May 9th, 2008
Posted by
Daran |
Blogosphere, Domestic Violence, Media, Violence Against Women |
31 comments
I have lost count of the number of times Donna Noble, the latest Doctor Who companion, has hit the Doctor. She did so two or three times IIRC in the Christmas Special which introduced her, and again in the most recent episode. And didn’t she also hit him in the Ood episode? I can’t remember. If they show it again, I’ll watch for it.
Whatever the exact score so far, it’s clear that this is going to be a recurring character trait. Whenever he falls short of her exacting standards, she’s going to hit him. I find this both disturbing and interesting. Disturbing, because this is a show which is aimed at a family audience, and is thus likely to normalise this kind of low-level female-on-male domestic abuse in the minds of children. It’s also interesting. Another recent episode, the last of the previous season, included a male-on-female DV theme, and so provides us with an opportunity to compare, not just how these themes are treated by the show’s creators, but also how they are received by the audience.
Contrasting Depictions
In “Last of the Time Lords“, Lucy Saxon, the Master’s human wife, is shown with a black eye. No explanation for this is given in the show, but this has been widely and I think correctly interpreted as indicating that the Master has been physically abusing her. This is an example of a recognisable dramatic trope. An evil person may do bad things to men, or to people in general, but if you want to show that he’s really evil, have him specifically target women and/or children.
Donna Noble is everywomen. She’s “not special… not powerful… not connected…. not clever… not important“. Her original depiction in the Christmas Special was loud, obnoxious, and superficial, but not evil. In the new series, her character has developed and she is no longer superficial, nor particularly loud, (though she still has her moments). She is shown to be insecure, prone to gaffes in an endearing way, witty, and compassionate. She’s much older than previous companions and neither particularly slim nor particularly good-looking. For these reasons, I think many female viewers will identify with her who perhaps couldn’t with the overachieving Martha or the too-perfect Rose.
And she batters men.
Audience Reception
Even a cursory web search confirms my remark above that many viewers recognise Lucy Saxon’s bruising as being the result of the Master’s violence. These cites show that this interpretation goes beyond the mere recognition that “the Master hit Lucy”. It’s conceptualised in the minds of these comentators as “domestic violence” and “domestic abuse”. Moreover it seems to be taken as read that it was intended to indicate the Master’s evil nature. By contrast, Donna’s hitting the Doctor has been greeted with universal approval, and with a single exception that I have been able to find, is not conceptualised as domestic violence.
Conclusion
That the show’s creators were able to convey the idea that the Master was a domestic abuser through such a subtle clue is a testament to the effectiveness of feminism’s campaign over many decades to raise the profile of male-on-female domestic violence as a social problem within the public consciousness. Feminists are rightly to be applauded for this. Unfortunately this has not been matched by any similar recognition of male victims or female perpetrators. The systematic framing, by feminists, of domestic violence as “male violence against women”, has served to erase these other possibilities at the conceptual level.
Given the remarkable number of feminists who are interested in science fiction generally, and the positive reception the recent Doctor Who series have elicited, I am disappointed to have found no analysis or even recognition within the feminist blogosphere that Donna’s behaviour is domestic abuse. I am not however surprised. The erasure of female-perpetrated and male-victimising domestic violence is almost as complete in the minds of the erasors as it is in those of the non-feminist general public at large. Equally disappointing, and more surprising, is that I have not found any discussion of it on male victim oriented sites, or, with the single, rather juvenile exception noted above, anywhere else.
One likely consequence of this erasure, this elimination at a conceptual level of domestic violence other than male on female, is that surveys intended to measure the incidence and prevalence of domestic violence are likely to relatively overestimate male on female violence, compared with other possibilities, because both perpetrators and victims of the former have a ready-made conceptualisation of their experiences, one denied to male victims and female perpetrators. This is particularly likely to be the case when the study instrument is explicitly a “Violence against Women” survey. This feminist-created distortion comes full circle when the results of such surveys are used by feminists to justify the claim that DV is overwhelming violence against women.
May 7th, 2008
Posted by
TS |
Feminist Criticism, Feminist Issues |
one comment
I spotted this on Stand Your Ground:
The day feminist icon Alice Walker resigned as my mother
In the mid-1980s, The New York Times ran a profile of the American writer and activist Alice Walker. Her novel, The Color Purple, had won the Pulitzer prize and was being turned into a film by Steven Spielberg.
The article was illustrated by a photograph of Walker sitting on her teenaged daughter’s knee. It was meant to be a “fun” picture; but, in retrospect, according to Rebecca Walker, the photographer unwittingly portrayed the true nature of her relationship with her mother.
Alice Walker was, and remains, an icon of the American civil rights movement. “People adore her. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘Your mother saved my life’ and ‘I have an altar to your mother in my bedroom’. They feel a connection to her and revere her greatly,” says Rebecca.
Walker’s success as a campaigner was to her detriment as a mother. Like Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby, who neglects her home and her children as she directs her energy towards the poor of Africa, so America’s icon often went to feminist meetings and rallies and left Rebecca to fend for herself. Her daughter experimented with drugs and became pregnant at 14.
More…
May 1st, 2008
Posted by
ballgame |
Blog Status, Navel Gazing, People |
4 comments
I’ve just posted an intro page where new commenters can leave a few words about themselves. Long-time commenters are invited to do the same if they’d like.
Update: Oh well, it appears that this particular implementation of WordPress won’t allow comments on “pages” even if you have the “allow comments” setting checked. 
April 27th, 2008
Posted by
ballgame |
Equality, Fallacies, Gynocentrism, Male Disposability |
64 comments
Gynocentric feminist organizations like NOW and the National Committee on Pay Equity recently commemorated April 22 as “Equal Pay Day,” the day when women ‘finally’ catch up to the amount of money that men earned in 2007. I look forward to their observation of another very important day: June 10, “Equal Workplace Protection Day.” That is the day when women would finally catch up to the amount of non-fatal injury and illness that men suffered at work in 2007 (assuming they worked the same number of hours per week as men).
More…
April 27th, 2008
Posted by
Daran |
Criminal Justice |
15 comments
Old Bailey Online:
In every study of serious crime ever conducted, men’s and women’s criminality has appeared different. Women are always accused of fewer, and different, crimes from men, and this was also true at the Old Bailey. Women account for only 21% of the defendants tried between 1674 and 1913, but this figure masks a significant chronological change. While women accounted for around 40% of the defendants from the 1690s to the 1740s (and, highly unusually, over half the defendants in the first decade of the eighteenth century), over the course of the period this proportion declined significantly, so that by the early nineteenth century only 22% of defendants were women and by the early twentieth century the proportion had declined to 9%. By this point serious crime had come to be perceived as essentially a masculine problem. Increasingly, female deviance was perceived as a consequence and aspect of sexual immorality rather than crime, and was addressed through other agencies of protection and control.
Read the entire piece for an analysis of why this is the case.
April 26th, 2008
Posted by
HughRistik |
Gender Issues, Generalizations, Relationships and Dating, Science, Sexual attraction and preferences, Stereotypes |
11 comments
Do women “know what they want?” This question came up at Overcoming Bias. I think “do women know what they want?” is the wrong question. Nobody can know what women want better than women themselves. However, we can compare women’s stated preferences and their actual behaviors. Research on this subject shows that there are often discrepancies between the two in women; the only question is whether men show such discrepancies also, and why these discrepancies exist.
More…
April 17th, 2008
Posted by
TS |
Queer Issues, Survivors and Survival, Victim (in)visibility, Violence Against Women |
53 comments
I saw this linked Men’s Activism. This is the first time I have seen anyone specifically address the topic of lesbian rape in this manner. The two filmmakers wanted to make sure the seriousness of the act was not missed:
Justine Chang: When you talk about women in the workplace, most feminist theorists are in agreement. When you talk about political and social equality, most feminist theorists are in agreement. But when it comes to lesbian rape, you begin to see a lot of contradictory elements. You’ll even see the same theorists saying opposite things about lesbian rape at different times. That’s important, because it shows that we aren’t just dealing with average people being insufficiently educated. The ambiguities and incomplete understanding runs all the way from the average person to the most important feminist theorists of the last fifty years. Its something that a lot of people, including the gender deconstructivists that, in retrospect, should have seen it, completely missed.
Armand Kaye: So we tried to show that this wasn’t just a “Joe Shmoe” problem. This is something that even the leading feminist theorists totally missed. So we tried to interweave what the theorists were saying with what the people on the street were saying, so you can see the differences and parallels. We used a lot of overlays to do that, so that the viewer can compare the views actually simultaneously.
And later:
JC: To add to that, the longer depictions really show just how destructive female sexuality can be. Society views male sexual organs as penetrating and destructive, and female sexual organs as receptive and nourishing, respectively. With the right context, female sexual organs can be just as destructive, or even more destructive, than male sexual organs. So the scenes are graphic and explicit, rather than made safe or medical, because they have to be. Lesbian rape is not a safe, clean act. And a safe clean depiction would do just massive amounts of injustice to the understanding of the phenomenon, and, in a real way, cheapen the experiences of victims of this phenomenon.
AK: And the same extends to female sexuality.
I am not certain what my opinion is of the filmmakers position that lesbian rape is more complicated than heterosexual as it is unclear from the questions whether or not that position extends to female rapists in general or only to female-on-female rapists. However, I my more curious as to what the feminist response will to a film that deals with a topic that rarely ever gets discussed. Regardless of that, I think this is an issue that is so bizarrely excluded from rape discussions that it is difficult to believe that it is not being intentionally ignored, even more so than male rape.
April 12th, 2008
Posted by
TS |
Current Events, Oppression of Men, Oppression of Women |
40 comments
I came across an article that I thought might be of interest. Ellen Snortland writes about her experiences of sexism in America and how as a woman she has been forced to step aside so that boys move ahead. She longs for a serious review of sexism of the sort that Barack Obama gave in his speech about race in America. Snortland states:
While I applaud Sen. Barack Obama’s speech about racism in America, I wonder if I will ever see someone tackle sexism publicly with the same seriousness. Please understand I do NOT minimize the human tragedy of racism by longing for a national dialogue about misogyny and gender-driven limits. I am well-aware that I am an educated and privileged white American woman and I am grateful for all of my advantages. (I’d be homicidal if I were a poor woman of color and had to deal with the triple whammy of classism, racism AND sexism.) As it is, as a privileged white woman I constantly have to temper my rage over the lethal “trifecta” of the “isms” by working to point out blatant examples of all of them, often packaged together.
The “isms” are also tricky because as South African anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko said, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Believe me; I’m well aware that some of the worst sexists of all are women themselves. Tricky business indeed, when the “oppressed” are in league with the “oppressors.” To rebut the abolitionists, there were slave owners who showcased the slaves who “witnessed” for the preservation of slavery.
More…
April 6th, 2008
Posted by
Daran |
Alas a Blog, Ampersand, Antifeminist and MRA Issues, Criminal Justice, Double Standards, Male Disposability, Privilege |
33 comments
My friend and coblogger TS, has launched a scathing attack on Ampersand over the latter’s recent post on Alas:
It is always interesting to see someone who generally considers an act a non-issue–or in this instance completely negligible and somehow an attack on real female victims–pretends to be concerned about it:
[…]
It is also rather interesting that while trying to pretend that prison rape against males is a worthy cause Ampersand conveniently continues to ignore that men and boys get raped and sexually assaulted outside of prison as well, 40% of which is committed by females. It certainly is a worthy cause and one that I personally address offline quite frequently, but in this instance Ampersand’s post is kind of like the Catholic Church releasing a coloring book about sexual abuse. Part of the reason why the Church had to release the book is because the Church created an internal infrastructure that silenced victims and treating victims as negligible. And part of the reason why Congress does not “combat prison rape” is because feminists like Ampersand framed rape as a “women’s issue” and created a support infrastructure that silences male victims and treats male rape (even against boys) as “so low as to be negligible.”*
Perhaps if feminists like Ampersand actually considered male rape a real problem rather just something to be ignored, dismissed or derided whenever advocates for male victims mention it or hijacking it when it seems politically correct to do so or to look unbiased then the problem could be sufficiently addressed. But with the callous, borderline condoning sentiment found in the quote “so low as to be negligible” (that is unfortunately common in the support community as well) it is hardly surprising that male rape does not get the attention it deserves or needs.
I cannot agree with TS’ assessment of Ampersand’s sincerity. I see no indication in his fairly extensive coverage of prison rape that he is motivated to blog on the subject (by which I mean to refer to those of his posts which centre the issue) by anything other than a genuine concern for its victims. In support of his position, TS refers to Ampersand’s use of the word “negligable” in a different context. Unfortunate that his use of that word in that context was, it didn’t imply that he viewed the crime of male rape as “negligable”, only its frequency outside of prison. Moreover he explicitly affirms his concern for the victims in that post.
Does it matter where rape takes place or who the victims are? In every moral sense, it does not matter. No one deserves to be raped. Prison rape is rape, and is totally inexcusable. Rape is rape, evil and wrong no matter where or to whom it happens. Every rape victim deserves sympathy and support.
That concern is shared by the commentariat on Alas at least as far as the current thread is concerned, all of whom are taking the issue seriously, a position which is regrettably not universal within feminism.
TS continues:
part of the reason why Congress does not “combat prison rape” is because feminists like Ampersand framed rape as a “women’s issue” and created a support infrastructure that silences male victims and treats male rape (even against boys) as “so low as to be negligible.”*
See this post for a fuller exposition of how feminist discourse anomalises male rape when not rendering it completely invisible.
there are statistically more male victims of sexual assault and rape in this country than there are gay people, and it is doubtful that feminists consider violence against gays “so low as to be negligible.”
TS’s example is invalid, because Ampersand was not talking about absolute numbers of victims, but the odds of a person within the designated category being so victimised. But his point is sound and can be illustrated by a different example: The odds that a woman will be raped in prison are somewhat less than 2%, the proportion of women in the US who are imprisoned in their lives, and also the figure Amp quotes for an upper limit for the proportion of men who are raped outside. Ampersand might agree in response to a challenge that those odds are negligable too, but he would never say so in the terms he used for male victims, and we can imagine the howls of feminist protest that would ensue if he did.
The attitude is that it really is not a legitimate problem**. It may be wrong on some level, just not one that would actually result in addressing the issue or providing support and services for male rape victims (or the feminist-friendly phrase “unfortunate male sexual experiences”). Even the series of posts Ampersand linked to demonstrate that he tacitly does not think male rape deserves anywhere near the same level of attention that is given to real female victims. At moment the posts just looks like lip service, especially given the frequency in which male rape victims have been mocked and attacked on his blog (often with Ampersand’s support of the attackers) and the half-hearted attempt to “discuss” male victims with the odd demand that they first pay tribute to female victims before being acknowledged.
As set forth above, I don’t agree with this in so far as it purports to critique Ampersand’s sincerity, but he’s absolutely correct about the extent to which Ampersand feels that female victims are entitled to the disproportionate share of public resources they already get. In the similar and overlapping context of domestic violence, Ampersand says:
But it’s not fair to demand that DV shelters divert already insufficient resources from battered women.
What’s fair, in Ampersand’s view, is that existing resources should continue to be hogged on behalf of female victims, and in the absence of additional resources, male victims should grateful for whatever back-of-the-bus treatment they can get. One could hardly imagine Ampersand agreeing with a similar approach to prison rape that designated it to be “violence against men” and excluded, marginalised and denied resources to female victims.
None of that actually leads to addressing the issue, and as one can see from the numerous comments on all the posts Ampersand linked to not too many feminists disagree with ignoring or downplaying the male rape (i.e. they think it has some merit, but nothing near the level of merit of real female rape).
They do address the issue in a very limited way. There are several concrete measures proposed within the comments on Alas which might go some way, or perhaps even a long way to alleviate prison rape. What is not addressed in any meaningful way - and can’t be in a feminist context - are the societal gender-norms which obstruct the implementation of these and other measures. There is no discussion, no analysis, of combatancy, disposability, and invisibility, or the impact of prison on service and accessibility for men. At the most basic, incidental level, they can see (some of) these features. But they cannot generalise, cannot abstract, cannot recognise the pervasive and systemic nature of these norms which extend well beyond prison walls.
And they cannot see their involvement in perpetuating them.
April 6th, 2008
Posted by
Daran |
Blog Status |
one comment
Posted by our webhost just 15 minutes ago:
I’m pleased to report that we have completed the roll-out of upgrades to our master database server and front-end servers that will allow fully distributed operation. The primary effect of this is that in the event of a critical failure of our master database, your hosted sites will continue to operate.
Previously, the master database was one of two two three single points of failure in the hosting of any particular site…
…However, there’s only one way to make sure that this upgrade will function as promised if the master database server goes down, and that’s taking the master database server down.
For that reason, we are scheduling a series of downtime windows to allow us to do exactly that. For the coming week, Monday through Friday, we are scheduling maintenance windows between 10pm and 11pm Arizona time (5:00am to 6:00am UTC). At some point during each window, we may (not “we will”) shut down our master database for five minutes to make sure everything works as expected, and that it comes back up properly afterward. Due to this upgrade, these five minute shutdowns should affect only access to ssh, FTP, and our member interface.
In other words, only affect me if I’m trying to do server-level admin. The site should remain up.
However, since not everything always goes according to plan, it’s possible that brief site disruptions may occur for the first couple of nights.
You have been warned.
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