The Rape words of Bristol Palin and 胡 春 香

I know that some of you know.  How arresting it is to talk about rape.

Bravely, nevertheless, Zerlina Maxwell talks anyway for a reason:

"My goal in posting ["Bristol Palin and the challenge of calling rape, rape"] and tying it my own experience is to get women thinking and talking about this. Bristol Palin’s account is in the public sphere and I think there is a danger in letting her own perception of what happened to her (whether you agree with her label or not) go unchallenged without pointing out the law....  I understand the confusion because in many ways that’s what this topic is all about in many respects, the uncertainty and still knowing deep down that something happened to you that you didn’t want to happen or consent to."

And Joel L. Watts is talking too.  He's looking for Bible words to get talk going, but elsewhere he's struggled for the right words, for the right verb for what Levi Johnston did to Bristol Palin, perhaps:

"Did Levi Johnston **** Bristol Palin?"

Joel softens his titular verb [****] by turning it into a noun and modifying it with an adjective to suggest it could have been "date rape."  He does well, then, to quote Jessica Valenti.  And Jessica quotes what Bristol said and what the Alaska court says:

“Levi wasn’t even there to help me process — or even confirm — my greatly feared suspicions,” she writes. “Instead of waking up in his arms . . . I awakened in a cold tent alone.” Palin realized that she had lost her virginity only after a friend told her what happened. 

She doesn’t use the word “rape” anywhere in her book [“Not Afraid of Life: My Journey So Far,”], but what she describes seems to be just that. 

She writes that she felt her virginity had been “stolen” and that she “tried not to vomit” when she found out what happened. 

Palin describes being devastated as she confronted Johnston: 

“ ‘You knew I didn’t want to have sex until I was married!’ I whispered. ‘How could you?’ ” 

She also writes that Johnston apologized. 

If Palin’s story is accurate, then what she appears to be describing is a nonconsensual — and likely illegal — assault. She doesn’t say whether she was unconscious, too incapacitated to give consent or just unable to remember what happened the next morning. But, by the account she gives, what took place in the woods near Wasilla that night sounds a lot like what Alaska rape law defines as sexual assault in the second degree, when the “offender engages in sexual penetration with a person who the offender knows is . . . incapacitated or unaware that a sexual act is being committed.”

So can we all can talk more now, as necessary, about the problem of rape and its horrific prevalence?  Can we can listen more, to realize how much of a struggle to talk women raped by men can have?

Even eloquent writers such as 胡 春 香 may require us, by their own horrific experience, to listen and to look intently.  In Vietnam today, this poet is known as Hồ Xuân Hương, her given name meaning "Delightful Fragrance."

She writes a poem about something that happened to someone, to a virgin, now pregnant, perhaps blaming not the man who made her so, without her consent, somewhere in the back woods at night perhaps but blaming herself more, sometime around the turn of the turn of the eighteenth century, when Xuân Hương herself was struggling to share her experiences with anyone who would listen.

Her poem is entitled

One male translator (Lý Quảng Mai) renders that

Unwed Pregnancy

Another translator (John Balaban) likewise paraphrases the words of "Sweet Essence" here as

The Unwed Mother

In more contemporary Vietnamese spelling we can hear how Xuân Hương starts her poem

Vịnh Người Chửa Hoang

Literally, these words mean 

Verses of a Person imPregnanted *Wildly

Let me just key in on the ambiguities of the word Hoang.  I've suggested that it literally means "wild" in the adverbial sense of how she was impregnated.  But it also could mean where she was raped, "in the wild."  The word is used for "un-cultivated" fields and for "un-inhabited" places.  It's also a word used for "virgins"!  The final word of this title, in any case, makes very clear that there is some profound lack if not some extremely lonely and unkept and uncared for person here.

The Vietnamese words also have tone, so that each word, each syllable, has its own melody and so that the phrasing makes its own tune.  If you were careful to listen, then you could hear significances in the sounds alone.  But John, after translating her words, suggests that the poet is also focusing her listeners on the context here.  He points out (in the end notes of his book, on page 121): 

For an upper-class woman, pregnancy out of wedlock could be punished by being forced to lie down while an elephant trod on her stomach, killing both mother and unborn child. For peasants, sociallly far more free in sexual encounters, there's a folk proverb that Hồ Xuân Hương seems to support:

Không chồng mà chửa mới ngoan.

Có chồng mà chửa thế gian sự thường.

No husband, but pregnant, that's skillful.

Husband and pregnant, that's pretty ordinary.

The consequence of the force of a man upon a girl or a woman who becomes pregnant before she's married to him or any other man is that there's the force of an elephant upon her.  There's execution by being publicly trod upon, two lives aborted without the woman, the girl, ever having a choice.  And does the social class of the perhaps-raped female really buy her any advantage?

Here now is the rest of Hồ Xuân Hương was saying with her song, her music, her poetry, her words:

John (page 121) suggests that this poet would like us to pay attention to her ambiguities.  Notice, he says, what she says, so musically, what she shows us, so visually, is subtle but significant:

The original in Nôm script is filled with aural puns as well as visual puns caused by the calligraphic brushstrokes. For example, a nét ngang cross-stroke across the belly of the Nôm character (liễu for “willow/girl”) changes it to  ( tử, “child”), implying pregnancy. Ngang also produces puns meaning “contrary” and “girth.” A downstroke, or dọc, on the character for “heaven,”  (thiên), changes the meaning to “husband,”  (phụ). Ađitionally, đầu dọc in line three also means “head,” implying a birth. Without her “love-fate” realized, the woman is incomplete.

In more contemporary Vietnamese, we see and hear these words as this:

Cả nể cho nên hoá dở dang

Nỗi niềm chàng có biết chăng chàng.

Duyên thiên chưa thấy nhô đầu dọc

Phận liễu sao đà đẩy nét ngang

Cái tội trăm năm chàng chịu cả

Chữ tình một khối thiếp xin mang

Quản bao miệng thế nhời chênh lệch

Không có, nhưng mà có, mấy ngoan.

Quảng Mai paraphrases these lines as this:

Because I pitied, this happened,
I wonder if he knows?
Our match had not begun
When fate intervened.
The sin he will have to bear, for a hundred years -
Right now, love's burden is all mine.

John renders the Vietnamese as this English:

Because I was too easy, this happened.
Can you guess the hollow in my heart?
Fate did not push out a bud
Even though the willow grew.
He will carry it a hundred years
But I must bear the burden now.
Never mind the gossip of the world.
Don’t have it, yet have it! So simplẹ.

In each of these cases, in her own words, and those words written and sounded in more contemporary Vietnamese, and in those words rendered now into our English somehow, there's a struggle.  There's the struggle to convey something horrific.  There's the tendency of society, of the world, to gossip.  Our tendency, no?  There's the understanding of the male, of his burden, what he intended and surely didn't intend.  "He will carry it," says the voice of the girl in the verses of her poem.  "Well, and Levi apologized," whispers and writes another girl.  And doesn't she blame herself, over and over, in words?  And don't we let her?

So now we choose, she lets us in on her lack of choices, she chooses now to do that?  Will we watch while others force her to lie down again, this time to be trampled by an elephant?  Will we read news reports and not cry out for real justice, for her, for other women and girls whose "virginity" is "stolen"? Shall we now talk about this, everywhere, and keep the talk going until rape itself is arrested?

To Prevent Men from Raping Women

Kristen asks "Why are there ... no classes for men on how to recognize attitudes and trends within themselves, their friends, and society in general, which leave a back door open for rape to happen?"

So how do you answer? What would you -- or do you -- tell boys, adolescent males, or full grown men?

My spouse and I tend to talk with our son and our daughters about sexism together in the same room. However, we also have times where she talks with the girls and I speak with the boy in different ways. My wife, for example, discusses with our daughters the fact that societies worldwide -- as Mary Pipher and Margaret Mead and Simone de Beauvoir but not Sigmund Freud nor Aristotle nor the male pastor in the church down the street, for instance, have observed -- view females as sex objects. From adolescence to menopause really, there is little relief from the external sexism. While I work with my son on his potential complicentcy in de-valuing people whose bodies are sexed female, on his views of girls and women. He has had one serious long-term relationship with a young woman in college, and their insistence together on egalitarianism was important, and to me was impressive, unusual.

But we're still learning. What would you advise us read, or have your own maturing children read? What should young men study?

Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender by A. Nicholas Groth?

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller?

The insightful Transforming a Rape Culture, written by notable feminist women and men (edited by Emilie Buchwald, Pamela Fletcher, and Martha Roth)?

And why shouldn't men (and not just women only) know and read He's a Stud, She's a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know by Jessica Valenti

Stop Rape Now

from The F-Word Blog by Jess McCabe:



In a symbolic gesture that sexual violence is unacceptable, UN is calling on people world-over to upload photos, with arms crossed, to its Stop Rape Now map.

The UN campaign is particularly focused on conflict-related rape:

United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict (UN Action) unites the work of 13 UN system entities with the goal of ending sexual violence during and in the wake of conflict. Sexual violence in conflict is a serious, present-day emergency affecting millions of people, primarily women and girls. It is often a conscious strategy deployed on a large scale by armed groups (state and non-state actors) to humiliate opponents, destroy individuals and shred societies.

200 000 persons have been raped in the ongoing war in DRC, 500 000 were raped during the war in Rwanda and every day hundreds of women are raped in Darfur.

Rape and Ruth: the woman and the text

      Marriage is a contentious category in the United States as some are asking who can and should marry, others are demanding the right to marry as a fundamental civil and human right, and still others are insisting on preserving a particular biblical paradigm.  But marriage is a normative category in most of Africa and Asia.  At the same time, the normative experience of black women in the Americas who do not marry shapes a reading of [the book of] Ruth that may not be congruent with Africana readers in other contexts for whom marriage is normative.  Asian and Africana readers frequently share a sense of cultural familiarity with the story of Ruth because of the focus on the mother-in-law/ daughter-in-law relationship, the cultural and societal vulnerability of widows, and the necessity of producing live offspring, preferably male, to secure a woman's status and economic well-being and that of her family.
      As an Africana reader, I am particularly interested in how issues of translation affect how scriptures are read, heard, understood, and interpreted in the broader African diaspora.  In a working paper on African feminist postcolonial biblical interpretation, Musa Dube notes the rarity of women on committees responsible for major translations of the scriptures (such as UBS; this is also true for NRSV, JPS, and others) and the tendency for translators and their translations to advance the aims of empire.  Construction of gender and gender roles, including marriage and motherhood, is one well-attested aim of empire.  An Africana translation-sensitive reading of the book of Ruth calls into question the virtue and value of Ruth's marriage to Boaz even as it recognizes the import of marriage in the ancient and contemporary African and Asian contexts from which the scriptures emerged and in which they continue to be venerated.
      The normative portrayal of marriage in Ruth is a particular problem for English readers because it masks sexual and domestic violence in a text that has been canonized as scripture for Jews and Christians.  There are at least three indicators that Ruth was abducted into marriage:  (1) the use of the verb ns', "lift," with "woman," instead of the standard lach, "take (as wife)," (2) the long-standing Israelite practice of abduction or rape-marriage, and (3) the preferential abduction of foreign women for rape-marriage.
      The verb in Ruth 1:4, vayis'u, from ns', "to lift" or "pick up," may be taken to indicate that Ruth and Orpah, both Moabite women, were abducted into marriage.  I translate the first three works of Ruth 1:4, "They-abducted for-themselves Moabite-women. . . . "  The verb ns' occurs 661 times in the MT.  The primary meaning of ns', according to The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), is "to carry" or "to lift."  In virtually every translation of ns' in which the object is not a person, the verb is rendered with some form of "lift," "carry," "take," or something similar.  Any thing or person may be the object of ns':  the hand (Deut. 32:20), prayer (Jer. 7:13), or sin may be lifted off of a person or community (Isa. 53:11), and so forth.  In Ruth ns' is also used to indicate lifting grain in 2:18.  Women are the object of ns' five times:  Judges 21:23; Ruth 1:4; Ezra 10:44; 2 Chr. 13:21 and 24:3.  Note that in Judges, the context is the abduction of sexually naive girls from Shiloh into forced or rape-marriages for the purpose of progeny.  The verb chtph in Judges 21:21, "to catch" (women), functions as a synonym.  In Ezra, the women in question are specified as foreign.  In 2 Chr. 13:21, Abijah's collection of women and the resulting offspring is cited as evidence of his strength in the previous verse, suggesting that these were abduction-marriages....
      The normative verb indicating marriage in the Hebrew scriptures, lach, "to take," with a woman as the object, indicates in every case in the Hebrew scriptures socially sanctioned union (Gen 4:19; Exod. 6:20; Jer. 16:2, and so on)....  Rape-marriage as a normative practice is introduced in Numbers 31, where sexually naïve girls are abducted as "booty," shalal.  It is codified subsequently in Deuteronomy 20,21, and 24.  Among the modifications introduced are the shift of focus from any outsider girl whose people are designated as "enemies" (as in Num. 31:19) to "beautiful" women and girls among the enemy (Deut. 20:11).  Deuteronomy20:12-13 also calls for the abducted women and girls to be stripped, their heads shaved, and their nails cut....
      .... The very name, "Moab," literally "from [my] father," evokes the alleged incestuous and therefore despicable nature of all Moabites according to the Israelite account of their origins in the Genesis 19 account of Lot and his daughters.  As a result, Moabites, particularly Moabite women, are highly sexualized in the scriptures of Israel, as are many contemporary Africana women readers of those same scriptures.
      Given the specific vocabulary deployed in the text and Ruth's identity as a Moabite woman -- which she never escapes -- Ruth is multiply marginalized, socially and sexually vulnerable.  Ruth and Orpah's marriages, therefore, hide dirty not-so-little secrets, covered up by generations of male translators.  Yet the experience of abduction-marriage and forcible pregnancy is not unimaginable to contemporary Africana readers.  In some parts of Eastern and raped into marriage.
      The Associated Press (AP) ran a story on June 21, 2005, under an Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, dateline in which a twelve-year-old girl, kidnapped by men who wanted to force her into marriage, was rescued by three lions that chased off her abductors and guarded her until police and relatives located her.  Sergeant Wondimu Wedajo of the local police reported that the men had held the girl for seven days, repeatedly beating her:  "Often these young girls are raped and severely beaten to force them to accept the marriage."
     The AP report noted that in Ethiopia, kidnapping has been part of the marriage customs for quite some time and that the United Nations estimates that more than 70 percent of marriages in Ethiopia occured by abduction, particularly in rural areas where the majority of the country's population lives.  (The AP report did not delineate its sources).
      Interpreters appealing to biblical narratives to describe idealized marriage have in many cases legitimized violence in marriage.  Religious authorities (Bible translators, pastors, seminary professors) have been negligent (and, I argue, criminally so) in failing to expose the ways in which the biblical narrative sanctions and contributes to the abuse of women in general and wives in particular.  By highlighting Ruth's embrace of Naomi and Naomi's god, interpreters of the book of Ruth have regularly overlooked the colence with which Ruth was initiated into marriage (and relationship with Naomi), as specified by the Biblical Hebrew vocabulary of that union.  Biblical interpreters, like all readers, are shaped by their own constructed cultures, which they in turn lay onto the text even as they identify "biblical principles" for marriage.  In doing so, lay and professional, clergy and academic interpreters of the Bible overlook the violence in which many women live, particularly in their marriages.  Men in every part of the world rape their wives.  According to Molly Egan and Jason Wood's 1999 Lehigh University report, The Abolition of Marital Rape Exemption, in the United States, spousal rape was criminalized by only seventeen out of fifty states in 1996.  By 2007, all fifty states and the District of Columbia had criminalized spousal rape.  (The state of New York relies on the ruling of an appeals court in 1984, People vs. Liberta, because an exemption for married men accused of raping their wives remains on the books.)  Spousal rape affects all people in the United States and beyond, including those in the African dispersion.
----

above, an excerpt from the section "Marriage," in the chapter "Ruth," by Wil Gafney, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora. 

HT David Ker

Sexual Violence: Big Problem, You-and-Me Solution

"It is a men's issue because 95 percent of sexual violence is conducted by men," explained Rebecca Alexander, OASIS program coordinator of the ETSU Counseling Center.
--Here's more at John Shuck's blog, Shuck and Jive.

"We live in a rape culture in which men (especially straight, cis men) are socialized and encouraged to be sexually aggressive, and so it is no surprise that they are....

These 76 men, just 4% of the sample, were responsible for 28% of the reported violence. The whole sample of almost 1900 men reported just under 4000 violent acts, but this 4% of recidivist rapists results in over 1000 of those violent acts.

If we could eliminate the men who rape again and again and again, a quarter of the violence against women and children would disappear. That's the public policy implication....

Cultural and institutional reform to reduce sexual assault begins with knowing who we're really dealing with. And it isn't otherwise good boys who just made a mistake. But they're sure grateful we think they are."

--Here's more from Melissa McEwan at the blog, Shakesville.

Growing Up in the West: Women

You don't have to be a woman growing up in the Middle East or in Africa - in Afghanistan or in Mozambique - to experience the pains of sexism. The horrors of misogyny are in the West, in the USA and in Canada and in the UK. But the solutions are here too, and you and I can be a part of the solutions.

Here are reports from the blogosphere today:

With a few exceptions, the mainstream media continue to kill stories about honor killings and attempted honor killings in North America. How often did you read stories about the honor killings that took place in Toronto (07), Dallas (08), Atlanta (08), Oak Forest, Illinois (08), Alexandria (08), Buffalo (09), and Kingston, Canada (09)—on and on, until the most recent attempted honor killing in Phoenix?

--from Phyllis Chesler at Chesler Chronicles, "Spinning Out Of Control: Honor Killings and Media Bias"

[A c]rime fiction writer and reviewer for the Literary Review is refusing to review any more crime novels because of the high levels of misogynist violence, the Guardian reports.

--from Jess McCabe at The F-Word blog: Contemporary UK Feminism, "Crime fiction reviewer refusing to review any more books because of misogynist violence"

In fact, it turns out that even among the most economically privileged women, the recession has been bad! (GASP!) And not only that—women have actually fared worse than men!

Female chief executives earned just 58 percent of what their male counterparts did in 2008, and their compensation packages were slashed three times as much as their male peers, according to a survey released on Monday. 

--from Melissa McEwan at Shakesville, "Shocked, I Say!"

--

Two suspects were in custody Monday, but police said as many as five other men attacked the [15-year-old] girl over a two-hour period Friday night outside Richmond High School. “She was raped, beaten, robbed and dehumanized by several suspects who were obviously OK enough with it to behave that way in each other’s presence,” Lt. Mark Gagan said. “What makes it even more disturbing is the presence of others. People came by, saw what was happening and failed to report it.”

It is impossible for me to believe that the people who stood by and did nothing are human beings- any more than the persons who perpetrated the act. Human beings don’t act this way. Or rather, don’t stand around watching and laughing while this kind of thing goes on.

--from Jim West at Dr. Jim West, "Total Deprvity: The 12 Who Watched A Rape, And Did Nothing"

The Campaign to End Rape coalition is conducting a survey on women’s attitudes to and experiences of rape and the law.

--from Laura Woodhouse, The F-Word blog: Contemporary UK Feminism, "Survey: Women, Rape and the Law"

Aristotle on Rape

This week, I learn that another of my friends has been raped. And, in a horrible coincidence, on the very same day, I learn that the "Top keywords driving traffic to speakeristic.blogspot.com from search engines" are "Aristotle on Rape." I wish I could say I am more surprised by the former.

The former makes me wonder about the long long painful silences outside of anonymous meetings - grieving, again. The latter makes me want to stop blogging entirely - hoping that men and women won't come to a blog when they can hear and interpret Aristotle for themselves.

The latter comes to my attention after reading Dr. Jim West's post on Alexa ratings. I wasn't surprised to learn that many of you find this blog, "Aristotle's Feminist Subject," from the top search words "aristotle logic essays." (In fact, some time ago, I wrote a series of long posts on "logic," and once many of you found a short post I'd composed comparing Aristotle's logic with Alice Walker's womanist essaying: "Aristotle's logic vs. Alice Walker's womanism" in which you and I considered "What does this mean for your writing?." And, indeed, some of you have come across a few posts I've labeled with the word "rape.")

But "Aristotle on Rape"? You've never read anything on that here. "Aristotle on Rape" is a dissertation. It's what translators like John Gillies get in 1823 when rendering the Greek of the Rhetoric into English this way:

"Again, If Theseus did not commit wrong in the rape of Helen, neither did Paris: if the sons of escaped punishment for carrying off the daughters of Leucippus, so neither ought the elopement with Helen to be prosecuted with vengeance."

It's what translator Ernest Barker, who really likes Aristotle and his Politics, finds he must write commentary on in 1962 when translating Aristotle's words in the treatise. Researcher Michael Davis explains:

[At the end of Book 5 of the Politics, one reads] Aristotle's long and detailed list of tyrants and their outrages, mostly sexual. We are given examples of rape, pederasty, insincere pederasty, pederasty in which the beloved is insulted by being asked playfully why he is not yet with child, wife-stealing, and castration, to name a few. So [ostensibly] uncharacteristic of Aristotle is this lurid account that one translator, Sir Ernest Barker, for the only time in his entire edition, relegates an undisputed portion of the text of the Politics to a footnote. His reasons are worth relating. The translator has omitted these passages in the text.

They are matters of scandal, or at best curiosities of history such as Aristotle with his encyclopedic habit loved to collect, rather than [Aristotle's own] matters of politics and theory.

Now, it is to be taken as a certain sign that something interesting is going on when an Oxbridge don's sense of propriety is offended. What is most peculiar about Aristotle's account of revolution is the connection he tacitly makes between sex and violence. Sexual outrages seem to be the paradigm for that hybris which

although having many parts, each of them is the cause of anger, and being angry, most men ordinarily attack for the sake of revenge and not preeminence. [Aristotle, Politics] (1311a33-36).

(Davis, "Erôs and Physics," The Politics of Philosophy: a Commentary on Aristotle's Politics, pages 90-91.)

What is staggering is how Aristotle's logic goes unnoticed. How surprised rational men like Barker and Davis can be by Aristotle's justifications for men raping women.

One only needs to start at the beginning of Aristotle's Politics to get more than hints. Aristotle is justifying his own elite Greek male dominant City State, "which is the highest of all... at the highest good." This is not just the ideal; it is the real, the status quo of Nature.

Here he explains how it must be, and how good it is:

For that which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master, and that which can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a slave; hence master and slave have the same interest. Now nature has distinguished between the female and the slave. For she is not niggardly, like the smith who fashions the Delphian knife for many uses; she makes each thing for a single use, and every instrument is best made when intended for one and not for many uses. But among barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female. Wherefore the poets say,

"It is meet that Hellenes should rule over barbarians; "

as if they thought that the barbarian and the slave were by nature one.

Out of these two relationships between man and woman, master and slave, the first thing to arise is the family, and Hesiod is right when he says,

"First house and wife and an ox for the plough, "

for the ox is the poor man's slave. The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants....

And Aristotle goes on teaching the boys in his Aca-Demy:

Again, the same holds good between man and the other animals: tame animals are superior in their nature to wild animals, yet for all the former it is advantageous to be ruled by man, since this gives them security. Again, as between the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject. And the same must also necessarily apply in the case of mankind as a whole; therefore all men that differ as widely as the soul does from the body and the human being from the lower animal (and this is the condition of those whose function is the use of the body and from whom this is the best that is forthcoming) these are by nature slaves, for whom to be governed by this kind of authority 1254b.20is advantageous, inasmuch as it is advantageous to the subject things already mentioned. For he is by nature a slave who is capable of belonging to another (and that is why he does so belong), and who participates in reason so far as to apprehend it but not to possess it; for the animals other than man are subservient not to reason, by apprehending it, but to feelings. And also the usefulness of slaves diverges little from that of animals; bodily service for the necessities of life is forthcoming from both, from slaves and from domestic animals alike.

Are we following what he writes (albeit through translation into our bar-bar-ic English)?

they say that it is monstrous if the person powerful enough to use force, and superior in power, is to have the victim of his force as his slave and subject; and even among the learned some hold this view, though others hold the other. But the reason of this dispute and what makes the theories overlap is the fact that in a certain manner virtue when it obtains resources has in fact very great power to use force, and the stronger party always possesses superiority in something that is good, so that it is thought that force cannot be devoid of goodness, but that the dispute is merely about the justice of the matter (for it is due to the one party holding that the justification of authority is good-will, while the other identifies justice with the mere rule of the stronger); because obviously if these theories be separated apart, the other theories have no force or plausibility at all, implying that the superior in goodness has no claim to rule and be master....

For a man's acts can no longer be noble if he does not excel as greatly as a man excels a woman or a father his children or a master his slaves, so that one who transgresses cannot afterwards achieve anything sufficient to rectify the lapse from virtue that he had already committed; because for equals the noble and just consists in their taking turns, since this is equal and alike, but for those that are equal to have an unequal share and those that are alike an unlike share is contrary to nature, and nothing contrary to nature is noble. Hence in case there is another person who is our superior in virtue and in practical capacity for the highest functions, him it is noble to follow and him it is just to obey

Lest it's lost in translation, that "very great power to use force" is that Greek man's ability to rape: βιάζεσθαι δύναται.

Woman, Black: the Double Whammy of Inequality in Your Neighborhood

"When Black women are beaten, raped, or otherwise exploited we are not understood as victims because our bodies are understood to exist for the purposes of exploitation."

"There are few rushing to her defence because these constructions uphold not only the black white binary but the crushing dominance that patriarchy has established over women."

--Renee at Womanist Musings
gets at a huge problem of in-equal-ity in (y)our neighborhoods,
showing those Nude Photos of Rihanna and Prejean
[asking] Which One Is The Slut?

Marital Rape Law Reconsidered in Afghanistan

this just in from Ruth Moon at Her.meneutics:

President Hamid Karzai agreed to review the law after outcries from Western agencies.

After heavy criticism from Western aid agencies and human-rights watchers, Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai agreed over the weekend to review a new law he had supported last week that legalizes forced sex within marriage and places Taliban-era restrictions on women in the country’s Shiite minority.

Read the full report.

Male MPs Screw Over the Female MPs of Afghanistan (so they can go home and legally rape their own wives)

Shinkai Zahine Karokhail, like other female parliamentarians, complained that after an initial deal the law [allowing men to rape their wives] was passed with unprecedented speed and limited debate. "They wanted to pass it almost like a secret negotiation," she said. "There were lots of things that we [women MPs] wanted to change, but they didn't want to discuss it because [President] Karzai wants to please the Shia before the election."

Ustad Mohammad Akbari, an MP [a man] and the leader of a Hazara political party, said the president had supported the law in order to curry favour among the Hazaras. But he said the law actually protected women's rights. "Men and women have equal rights under Islam but there are differences in the way men and women are created. Men are stronger and women are a little bit weaker; even in the west you do not see women working as firefighters." Akbari said the law gave a woman the right to refuse sexual intercourse with her husband if she was unwell or had another reasonable "excuse". And he said a woman would not be obliged to remain in her house if an emergency forced her to leave without permission.

--excerpts from
"'Worse than the Taliban' - new law rolls back rights for Afghan women"
by Jon Boone in Kabul The Guardian, Tuesday 31 March 2009
--------------------------------------

Safia Sidiqi, a [woman] lawmaker from Nangarhar province who condemned the legislation, said she cannot remember parliament debating or even voting on the law and she does not know how it came to be signed by Karzai. She called for the law to be recalled to parliament for debate. "It is impossible in a two-month session for parliament to pass a law more than 200 pages long," she said of the 263-page law.

Sayed Hossain Alemi Balkhi, a [male] Shiite lawmaker involved in drafting it, defended the legislation saying it gives more rights to women than even Britain or the United States does. He said the law makes women safer and ensures the husband is obliged to provide for her.

--excerpts from
"Critics assail Afghan law that 'legalizes rape'"
By FISNIK ABRASHI, Associated Press Writer Fisnik Abrashi, Associated Press Writer – Thu Apr 2, 7:04 pm ET

HTs: Dr Jim West and Women In His Image

one of our oldest arguments

I can tell by the way my mother chews her toast
whether she had a good night
and is about to say a happy thing
or not.

Not.
She puts her toast down on the side of her plate.
You know you can pull the drapes in that room, she begins.

This is a coded reference to one of our oldest arguments,
from what I call The Rules Of Life series.
My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night.

I open mine as wide as possible.
I like to see everything, I say.
What’s there to see?

Moon. Air. Sunrise.
All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up.
I like to wake up.

At this point the drapes argument has reached a delta
and may advance along one of three channels.
There is the What You Need Is A Good Night’s Sleep channel,

the Stubborn As Your Father channel
and random channel.
More toast? I interpose strongly, pushing back my chair.

Those women! says my mother with an exasperated rasp.
Mother has chosen random channel.
Women?

Complaining about rape all the time
I see she is tapping one furious finger on yesterday’s newspaper
lying beside the grape jam.

The front page has a small feature
about a rally for International Women’s Day—
have you had a look at the Sears Summer Catalogue?

Nope.
Why, it’s a disgrace! Those bathing suits—
cut way up to here! (she points) No wonder!

You’re saying women deserve to get raped
because Sears bathing suit ads
have high-cut legs? Ma, are you serious?

Well someone has to be responsible.
Why should women be responsible for male desire? My voice is high.
Oh I see you’re one of Them.

One of Whom? My voice is very high. Mother vaults it.
And whatever did you do with that little tank suit you had last year the green one?
It looked so smart on you.

The frail fact drops on me from a great height
that my mother is afraid.
She will be eighty years old this summer.

---

Samhita's post "The sleepwalking defense?" and David's "There’s no escape from your husband", made me think, again, of Anne Carson's poem "The Glass Essay", and the bit of encoded argument, recurring, excerpted above. I know a man, a family guy, who raped a woman while "sleep walking." The guy's walking around today, "awake." The rest of us? What comes in poetry? And who listens? Is it really much of an argument? However old it is, when will it stop. Like I said, some things make me think, but some things make me sink.

Rape

Last night, we watched Mad Men episode 12. We love advertising (and Julie is an award winning copywriter), but there's something else, something very disturbing right here where we live. Look at the tv.

The show's creator Matthew Weiner gets right to the sexism in the male dominant world of American advertising in the '60s. When a male copywriter is out, Peggy Olson steps up and pitches an account with a "love" slogan to a couple of men; winning the campaign, she announces herself as a "copywriter" and asks the boss Roger Sterling for the office that another man had vacated long before. Sterling comments that young women are getting aggressive and tells her she has more "balls" than some men. (She gets the office.) The show cuts to Joan Holloway (an office manager for the agency) walking in with her new fiance: "So you're the one who got our Joanie," Sterling says to the man, indicating also that he knows a couple of other things about Holloway. Full of jealous rage, the fiance gets her alone in an empty office and rapes her.

It's just a tv show. And we used to watch thirtysomething too. Another tv show about ad men, through the late '80s and early '90s. More sexism then too. It's no accident that real life Nancy Ziegenmeyer chose actor Patricia Wettig to play her in the tv film based on her book, Taking Back My Life. (Wetting had won three Emmys and a Golden Globe for playing Nancy in thirtysomething). Ziegenmeyer is a victim of rape. She went public with the rape after reading an article Geneva Overholser wrote as editor of the Des Moines Register in which she asserted: "As long as rape is deemed unspeakable, the public outrage will be muted as well." At the end of 1990, before Ziegenmeyer's book or the tv movie, People magazine reported Ziegenmeyer's story, and noted that "approximately 100,000 women are raped each year in the U.S."

How many women now are raped in the U.S. every year? The FBI, Department of Justice web site has updated the numbers: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/offenses/violent_crime/forcible_rape.html. Why so many? Why even one? Why? Why? Who? Who? Who? Who? And do you know what happened to the man who raped Ziegenmeyer? What if she'd been silent? Who next?

I know you know someone who was raped. I do! Maybe it's you. Why?!!!! How can any of us be silent?

Yesterday, in the New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman begins the story:

Honorata Kizende looked out at the audience and began with a simple, declarative sentence.

“There was no dinner,” she said.

“It was me who was dinner. Me, because they kicked me roughly to the ground, and they ripped off all my clothes, and between the two of them, they held my feet. One took my left foot, one took my right, and the same with my arms, and between the two of them they proceeded to rape me. Then all five of them raped me.”

The audience, which had been called together by local and international aid groups and included everyone from high-ranking politicians to street kids with no shoes, stared at her in disbelief.

Gettleman goes on to report on the rape epidemic in Congo. Somehow, even with the color pictures in the black and white newspaper, the voices of women and men seem quiet here in the U.S. The women in Congo are speaking out, with effect:

After years of denial and shame, the silence is being broken. Because of stepped-up efforts in the past nine months by international organizations and the Congolese government, rapists are no longer able to count on a culture of impunity. . . . 

Few are more passionate than Eve Ensler, the American playwright who wrote “The Vagina Monologues,” which has been performed in more than 100 countries. She came to Congo last month to work with rape victims.

“I have spent the past 10 years of my life in the rape mines of the world,” she said. “But I have never seen anything like this.”

She calls it “femicide,” a systematic campaign to destroy women. . . .

“The details are the scariest part,” Ms. Ensler said.

At the event last month, many people in the audience covered their mouths as they listened. Some could not bear it and burst out of the room crying.

One speaker, Claudine Mwabachizi, told how she was kidnapped by bandits in the forest, strapped to a tree and repeatedly gang-raped. The bandits did unspeakable things, she said, like disemboweling a pregnant woman right in front of her. “A lot of us keep these secrets to ourselves,” she said.

She was going public, she said, “to free my sisters.”

Believe it or not, Gettleman writes this story yesterday to celebrate the positive. His article's entitled, "Rape Victims’ Words Help Jolt Congo Into Change." This time last year, Gettleman could only report: "Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War."

So what? Well, if you've made it this far through this blog post, then I'd say you may be one who can help effect change. Did you see and hear what Weiner, Overholser, Ziegenmeyer, Wetting, Ensler, Gettleman, Kizende, and Mwabachizi have been doing and saying? What more can you and I do and say? Don't think we can make much of a change? Do you know how many women were raped, by the men, in your country last year? Do you think you cannot help change this horror?