Ms_Armstrong !'s List: CST - Sexism / Gender Violence

• an aspect of the Steubenville case that should resonate in locker rooms and athletic departments across the country: the connective tissue between jock culture and rape culture. Rape culture is not just about rape. It’s about the acceptance of women as “things” to be used and disposed, which then creates a culture where sexual assault—particularly at social settings—is normalized.
• We need to ask the question whether the jock culture at Steubenville was a catalyst for this crime. We need to ask whether there’s something inherent in the men’s sports of the twenty-first century, which so many lionize as a force for good, that can also create a rape culture of violent entitlement.
• I am not asking if playing sports propels young men to rape. I am asking if the central features of men’s sports—hero worship, entitlement and machismo—make incidents like Steubenville more likely to be replicated.
• ”It’s really a sense of power that comes from specialness…. anyone who finds himself at the center of the world they’re in has a sense of impunity.”
• On colleges, there is reason to believe that the same teamwork, camaraderie and “specialness” produced by sports can be violently perverted to create a pack mentality that either spurs sexual violence or makes players fear turning in their teammates. A groundbreaking 1994 study showed that college athletes make up 3.3 percent of male students but 19 percent of those accused of sexual assault.

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• College women are more likely to be raped than their unenrolled counterparts, and the vast majority of college rapists are trusted acquaintances of the victim, not a man in a ski mask hiding in the bushes wielding a knife or a gun.

   

  Freshmen are more likely to be raped than other students. College rape most often takes place in the victim’s home and is likely to be preceded by consensual kissing. It is almost never reported; fewer than 5 percent of rapes and attempted rapes on college campuses are reported to law enforcement officials, according the National College Women Sexual Victimization (NCWSV) study conducted by the National Institute of Justice.
• The preferred weapon of choice in a typical campus rape is confusion.

• This story is as heartbreaking as it is familiar. Think about what happened in Steubenville, Ohio, when two football players raped an intoxicated young woman while friends cheered them on and videotaped the incident. The victim apparently did not remember what had happened until she saw it on social media. As word got out, the town rallied around the football players, so much so that last week a grand jury was called to investigate whether adults in the community—including school administrators, coaches, and parents—tried to cover up the incident to protect the boys. The general sentiment of the case was summed up by CNN reporter Poppy Harlow, who showed a great deal of sympathy for the perpetrators on the day they were found guilty of rape. “These two young men who had such promising futures—star football players, very good students—literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart,” she said. She did not express similar sympathy for the rape survivor in the case.

   
• we have a rape problem in our society. Too many boys think it is OK to have sex with girls who have not consented. They think it is OK to have sex with girls who are so drunk they could not possibly consent. They think it is OK to have sex with girls who are completely unconscious. They are so convinced that this behavior is OK that they record the behavior and release it for all the world to see. Instead of reacting with horror and punishment, their peers applaud and call the victim a slut. And the adults in their lives tut-tut, say boys will be boys, sweep it under the rug, and somehow, inevitably, turn around and blame the victim, especially if she was too drunk to say yes or too unconscious to say no.
• In fact, rape prevention programs targeting boys have been shown to be successful. One class for freshmen guys started with a video on male-to-male rape in an effort to get the boys to empathize with victims. It went on to have men visualize a typical rape scene with a girl who has been drinking at a party and imagine that the drunk girl was their mother, sister, girlfriend, or grandmother. The course then helped them recognize consent, understand the role of alcohol, and consider how to intervene if they were a witness to unwanted sex

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• glosses over the role that misogyny and gun culture play (and just how foreseeable violence like this is) in a sexist society. After all, while it is unclear what role Rodger's reportedly poor mental health played in the alleged crime, the role of misogyny is obvious.
• Rodger, like most young American men, was taught that he was entitled to sex and female attention. (Only last month, a young woman was allegedly stabbed to death for rejecting a different young man's prom invitation.) He believed this so fully that he described women's apathy toward him as an "injustice" and a "crime".
• If we need to talk about this tragic shooting in terms of illness, though, let's start with talking about our cultural sickness – a sickness that refuses to see misogyny as anything other than inevitable.

• I have to wonder how much police dismissed Rodger's video rants because of the expectation that violent misogyny in young men is normal and expected.

   

  "Dismissing violent misogynists as 'crazy' is a neat way of saying that violent misogyny is an individual problem, not a cultural one,"
• The truth is that there is no such thing as a lone misogynist – they are created by our culture, and by communities that tells them that their hatred is both commonplace and justified.

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• And just as in Adam Lanza's case (and others) there will be no "national conversation" about why white men are 23 or so percent of the United States population and approximately 75 percent of those who commit mass shootings

• Misogyny and violence against women are social problems as well as individual ones. The fact that these men see “game” as the remedy to all personal and social ills is perhaps the greatest indictment of the way they view the world.