I don’t get it.” Make the dude who told the joke try to explain it. Multiple times if necessary. Because those jokes always break down to “X is not really human” and once the “humor” gets peeled away that becomes apparent. Dude will probably think twice about telling that kind of joke in front of you again.
For Dan or any other lurkers or people feeling like they want to know more about these issues, I would suggest these three posts:
http://www.shakesville.com/2009/08/terrible-bargain-we-have-regretfully.html
http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/
http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/another-post-about-rape-3/
@joanimal
that’s…really disturbing. :(
@kittehs unpaid help
on one hand I’m kind of curious what they were. On the other hand I’d probably rather not know.
OT, but did you tell me to abbreviate your name to kittehs? I think I remember that, but it takes a while for me to drill names into my head.
Kittehs is fine, Marie! :) Or whatever variation comes to mind. I got called Kittehserf once – soooo true, I’ve been tempted to change my handle to that ever since.
The comments were of the “It’s my natural orientation, waaaah” variety with one or two adding their personal kinks about underage girls for good measure. Not bottom-of-the-barrel horrible, but I definitely wanted to get out of that forum on the first page. Adults who want sex with children, for whatever reason, and whatever their diagnosis would be, talking in self-justifying terms =/= something I want to read.
@joanimal: What a horrifying story. And I imagine that his paediatric knowledge fed into the cognitive distortions he used justify his actions.
I was watching a doco about Savile and they interviewed this parade of people who saw or heard something amiss, but somehow didn’t realise the gravity of the situation and didn’t respond appropriately. It’s horrible, because it seemed to me that they sincerely didn’t understand what they were meant to do, and now everyone has to live with it.
@The Kitteh’s: I’m not sure what the difference is between an orientation and a fetish. What made me say that it was an orientation was this article [trigger warning: detailed description of a grooming, starting in the first sentence]. The relevant quote:
I gather that they have other correlates that indicates that how they are is deeply rooted in the structure of their brains (e.g. a tendency to left-handedness), that it is something that was determined in utero.
@marinerachel: I think there might be other correlates with paedophilia (low IQ?) that makes it more difficult for them. That said, I remember ages ago Dan Savage fielded a letter (it’s also mentioned in the article above) from what he calls a ‘gold-star paedophile’, someone who has the orientation but has never acted upon it.
Most people who study pedophilia now agree that it is an orientation. However, not all pedophiles abuse children, and not all those who abuse children are pedophiles. This is a pretty decent summary of what is and isn’t known about treating pedophiles. Like rape, the incidence of child sexual abuse has declined.
Well, thanks for the answers on pedophilia. I just hadn’t heard as it reffered to much as an orientation, so I was a little confused.
@kittehs
Okay, kittehs it is :D
umm, what? O_O
@Marie
Here is one paper that looked at pedophilia and found a correlation between it and lower IQ. (I am linking to this one because it was attempting to determine if the previously found correlation was genuine or artificial, that is a true correlation or one only found because of the sample used.)
@some gal
thanks for the link. The phrase just seemed kind of..skeevy to me :/
@Marie
There are numerous problems with IQ tests and plenty of things that correlate with lower score. It does indicate that pedophiles are likely to be dealing with at least one challenge (economic, troubled upbringing, etc.) in addition to their orientation.
@cloudiah: Thanks that’s useful.
@Marie: Paedophile offenders have lower IQs on average, 10 points less than those who commit offences against adults. It’s from the article mentioned above (trigger warning).
@nerdy pants.
I get it know that I read the article (some gal’s like, haven’t gotten around to the one on the gawker yet, and given the trigger warning idk if I will). Just without seeing sources I assumed you were making an assumption :/ Sorry.
Um, I’m confused. I was responding to the comment “if someone’s a decent person they wouldn’t be abusing kids anyway”. My reply was that if it’s generally true that they have lower IQ, and that IQ is both directly and via covarying factors related to someone’s ability to make good choices, then someone who already has the paedophile orientation is more likely to have these additional difficulties fighting their urges.
@Marie: The Gawker article is really interesting and I recommend it. If you want to read it without being subjected to the description of a grooming and rape, what you could do is skip the first 3 paragraphs before the “***” divider where it is written.
Um, ok, now I’m just really confused. I don’t think I followed the conversation. :/
@Marie: My fault, I should hit reload before replying :-) The short of it is that having a pedophile orientation not only means an attraction to children but a bunch of other cognitive deficits that make it harder to resist acting on that urge.
Ok, well, I think I’ve got it now… I hope :p
Checking out that article now. (well I was already in the middle but I’m not a fast reader)
Since Poxy doesn’t believe in education, the irony is lost on them.
So this thing with Zerlina Maxwell made it to ThinkProgress (a US progressive news/blog site), and there’s a FemRA all over the comments whining about “misandry” and “but female perps!” and it’s really pissing me off. TP ate a couple of the replies I made to her (I’m the one with the terribly misandric userpic, shamelessly stolen from David’s post on vintage anti-suffragist postcards), and I really need to not go back in and post them again because the more I post, the madder I get.
Anyone got some brain bleach? Bonus points for adorable birdies.
@emilygoddess
Less an adorable bird and more a gorgeous one, but I was inspired to search for cats and peacocks by a weird friend earlier today and the findings have all been fun. :)
@Some Gal:
I just wonder what a reduction you can reasonably expect. With child abuse you don’t have to bother with stuff like ‘gray rape’, rape threats etc. . It’s utterly condemned by society but it’s in no way controlled. We don’t rely on educating child abusers, we also teach how adults can protect children and children how to protect themselves.
@katz:
Do you know about the sex offenders registry? The draconian laws that accompany it? The residency restrictions? The idea that people who commit sex offenses are not normal people permeates the whole thing. (sarcasm doesn’t work with fringe opinions).
@The Kitteh’s:
Exactly the same thing is going on at CP communities (no, I never visited them, I only read about them, 100% legally.). It’s even more disturbing than Paraphlia forums: they not only justify their crimes (“It doesn’t hurt children. CPS destroys families and brainwashes them to feel abused.”), they encourage themselves.
@drst:
I didn’t say that. ;-)
For the record, this is my favorite adorable birdie video: http://youtu.be/lfbTPc4_7uo
Durnit
How about a wee sandpiper?
@Poxy
There is a lot wrong with what you just said. Plenty of child abuse is not condemned by society. Rape culture hurts children, too.
@emilygoddess
Here are About.com’s 10 Cutest Birds. They don’t have parakeets listed, but there is an adorable little hummingbird.
Birdie brain bleach? How about Marley and Tiko:
or Ziggy:
It’s getting closer to that, but we’re not all the way there yet. Do you remember that case in Texas with the 11 year old girl? From here:
I find it hard to believe that all 20 men accused in this case have a pedophile orientation. These are likely the kind of men that could be reached by education.
ewww. I hate people like that.
Also the:
god! those poor teenage sons! getting horny! so horny they should…rape someone? HORMONES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! *barfs*