This attack on the reproductive rights of poor Americans may have dire repercussions for women and society, and that may be what the pro-life movement wants.

A significant portion of the pro-life movement does not truly care about fetuses. If they did, they might advocate good nutrition or smoking cessation to prevent miscarriages. Miscarriages cause the loss of 10-25% of clinically recognized pregnancies, according to the American Pregnancy Association.

Nor does the pro-life movement advocate for accessible contraception to prevent the conception of unwanted fetuses. The National Right to Life Committee “does not have a position on issues such as contraception [or] sex education,” despite the causal relationship between a lack of contraception and unwanted conception. The online forum LifeSiteNews deplores sex education workshops taking place at St. Mary’s College, and offers contact information for the office of the college’s president, Dr. Carol Mooney, with the heading “To express concerns.”

What concerns me is that LifeSiteNews doesn’t want these female college students to be “encouraged to receive STD screening and build relationships with their sexual partners.” The Christian right espouses values that amount to a movement against the woman, inasmuch as the woman can expected to be an independent agent who makes informed decisions and directs her own life.

It’s not my imagination running away with me: women are included in the Declaration of Independence’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Women already earn less than men do. Academics who study welfare argue that it is based on a gendered model that is built for and by men, without considering issues such as child care. Women are therefore more likely to receive federal subsidies in the first place than men are. They are thus further at the mercy of the state, and stripped of any financial means of escape to a private system.

If we are cutting health care, let’s not cut it from the people who need it most and have no alternatives. On a practical level, since a pregnancy and labor are much more expensive than an abortion, the state would save money by covering abortion for those who wanted it.

This is an incredibly important issue in light of the horrifying rape statistics our culture racks up. Those statistics indicate that women are already subjected to a terrifying lack of control over their bodies and often, over their conception.

This is exactly the kind of disempowering situation which can perpetuate inequality because, as Professor Wraga’s research shows, stereotype threat affects certain kinds of mental performance, and affects people most strongly when the stereotyes are upheld by high authorities. Thus, by legally decreasing the rights of women–which is to say, decreasing the rights of women under the auspices of highest authority in secular society–Stupak and his cronies are likely to decrease the power and confidence of individual women — even women who would never get abortions. This is a reversal of the same principle which caused the so-called “Obama effect,” in which black test-takers’ scores improved following the election of our first black leader. The Christian right has a definitively misogynistic message, which has misogynistic implications.

It troubles me especially because of what it will mean for people who experience rape and sexual assault. Of course, Stupak makes an allowance for those people–along with mothers whose pregnancy endangers their health, they can receive abortions.

But Americans are very, very suspicious of rape claims.  Remember, in 94% of rape cases which are judged to have enough evidence to stand trial, the alleged rapist is allowed to go free. And 60% of rape cases are never reported, because the survivor convinces him or herself that others would judge him or her, that it’s his or her fault for wanting to go out looking cute, that the other person was too drunk to know what he was doing.

The survivor is always guilty until proven innocent: his or her case is too shameful, too sordid, too vengeful to identify with. (Some survivors have trouble believing their claims themselves, even after they’ve had surgery to repair their bodies, because having your entire culture negate your experience is so disempowering.) We don’t want to perceive the threat of rape, even when it’s all around us, because that would mean shattering our comfortable worldview. So American courts do not believe survivors 94% of the time.

So now, what Stupak is saying is that the only way that a survivor can get an abortion is if she can prove to a doctor that she experienced rape or incest. The survivor still bears the burden of proof, only now much more is at stake. Instead of not getting justice, the survivor stands to not get justice and be forced to bear and raise injustice’s child for 18 years. I don’t doubt that there will be more reports of rape by women with unwanted pregnancies, but I also believe that this law fails to offer women the life of liberty and happiness that was the foundation of this country.

Title IX is supposed to protect women from a “hostile environment” in educational institutions, requiring

“immediate and appropriate steps to investigate or otherwise determine what occurred and take prompt and effective steps reasonably calculated to end any harassment, eliminate a hostile environment if one has been created, and prevent harassment from occurring again regardless of whether the student who has been harassed complains.”

Yet little has been done to address the hostile environment created by our culture. You can start liberating women today by signing Planned Parenthood’s condemnation of the Stupak amendment here.

What if we treated rape like an actual public health crisis?

Meg Stone goes into it over at Bitch. Hat tip to the ever-rad Kaveri for the link.

Sometimes, the News Media has all the answers.

The New York Times reports that a recent study shows that women’s shoes hurt their feet.

Women mostly have sex because “it feels good,” according to a new study reviewed on Salon.com by Tracy Clark-Flory.

Also, the only sexual assault prevention tips guaranteed to work are those given to rapists, according to Lynn Harris, also at Salon.

She’s right that the majority of anti-rape education is aimed at women, while those who are actually responsible for the rape are generally men. Judging from that scary (but hopefully dated?) statistic at the top of the “Rape Index” post—the one that stated that 35% of college men would rape someone if they wouldn’t be caught, as of December, 1984—there needs to be some more education in that direction.

Anyone who reads feminist blogs has come across “trigger warnings” before graphic images or descriptions of rape or violence to women.

The intent of a trigger warning is to advertise the potentially emotionally triggering content of a piece, which might revive memories of rape or sexual assault for survivors.

Survivors of sexual assault are especially sensitive to such images because they are traumatized, and like other traumatized people, this may affect their whole world-view. Some survivors experience post-traumatic stress disorder.

My work and acquaintance with survivors of sexual assault has taught me that the world can be a fairly triggering place — and for good reason: rape is more frequent than most of us would like to think. Although figures are difficult to pin down, the less disputed number is 13% of American women. While men are also raped, this appears to happen less frequently, although by some reports, men are raped about as frequently as women in the U.S. Military. While a trigger warning protects survivors from running into the graphic details farther on, such articles usually refer to specific cases of rape, and the idea of a brutal world is not comforting.

The trigger warning also implicitly validates survivors of sexual assault, by recognizing their existence and their potential needs and offering them control over some of what they process. The Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act, as Title IX is now officially called, requires

immediate and appropriate steps to investigate or otherwise determine what occurred and take prompt and effective steps reasonably calculated to end any harassment, eliminate a hostile environment if one has been created, and prevent harassment from occurring again regardless of whether the student who has been harassed complains of the harassment or asks the college to act.

Of course, Title IX applies only to colleges and universities, and it can’t fix rape culture (see Nirvana album cover above) alone. But it is a legal precedent, and an acknowledgment that a “hostile environment” can impede or delay full healing from trauma. My goal here, with ObjectifyThis, is to work towards a less hostile environment for almost everyone, in the Sarah Haskins school of non-polarizing feminism. In that vein, I will be using trigger warnings from now on.

Today, instead of explaining a position, I offer a ‘statistical poem’ about rape. Each statistic is preceeded by the month and year that it ran in Harper’s. Find sources here.

12/84–Percentage of college men who say they might commit rape if there were no chance of being caught: 35

Link

1/86—Percentage of female college students who say they have been raped: 16

Professor Mary Koss (Kent State University)

Percentage of those who say the rapist was someone they were dating: 57

Professor Mary Koss (Kent State University)

4/87—Number of Americans 15 years of age or younger who were charged with rape in 1985: 2,645

Federal Bureau of Investigation

4/88—Percentage of all rapes in 1985 in which the victim and assailant were of the same race: 87

Bureau of Justice Statistics/Harper’s research

Percentage of all robberies: 65

Bureau of Justice Statistics/Harper’s research

7/88—Percentage of 13- to 15-year-old boys who say that it is acceptable for a man to rape his wife: 86

Jacqueline Jackson Kikuchi, Rhode Island Rape Crisis Center (Providence, R.I.)

Who say that it is acceptable for a man to rape his date if he has spent “a lot of money” on her: 24

Jacqueline Jackson Kikuchi, Rhode Island Rape Crisis Center (Providence, R.I.)

8/89—Percentage increase, since 1986, in the number of boys under 13 arrested for rape in New York City: 333

State Division of Criminal Justice Services (N.Y.C.)

8/89—Chances that an American woman will be the victim of a rape or an attempted rape in her lifetime: 1 in 12

U.S. Dept. of Justice

2/90—Percentage of Catholic members of the House who voted last fall to federally fund abortions for rape victims: 37

Congressional Quarterly (Washington)/Harper’s research

8/90—Ratio of reported rape victims with incomes of less than $3,000 to those with incomes of more than $15,000: 6:1

Mary P. Koss, University of Arizona (Tucson)

1/91—Percentage of male college students who say that “some women look as though they’re just asking to be raped”: 84

Donn Byrne, State University of New York (Albany)

12/96—Number of people sentenced under California’s three-strikes law for murder or rape: 65

Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (Washington)

Number sentenced for petty theft or drug possession: 5,900

Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (Washington)

8/96—Estimated number of abortions performed on victims of rape or incest each year: 15,000

The Alan Guttmacher Institute (N.Y.C.)

Number performed on born-again or evangelical Christians: 250,000

The Alan Guttmacher Institute (N.Y.C.)

6/97—Number of Latin American countries in which a rapist is exonerated if the victim accepts his marriage proposal: 14

Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (N.Y.C)

6/97—Chance that a Florida rape victim’s account will be believed by hospital medical personnel: 1 in 2

Governor’s Task Force on Domestic and Sexual Violence (Tallahassee, Fla.)

10/98—Estimated number of Catholic priests accused of sexual assault in the U.S. since 1978: 3,000

Linkup (Chicago)

10/98—Estimated amount U.S. Roman Catholic dioceses have paid to victims of sexual assault since 1980: $800,000,000

Linkup (Chicago)

3/98—Percentage change in murder, rape, and robbery cases in New York City since the election of Rudolph Giuliani: -44

NYPD Press Office (N.Y.C)

7/99—Chances that a U.S. Catholic hospital does not provide emergency contraception to rape victims: 4 in 5

Catholics for a Free Choice (Washington)

7/99—Number of male witnesses that Pakistan requires for a rape prosecution: 4

Permanent Mission of Pakistan to the United Nations (N.Y.C.)

1/03—Chances that a Rwandan woman raped during the 1994 genocide is now HIV-positive: 2 in 3

From Johannesburg, the story of Dumisani Rebombo, one rapist repenting, asking his victim’s forgiveness, and suggesting that we all learn to talk about our feelings and respect women.

From China, the story of Deng Yujiao, a woman who killed a government official when he tried to assault her, and then became a national symbol.

From Iran (in case you’ve been hiding in a cave), reportage of the death of Neda Agha Soltan, a woman killed walking down the street who became a national symbol.

In Granta Magazine, a discussion of the relationship between novelists Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford, rendered as correspondence between the novelists Maud Newton and Alex Chee.

For ‘statistical poetry,’ the ever-mesmerizing searchable Harper’s index, and for musings on Woman: The New Social Problem, an article by Meghan Falvey from N+1.

From the interwebs, a guide to which sunscreens contain carcinogens, dispatches from an environmental lawyer who is trying to grow a mustache, a warning that food coloring may cause ADD and ADHD, and a catchily Auto-Tuned remix of Allen Iverson’s defensive press conference discussing his absences at practice, which is right here:

Hat tip to Bust for their coverage of this well-heeled event in their August/September issue: there’s a a new annual parage of feminist men who strut their stuff and walk the walk, literally.

The “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes,” which bills itself as an “International Men’s March Against Rape, Sexual Assault and Gender Violence” — in which men walk a mile in heels to raise awareness about gender violence and simultaneously raise funds for rape crisis centers.

The organization creates communication about sexual violence by encouraging empathy across genders by putting “yourself in her shoes,” and then promoting an ongoing male identification with the experience of femininity by “walking the walk.”

The movement reminds us to “talk the talk,” because “ It’s critical to open up communication about sexual violence. While hidden away, it’s [incurable]. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get people talking.

“People unfamiliar with it often don’t even want to know it exists. It’s ugly. People that have experienced it themselves want to forget about it. How do you get them talking now, so they can prevent it from happening? And after it’s happened, how do you get them to talk about it so they can recover?

The site concludes, “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® provides several opportunities to get people talking. For preventive education, it helps men better understand and appreciate women’s experiences, thus changing perspectives, helping improve gender relationships and decreasing the potential for violence.

“For healing, it informs the community that services are available for recovery. It demonstrates that men are willing and able to be courageous partners with women in making the world a safer place.”

With 99 Walks already planned internationally for 2008, the organization has grown by leaps and bounds since its inception in 2001, carrying its message that violence against women hurts everyone. As they put it, “Sexualized violence does not just affect women. It affects the men who care about them, their families, their friends, their coworkers, and their communities.

“Sexualized violence is epidemic. Some of the statistics: Every two minutes someone in America is raped. One in six American women are victims of sexual assault.That means someone you know, someone you care about, has been or may become the victim of sexual violence. It may be your mother, your sister, your friend, your girlfriend, your wife, your coworker, or your daughter.” For a calendar of events and a listing of locations by city and state, see this page.

So far, this seems to be some creative-minded do-goodery: interesting, yes, but not necessarily significant. Yet consider that the high heel is typically read as a tool of female self-objectification — it literally puts the female on a pedestal; it recalls us to the female foot flex in orgasm that is thought to be the origin of the foot fetish, suggesting an always-erotic being.

Diary of a Goldfish’s imaginary feminist claims that “high-heel shoes serve one purpose. Standing on tip-toes makes your arse stick out in such a way which advertises your sexual availability to other primates. High-heel shoes are entirely for the benefit of men who live under the illusion that all women are available to them for sex. And by wearing high-heel shoes you perpetuate this myth, as well encouraging other women to do the same.”

As Jessica Crispin notes in her review of The Meaning of Sunglasses over at The Smart Set, some feminists take an even more cynical view. She reports that “a work colleague recently took one look at the four-inch peep toe heels I was wearing and snarled, “Don’t you know why men invented high heels?” I doubted anything I said would deflect what was coming next, so I just shrugged. “So you can’t run away when they want to rape you.” I understand. I used to be a humorless feminist, too, complete with shaved head and my father’s combat boots. Then I discovered Charles David heels and got over it. If only The Meaning of Sunglasses had existed sooner, I could have spent less time being a self-righteous twit.”

So why do we wear these shoes when they are so often equated with objectification and even rape? Certainly these associations and their clichéd companion phrase, “she’s asking for it,” though absent from the Walk in Her Shoes website, are the link between the support of rape crisis centers and the display of men in heels.

The fact that the Walking men are not gussied up to resemble women, outside of their footwear, reveals the equation of heels with rape ludicrous. What I love is that heels are employed here by male feminists not in a mode of objectification but in a display of active solidarity that reinforces the agency of the heel-wearer. The heels are not just to look at, but to walk an entire mile in! I admit, however, that even my favorite pair of relatively comfortable thrift-store pumps would probably have me hobbling, or more likely, barefoot, at around two thirds of a mile. Then again, I’m told I’m something of a dirty hippie. I’m going to save a more serious investigation of heels for another day, when it’s not 4 in the a.m.

]]> http://objectifythis.com/2008/07/a-mile-in-her-shoes-men-walk-the-walk-talk-the-talk/feed/ 0 http://objectifythis.com/2008/06/un-rules-that-rape-is-a-weapon-of-war-um-duh-now-what/ http://objectifythis.com/2008/06/un-rules-that-rape-is-a-weapon-of-war-um-duh-now-what/#comments Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:50:35 +0000 Marina http://objectifythis.com/?p=277 As The Austrailian reports, “In his remarks, UN chief Ban Ki-moon stressed the world body was “profoundly committed to its zero-tolerance policy against sexual exploitation or abuse by our own personnel”.”

“”Violence against women has reached unspeakable and pandemic proportions in some societies attempting to recover from conflict,” he said.”

The BBC notes that China, Russia, Indonesia and Vietnam expressed reservations about the universalized classification of rape as a weapon of war, but in the end, the entire Security Council voted unanimously to condemn rape.

While it’s good to hear that the U.N. is no longer turning a blind eye to the problem of rape, it’s unclear whether this resolution will have many consequences, especially considering that in the past, U.N. Peacekeepers have engaged in rape and pedophilia and employed child prostitutes, according to the Washington Post and evidence gathered by blogger Michelle Malkin, both in 2005.

Since the Security Council stands little chance of stopping violence in wars themselves, those of us outside of war zones are left to question what consequences the new classification of rape has. The Council is clearly trying to move in the right direction, but the use of the word “unspeakable” in connection with discussions of rape reiterates the old equations of rape with impurity and shame.

Surely, feminists everywhere are celebrating: rape has been recognized as the grievous crime it truly is, encouraging the decline of rape culture and the cultivation of a more woman-friendly global community. Yet does this mean that we need to view gender relations as a form of war? Is this a productive way to examine the issue? Clearly, this is an issue that deserves greater examination, although the ruling is a good start.

To the right is six year old Mapendo, a Congolese girl who survived rape during war and is now being given a ten-year scholarship by The Goma Student Fund.

Yet rape is a shock to the system, like any demonstration of overt oppression. Rape reminds women that they don’t have power, and attempts to prosecute rapists are so unsuccessful (and until recently, they usually consisted of a public examination of the victim’s sexual history, as if a decision to have sex with anyone was an open invitation to everyone) that most women thought twice about prosecution.

That’s only natural: anyone whose agency has just been squelched is less equipped to make decisions about prosecution; part of the reason that so little evidence is collected in rape cases is because survivors of rape so rarely decide to prosecute immediately, as perpetrators are often their acquaintances, friends, or relatives.

Luckily, as Jezebel reported in May, so-called “Jane Doe” rape kits are going national. This means that anyone can file a rape kit anonymously, indicating evidence of a rape, without necessarily deciding to prosecute right away. This is wonderful for three reasons: 1: rape victims have to make fewer instant decisions in the first few hours of recovery; 2: there is more of an incentive to report rape, since evidence of it no longer requires prosecution, and 3: the Jane Doe kits can be entered into a national database, so that the DNA of serial rapists can be matched and those sickos can be brought to trial sooner.

This is especially important because the government has historically created many loopholes for rapists, as in Iraq, where the Bush Administration has given defense contractors impunity and in the multiple military cases in which U.S. military personnel have been implicated.

These cases, which seem to indicate that a patriarchal system is at work, are not limited to the civilian communities around military bases. As Gregory Flannery reports in the Cincinnati CityBeat, “Women in the U.S. armed services are increasingly at danger — not from foreign terrorists, but from men in the U.S. armed services.

“The deaths of four Army wives in six weeks this summer at Fort Bragg, N.C., allegedly at the hands of their soldier husbands, might be an aberration. But the number of rapes, sexual assaults and sexual harassment against women soldiers in the military has reached the level of an epidemic, according to Terri Spahr Nelson of Oxford, Ohio.

The author of For Love of Country: Confronting Rape and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military, Nelson documents a problem that ought to give pause to women considering a military career.

“It is estimated that two-thirds of female service members experience unwanted, uninvited sexual behavior in the military,” she writes. “To exemplify the magnitude of this problem, consider what would happen if the U.S. armed forces were faced with a problem that affected two-thirds of the male service members. One would hope that there would be an immediate call to action, a stand-down and nationwide attention to the problem.”"

And there are more than 59,000 women in the military today; this problem is not affecting a tiny population. As this USAToday article reports, “Several problems link the complaints of the women who reported assaults to the Miles Foundation. Among them:

“•Poor medical treatment. Eleven women reported assaults to military authorities, but several said they were not tested for sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy. Nor did they receive psychological counseling. Assaults occurred in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, according to Summers, who wouldn’t reveal further details, citing the women’s privacy.

“An Army soldier who reported being raped last November in a camp in Kuwait that was a staging area for the Iraq war said she felt superiors ignored her assault and injuries, according to a spokesman for Rep. Joseph Pitts, R-Pa. Only after she attempted suicide last December and Pitts intervened with the secretary of the Army was she flown to her U.S. base, the spokesman said.

“•Condoned retribution. One female officer who reported an assault by a subordinate now faces a court-martial on charges of fraternizing with a subordinate and adultery because she is married. Summers said her alleged assailant has not been charged. Another officer, placed on medication for trauma after belatedly reporting an assault, said she lost her security clearance because of the drugs she was taking. The loss is a serious blow to her career.

“The recent allegations fit a pattern of female troops who have been sexually assaulted by servicemen in combat zones. A study released in 1998 found that a third of 160 women who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War reported “physical sexual harassment,” including 13 who said they’d been assaulted. The study, conducted by researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs, did not examine whether the charges were reported formally or acted on by the military.

“The latest accusations come a year after reports of commanders’ indifference to sexual assaults at the Air Force Academy. While the Pentagon reassigned the commanders, it failed to address the broader issue of sexual assaults in the military or commit to better protect female servicemembers.

“The Pentagon declined to comment on individual cases, but said it does not tolerate sexual misconduct. Commanders have a duty to prevent assaults, protect victims and punish attackers, it says. In 1994, the Pentagon started a program to assist victims and encourage their help in prosecutions.

“The military’s efforts to crack down on sexual assaults are hampered in part by the reluctance of some victims to report their attacks. And a study of veterans released last year found that is a common response. In fact, a majority of the 37 women told Miles counselors they did not file complaints because they feared damage to their careers or retribution from their attackers, who continued to work in the same vicinities.

“In spite of victims’ reluctance to step forward, enough assault accusations have been lodged to prompt closer scrutiny. That is the best way to determine why women who protect their country get so little protection themselves from the Pentagon.”

So scrutinize, if you don’t mind me getting a bit didactic, that culture that causes us to perpetuate this kind of violence against women in Pass the Gender Role, Bro; I’m Not a Manhater, I Just Dream A Lot, or Our Masculine Systems: Women’s Inequality Under the U.S. Consistution.

In this case, “An American marine accused in an alleged gang-rape of a 19-year-old Japanese woman last year was sentenced Friday to two years in prison after being convicted of “wrongful sexual contact and indecent acts” but cleared of rape, the United States military said.

“The marine, Lance Cpl. Larry A. Dean, 20, was the first of four marines who are to face court-martial in the case, involving an episode in Hiroshima in October. Japanese authorities had investigated the matter but in November decided not to prosecute.

“As part of his sentence, Lance Corporal Dean was dishonorably discharged, according to a statement by the Marine Corps Air Station in Iwakuni, in southern Japan. He also must forfeit all pay and allowances and was reduced in rank to private.

“During the court-martial on Thursday he was also convicted of “fraternization and violating military orders about liberty and alcohol.” He was found not guilty of rape and kidnapping charges.

“The other marines charged are Gunnery Sgt. Carl M. Anderson, 39, Gunnery Sgt. Jarvis D. Raynor, 34, and Sgt. Lanaeus J. Braswell, 25. Sergeant Anderson and Sergeant Raynor will be court-martialed later this month, and Sergeant Braswell in June, Master Gunnery Sgt. John Cordero said on Friday.”

In many ways, gang rape is the most disgusting kind of rape. Unlike date rape, or drunk date rape, when there is sometimes an especially gray area about the consent of either or both parties, gang rape is the intentional violation and re-violation of the victim, in the presence of witnesses and usually in full knowledge of the victim’s lack of consent.

The appallingly low conviction rates for rape have not always been this way, either. The Feminist Peace Network reports that “Currently only 5.7 per cent of rapes reported in the UK lead to a criminal conviction, a figure which has fallen from 33 per cent in 1977.” Why has the rate of convictions fallen so dramatically?

The FPN reports that “Stereotypical media representations of rape are damaging conviction rates when cases come to court, according to a Home Office funded study.

“The report, entitled Just Representations? Press Reporting and the Reality of Rape, concluded that highly selective and sensational reporting of rape cases has distorted public perceptions to such an extent that juries can no longer recognise the more typical rape when they are presented with it in during a trial.

“The study identifies a press “construct” about rape – namely that it is an outdoor crime, suffered by an unimpeachable woman at the hands of a monstrous deviant – a scenario that actually contradicts all research and crime statistics, distorting public perceptions and feeding into the criminal justice system.The widespread belief among the public is that women are most at risk of being raped when walking alone in dark or remote areas. Although instantly recognisable, the scenario bears little resemblance to the reality of most rapes.

“More than 80 per cent of rapes in the UK are perpetrated by men known to their victim, and only 13 per cent happen in public places. The widespread misconception is largely generated by the media, according to the report.

“Statistics revealed in the report – which surveyed a random selection of articles about rape and sexual assault over a 12-month period – show that vastly disproportionate press coverage was given to false rape allegations made by women, attacks by foreigners, and attacks on young girls.”

Such representations are so common that they have become widely accepted. The Daily Mail reports that Asda, a supermarket chain, “has pulled a slogan T-shirt from sale following complaints it was an incitement to rape. The £4 men’s garment showed images of women and the words: “If at first you don’t succeed… buy her another beer.”

“It prompted Rape Crisis Scotland to launch a letter writing campaign calling for the T-shirt to be pulled. Template letters addressed to Asda on the group’s website say the slogan shows “overt contempt” towards women.

“Asda staff said the T-shirts were humorous and shouldn’t be taken too simply.But the Rape Crisis letter says: “These T-shirts are, however, plainly and simply an incitement to rape. That is not a matter of opinion, but of fact.”

“The men’s t-shirts went on sale in January as part of Asda’s comedy range. Around 15,000 were sold before the supermarket chain pulled them from sale last week in response to the complaints.

“An Asda spokesman said the T-shirts were “just a bit of fun,” and added, “Even though we have only had a small number of complaints we have decided to withdraw this particular T-shirt. Naturally we are sorry that anyone found the T-shirt offensive,” he said.”

The unfortunate upshot is that there’s a lot of reinforcement for the idea that women are second class citizens when their emotional and physical safety is regularly subordinated to the sexual desires of men, creating a rape culture of the objectification of women.  Here’s an argument against objectification. Here’s a description of women’s inequality under the U.S. Constitution. Here’re some other examples of the normalization of rape in popular culture and cultural reinforcement of gender power disparities. And here’s why feminism is not about hating men.