High Volume Automotive Repair Facilty, is in need of a mature, detail oriented individual with above average computer skills to help out with our front office operations. Must be able to multi-task and be able to handle a large volume of telephone calls on a regular basis. Knowledge of the Automotive business is a plus but not essential to performing the functions of this position, However a good sense of humor is, as well as a positive can do attitude. This job involves answering phones, invoicing, preparing service orders, adjusting inventory counts, scheduling and much more. The ideal person for this job will be able to think fast on his or her feet and be willing to do what ever is required of them in this type of position. Must be able to meet the attendance requirements of M-F 9am to 6pm have reliable transportation and be able to make a good presentation to my customers. Additionally the ideal candidate will have a customer service background and be able to pass a pre-employment background screening. If you feel you have the right personality and the unique set of skills for this position then we want to hear from you. Please submit resume and references. Compensation based on qualifications.

Now, all qualified Maryland job-seekers can apply for this position in peace, knowing that their potential employer only secretly wishes you were a hot, sexy lady who he could repeatedly refer to as “gal.”

Unfortunately, expecting that your employer comply with anti-discrimination laws comes with a price. The ad originally advertised an hourly rate of $13.75 to $16.85 an hour; now, potential employees are looking at $10 to $16.

We’re in the middle of the worst recession in our lifetimes. The state of Maryland is hanging at a 7.2 percent unemployment rate. And one Maryland employer has found a silver lining in the desperation of his countrymen: The potential for hiring a total babe.

Last week, an area job seeker alerted me to this Craigslist ad for an office assistant job at a Rockville, Md. automotive repair company. Necessary qualifications: Sexy “gal” who knows how to “take direction.” Unessential: Actual knowledge of cars.

Here’s the ad (it’s since been flagged for removal):

I am seeking an attractive self motivated, mature, detail oriented female with good computer and telephone skills to help me run my business. This is a full time position with full company benefits. Knowledge of the Automotive Repair business is a plus, but not essential to performing the requirements of this position, however a good sense of humor is. I need a gal that is confident with her sexuality and does not mind working around a bunch of guys. This is a very fast paced business so I need a gal that can think fast on her feet take a proper message and take direction and do what is needed of her. This job is not for everyone, I need a gal that can interact well with the general public and handle a large volume of incomming calls on a day to day basis. A good clear voice and good communication skills are essential to this position. Reply with resume and photo if available to this post, I like to have a face to go with a name. If you think you can keep up with me and our work environment then I want to hear from you.

Seeing as this job ad alone blatantly defies Montgomery County human rights law, which specifies (and I’m paraphrasing here) that you cannot exclusively hire hot chicks on the basis of their glamor shots. This employer better hope his new hire isn’t too confident in her sexuality. She may just end up suing his ass.

It seems as if my critique of last night’s Superbowl ads struck a nerve with the most loyal fans of the Dodge Charger. These are their stories.

stann thinks that painting men as a bunch of emasculated wimps in order to sell a Dodge is just tellin’ it like it is:

God forbid any commercial should be geared towards men, reflect the feelings of men or (worst yet) poke fun at women a little instead of making men look like idiots. The “Spine”, “Dodge Charger” and “You’re a man” commercials were some of my favorites and reflect what so many women don’t (or refuse) know about men. This may be why so many of them are divorced or can’t get a man.

gdmt is unconvinced:

stann, as a fellow heterosexual man, i think these commercials make men look totally pathetic. how can you relate to a commercial that makes men look resigned to spending miserable lives doing shit that they dont want to do all the time just so they can fuck a woman and drive a shitty dodge? maybe your life just sucks. sorry, stann.

stann insists that any man who doesn’t like the Dodge Charger is either emasculated, or straight-up female:

gdmt: Any “man” who says a Dodge Charger sucks on anything but gas should just admit she’s really pretending to man so as to give some credibility to her point of view. It would be no surprise though, that complaints would come from the same emasculated men depicted in the commercials. Sorry to show you up to a mirror, but that’s life.

gdmt points out that that makes absolutely no sense, since “the same emasculated men depicted in the commercials” are the ones meant to be buying the fucking Charger. Therefore, if it is only the “emasculated men” who are complain about the Dodge Charger commercial, the Dodge Charger commercial has failed on its face:

stann: I’ll gladly be called emasculated if asserting my masculinity requires buying a dodge charger. also; those emasculated men depicted in the commercial are the ones driving the car i.e. you.

Last year, we delved into the world of 7orbetter.com, an online dating network that caters to men with long penises—and the men and women who love them. Recently, a reader wrote in to ask if there exists any similar service for men with genitals on the opposite end of the ruler. He writes:

Hello Amanda, I recently read your article about this website and wondered if you found any others with the opposite slant.  I think the concept is great in that you do know up front.  As an alternative are there any sites that also advertise size but not focused on the larger variety of men.  I guess what I am getting at is getting the whole “size” question out of the way early so there is no disappointment when things are revealed.  A girl may not want a 7 incher but a 4 incher may also be unacceptable.

I’m not an expert on genitally-themed dating sites myself, so I reached out to my sole contact in the field of penis-length marketing: 7orbetter.com creator Steven Pasternack.

“As far as I know there are no sites devoted to men with a small penis,” he writes. However, Pasternack does foresee some room for his own large penis dating site to expand to smaller sizes in the future. “I had played with the idea of allowing men with all penis sizes on 7orbetter but it sort of detracts from the marketing angle of men with 7″ or better in size,” he writes. “As the site becomes more established I will probably open it up for everyone eventually, but by itself I do not see a very marketable site that is devoted only to men with small penises.”

7orbetter.com’s bias in favor of larger-than-average penises is no secret—after all, we’re not dealing with “7orlonger.com” here. I imagine that this “marketing angle” attracts two demographics: Discriminating ladies and gentlemen who are solely interested in men with big dicks, and guys who want a forum to brag about the size of their cocks. 7orbetter.com, in other words, is the perfect spot for hooking up shallow penis-seekers and conceited penis-holders. They’re perfect for one another.

A site like, say, “4orsmaller.com” would struggle to tap into such a cosmic dynamic. I’d like to think that some men and women would be attracted to a guy with the self-confidence to stand up in an Internet forum and say, “My penis is smaller than the average penis. Now, on to my various hobbies and personality quirks.” However, I doubt that those same men and women would want to restrict their online dating opportunities to a Web site specifically themed around shorter-than-average-penises. I imagine that men interested in advertising their genitalia on such a site might be better off finding an understanding sex partner the old fashioned way—real-life trial-and-error.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Local anti-sexual harassment resource Holla Back D.C. has declared March “Public Transit Awareness Month” in order to “focus on public sexual harassment on our public transportation in the DC metro area.” I’m inclined to support this occasion for the following reasons:

(a) About half of the groping stories I’ve heard (and I have heard a lot of groping stories) took place within D.C.’s public transportation system.

(b) The vast majority of the victims in these cases did not report their assaults to the police.

(c) Since many commuters rely on Metro to get to work, it’s really fucking hard to avoid this particular venue for public sexual assault. (Metro logs over 700,000 trips in its system every weekday).

(d) Metro police take public transit-based sexual assaults seriously—when the assaults are reported to them. Since only a small number of Metro-based sex offenses actually reach Metro officials each year (2009’s count was 43 sexual assaults), police don’t see Metro-based assaults as a serious problem on the whole.

It is so ordered.

Throughout the month of February, Holla Back DC is inviting comments for ways D.C. can tackle the problem of sexual assault and harassment on public transportation. I like the suggestion of one commenter: Why not stage a public awareness campaign directly inside the venue of many assaults—on Metro trains?

Last fall, New York City waged a similar campaign against subway sexual harassment. According to an MTA presser, the campaign included a series of subway banners (a colleague sent me a photo of one, above) as well as heavy distribution of bilingual brochures encouraging victims of subway sexual violence to report the crimes to the NYPD Sex Crimes Report Hotline. The full banner text reads:

Sexual Harassment is a Crime in the subway, too. A crowded train is no excuse for an improper touch. Don’t stand for it or feel ashamed, or be afraid to speak up. Report it to an MTA employee or police officer.

I think that a campaign like this is a really good start, because it addresses a few the reasons why some victims of public sexual assault don’t speak up: they’re taken completely off-guard by this sexual assault on their regular morning commute; they feel like no one would understand their reaction to such a thing; they doubt the authorities would care if they did report it. So, when are we going to see similar ads on Metro?

Photo by Andrew Beaujon

Why is the Superbowl commercial line-up, hailed as an achievement in advertising industry creativity, often so casually sexist, racist, and homophobic? Credit the watchful eye of the CBS Standards and Practices department, which ensures that Superbowl ads bring in millions of viewers looking to be shocked—without offending the delicate sensibilities of the American people.

In order to achieve this difficult balance, ad-makers are forced to play within a very small range of acceptably “outrageous” topics. Since casual sexism, racism, and homophobia are main sources of shock-jock humor—and since these attitudes are too pervasive to inspire true outrage in the average American—companies compete to put the most creative twist on the lazy stereotyping without going too far off the deep end. And so: CBS bans an ad that shows two gay men kissing, but greenlights several commercials that play off “gay” stuff for laughs. It bans an ad that shows a guy’s head up his own ass, but lets fly a commercial that makes fun of those silly, backwards South Asians who answer your tech support calls (racism: officially less controversial than asses). Even the advertisement decried as the most “controversial” of the evening—college football superstar Tim Tebow’s anti-abortion ad—concluded not with a politically controversial rallying call to life, but with Tebow totally sacking his own mother. That’s gotta sting!

Some advertisers choose to side-step this paradigm, of course, with varying success (See: Cute farm animals in love; everyone has T-Pain’s voice; coffin filled with Doritos). The ones that don’t end up being mildly but reliably offensive, and extremely boring.

RACISM:

This was one of the only Superbowl ads I noticed that featured people of color. The other was a Doritos ad where a black man walked into his date’s house, checked out her ass at length, and then received a firm slap in the face from his date’s small child. In Superbowl ads, people of color are never employed to, say, return an Orca to the ocean after a wild bachelor party; they’re just here to get some laughs out of racial stereotypes.

SEXISM:

Welcome female sports superhero Danica Patrick, who stars in the most Meta Controversial ad of the night. In this series of commercials for GoDaddy.com, Patrick is going around living her normal life—receiving massages, appearing on television news programs—when she unwittingly finds herself at the center of a “controversial” Superbowl ad. Wherever she goes, blonde ladies are just itching to take down their hair, rip off their shirts, and become the next scandalously hot Superbowl GoDaddy girl. This ad could have been a clever subversion of standard Superbowl bodice-ripping if Patrick’s character had been allowed to point out how totally fucking weird this is. Instead, viewers are asked to head online to check out the even sexier action. Just a reminder that even women who excel in traditionally male fields (a girl who’s really good at driving!) are still forced into traditionally female representation (boobs!).

Ah yes: the “men have turned into demoralized, overly feminine wusses who can only be saved by big machines that go RRRRARRRR” category. This ad, for the Dodge Charger, really opened my eyes, you guys: It really sucks to be a man, especially one in a serious relationship with a woman! (Seriously, guys, if it’s this bad, just break up with us. We’re not worth it). I have one question, though: Why are you carrying my lip-balm? As a member of the gender generally expected to carry an expansive purse instead of utilizing her limited pant pockets to store items, I have often carried this proverbial lipbalm for my significant other. And it has never been so traumatizing that I’ve been forced to shell out $30k for a Dodge Charger to heal the pain. But then again, I don’t know what it’s like to be forced to carry lipbalm as a man. I’m sure it’s very tough.

Did you know that men are also extremely stupid? Men are only interested in beer, sports, and sex; women are from Venus.

HOMOPHOBIA:

This ad subscribes to the same theory of gender as the Dodge Charger ad, but this time men can only be saved from their spineless, overly feminine lifestyles if they buy a hand-held television. Bonus: this ad is even clearer in its assertion that men who do anything attributed to the mysterious realm of “female shit” aren’t true men. Change out of that skirt, Jason.

I believe that this Megan Fox ad contains the Superbowl’s sole same-sex couple: Two guys who slap each other with dramatically limp wrists when they discover that one of them has been checking out Megan’s sexy pix on the Internet. Apparently, gay men can only be represented in Superbowl ads in the pursuit of hilarity. We are truly living in a post-sexual-orientation America, people.

At first, this Careerbuilder.com ad was is headed firmly down the casual homophobia route: Naked dudes! Around other dudes! Touching their own nipples! But then a couple of underwear-clad female co-workers show up, and the ad refuses to go the aggressively heterosexual route with them. Careerbuilder.com actually reveals itself to be the rare Superbowl advertiser that doesn’t exploit boobs for faux “sexy” controversy. Ah, the complexity of Superbowl ad politics.

Last week on the Sexist,we learned that since both climbing stairs and riding in elevators put women at a high risk of sexual assault, the only way for us women to ascend beyond the ground floor is to invent some sort of rocket boot. Think about it!

1. The Worst Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Ever, in which wearing rocket boots is truly the only reliable mechanism for avoiding rape. That is, until the rapists invent their own  rocket boots. Then we’re shit out of luck.

2. The Breast Massage Will Happen, in which your boss uses phrases like “bone-girl” in your work e-mails.

3. Why Do So Many Men Die as a Result of Domestic Violence?, in which murdering your wife can be deadly.

4. Victim Blaming and Transgender Rape Victims, in which transphobic commenters argue why a trans women simply can’t have been raped.

5. Style Tips From Men’s Rights Activists, in which men’s rights will never truly be achieved as long as dudes are still buying “stylish elevator shoes.”

Photo via the Library of Congress

Last week, Montgomery County high schoolers brought home an extra special science lesson with their report cards: A flier from Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX) informing parents that their gay kids don’t have to stay that way.

The flier, which claimed to be in the business of promoting “diversity for the ex-gay community,” contained a series of “scientific” ruminations on human sexuality. It’s all good, but this is my favorite part (emphasis mine):

According to mainstream psychological associations, there are no replicated scientific studies to support that a person can be born “gay.” No “gay gene” or gay center of the brain has been found. No medical test exists to determine if a person is homosexual. Sexual orientation is based on feelings and is a matter of self-affirmation and public declaration.

The gay center of the brain: The final frontier.

So, while the world’s most brilliant scientists are busy mining the deepest recesses of gay brains in search of that elusive chocolaty center, I’ve got a related question for PFOX: How many real, live ex-gay people has PFOX discovered at this point?

PFOX claims that the ex-gay community grows by the thousands each year. But last time I checked, PFOX’s ranks were overflowing with “everstraights”—heteros who say they have never been gay, not even once in college—and positively hurting for members who had really, truly successfully prayed the gay away. I can only conclude that the world’s ex-gays are all on a very long vacation to somewhere just out of our reach—the gay center of the brain, perhaps!—sipping on Mai Tais and having enthusiastic heterosexual sex with their spouses, far away from the uncomfortable glare of scientific fact.

—

Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX) promotes diversity for the ex-gay community. Ex-gays demonstrate that those with unwanted same-sex attractions can seek help and information on overcoming their feelings. All individuals deserve the right to self-determination and happiness based on their own needs, and not on the needs of others. PFOX supports tolerance for everyone regardless of sexual orientation.

PFOX can provide: resources for parents and students, ex-gay speakers for your school or club, books for your school library, and brochures on same-sex attractions, bullying and tolerance.

Who are ex-gays?

Every year thousands of people with unwanted same-sex attractions make the personal decision to leave a gay identity through gender affirming programs, including therapy, faith based ministries, and other non-judgmental environments. Their decision is one only they can make. However, there are those in society who refuse to respect an individual’s right to self-determination. Consequently, formerly gay men and women are subjected to verbal and physical attacks simply because they dare to exist. Ex-gays and their supporters are denied equal access and support, forcing them to remain silent for fear of negative reactions and disapproval, while gays are affirmed for their decision to come out as gay. Former homosexuals do not think something is wrong with them because they decided to fulfill their heterosexual potential by overcoming unwanted same-sex attractions.

But aren’t some people born “gay”?

According to mainstream psychological associations, there are no replicated scientific studies to support that a person can be born “gay.” No “gay gene” or gay center of the brain has been found. No medical test exists to determine if a person is homosexual. Sexual orientation is based on feelings and is a matter of self-affirmation and public declaration.

If only one part of you has gay feelings, should your whole life be gay identified?

Many people would agree that just because one part of you feels a certain way, it doesn’t mean you entire identity is that way. Having feelings of same-sex attraction may make you feel different. We all feel the need to fit in and be accepted. But no one should identify themselves based on sexual feelings alone,. There is more to your identity than your sexual attractions. Thousands of ex-gay men and women had those very same feelings when they were in school. You may have heard, “You must be gay!” But no one should be labeled based on the perception of others. Get smart! Explore the origins of your same-sex attractions. Why do I have these feelings? Where did they come from? The decision of a prom date, a car, or whether to super-size those fries can be based on a feeling, but important decisions should not be made on feelings alone. In order to make an educated decision, you have to be informed! Sexuality develops over time. It is not necessary to label yourself today.

Find out more at www.pfox.org !!!

(These materials are neither sponsored nor endorsed by the Board of Education of Montgomery County, the superintendent, or this school.)

Illustration by Robert Ullman.

After it was reported this week that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had used the phrase “fucking retarded” to refer to a group of Democrats, Sarah Palin took to Facebook to decry Emanuel’s word-choice as a “slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities”—and to demand that Obama give him the ax. Prepare to get totally fucking deep into the philosophical import of a Sarah Palin Facebook update, everybody.

In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I parse the new Republican PC strategy, examine Palin’s record on disability (it ranges from condescending to damaging), and propose that Palin’s adoption of a far-left feminist talking point is a sign of the coming apocalypse.

SADY: Why hello!

AMANDA: Hello, m’lady

SADY: What shall we discuss on this fine morning? In my newly adopted 19th-century-dandy idiom, apparently?

AMANDA: Indubitably! Or something! I dunno: How about Sarah Palin’s Facebook updates?

SADY: OH GOOD. I ALWAYS KNEW IT WOULD COME TO THIS. Yeah: What strikes me about this Facebook update, aside from the obvious “Oh God I am reading Sarah Palin’s opinions on Facebook” feeling, is that her call-out of Rahm Emanuel is continually framed as being “not about politics.” And yet, she is calling for someone in the White House to be fired? And going all, “the President is responsible for this! Directly responsible! WHY haven’t I heard from him about it, hmmmmmmmm?” And that seems… political.

AMANDA: Yeah. Of course it is. Although the thing that struck ME about her Facebook entry was that she used euphemisms for two words: “F—ing” and “N-Word” but not for the word she was concerned with everyone banding about in this case. And another thing! It’s also kind of funny that Sarah Palin thinks that the President of the United States firing a member of his staff is, like, a reasonable result of a Sarah Palin Facebook update.

SADY: Well, you know: it is the POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA! But I mean, I keep thinking that the reason she’s all, “this isn’t about politics, it’s about God’s children and a patriot in Somewheresville and decency because life is precious, and God, and the Bible,” is that she’s playing kind of a rhetorical con game. In that disability IS a political issue, but it’s one on which Sarah Palin happens to be on kind of the wrong side. So it has to be apolitical in her framing – even though her means are political – so that, you know, we don’t get to politicizing it and figuring out some basic stuff like universal healthcare keeps disabled people from dying on the fucking subway platform where they live, and so on and so forth.

AMANDA: Right. Palin’s concerns are clearly entirely political, and not at all about securing actual rights for the disabled. But even so: words are important, and Palin has gotten 13,841 people who probably do not give a fuck about this stuff generally to agree that using that word is offensive. She also got Emanuel to apologize, which I think is a reasonable expectation (compared to forcing him out of the administration).

SADY: Yeah. And, I mean, people are having a conversation about the word. People aside from the left-of-the-left people I’m used to seeing discussing the word.

AMANDA: However, now we also have people who hate Sarah Palin (and there are a lot of them) using that word in spite. Like this commenter: “Give us a break Sarah, the people he was addressing were acting retarded and that group didn’t contain a single person you are defending. We all know he was not referring in any way to children or any other mentally challenged individuals.” So, the way that we talk about this stuff is important. Starting this discussion in order to score an absurd political point—and refusing to engage in issues of disability beyond politics—isn’t helping anyone.

SADY: Yeah, exactly. What kills me is that in the comments, people who are anti-Palin are starting to get really amped up about making “retarded” jokes to prove that they don’t like Sarah Palin. Like, one guy just wrote “your baby is fucking retarded.” Or there’s this example of point-missing: “Come to think of it I believe Rahm Emmanuel has a mental deficit that he and his president fail to recognize or adknowledge.” FROM A SUPPORTER.

AMANDA: Oh my goodness.

SADY: But I guess she said “mental deficit?” Because if she’d just said “Rahm Emanuel is fucking retarded,” THAT would have been wrong? And that’s where these language games get tricky. Because it’s true: the only people I’m used to seeing discussing this are the left-of-the-left disability activists, often disabled feminists because that is where I roll, discussion-wise. But when it makes it into a more mainstream discussion, especially when it’s tied to something this obviously disingenuous . . . You have someone who’s making an ableist comment but isn’t able to recognize it as such because she’s only identified the PEJORATIVE WORD as the problem, not the attitude. Or people who now construe using the word “retarded” as a pejorative as a bold political act.

AMANDA: It’s a can of worms. I do find it interesting that Sarah Palin, Republican darling, has taken it upon herself to become the queen of “PC” now, even though complaining about liberals forcing political correctness on the world is a treasured Republican pastime. And I think Sarah Palin does represent the worst kind of “PC,” which is to be only “politically” correct, and not correct in your social policies, or the way you live your life, or your expectations of all people, but “correct” only in a way that sticks it to people you don’t like.

SADY: Right. It’s the use of certain, I guess we can call them “PC,” actions to boost your own status as a righteous person rather than to make any change. And obviously she’s always been selective with her PC—one of the great triumphs of Sarah Palin in politics is that she kind of, if not pioneered, then perfected the use of typically left ideals to shut down the left. Like, “sexism!” Which means not challenging my candidacy, but sticks because there is actual sexism on the left. Or, “choice!” Which… actually, I don’t even know how “choice” applies to anything Sarah Palin has ever stood for.

AMANDA: Being brave enough to make the choice to keep a baby and then making the choice to force all other women make the same choice? I mean, part of the reason that it does stick is because us liberals are, like, interested in this stuff. We’re interested in dismantling sexism and ableism and racism (OK: Sarah Palin does not seem overly concerned with racism), and we’re interested in doing it from all sides, but Palin is only interested in doing it from her side. The amazing thing, to me, is making it stick among conservatives.

SADY: Right. That’s the thing: She’s coming at the left in the places that they care about. She’s found the Achilles heel, which is – you can call us Commie pinko bleeding-heart pussies from now until Doomsday, and we won’t really care. But DON’T TELL US WE ARE INSUFFICIENTLY SENSITIVE. Because we care about that stuff, and are trying hard (uh, some of us) and aiming that accusation at us forces us to slow down and self-examine and meanwhile you are whipping a crowd of racists into a hardcore voting frenzy. Which is why I think she’s so beloved by certain Republicans; this is good “politics” even if it’s not good politics. Although, on the topic of Emanuel’s supporters, I have to say: Some of them are not doing themselves (or myself) any favors here.

AMANDA: Yeah. Also, I mean, I don’t doubt that there are many people among Palin’s fan base who do care very deeply about these sorts of issues, because, like Palin herself, they were brought into caring about disability through a child or other family member. And now, tragically, I think, Sarah Palin is there to tell these families that they can do just fine raising their kids without any sort of government “interference,” which is probably true of a certain person who just sold a billion copies of a book that certain person didn’t have to write.

SADY: Yeah! Government interference is totally unnecessary, if you happen to be a rich lady! Which is why it is so weird that disabled people only ever belong to families that are super-rich. God has a Special Plan for us all, truly! Also true: All disabled people HAVE families. Private wealth, which all disabled people have access to, is always and totally sufficient to their needs. Like: WHAT. I have no doubt that Sarah Palin cares about her son, but if she cares about the ISSUE, she’s either completely devoid of empathy or just really, really stupid.

AMANDA: Now the only thing left to be cleared up here is Rahm Emanuel’s mouth!

SADY: Dear Rahm: Your usage is unbecoming. I like to swear, just like you, and also I like to rant at people in a kind of mean way over issues, as I am aware that you apparently do also. I am here to tell you that you can be a big swearing jackass without using the term “retarded.” Love, Lady Who Yells On The Internet.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Commenters have also noted that the Sexual Assault Prevention page lives “in infamy” (for now) in Google cache, so the curious can still get their heavy dose of victim-blaming scare tactics here. All kidding aside, though, I’d like to thank the folks at Valdosta State University for no longer endorsing these damaging “tips” on their Web site. I’ve already heard from several members of the campus community who are committed to making positive change in the school’s sexual assault policies, and I look forward to VSU’s future approach to these issues.

Following the assault, Montgomery College rolled out a comprehensive administrative response across its three campuses. The Takoma Park campus immediately went into a two-hour lock-down. Campus police reviewed video surveillance of the performing arts center, where they identified the man who was later charged in the attack—a former Montgomery College student and one-time student tutor. Administrators reached out to faculty and staff to help facilitate conversations with students. The school sent out multiple campus-wide messages alerting students to the university’s response, reminding them of campus counseling services, and inviting comments from students.

But let’s focus for a minute on one Montgomery College administrator’s public reaction to the attack. Two days after the assault, Dr. Clemmie Solomon, Takoma Park/ Silver Spring Dean of Student Development, sent a campus-wide e-mail reminding students of their responsibility to take charge of their own safety on campus.

The e-mail read:

On Tuesday, January 26, 2010, one of our Takoma Park/ Silver Spring students was sexually assaulted in the bathroom of the Performing Arts Center on the Takoma Park/Silver Spring Campus. The suspect was apprehended by the Montgomery County Police Department a few hours later. Please keep the victim of this heinous crime in your thoughts and prayers.

This unfortunate event reminds us all of the importance of remaining vigilant when it comes to safety. Accordingly, I seek your support in efforts to promote a safe and secure environment. Safety is everyone’s business and it requires each of us to play a part. I want to share steps that each of us can take to try and minimize risk, but remember that some of the best security measures are those you create for yourself. Make them part of your daily routine.

Solomon’s tips included:

* Keep an eye out for anyone who is loitering or hanging around campus.

* Be aware of your surroundings. For example: As you walk to your car check to see if someone is around or near your car as you walk up to it; have your keys ready.

* Get into your vehicle quickly and confidently.

* Travel in groups, especially after dark.

When Montgomery College student Rebecca Levy received Solomon’s e-mail, she was perplexed by these vague new security measures. After all, the campus rape victim had been assaulted in the middle of the day, in an on-campus facility where any student should have a reasonable expectation of safety. How could entering her car with confidence have prevented her being targeted in a women’s bathroom? How could walking in groups at night have prevented this afternoon assault? And how could noting campus loiterers have singled out a potential rapist on a college campus teeming with “loitering” students?

Levy fired off an e-mail to Solomon. “The onus is not on women to prevent being raped, but your e-mail suggests otherwise,” she wrote. “Your common-sense safety recommendations are an insult not only to the survivor of Tuesday’s assault but all women and all survivors, who are generally only guilty of such crimes against safety as daring to use a women’s restroom at the college we pay to attend.” Levy, who informed Solomon that she has “several years of experience doing workshops on this very topic at schools, conferences, and women’s groups,” then offered to share her war chest of local sexual assault resources with the dean. “Rape is widely accepted as being a hate crime, and I wish the school would treat it as such,” she concluded.

Solomon wrote back:

Thank you for your email regarding the assault on the Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus. Your feedback is appreciated.

The safety recommendations outlined in my memorandum to Montgomery College students were designed to provide general safety tips for our college community. These recommendations are widely accepted as good crime prevention measures for students on college campuses.

Montgomery College is continuing its efforts to make the college a safe and secure learning environment.

So Levy stepped up her criticisms of Solomon’s original missive:

Publicly responding to a rape with general safety recommendations ignores the status of rape as a hate crime. It also is victim-blaming, because it suggests that by complying with any of the recommendations (which vary in uselessness from getting into a car “confidently” to being wary of people “loitering” on campus which is practically the school sport) one can avoid being raped. I am not satisfied with your response and maintain that it is an insult to women and all survivors of sexual assault. That is unacceptable.

Questions I would like to ask Dean Solomon:  How will entering my car with confidence prevent me from being raped in my school’s women’s bathroom? Are women who urinate on campus failing to take responsibility for the entire campus’s safety? Do you ever walk alone at night on campus?  How do you think the victim of last week’s crime might grade the effectiveness of your general safety tips?

Unfortunately, Solomon didn’t respond directly to my request for comment (or to Levy’s last e-mail). Montgomery College Associate Communications Director Elizabeth S. Homan did call to say that Solomon’s e-mail was written in response to student demand for safety advice in the wake of the assault. Homan also noted that, in addition to its various immediate responses to the assault, Montgomery College is currently planning additional campus programming aimed at identifying and dealing with the problem of sexual assault.

The question remains, though: Was Solomon’s general safety advice an appropriate component of a school’s response to a campus sexual assault? For a professional opinion, I turned to Sarah Martino, communications coordinator for campus sexual assault watchdog SAFER Campus. “It is definitely not a surprising response, but it is not an appropriate one either,” says Martino. “A lot of schools offer really, really general safety information in terms of how to keep yourself safe from a ‘predator,’ but they’re really not addressing the fact that if you’re assaulted on campus, the perpetrator is likely a peer . . . and campus rape generally does happen in places where you’re supposed to feel safe—in a dorm room or in this case, a campus academic building.”

Martino says that staging community conversations surrounding sexual assault—like the one Homan notes are in the works—can have an extremely positive effect on a campus reeling from a high-profile sexual assault. Telling students to always watch their back while on campus? Not so much. “It’s incredibly harmful to act as if students are doing something wrong by just walking around,” Martino says. “That’s really disheartening, and I wish we didn’t hear it more often.”

It’s officially Ludicrous Sexual Assault Prevention Tips day on the Sexist! Next up: How to avoid being raped and murdered by a notorious serial killer—by shelling out $19.95 to glean some valuable safety lessons from Ted Bundy’s meticulously preserved 1968 VW Beetle.

Today, I received my media invitation to the “First-Ever Public Unveiling of Ted Bundy’s Deadly VW Beetle.” The gruesome car show will occur at D.C.’s National Museum of Crime and Punishment next Wednesday. Special extra for the ladies: Bundy’s car is being converted into an invaluable “teaching tool” that can help you not get raped and/or murdered. From the NMCP’s press release:

With last week’s move of the John Dillinger 1933 Essex Teraplane getaway car to the Southwest terminal at BWI Airport, the National Museum of Crime and Punishment (NMCP) is welcoming a new vehicle to its main lobby floor.  The media is invited to the first public opportunity to view the car of notorious serial killer Ted Bundy’s 1968 VW Beetle, the automobile used in a slurry of women’s murders from 1974-1977.  The car, purchased by a collector and stored in a private collection until its arrival at NMCP, will serve not only as a unique artifact but also as a teaching tool for museum visitors to learn how to avoid becoming victims of vicious criminals such as Bundy.

Come to satisfy your macabre fascination with a notorious rapist; stay for the public safety tips.

Photo via Ivan Cabrera, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

The worst of the worst, after the jump.

Women: Nature’s victims. According to Valdosta State coppers, women “make easy targets for random acts of violence” for three reasons: (1) they’re dumb; (2) they insist on walking around like dainty little ladies; (3) they go places girls aren’t allowed.

The three main reasons women make easy targets for random acts of violence are:

* Lack of awareness (you MUST know where you are & what’s going on around you.)

* Body language (keep your head up, swing your arms, stand straight up)

* Wrong place, wrong time (DON’T be walking alone in an alley, or driving in a bad neighborhood at night)

One major deficit of female “awareness”: Awareness of that serial killer parked next to you.

Some women have a tendency to get into their cars after shopping, eating, working, etc., and just sit (doing their checkbook, or making a list, etc.). DON’T DO THIS! A predator could be watching you, and this is the perfect opportunity for him to get in the passenger side, put a gun to your head, and tell you where to go. AS SOON AS YOU GET INTO YOUR CAR, LOCK THE DOORS AND LEAVE. . . . If you are parked next to a big van, enter your car from the passenger door. A lot of serial killers attack their victims by pulling them into their vans while the women are attempting to get into their cars.

Better just stick on the ground floor, ladies. First rule of multi-level buildings: Always remember that “stairwells are horrible places to be alone.” Second rule of multi-level buildings: Always remember that elevators are horrible places to be with other people. Ask yourself: Do you really need to get above the lobby today?

Always take the elevator instead of the stairs. (Stairwells are horrible places to be alone.)

* Do not get on an elevator if your instincts tell you that something is wrong (Remember, bad men don’t always look bad).

* Do not stand back in the corners of the elevator, be near the front, by the doors, ready to get off.

* If you get on the elevator on the 25th floor, and the Boogie Man gets on the 22nd, get off when he gets on.

Know your predator shooting statistics. Stop freaking out, delicate ladies: “it most likely WILL NOT be a vital organ.”

If the predator has a gun and you are not under his control, ALWAYS run!

* POLICE only make 4 of 10 shots when they are in range of 3-9 feet. This is due to stress.

* The predator will only hit you (a running target) 4 in 100 times. And even then, it most likely WILL NOT be a vital organ. RUN!

Live in fear of all other humans. If you don’t, you may get yourself raped.

Women are always trying to be sympathetic: STOP IT, it may get you raped, or killed.

Ted Bundy, the serial killer, was a good looking, well-educated man, who ALWAYS played on the sympathies of unsuspecting women. He walked with a cane, or a limp, and often asked “for help” into his vehicle or with his vehicle, which is when he abducted his next victim.

If you don’t gouge his eyes out, whatever happens to you is all your fault. Yes: It actually says that.

If he’s driving, find the right time, and stick your fingers in his eyes. He must watch the road, so choose an unsuspecting time, and gouge him. It maybe your ONLY defense. While he is in shock, GET OUT. (This sounds gross, but the alternative is your fault if you do not act.)

Stepping outside your car at noon on a Monday: Risky business.

BREAKDOWNS: (avoid this by ALWAYS keeping your car in good working order)

* If your car breaks down, you better have a cell phone to call for help, and lock your doors.

* Keep a blanket, and a pair of warm clothes and boots, and a flashlight in your car always for emergencies.

* If you don’t have a cell phone, shame on you.

* If it’s noon on a business day, you MAY want to put your hazards on and walk to safety.  If it’s 2 a.m. and you’re close to a populated and well lighted area, go there ASAP. Otherwise, your best bet is to stay in your vehicle.

Do not leave shelter after sundown.

If you are walking alone in the dark (which you shouldn’t be) and you find him following/chasing you:

* Try to get to a lighted area, preferably a populated area.

* If he’s following you, cross the street. If he follows you, turn around and look at him. He will know that he can now be identified and that he has lost the element of surprise.

* If he chases you, yell for help and run!

* Find an obstacle, such as a parked car, and run around it, like ring around the rosy. This may sound silly, but statistical data shows that this has SAVED LIVES.

I don’t know what this one means, but it doesn’t sound good.

Never let yourself or anyone that you know be a in any type of business (bar, store, restaurant, gas station).

Make sure to sign up for more great tips, in a class where a police officer will almost surely refer to you and your friends as “ladies,” without irony.

Sign up for VSU R.A.D. course. It’s a self-defense course for ladies.

And now, for some less sarcastic commentary: Here is what the sexual assault policy gurus at SAFER Campus have to say about these tips:

The University’s Police Department’s website for Sexual Assault Prevention is deeply offensive, misogynist, heterosexist and perpetuates myths about the reality of sexual assault. . . . It is difficult to believe that University endorses such so-called “life-saving” victim-blaming advice, which frames women as naive “easy targets”, overly “sympathetic” and illogical. This patriarchal and patronizing advice does nothing to address rape culture on campus, date rape or acquaintance rape. The school is informing students that a violent experience of sexual assault is their fault. No information was found that suggests that a sexual assault victim may be male or transgender.

Today, Mediate reported that Man Crunch, the gay dating Web site whose men-kissing Super Bowl ad was rejected by CBS, may be hiding a less-than-progressive agenda. This makes so much sense.

Mediaite’s evidence: (1) Man Crunch’s literature says that the Web site is for men on the “down low,” i.e. they are trapped in the closet; (2) Man Crunch is owned by Avid Life Media, the parent company that also owns extramarital affair facilitator Ashley Madison; (3) both Web sites are perfect for repressed conservative men who want to have great sex without abandoning their politically expedient facade.

But don’t take it from me. Watch the ad closely: Those kissing dudes? They never even kiss. They just kind of rub their faces into each others’ shoulders for a few seconds. Perfect for the dude that’s into other dudes, but is nevertheless totally grossed out by gay stuff.

Ladies: You prefer Antwerpen Toyota. At least, that’s the impression held by the Clarksville, Md. car dealership, which has been circulating the “Ladies prefer” assertion in its advertisements since 2007. In order to keep the ladies happy, the dealership offers up female-friendly extras to waiting customers, including professional manicures, on-site cappuccinos, and pastries.

According to a 2007 story in the Maryland Daily Record, Antwerpen Toyota’s female outreach services initially went far beyond the fingernails. The story read: “On ‘Ladies Days’—Tuesdays and Wednesdays—women who come to get their car serviced can get manicures, pedicures and cappuccinos. And the truly brave can even get their eyebrows and bikini lines waxed.”

Wait: which of us ladies prefer to get their bikini lines waxed at a car dealership?

“I can’t imagine anyone getting their bikini waxed at a car dealership,” insists Ben Messier, Antwerp Toyota’s general manager. Messier says that the dealership’s resident professional manicurist performs up to 25 manicures a day—but offers none of the more intimate spa extras. Not even pedicures. “I’m sure you understand, we’re not trying to do a full-service salon here,” says Messier. “We’re not offering pedicures, shaves, or Brazilians. But if you bring the car in for an oil change, and you’ve got 35 minutes to kill, we can have your nails done by the time you’re finished.”

Then again, the Daily Record story broke before Messier’s time. Messier inherited the “Ladies Day” programming from Bob Schrader, who served as Antwerpen Toyota general manager back in 2007 (he’s with Jim Coleman Infiniti in Rockville now). Schrader says that the bikini wax was never a part of his package. In fact, it’s not even a part of his vocabulary. “I don’t even know what that is,” says Schrader, who was heretofore unaware that the Daily Record story attributed the bikini wax to his Ladies Day regime. “I’ve never heard anything like that in my life. That’s absolutely ludicrous,” he said.

Daily Record reporter Louis Llovio, for the record, couldn’t immediately recall where the four-year-old factoid originated—whether from manager, advertisement,  manicurist, or otherwise. Messier offers up one possibility: “We do offer hand waxing—on cars,” says Messier. “Maybe they jumped from hand waxing to bikini waxing.”

The man never even touched Miranda Vargas, but her body felt him. While riding the Metro, Vargas watched as a man with a “stale, semen smell” inched close to her, opened his legs, and “began playing with himself over his pants,” Vargas says. As the guy publicly masturbated to her, Vargas’ body experienced symptoms of mild shock. She started sweating, breathing rapidly, and overheating. Her mind raced through various exit strategies.

Meanwhile, Vargas struggled to maintain a perfectly calm exterior. “I was so horrified the whole time, I just pretended I was reading my book but I never turned a page,” she says. “When I started breathing faster, I remember I consciously told myself to breathe slower, because I didn’t want the man to know how much he was upsetting me.”

Even the most low-contact public groping incidents assault the nervous system. One woman lay in bed shaking with rage all night after a man swiped her butt at a coffee shop. Another woman dry-heaved after a man grabbed her genitals at a bus stop. One man felt so sick after being deliberately rubbed on the Metro that he was physically unable to look himself in the mirror. Instead, he sat blankly in front of the television all evening until he could fall asleep. Years later, memories of the incident still produce a shudder.

Violent revenge fantasies are common.

Months after 27-year-old Jessica Graves was grabbed in the coffee shop, she still had daydreams about kicking her groper’s ass. “What I wanted to do was push him down the stairs and pound his face into the pavement,” she says. The bus stop victim, 28-year-old Elizabeth, has a recurring fantasy, too. “My anger and my frustration—I got those feelings out in my fantasy,” she says. “In my fantasy, I would turn around and grab him and get someone to grab the Metro police, and he would have gone to jail, and then he would learn that groping isn’t OK.”

One groping victim has spent years reliving his assault, but with one slight revision—the swift downward motion of a sharp pencil.

A couple of years ago, John, then a 23-year-old law student, was sitting on a crowded Red Line train, clutching an open casebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. Halfway through the trip, a new seatmate decided to make it a bumpy ride. “As the train started moving…I felt some
motion from the man next to me—his body was kind of moving slightly up and down against my side,” John says. “At first, I thought this was due to the natural movement of the Metro train, but it soon became clear that the movement was not from the train, but from the man.”

As the train continued down the track, the guy’s movements advanced beyond “natural movement.” “As the train moved on, the [rubbing] got more intense to the point where the man was grinding his side and back, half his ass, and part of his leg up against me,” John says. When John attempted to edge his body away and focus on the reading, his assailant stepped up his activity. “My efforts to get away from him seemed to only embolden him more, and at one point he even reached back to lift up his shirt so the skin of his back was rubbing up against my arm, leg, and side,” he says.

John did nothing. “I just retreated into myself,” he says. Years later, he still fantasizes about taking the pencil in his hand and swiftly stabbing the guy in the leg. Or leaning over and quietly whispering, “If you don’t stop that right now and get the fuck away from me, I’m calling the cops.” But mostly, he thinks about the pencil. “Out of all the scenarios I went through in my mind where I actually did something, this is the one I replay over and over again,” he says. “Of course, I didn’t follow through on it, and I still don’t know if I ever would have been able to. But I do keep thinking about the possibility of attacking my attacker.…It seems more satisfying than trying to embarrass him in front of a train car full of people.” Memories of the minutes-long attack still produce a physical effect in the victim. “I wanted him to feel some sort of physical pain for what he did to me,” he says. “I still do.”

Megan Carpentier, 32, makes gropers feel physical pain. In the decade she spent as a District resident, Carpentier was groped, grabbed, and grinded over and over again. Eventually, she began responding by pushing, elbowing, and stomping. “The crotch-grab—and my lack of reaction to it, honestly—was what pushed me over the edge,” says Carpentier. In 1999, she and some roommates were exiting a crowded Republic Gardens dance floor when a man swooped in for a double grope: “One dude literally just reached down and cupped my genitals over my skirt…without even looking at me. And I just froze,” she says. “He then reached down and did the same thing to my roommate.”

After that, Carpentier understood that the common club practice was a legitimate assault. “[He did this to me] because I had female genitals, and he was bigger, and close enough to grab them, and felt entitled. And it was the first time I realized that,” she says. Since then, Carpentier has been living the fantasy. “The next time some dude groped me in a club…I turned around and punched him in the kidneys,” she says. When another man attempted to grope Carpentier’s friend at (since-shuttered) retro club Polly Esters, Carpentier reached over her friend’s shoulders and “pushed him to the ground,” she says. The latest recipient of Carpentier’s self-defense groped her at an ill-fated Rumors bachelorette party. “Dude walked up behind me, ground his crotch into my ass and attempted to cup both breasts in his hands,” says Carpentier. “He got a 5-inch stiletto to the top of his foot, an elbow in the ribs, and if I’d had less to drink, he might’ve ended up with a sprained wrist.”

The aggressive approach can yield mixed results. Some victims find that no amount of pushing, elbowing, or stabbing can negate a sexual assault. “Almost every victim of assault thinks they could have controlled what happened to them. So you get mad at yourself or blame yourself for what you did or didn’t do,” says local self-defense expert Lauren Taylor. “But even if you do everything you’re ‘supposed’ to do, you were still sexually assaulted.”

Other physical resisters find themselves with less philosophical concerns. Last week, another Rumors-based groping ended in a hospital visit for the victim’s boyfriend. According to police, a woman was with her boyfriend inside the M Street club on Jan. 24 when a stranger approached and groped the woman. The boyfriend responded by confronting the groper, who “without warning or provocation head-butted [the boyfriend] in the face.” For the record, here’s the D.C. police’s official word on assaulting your groper: “The Metropolitan Police Department would never recommend that victims of assaults confront the suspect. This can be extremely dangerous.”

This column is the fourth in a series. Catch up:

Part 1: Touch and Go: How Groping Happens.
Part 2: “I Just Wanted Him to Finish And Leave”: Why Some Groping Victims Stay Silent.
Part 3: “Why Would I Want to Touch Your Ass?”: When Groping Victims Talk Back.

Find all the Sexist’s groping coverage here.

(Illustrations by Brooke Hatfield).

Conservative stunt journalist James O’Keefe—of alleged Mary Landrieu wiretapping “misunderstanding” and ACORN pimp fame—joined forces with another straight guy in 2008 in an attempt to enter into a Massachusetts same-sex marriage. The secretly-videotaped shotgun wedding was cooked up in order to score one of O’Keefe’s more bizarre wingnut points: To prove that government bureaucrats in charge of administering marriage licenses don’t care about love.

“What if two straight men wanted a same-sex marriage?” the video asks to a stock investigative soundtrack, before running the tape of O’Keefe and friend informing Massachusetts government officials that they are 100 percent hetero, dating women, and interested in getting hitched. For the insurance benefits. Here’s the “Gotcha!” moment: The officials don’t appear to give a shit. Probably because no American couple, gay or straight, has ever had to prove to their state government that they really, truly want to fuck each other in order to secure their official paperwork.

O’Keefe and his stunt fiancee take this to mean that same-sex marriage is bad because . . . maybe gay guys who don’t really love each other can get married, now? Or something? Meanwhile, gay men and women have been cornered into opposite-marriages far before the institution of marriage edged away from the strictly heterosexual.

When asked why, exactly, the totally straight O’Keefe and his totally straight friend tried to get gay married, O’Keefe told the Washington Examiner that he was “investigating the way soulless government bureaucrats treat the institution of marriage in Massachusetts.”

Exactly! This is why the government should concern itself solely with administering legal benefits of its citizens’ partnerships, and not at all with the moral business of determining what sorts of people should be allowed to couple up. Thanks for reminding us, O’Keefe.

Question for the columnist: Is this guy a dick, or what?

If that very unfortunate scenario sounds familiar, it’s because last November, Daily Telegraph advice-giver Lesley Garner answered a question from a woman in an eerily similar situation. Garner failed.

Garner’s advice-seeker had been raped, become pregnant, and had the baby. Her husband split, leaving her to raise the child as a single mother. Her question: Should she attempt to rekindle a relationship with the man who had dumped her as a result of her sexual assault?

You may recall how Garner responded: She informed the woman that her rape “wasn’t exactly a rape but a situation between you and your boss that got out of hand.” Garner also insisted that a husband jetting after his wife is impregnated through rape is “a no-brainer . . . No man could contemplate this. He would have found your decision inexplicable.”

In my critique of Garner’s advice (in short, do not advise rape victims that they are not rape victims, and also, please refrain from informing women that their reproductive choices are thoroughly “inexplicable” to other humans), I noted that I was not an advice columnist, but that I suspected the husband in question to be a “dickwad.” Now that we’ve got a legit advice-giver in the form of Carolyn Hax to weigh in on the subject, we may finally learn the answer: Are you a dick for abandoning your wife after she is impregnated from her rape?

But first, the big wind-up:

Oakland, Calif.: Hello Carolyn. A friend’s wife became pregnant as a result of a sexual assault. She has decided to not have an abortion, and doesn’t know yet whether she wants to give the child up for an adoption. Would the husband be a [glass bowl] for refusing to raise this child, and divorcing if necessary? Thanks.

Essentially, the reader is asking Hax this: “Oh, hello Carolyn, my friend’s wife was raped. LONG STORY SHORT, now my friend has been seriously inconvenienced by this, so can you please let him know he’s not a dick for peacing? Thanks.”

Hax delivers a reasoned response that manages to give credit to the difficulty of the husband’s situation while still conveying the fact that, yes, he is a gigantic jackass:

Wow. I think the only happy outcome is one the husband and wife conjure together. Technically, this isn’t something the wife can force on the husband and expect him to agree to joyfully.

That said, technically, this pregnancy wasn’t something to be forced on the wife, and yet it was. So, in a rare case where bean-counting is the way to go, the husband needs to let go of any notion of an ideal outcome here, in direct proportion to the wife’s distance from her notion of an ideal outcome. This is the only fair and decent course.

Finally, there’s the child to be considered, who is obviously innocent, and deserves to enter the world with just as clean a slate as any other child’s.

I’m not saying this wouldn’t be a Herculean challenge for the husband, because it would–but embracing the innocent child strikes me as immeasurably better for the soul than leaving one’s rape-victim wife to be a single mom.

I trust Hax on this one. Here’s why: Observe how Hax refrains from suggesting that (a) perhaps this rape victim was not in fact raped, nor that (b) rape victims who carry their pregnancies to term deserve to be alone for the choices they have made. Incredible. It is thus resolved: abandoning your rape-victim wife is a dick move.

UPDATE: It’s worse than I thought. The rape victim’s husband’s friend weighs in to further contextualize the situation:

Oakland again: Thanks Carolyn. Obviously this whole situation is devastating for them. I don’t know if this make a difference, but the couple is white, and the assailant was Afircan-American, and the husband isn’t exactly progressive when it comes to race relations.

Is there a more grope-centric nightlife destination in the District of Columbia than Cobalt? Out of the dozens of groping stories reported to the Sexist over the past couple of months, two highly non-consensual groping incidents took place inside the Dupont Circle gay bar. In one incident, a man latched onto a woman and didn’t let go until he ejaculated. In another, a man groped another guy’s genitals without warning and offered to pay him for sex. When the grope recipient informed the groper that he was “straight but flattered,” the groper told him that straight men had no place on Cobalt’s high-contact dance floor.

Now: Two gropes does not a Gropetown make. But as far as the Sexist’s limited source material is concerned, Cobalt is outstripped only by the Metrorail system in the frequency of gropes reported in the location. The reason is pretty obvious: Unlike the Red Line, Cobalt is a popular hangout for folks who are actually into the whole groping thing.

One Craigslist user admits he’s into Cobalt grabbing:

I was standing just to the right of the entrance of the upstairs dance bar talking with friends, you came in with a group and walked between my friends and I and groped me as you walked past…..you should have said something…. hit me up.

Some D.C. clubbers have found themselves pleasantly surprised by a surprise grope; other bar-hoppers plan their groping activities well in advance. In another Craigslist posting, a man seeks a partner-in-groping for a night out at D.C.’s bars:

Passing through DC, bi and no gf with me… need another cool masc guy, prefer vgl, masc and hung, to go clubbing with Saturday night (only). Get drunk, help eachother pick up, grope a few guys, and who knows, end up togther or share together :-) be tall, masc hung, vgl, pic and -34 Be good in social settings but not flamers pls

So: How does a venue like Cobalt walk the line between accommodating those men who want to have a good time touching each other, while providing a safe space for those patrons—gay, straight, male, and female—who aren’t interested in the genital assault? After all, Cobalt’s permissive dance floor isn’t solely employed to engineer gay hook-ups; in at least one instance, a straight man picked Cobalt as his venue for sexually assaulting a straight woman.

I posed the non-consensual groping question to Cobalt general manager Mark Rutstein last month. I have yet to hear back.

The battle for ideological dominance in our nation’s capital’s collegiate sex columns continues. Are our local campus columnists on the forefront of radical sex writing, or are they bringing back the good-old-days of referring to all former sex partners as  “trash”?

This week: How to “recycle” last week’s “human trash,” in the bedroom; how getting waaaaaasted will help you get into her pants; why you should never approach the person you’re fucking in public.

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY:

Sex Tip: Georgetown Hoya relationship columnist Colleen Leahey goes green this week by applying the three R’s to drunken GW hook-ups. In short: Your previous sex partners are “trash.” Having sex with a casual hook-up twice means you’re “recycling.” “Human recycling is rather different from rocking your older sibling’s hand-me-downs,” Leahey writes. “It typically involves alcohol, bad judgment and a late-night phone call. However, it happens on college campuses—all the time. So, is there some sort of benefit to this practice, or should an old hook-up be thrown in the trash, never to be touched again?”

Life Lesson: Sex makes everybody feel worthless. “Next time you see your random hook-up out, think about the repercussions of what you’re about to do,” Leahey writes. “Weigh the pros and cons of your situation; if it seems worth it, then feel free to recycle one more time. But do remember, you could wake up the next morning feeling like a piece of trash yourself.”

Progressive Meter: Even environmentalists are vulnerable to the conservative idea that having sex destroys every boy and girl’s precious reserve of purity. ZERO.

—

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND:

Sex Tip: Seal the deal while she’s drunk. UMD Diamondback advice columnist Esti Frischling returns from winter break to dole out advice on how to hook up with the girl you had your eye on last semester. Whatever you do, make sure she’s not sober: “You didn’t man up and have your way with her when you had the chance, and now you’re just a loser with some number in your phone,” Frischling writes. “The next time this happens, you have to capitalize on her tipsy advances.”

Life Lesson: COLLLLEEEEGGGGGE! “I wouldn’t go straight to the sober, daytime date just yet. That’s a serious recipe for disaster. . .  you might not be drunk at that time during the day, meaning you’ll be less confident and she’ll be less attractive,” Frischling writes. “I think you should meet her where you’re both most comfortable: drunk at a bar. You also don’t want to be stuck alone with her when everything goes to shit, you realize you have nothing to talk about, and you’re both terrible dancers.”

Progressive Meter: Buhh. DRUNK.

—

HOWARD UNIVERSITY:

Sex Tip: This time in the Howard University Hilltop’s “He Said . . . She Said” column, the He and She team up to warn undergrads against becoming somebody’s “boo.” According to the Hilltop, “boo” really stands for “Boy Other Option” or “Broad Other Option,” depending upon the gender of the “side jawn” in question. How to be a good boo: “Don’t spend all your money, don’t ask a bunch of questions, don’t expect to meet their friends, don’t go physically farther than your emotions will allow, and never try to come up to them when they’re with another person.”

Life Lesson: Boos can graduate to boyfriends and girlfriends—if they know their role. “We’re young and many of us have lots of options to choose from when it comes to being in a relationship—especially the guys on campus—so I can’t blame them for testing the waters before jumping into commitment,” they write. “But the key to being a good boyfriend/girlfriend is first being a good B.O.O. Play by the rules folks, and you will win.”

Progressive Meter: Some aspects of boo behavior show a respect for your sex partner’s autonomy—a willingness to allow some physical and emotional distance “before jumping into commitment.” Other characteristics of the boo appear to be an entrée into an abusive relationship. Never try to come up to them when they’re with another person! THREE.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

• 32 of the dead are female.
• 21 of the dead are male.

Last year, in other words, 40 percent of people who died in Maryland as a result of domestic violence were male. Right about now, men’s rights activists are surely waiting in the wings, ready to pounce on this statistic as irrefutable evidence that men are victimized by domestic violence at nearly the same rate as women. The truth is much more complicated.

Let’s look at the numbers on the female side first (courtesy of the MNADV’s extensive research).

Of the 32 females who died as a result of domestic violence last year:

• 3 were children.
• 29 were adult women.

Of the 29 adult women:

• 28 were victims of domestic violence.
• The one remaining woman was a domestic violence aggressor who committed suicide. She is the sole occupier of the category of “females who killed themselves or were killed after committing murder/attempting to commit murder.”

Of the 28 adult female victims:

• 10 were wives or ex-wives of the offender.
• 17 were girlfriends or ex-girlfriends of the offender.
• One was a domestic violence victim who committed suicide.

And on the male side of things:

Of the 21 males who died as a result of domestic violence last year:

• 2 were children.
• 19 were adult men.

Of the 19 adult men:

• 9 were victims.
• 10 were domestic violence aggressors who died as a result of their own domestic violence—”males who killed themselves or were killed after committing murder/attempting to commit murder.”

Of the nine male victims:

• 2 were husbands or ex-husbands of the offender.
• 3 were boyfriends or ex-boyfriends of the offender.
• 3 were killed by their current partner’s ex.
• 1 was killed by his ex’s current partner.

Of the ten men who killed themselves or were killed after committing murder or attempting to commit murder:

• 1 man was killed by the police.
• 3 were killed by their partners in self-defense.
• 6 committed suicide.

Of the 53 total dead:

• 27 were killed by gun or rifle.
• 12 were killed by knife.
• 5 were killed by strangulation.
• 4 were killed by vehicle.
• 2 were killed by “physical force/hands.”
• 2 were killed by burning
• 1 cause of death was unknown.

Domestic violence kills in many ways. When it comes to male deaths by domestic violence, men are more likely to be killed as a result of attempting to murder their own partners than as a result of their partner’s aggression. Men who are victims of domestic violence are almost as likely to be killed by a partner’s ex than by their partners themselves. “Domestic violence is not as simple and straightforward as people think,” says Michele Cohen, MNADV’s Executive Director. “The work that we do attempts to capture the full picture of all the individuals who die as a result of domestic violence—both victims and offenders.”

Tonight, the MNADV will hold its 22nd Annual Memorial Service for all the “women, men, and children” who died over the past year from domestic violence. Find more information about the Annapolis, Md. service here [PDF].

In response to some off-the-cuff criticism of R. Kelly I wrote eight months ago, a reader writes in:

You seem like you may have some sexual tension issues going on. I hate to sound superficial, but if you are as attractive as me (I’m pretty damn good looking) we should get together. This is a NSA offer only. I don’t wand to fuck every girl in the world, but your attitude added you to the list. Holla at me.

I still don’t have any advice for my friend on how to deal with her love-struck commenter. But I do have one tip for any blogger who finds herself on the receiving end of a booty-call from a reader who assumes the blogger to be a frigid but possibly extremely attractive woman who may be interested in no-strings-attached sex with an anonymous R. Kelly enthusiast: Hit publish!

“Principles 101: Feminism, Manhood, and You” [PDF], a guide to Men’s Rights Activism from Manhood101.com, contains tips on everything from restoring your manhood to fighting feminism to . . . brushing your teeth twice daily. (Thanks to a reader for the tip).

Seven golden style tips for the Men’s Rights Activist community, after the jump.

1. SPEECH. “Many people make the mistake of not speaking because they have no new information to convey,” the guide laments. ” They fail to realize that new information is not as stimulating as how you experience things.” Let’s see how this applies to the realm of picking up women:

Bad pick-up line:

“Hello, how are you?”

Good pick-up line:

“Wow . . . I like how your hair is straight in some places, and then there are these little strands that curl off of it. They remind me of some fashion magazine cover where the hair is perfectly arranged like a little piece of art, but since you’re here in person, I feel like I’m talking to the cover in real life. I want to touch your hair and feel how soft it is. I picture it smelling like coconuts or something sweet. Your hair is making me think dirty thoughts. I want to tug on it and kiss your neck. I have a crush on your hair. It gives me a nice ‘ahhhhhh’ feeling deep inside like when you eat a warm chocolate chip cookie right out of the oven.”

2. BODY TYPE. It’s OK if you’re short, but DO NOT BE FAT:

First, you must recognize the difference between a disorderly physical appearance and the symptoms of a disorderly life. Being short is not under your control. You were born that way. Being fat, however, is under your control.

Being fat is a result of disorderly eating habits. Although people today claim that discriminating against fat people is wrong, disorderly conditions should be discriminated against, especially when a person has control over their disorder. Smoking, obesity, bad hygeine, decaying teeth and other symptomps of a disorderly life are naturally offensive to others. You should do whatever is necessary to rectify such disorderly conditions.

3. FOOTWEAR: Avoid stylish elevator shoes.

[B]eing short is not unattractive in itself, as are many other perceived shortcomings society arbitrarily invalidates you for possessing. The problem begins when society attaches an undesirable assocation to your height. Because society invalidates you for being short, you believe yourself to be unattractive. This belief causes you to become anti-social and express unattractive social behaviors. . . . . The solution is not to change your physical characteristics, rather you must change the negative associations made with those characteristics.

. . . Stylish elevator shoes, plastic surgery and laser hair removal are not the answer. The solution is twofold; you must develop a functional perspective regarding attraction that emphasizes your ability to create order, and you must break the dysfunctional, negative associations held by women.

4. BODY LANGUAGE. Pretend as if you are human.

When appropriate, use your hands and arms to enhance what you’re saying. Drawing with your hands or using gestures to indicate something relevant reinforces what you’re attempting to express.

5. DRESS: Men who can properly exercise their authority do not require pants.

Being stylish is unnecessary (not to mention a pointless preoccupation with a dysfunctional social expectation). Having an orderly appearance should be your only focus where clothing is concerned. Properly exercising your authority can accomplish much more than a pair of designer jeans. Being unable to create orderly social interactions is what prevents most men from attracting women. Not lack of fashion sense or good looks.

6. HYGIENE: Although women are more stimulated by power than physical appearance, you still have to brush your teeth, dude.

Studies show that facial symmetry is attractive. If your eyeball was an inch lower, it would break your facial symmetry, causing
disorder to your appearance. This would be a major breach of your natural physical order.

Order in any form, whether in nature or in our physical bodies attracts us. This is why an orderly appearance is important. Granted some men were born with deviated septums or crooked teeth, but thankfully, women are more stimulated by the order generated from exercising your male authority.

However, this does not mean you should neglect your physical appearance entirely.

It’s important to practice good hygiene because it maintains an orderly physical appearance. Brush your teeth at least twice a day. Shower. Shave if necessary. Comb your hair or cut it cleanly.

7. STARING ETIQUETTE:

Look directly at people instead of staring at them out of your peripheral vision.

Photo via Migraine Chick, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

In last week’s Sexist Beatdown, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I discussed the great social dilemma facing girls today. It concerns, of course, “The Fat Talk,” a ritual that girls of every size practice in order to keep their self-esteem firmly in check. Behold, the “Fat Talk” Model of Female Friendship:

Girl 1: I am fat.

Girl 2: Me too.

So, girls: Do you cement your spot in the social hierarchy of girlhood by engaging in this self-destructive chatter about how fat, dumb, and ugly you are? Or do you risk being cast out of girlhood’s good graces by holding yourself with confidence?

Commenters to the rescue!

Julia, too, is vexed by the incessant “fat talk” of women and girls:

Wait no! I need more practical tips on how to handle fat talk! It is absolutely RAMPANT among my friends, and I have no idea how to handle it in a constructive and healthy way. It doesn’t help matters that I’m thin, and so any objections I raise are usually met with “well you wouldn’t understand, anyway.” Actually, when I was younger that used to cut me deeply, because it felt like I was being ostracized for being thin, and I SO BADLY wanted to participate in fat talk with a level of authority. I don’t even want to think about how messed up that is… I was supposed to want to be thin, but then everyone [female] HATED me for being thin, so then I hated me for being thin, even though I supposedly possessed something praise-worthy. Which was/is confusing, to say the least.

Anyway! Point being, does anyone have ideas/stories about how they have successfully navigated the fat talk mine field? I for one freeze in fear every time the subject comes up. (Because even more than a decade later, it still signifies being left out, in my mind). How do I effectively communicate concern about body image issues without coming across as condescending or dismissive? I love my friends, I think they’re all beautiful, and I love that we don’t all look the same! Why does self-esteem have to be some sort of messed up self-sacrificial zero sum game?

Em suggests getting it all out over a couple of beers:

Julia, a friend and I successfully navigated this by just being honest. We were up late drinking one night and I honestly said what I thought for years, that I was really jealous of her 5′11, 120-pound frame. She laughed and said she had always been jealous of my curves! From then on out we’ve always discussed our INSECURITIES, not our supposedly awful, ugly bodies, knowing that we’re being ridiculous.

Of course, I only have this sort of candidness with one friend, so I don’t know if that’s a really group-wide solution. But for the girls you are really close to, I think it helps to think of the real reasons you engage in this kind of “fat contest” and then to be honest about it. It usually comes down to jealousy—I’ve had to explain to my boyfriend, men look at women to check them out, women look at women to compare. Constantly and exhuastively. If we talk about this pissing contest and we’re all aware of it, sometimes we can transcend above it.

Of course, this assumes the maturity of all parties. Ha.

b-bop notes how frighteningly pervasive the “fat talk” is:

I have a friend who is extremely gorgeous and always turns heads wherever she goes….she thinks her teeth are a major embarrassment because they’re “too pointy” and is sensitive about her age for some reason…

I have known girls who were size 0 and model height claim to be fat…

Affects everyone I suppose.

Frankie explains how “fat talk” works as a cover for all manner of “insufficient talk”:

I have an awesome group of close female friends. I don’t think a single one of us is the same height, weight or shape and yet we’ve all engaged in this weird ‘fat talk’ thing, where by one of us gets to feel guilty for being the skinniest/lightest/curviest/tallest/shortest or whatever is deemed the most awesome trait of that five minutes whilst everyone else feels terrible for not winning the contest to be most beautiful right that second.

It’s ridiculous because there is no way that my gorgeous six foot tall friend should weigh the same as I do, or that my girlfriend should be both proud of and embarressed by her breasts because they are somehow both something to be envied and ashamed of at one and the same time. We all know this but still engage in this behaviour. So we’ve been trying something new, something my therapist suggested when I was being treated for Anorexia.

When any one of us says ‘I feel fat/ugly/whatever’ we do our best to make the time to sit down and talk about what is making us feel bad. It’s not ideal but it seems to be working, enough so that I’m more likely to get a call from a friend now saying she feels low and could do with a chat than I am to be asked to reassure her that she’s not hideous.

One thing we seem to have noticed is that nine times out of ten, something which is unrelated to looks is going on but our self esteem is so tied up in how we see our bodies that we translate feeling bad about anything into feeling bad about how we look. So for example, if I forget to do something important aswell as feeling terrible about forgetting I ALSO feel fat or ugly, even though there is no way the two have anything to do with each other. What’s more, I will feel so bad about feeling fat that I am more likely to mention that as the reason I am upset. I did used to think this was just because I had an eating disorder, but it turns out that the same is true to a greater or lesser degree for all my close female friends.

Photo by SantaRosa, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Last week on the Sexist, the breast massage happened.

1. “The Breast Massage Will Happen”: Inside the Culture of Sexual Harassment at the Marijuana Policy Project, in which a work e-mail from the boss employs the phrase “bone girl.”

2. Date Rape Anthem: Ke$ha’s “Blah Blah Blah”, in which if you get drunk and shut up, Ke$ha may attempt to gain access to your penis.

3. Touch and Go: How Groping Happens, in which the “Sideboob Handshake” rises again.

4. “Why Would I Want to Touch Your Ass?” When Groping Victims Talk Back, in which groped women respond.

5. The Penis Monologues: A Primer on Republican Genitals, Through the Years, in which MY PENIS IS ANGRY!!!

Photo via the Library of Congress

Yesterday, the New York Daily News reported that a New York woman recently filed a lawsuit against former NFL player Eric Green, claiming that Green “forcibly sodomized her” in his Scottsdale, Ariz. condo. According to the woman’s suit, Green claimed to be taking her back to the condo so that “he could telephone his dealer, get some marijuana, and get high,” and also, bizarrely, to “introduce her to his friend, the Prince of Bahrain.” Green and the woman began having consensual sex, the suit claims. But when Green realized that his sex partner was transgender, the woman claims that Green held her down and forcibly sodomized her against her will.

At this point, no armchair observer in this case could reasonably determine whether this woman’s story checks out or not. But the New York Daily News commenters are already inventing dozens of reasons why the assault could never have occurred—and if it did, she deserved it!

According to the commenters, the woman engaged in a variety of behaviors that screamed she was “asking for it.” They include:

ENTERING A ROOM. Sure, this commenter doesn’t write in full sentences. But intelligent women will still heed his advice: Never enter a room by your own free will:

She went to a room with on her own free will. Bad move.

BEING A TRANSGENDER WOMAN. No. 1 way not to evaluate claims of rape: “So let me guess what happened”:

So let me guess what happened. he met “her” in a club, took her back to his condo thinking “she” was a woman, then it got all “Crying Game”. Shocked and embarrassed he told her to get out. “She” in turn was humiliated and even though “she” isn’t a woman, did what many women that seek revenge on men do . . . cry rape?

BEING IN THE VICINITY OF A PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYER. This commenter claims that anyone who goes back to the home of an NFL player to party—even a straight, cisgender, red-blooded, meat-eatin’, football-lovin’ American dude—should reasonably assume that that football player will rape him. Observe how thoroughly this commenter is not a bigot!: No matter who the rape victim is, he or she still deserves it!

Man/Woman/Gay/Straight/Transgender/Whatever…you go home with a biga$$ football player you don’t know, you are playing Russian Roulette. I wouldn’t feel sorry if it were any of the above. Has no one learned anything about personal responsibility for personal safety?

BEING IN THE VICINITY OF ANYONE WITH TESTOSTERONE. A closely-related argument: Big football players just can’t help themselves:

Half the NFL players I would never want to meet in the bedroom, they are hulking gigantic people. If you disrupt the testosterone/steriods then your on your own.

BEING A TRANSGENDER WOMAN, PART TWO. Did you know that if you are transgender, your rape is so much less crucial than the consensual sex partners a professional football player prefers?:

Let’s keep an open mind about this. Maybe Green has a fetish for transgenders.

BEING RAPED BY A PERSON WHO HAS FRIENDS. Oh, this old standby:

why are you people so quick to assume that any of this is true. all of his friends know him and know this is something he isnt even capable of doing. why be so quick to jump on the media bandwagon. because some person who obviously likes to file lawsuits everywhere it goes were supposed to beleive. dont be so quick to judge because if you knew him like i do you would know that he is one of the nicest, happiest person you ever met, he lights up a room when he enters it so instead of going with the looney maybe you should support the one who is truly the victim. ERIC.

BEING A TRANSGENDER WOMAN, PART THREE. According to commenter “RotorRooter”—surely, “the dominant expert on the subject—this woman’s story is false because she is just too womanly!

I can almost guarantee that this was a situation in which he was naive and did not even know that this woman was actually born a man. Chances are that he tried to get intimate with her, she told him that she was experiencing her menstrual cycle, and offered her backside instead (happens all the time on Jerry Springer- LOL!). Afterward, she saved some DNA evidence and made up this cockomamy (no pun intended) story as a get-rich-quick scheme.

TALKING ABOUT YOUR RAPE. Congratulations to commenter “ccb94.” Never has a victim-blaming argument come so close to exploding my brains out of my fucking head. Here you go:

I bet he never touched her. If he did, she wouldn’t be this mad. I don’t take those harmones, I am born with them and know that is how a woman would be. If she were raped, she would be acting differently and more quietly!!!

This one’s for the tweens. Say you’re a typical seventh-grade girl. And so, as is typical for a girl your age, a good deal of your existence is devoted to self-loathing. You hate everything about yourself—your skin, your weight, your clothes, your hair, the way you eat, the way you talk, the way you walk, the way you look in a swimsuit, the way you look in shorts, the way you look in pants, the way you look to boys, the way you look to other girls.

Perhaps you are wondering when this hell on Earth is going to end? When you’re going to gain a little bit of confidence in yourself? When you’ll be able to do things humans do—eat, walk, talk, dress, swim—without hating yourself for it? Eight grade, maybe? Ho ho, not so fast, girl who doesn’t want to hate herself anymore! As Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I discover in this edition of Sexist Beatdown, insecurity is all part of the social hierarchy of girl culture. Sure, a little bit of confidence might help you live a full, human life—but it just might make all the other girls in school hate you.

Sady has already laid the groundwork on this pervasive negativity of girlhood, in which  a social order is built upon this delicate balance between feeling like shit and making other girls feel like shit, too. Fast fact: according to Rachel Simmons‘ Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, the no. 1 way to put yourself on the fast track to social hell is to be a confident girl. In order to avoid appearing too confident—while keeping other girls self-loathing as well!—passive-aggressive social strategies develop. Sady points to two particularly odious rituals of girl culture:

a. The Complinsult. Sady on the “complinsult”:

Here’s one of the best I have ever received, which I keep close to my heart: “Your outfit is amazing! I think it’s so great that you can wear that out in public. I’d never have the nerve.” The words are saying “I suck and you are awesome,” and yet? That is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what it means.

b. The Fat Talk. Sady on the “Fat Talk”:

For years, I thought this was some grody stereotype that you only found in male stand-up comedians’ routines about how women are awful. But then I met women who actually did it: the thing where, before ordering dinner at a restaurant, you all talk about how you should order this and you absolutely cannot order that, because you are so disgusting and you cannot stick to your diet and eating a cheeseburger will literally send you right straight to hell, and if you are the girl who straight-up says she wants some nachos so covered in cheese and guacamole and various meats that they might as well not even have any chips involved – just a big mess of meats and milk fat and squished-up avocados, that is the experience for which you are aiming, and also it would help if the entire thing had sour cream all over it – well, you just might have earned yourself a Complinsult about how brave you are with your dietary habits, young lady.

Any social order which denies girls the most delicious nachos of all simply cannot stand. So: How do we get out of this mess?

AMANDA: Before we begin this conversation, I should inform you that I am fat, and also that I think it’s so great that you’re the type of girl who could post a long, introspective essay on self-esteem and female relationships, because I would never have had the nerve to say such a thing in public.

SADY: I think it’s really brave of you to admit that in public, Amanda, considering the sort of backlash you are likely to get from people who think it is stupid! Although I, myself, have a hard time concentrating on what you are saying, because mostly I am thinking about how ugly I am at the moment. Have we done the rounds yet? Do we need more backhanding?

AMANDA: I think we’re fine for now. Until you start to get too confident! Then, I will commence with the outright shaming.

SADY: HA. This is something I have been thinking a lot about, the shaming! And it had two causes: one, the Clay Shirky piece I read [Quick plot overview: Dude thinks women just need to act more confident, and all the problems of women will be solved. -Ed.] and then used as a platform for my particular dive off the Deep End. And, two, the fact that I Googled myself.

AMANDA: Oh continue!

SADY: And the first thing I thought, after commencing the Googling, was—not that there weren’t nice things and bad things and one bad thing from a guy who wrote a bad thing about me before and then had to list it in his top-trafficked blog posts of the year, I think because I read it 9,000 times—the FACT THAT I HAD A GOOGLE PRESENCE sent me into this weird shame spiral. I was like, “Oh, no! For every person that knows about me, there is ONE MORE CHANCE for someone to HATE MY ASS SEVERELY!” And this led a very strange series of reflections. Which I will not dominate the discussion with, because they are boring.

AMANDA: I’ll reflect on something: I feel like for much of my adolescence, I was both repulsed by and unable to ignore the self-shaming hallmarks of female bonding. I hated myself, for sure, most furiously during the 7th-8th grade years, but I was also extremely uncomfortable with other girls expressing their own imaginary failures—the “I’m too fats” or the “I’m too uglies” or the “I’m too dumbs.” I think I did realize at the time that this was an odd form of bonding that had to be engaged with in order to prove your friendship to the other person—”you’re not fat! you’re not ugly!”—but I never felt comfortable engaging in those kinds of proclamations.

SADY: Right. And I think this is something that I actually ran up against when I started to engage with other feminists: like, people would point out that I apologized for something trivial ninety thousand times over the course of the discussion, or couldn’t have a conversation without being like, “By the way, have I pointed out that my outfit is horrible?” But it was very hard to get over, even though I could notice it when other women did it and provide support for them in that respect. And I think that it’s interesting, in that those things can become social currency among girls—you have to apologize for taking up whatever space you take up—and is pretty clearly part of the Patriarchy deal which is that women aren’t supposed to take up space. But it gathers a new level of nuance. Like, somehow, we’re so caught up in this that it exists even when no dudes are present in the room, and we self-lacerate and lacerate each other to the same degree.

AMANDA: I agree, and now thinking back on it, I think part of me, as a kid, just wanted my friends to deal with all that horrible shit silently. I didn’t want to talk about that stuff, so when my friend in the 8th grade who was stick-thin repeatedly complained about how fat she was, I got annoyed at her, instead of understanding what a fucked-up situation she was in and talking about THAT. I didn’t have that kind of awareness then however, and I wonder where those kinds of conversations would have situated me in the female social group I was in.

SADY: Right. Like, allow me to present you with two ways I have handled this conversation in the past: “What are you talking about?! YOU WEIGH LESS THAN I DO.” Which amounts to, basically: shut up, your body insecurities are not worth my time. Or: “What are you talking about?! THAT IS SO SELF-LOATHING.” Which, while engaged in with a slightly purer intent, still translated to: shut up, your bodily insecurities are not worth my time. Like, instead of engaging women on their insecurities, I would try to shut them down. Which is clearly super feminist, right?

AMANDA: Right? I think the way that I handled those situations was to, again, put it in the perspective of this hierarchy where a) someone skinnier than me was saying she was fat, which b) implied that i was fat, which c) made me lash out at this person in some way. It’s certainly interesting to see how boys in our culture at least have defined their social hierarchies by boasting, while girls have done it by passive-aggressively cutting themselves down in order to lift themselves up in another way.

SADY: Right. And I think that this is where “Odd Girl Out,” the book I have been reading that I think everyone should read, and also the “Trashing” essay from forever ago [Quick plot overview: This shit that little girls do? Grown feminist women do it, too. -Ed.] comes into play. Because, the thing is, we are dealing with this excessively complex hierarchy wherein (A) Women aren’t supposed to value themselves over and above the people around them, (B) Women, to demonstrate how not-selfish they are, are supposed to be nice all the time, and (C) Women find it easier to lash out at OTHER WOMEN for violating these tenets than to examine the fucked-up rules in the first place, but (D) You still have to win the Nicest Person in America trophy, so you can never express the lashing-out in a direct way. It has to look like something else.

AMANDA: The trick for me has always been staying out of that horrific, horrific structure without shunning other women.

SADY: Yeah, exactly. Like, shaming women for DOING this isn’t exactly breaking away from the overall structure of women-shaming, you know?

AMANDA: that’s one of the main complaints about the Rant About Women, which that it explicitly tells women that the way out of this trap is just to act like dudes. When the point is that we don’t get to choose, actually. The pull-yourself-out-of-your-gender-by-your-own-bootstraps argument doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

SADY: Right. And I think we can agree that this is perhaps overly simplistic.

AMANDA: this is where we come up with a better solution. :-/

SADY: HA! Um, carousel rides for everyone? Overthrow the capitalist system? For me, I guess I’m situated at a weird place with this argument, which is the place I always wind up in with structure/agency arguments. Which is: YOU, by yourself, cannot singlehandedly escape the system. Your bootstraps are NOT THAT POWERFUL. However, you cannot say that there is no way to RESIST the system, in your own personal life. Like, even if I acknowledge that registering www.sadydoyleisthebestever.com will have more negative consequences than positive ones, being freaked out and self-sabotaging and constantly downplaying everything are ALSO not likely to have the most positive consequences. Does that make sense? Am I point-missing, here?

AMANDA: That makes sense to me. But I mean, I also haven’t had significant issues with the typically feminine self-esteem stuff since I left high school, so maybe I’m one of the lucky ones. [OK, actually, in retrospect, this is totally not true! I think what has actually happened is that I have become so accustomed to the casual and absurd self-loathing that women experience (i.e. "I'm fat") that I don't even recognize it anymore, I just consider it a constant fixture of my life. Fuck! -Ed.]

SADY: I am building an escape pod from this whole deal where I basically surround myself with ladies who tell each other how great they are all the time, and are cool about ladies! That’s what I’m doing. JOIN THE LADIES ARE GREAT PARTY, EVERYONE. That’s my shitty little personal solution that doesn’t fix everything! YAY LADIES WOOOOO.

AMANDA: Maybe we can all pitch in for a cruise ship or something.

SADY: HA! If there are any super-rich ladies, maybe they can help us build Self-Esteem Island. That seems like a solution! Yes, I think we’ve just fixed it. ALL BY OURSELVES. RIGHT HERE. YOU SAW IT HAPPEN.

AMANDA: well great! I’m going to have a nap then.

SADY: Okay! I’m eating a cheeseburger. Like, THREE of them. RIGHT NOW.

AMANDA: Oh shit I forgot. I REALLY want those nachos you spoke of.

SADY: Extra guacamole is a feminist act, dude. Enjoy!

Photo by bugeaters, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

This week, it was revealed that accused Mary Landrieu phone-tapping conspirator Stan Dai, 24, was once a promising aspiring playwright. In 2004, while a student at the George Washington University, Dai penned a dramatic piece entitled “The Penis Monologues” for campus conservative newspaper The Patriot.

In the great anti-feminist tradition of college-aged male Republicans, there have been many “The Penis Monologues.” Over the years, dozens of these men have been brave enough to bare the innermost thoughts concerning their genitalia. Mainly: “Wahhh! Why is ‘The Vagina Monologues’ only about vaginas! Pay attention to my penis!”

Having trouble paying suitable tribute to every 20-something Republican dude’s genitals? A quick primer on the many “The Penis Monologues,” after the jump:

“The Penis Monologues,” 1990’s, by Penn State student Jason Cassidy.

Penis Insight: According to student newspaper the Daily Collegian, “‘One monologue is about a guy—after having sex he tries to pee but he can’t control his penis so he’s peeing all over this girl’s bathroom and eventually pees on the girl,’ [explained one] performer . . . At the end of the show, each performer will make one last appearance clad in just his underwear. He will then tell the audience his favorite nickname he has heard for a penis and make different orgasm sounds.”

Anti-Feminist Ire: “A guy wrote a script that’s kind of mocking Vagina Monologues—well it’s more so a response to The Vagina Monologues,” a performer told the Collegian. “He put together a series of monologues performed by all men. It’s all about sex, masturbation, peeing and all of the crude testosterone things guys talk about.”

—

“The Penis Monologues,” 2002, by Oregon State University student David Rapoza.

Penis Insight: Due to a birth defect (?), David Rapoza’s penis is incapable of gaining your consent (or something?):

So I thought about my penis. I’m positive he’d sport a black leather trench coat and titanium sunglasses. He’s got a terrible case of Keannu-envy. He’d also drive a Beamer while head-banging to the harmony of ‘NSYNC. What does he say? Nine times out of 10, he begs for more attention. Yeah, he’s demanding like that. The tenth time out of 10, he asks you to repeat yourself. He lost his ears during the third trimester and sometimes has trouble reading your lips.

Anti-Feminist Ire: Um: “Bobbitt has become a trendsetter. A firestorm of insane copycats rages after the spark of her famous gender-war crime. According to Time Magazine, over a hundred cases have been documented in Thailand alone. The penis is a symbol of power. Cut the symbol off, and what do men have left to rule you with? Their brains? Ha! This must be the rationale supporting penis decapitation.”

—

“The Penis Monologues,” 2004, by George Washington University student Stan Dai.

Penis Insight: “MY PENIS IS ANGRY!!!!!!! You want to know what happened to my penis? Joan happened to my penis! There I was, sleeping peacefully when Joan stormed in and dragged me out for ‘an educational program.’ I thought was going to see Mr. Rogers! But nooooooo! It turned out to be the ‘Whine-gina Monologues!’”

Anti-Feminist Ire: From the piece’s Editor’s Note: “What are these vaginas angry about? Tampons, thong underwear, and gynecologists. Shouldn’t feminists be more concerned with encouraging women to go to the gynecologist to prevent cervical, uterine, and breast cancer (which, of course, are the fault of evil repressive men)? Why must the only reference to the sanctity of motherhood be given to a lesbian couple? Can’t men be more than just sperm donors and rapists in a feminist’s world? Justice Blackmun doesn’t even get a shout-out!”

—

“The Penis Monologues,” 2005, by Roger Williams University College Republicans.

Penis Insight: In order to combat a presentation of the Vagina Monologues on campus, Roger Williams College Republicans constructed a gigantic penis, dubbed “Testaclese.” From the National Review:

”Testaclese’ tipped the scales when he approached the university Provost, Edward J. Kavanagh, outside the student union. Apparently taking him/it for a giant mushroom, Provost Kavanagh cheerfully greeted him. But when Testaclese presented him with an honorary award as a campus ‘Penis Warrior,’ the stunned official realized that it was no mushroom. After this incident, which was recorded on videotape, the promoters of P-Day were ordered to cease circulating their flyers and to keep Testaclese off campus grounds. Mindful of how school officers had never once protested any of the antics of Vagina warriors, the P-warriors did not comply. The Testaclese costume was then confiscated and formal charges followed.

Anti-Feminist Ire: According to the National Review, “Unhappily, P-Day may be the only effective means of countering V-Day with all its c-fests, graphic lollipops, intrusive questionnaires, outsized effigies of vaginas and its thematic anti-male play.”

—

“The Penis Monologues,” 2006, by University of Rhode Island student Chris Ferdinandi [Update: not a Republican!]

Penis Insight: Chris Ferdinandi discovers the shocking secret of the “Penis Monologues”—that there’s nothing progressive about a bunch of guys talking about their dicks:

So how about it, guys? Feel liberated? Yeah, me neither. I could go on and on with more examples: stories about men circle-jerking as they learn how to enjoy their penises together; a lament about all the injustices committed against penises—’turn and cough,’ ungroomed women, kung-fu grip; me shouting the word dick louder and louder to free the word from its negative social connotations.

Anti-Feminist Ire: Surely, the feminists are to blame for this. “But honestly, none of that does anything to express the true value of manhood and masculinity. If anything, it reduces men to their genitals, and it’s quite obvious that The Monologues does the same thing to women. Ironically, that’s something they accuse men of doing to them on a fairly regular basis.”

Photo via Sundve, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

In this week’s episode of the Real World D.C., Ty gets romantic in McFaddens; random lady in purple leggings gets some action; Josh isn’t getting his dick sucked. Refresh yourself with the first, second, third, and fourth episode sex recaps here).

The top 10 sex-ish moments of the third episode, after the jump.

10. JOSH’S MOTHER TATTLES ON HIS GIRLFRIEND

Josh’s mom calls in to inform him that somebody in Philly saw GF Ashley kissing some guy called “Richie.”

9. CALLIE IS NOT ATTRACTED TO SINGLE MEN

He does.

8. TY AND EMILY HAVE A SERIOUS TALK

Ty wants to do it, then gets philosophical on gender: “For Emily to put on a facade and pretend she has no feelings, pretend she’s not a woman, it kind of makes me lose a little respect for her.”

7. CALLIE REVEALS HER ADDICTION TO DRUNK DIALING

Emily: “That’s a douchebag. Hang up the phone.”

6. JOSH CRIES

“The pain of my nose being pierced, and the pain of Ashley allegedly cheating … they’re both hard to deal with.”

5. TY MASSAGES BUTT

Emily: “Will you massage my butt? That’s my biggest turn-on.”

4. JOSH MAKES OUT WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND FOR A WEEK

3. . . . BEFORE MAKING OUT WITH LADY IN SPARKLY PURPLE LEGGINGS

Erika: “I kinda feel like Josh is a scumbag.”

2. JOSH BREAKS UP WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND

His last words: “I’m not getting my dick sucked, which I could be.”

1. TY TELLS EMILY HE LOVES HER

. . . inside McFadden’s.

The women’s poll asked questions like these: Have you ever been groped? How did you react? Did you report the incident? The men’s poll, on the other hand, asked questions like these: Have you ever groped a woman? Do you think groping is morally wrong? Do you think it’s inappropriate to furtively sniff a woman’s hair?

The gender-specific polling left us with a significant information gap. How many men are victims of groping, anyway? Do male groping victims call the police? How do they process the experience? Do they scream, hit, freeze, or quietly escape? And how many women have reached out and touched a man without his consent?

Below, four stories from D.C.’s male groping victims —and the testimony of one female groper.

“[I] could barely look myself in the mirror.”

A couple of years ago, a local law student was sitting on a crowded Red line train when his seat-mate decided to make it a bumpy ride. “As the train started moving . . . I felt some motion from the man next to me—his body was kind of moving slightly up and down against my side,” says the student, who was busy studying a casebook for class. “At first, I thought this was due to the natural movement of the Metro train, but it soon became clear that the movement was not from the train, but from the man.”

As the train continued down the track, the guy’s movements advanced beyond the realm of “natural movement.” “As the train moved on, the movements got more intense to the point where the man was grinding his side and back, half his ass, and part of his leg up against me,” the student says. When the student attempted to edge his body away and focus on the reading, his assailant stepped up his activity. “My efforts to get away from him seemed to only embolden him more, and at one point he even reached back to lift up his shirt so the skin of his back was rubbing up against my arm, leg, and side,” he says.

The escalating rubbing left the student “horrified and disgusted.” But as the train approached the student’s station, another response hit—”extremely frightened.” The assailant was trapping him in the seat, and he’d have to confront him to get out. At the last minute, the confrontation was avoided—one station before the student’s stop, the man abruptly exited the train. The student hadn’t uttered a word. “I got home to my apartment that night and could barely look myself in the mirror,” he says. “I was scared, disgusted, felt violated, and also was pissed off at myself for not doing anything.”

The crowded, enclosed train isn’t the only breeding ground for D.C. public transport groping; gropers have been known to stage their assaults in all corners of the Metrorail system. Another of the District’s male groping victims got grabbed while ascending from the Foggy Bottom station on an escalator. The man “felt someone drag their hand along the bottom of my ass and then give it a squeeze,” he says. “I looked back and it was a 20-something woman . . . She just gave me this ‘dare you’ smile back.”

As he stepped off the escalator, the woman commented about “loving a good ass,” then walked away. The victim, who said nothing at the time, says he had mixed feelings on the event: “I was kind of stunned and torn between outrage—how dare you grab—and flattery—hey, she likes my ass. And then wondering what the hell was wrong with me for feeling flattered.”

Later, the man was groped again on the Foggy Bottom stop’s escalator—this time, going down. As he descended into the station, “someone behind me slipped their hand into my back pocket,” he says. “I turned around and it was a lady in her 40s or 50s. She just smiled and told me I should be careful leaving my back pockets unbuttoned,” he says. “I was just . . . flabbergasted. . . . I never had a response for either of them, vocally or otherwise, other than stepping away. I’m not sure why.”

—
“I was too stunned to punch him.”

Date Rape Anthem: The parade of female-sung Date Rape Jams continues. Kiely Williams‘ “Spectacular,” a song about getting wasted, passing out, and having the most incredible sex of your life!

Relevant Lyrics:

Last I remember I was face down
Ass up, clothes off, broke off, dozed off
Even though I’m not sure of his name
He could get it again if he wanted
Cause the sex was spectacular
The sex was spectacular
The sex was spectacular
The sex was spectacular

Why It’s So Rapey: Although Williams insists—several times—that the sex was “spectacular,” she also reiterates that she doesn’t remember the damn thing. “What was I drinking, I can’t believe I blacked out,” she purrs, before getting specific on the sweeping memory loss: “I hope he used a rubber, or I’m a be in trouble, problem is I don’t remember, except for (unintelligible).”

From time to time, commenters on this blog will pose the following burning question about consent: So, what if your sex partner was too drunk to consent to sex—she was ass up, clothes off, broke off, dozed off, and blacked out. But what if—what if—when she wakes up the next day, she’s totally pumped about what she can’t remember happened the night before? [See: The controversy over broke off, dozed off consensual sex at American University last year].

What if, indeed? Well, OK: If the lady in question is heading into the recording studio to sing the praises of the stallion who spectacularly sexed her when she was passed out, that stallion is probably in the clear as far as his legal situation is concerned.

That doesn’t put him in the clear as far as my feminist shaming is concerned, however. I understand that the exact moment a potential sex partner becomes too drunk to fuck is not always obvious. But surely, dozing off in the middle of sex is a good indication that you should stop, no matter how spectacular it was when she was actually coherent. You’ve got to have meaningful consent before and throughout the act, no matter how she feels about it the next day. If your sex partner’s kink is being fucked while she’s asleep, that’s a situation that you’ve got to set upbeforehand. And even if she ends up telling you the sex was great when she wakes up, that doesn’t let you off the hook, either. A commenter on Bossip put it this way: “so she got slipped a roofie, date ra.p.e.d and wrote a song about it. life gives you lemons you make lemonade i guess.”

And another thing! How many pieces of popular music have to be written about how pushing booze on women until they vomit all over themselves and ultimately juuuust barely consent to having sex with you is sexy? Because these songs actually glamorize the behavior of rapists. And even if you’re the elusive chick who happens to be into that, presenting this situation as “spectacular” is both a) not particularly interesting, as far as pop music is concerned, and b) harmful to all the women who wake up in that same situation and have a much different descriptor for the sex: “rape.”

For 15 years, Rob Kampia has served as executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), a nonprofit group dedicated to the reform of marijuana laws. In that capacity, Kampia, 41, has pursued two goals. One is the steady advancement of the organization, which he founded out of his Adams Morgan home in 1995. And the other is cultivating an office environment suited to his sexual appetite. A brief inventory of Kampia’s knack for mixing business with pleasure:

• In 2008, Kampia dated a 19-year-old MPP intern.
• “How was the NORML Conference?” a staffer asked Kampia one year. Kampia replied, “I got laid.”
• At a staff happy hour, Kampia guessed a female employee’s breast size and told her that she would be “hotter with a boob job.” (Kampia denies the conversation occurred).
• Kampia made it known that a female employee’s dress had “made an impression on him.” Later, he directed her to leave some room in his schedule for “bone-girl,” a woman he was “trying to bone.” He also repeatedly informed her of his intentions to perform a “breast massage” on another woman.
• At the conclusion of a staff happy hour last August, Kampia escorted a subordinate back to his home. The woman was so upset by what happened next that she refused to return to work at MPP ever again.

As office creeps go, in other words, Kampia can lay claim to being king of the water cooler. Kampia’s office politics hit the headlines this month with the announcement that he’d be stepping down to take at least a 90-day leave of absence in order to undergo therapy. “I just think I’m hypersexualized,” Kampia told the Washington Post. The coverage, accordingly, has focused on Kampia’s hands-on management techniques.

Less has been said about Kampia’s deputy, Alison Green. When Green, a longtime friend of Kampia’s, joined the organization six years ago, she brought along some serious management bona fides. Green, 36, writes a weekly online column about workplace issues at U.S. News & World Report. She started a blog called “Ask a Manager,” where she doles out workplace solutions to HR reps and low-level staffers alike. And she co-authored a book called Managing to Change the World, which MPP department heads were required to read in order to bring the organization in line with her philosophy.

How did a manager like Green deal with Kampia’s office conduct? By cleaning up after him.

Rob Kampia with chief of staff Alison Green

Case in point: In fall 2008, MPP’s director of membership, Salem Pearce, was rifling through some back e-mails of a recently fired female employee when she happened upon a past office flirtation: Kampia had sent an e-mail to the employee asking for her private e-mail address. “I discovered they had gone on a date and maybe more than one,” Pearce says. “I had known about how Rob acted toward women for a long time, but this is one instance where I had proof that he did it.” Pearce approached Green about the situation and told her it was a “problem,” and Green agreed to take the issue to Kampia.

Kampia and Pearce met. “You’re abusing your power,” Pearce recalls telling Kampia, adding that the 20-or-so females working at MPP are the only women “in the world that you can’t date.” In Pearce’s recollection, Kampia disagreed with that position. As for Green, Kampia’s input on the matter settled things. “Alison would always go and try to convince Rob,” says Pearce. “She did realize that it could be a problem, but she didn’t have the power to stop Rob’s libido.”

In Green’s view, Pearce’s concerns didn’t rise to the level of a “complaint” against Kampia. “I would not characterize that conversation as a complaint,” Green says. In fact, Green claims that she never received any complaints about Kampia’s sexual comments or behavior. “It was openly acknowledged in the office that many people on staff, including Rob, used crude sexual language in the office,” says Green. In her time at MPP, “I got some eye-rolling about Rob and others, but I never received a formal complaint.” As for Kampia’s pursuit of employees? “I call that terrible judgment,” Green says.

A formal complaint was hardly necessary to bring Kampia’s behavior to Green’s attention. The sexually loaded chatter—from Kampia as well as other MPPers—was hard to miss. “She was aware of it, for sure. Everyone was,” says Kampia. “You’d have to be blind and deaf not to notice it.” Green says that she approached Kampia with concerns about the inappropriate office environment “multiple times every year over six years,” but that Kampia “disagreed that it was something that required changing.” At one point, Kampia and Green even discussed instituting a sexual harassment policy at MPP, but Kampia ruled the possibility out. “I did discuss it with Alison,” says Kampia. “I thought it would be a bad idea at the time, because if we had a policy, two-thirds of the staff would have been in violation of it for their language and dating practices.” As executive director, Kampia was responsible for them all.

So: In order to determine the accuracy of the groping coverage, Weingarten set up two reader polls, one for men, and one for women. The good news: The poll confirms that groping is a serious problem for women! The bad news: 84 percent of Gene Weingarten’s female fans have been groped.

Some key results of the poll for women:

* Of the 1553 women who took Weingarten’s quiz, 84 percent attested to have been groped at least once; 18 percent claimed to have been groped “so often I lost count.”

* 78 percent of women said that they never “officially complained about being groped”—whether to the groper or some sort of authority.

* 61 percent of women said that if a stranger touched them in order to become aroused on a crowded train or bus, “I would quietly try to get out of there, but not make a scene.”

* Despite those numbers, women were pretty divided on whether my groping coverage “overstates the problem.” 21 percent of women say that the column “seriously” overstates the problem; 44 percent say that the column overstates the problem “maybe a little bit”; 34 percent don’t believe the column overstates the problem “at all.”

Meanwhile, 1001 men submitted their thoughts on groping to Weingarten’s quiz. Ever wonder how many readers of Gene Weingarten’s column are serial sexual assailants? Now we know!:

* 90 percent of men think that it is “ethically and/or morally wrong” to grope a woman.

* 77 percent of men claim never to have committed a grope; only 12 guys (1.2 percent) admitted to practicing groping “often.”

* 5 percent of men have this view of groping: “I think playful touching is exactly that, playful touching. If a woman complains, Ill stop, but otherwise, cmon.”

I thank Weingarten for taking up the groping issue over at the Post, and for crunching the numbers for a significant slice of the D.C. population. I do wish that the groping quiz had asked the fellas if they thought the groping problem was overstated, as well. Ninety percent of men think it’s wrong to grope a woman. But do they believe groping happens?

Last week I was on the train and happened to pick up the city paper. I started to read stories of other women being assaulted on the streets and their reactions. I had though about what I would do in that circumstance and what I should do, but never really believing it would happen to me.

Last evening while on a run, a older man grabbed my butt as I went past him. I was so stunned that I was a few strides away before I turned to find out if this may have been accident. As I turned to look at the person, the man had a look on his face that indicated he meant to do it. I confronted him by [saying] “that is completely inappropriate”. My response apparently amused the man. He had this creepy smile that basically [conveyed] to me that he knew what he was doing and there is nothing I could do about it.  I looked around for a cop, but at that time there was none to be seen. I didn’t know what to do at that point and left feeling helpless.

When I got home, I spoke to a few friends about it. All my male friends encouraged me to call it in. All my females said nothing or the older ones scolded me for even confronting him. I knew it was wrong and I knew it was assault, given the information in this series, so I called and reported the incident. It turns out there are a few of these guys around in my neighborhood.

I don’t know what will come from my reporting the incident, but if he does it again and we continue to report these incident, [he] eventually will be caught and held accountable.

Date Rape Anthem: Last week’s Date Rape Anthem, Ke$ha’s “Blah Blah Blah,” has inspired some interesting discussion about what happens when women take on the traditionally male anthem. Bitch Magazine says that Ke$ha’s music “turns the traditional male-chauvinist, sexist attitude on its head to deploy the same tactics for her own purposes: being the life of the party.” But can female rapiness ever be empowering? Let’s examine the case of Paradiso Girls‘ “Patron Tequila,” a song that commenter riese hails as the “rapy-est song ever!” Surprise twist: It’s sung by ladies!

Relevant Lyrics:

Hey girl, where’s your drink?
We can all get fucked up tonight
Hey girl, I got bud
We can all get fucked up tonight
By the end of the night
I’m a have you drunk and throwing up
By the end of the night
I’m a have you so fucked up!

Why It’s So Rapey: Serious role reversal, right? Lyrics like “hey girl, where’s your drink?” and “I’m a have you drunk and throwing up” are generally reserved for such Date Rape Jam hall-of-famers as Jamie Foxx and T Pain. But the gender reversal is strangely incomplete: In the song, the Girls aren’t pushing the booze on the male objects of their affection, but rather on other girls. It’s almost as if the record execs took a Foxx B-side, fed it to five ladies, and didn’t bother to change the pronouns to conform with the Paradiso Girls’ (presumably) heterosexual image. The result? An “empowering” role-reversal, whereby the Paradiso Girls get girls so drunk they vomit—just like the boys do!

Perhaps the music video for the track can explain this interesting new breed of girl power. A-ha: In the video, our five lovely Paradiso Girls are not pushing other women to drink, vomit, and sex it up by their own free will. Their date-rapiness is, in fact, controlled by a random guy’s magic sex headphones. Role-reversal: It’s still all about male fantasy. That’s right, folks! We’ve finally discovered the elusive Super Meta Date Rape Anthem, in which a set of voodoo headphones forces women to assume the characteristics of date rapists, against their will! Observe:

Yeah. No surprise here: While our friend Ke$ha at least writes her own songs, the music of the Paradiso Girls is the product of some decidedly male influences. The Girls are a pop supergroup designed by Pussycat Girls mogul Jimmy Iovine. And in case you couldn’t smoke him out by the trademark crunkness: Lil Jon had a hand in writing this track.

One of the gripes leveled at the Sexist’s recent groping coverage is that it has so far focused on only one category of victim—women. Men get groped, too, so let’s hear one male victim’s story. This weekend, a male MPD officer was subjected to a public genital grab, courtesy of a violent burglary suspect. The incident was aired on the MPD 1st District Listserv on Saturday:

On Friday January 22, 2010, at about 3:00 pm, Officer Andrew Zabavsky (Third District) was off duty and walking his dog in the 500 block of 6^th Street SE. About the same time off duty Officer Andrew Horos (First District) was responding to work at the First District Sub-Station.

Officer Zabavsky was walking his dog (on a leash) when he observed a citizen yelling for help and the perpetrator fleeing. Officer Zabavsky then identified himself as a police officer and attempted to restrain the perpetrator. The perpetrator started violently choking Officer Zabavsky. Officer Horos was responding to work when he observed the struggle, alighted from his vehicle and assisted. Officer Horos identified himself and asked the perpetrator to stop resisting. The perpetrator used profane language then grabbed the genital area of Officer Horos.

According to police, the 47-year-old suspect has been charged with burglary and assault. As for the Andrews? “Both officers are okay,” the Listserv claims. If you’re a man who has been the victim of groping, tell the Sexist your story here.

File photo by Darrow Montgomery.

This week on the Sexist: Puppies! Just kidding, this week’s topics were far more depressing than that.

1. Rape Victims vs. Prison Rape Victims, in which victim-blaming takes the form of a change of clothes.

2. How Bystanders Can Help Groping Victims, in which we get servicey on this groping stuff.

3. Why Would I Want to Touch Your Ass: When Groping Victims Talk Back, in which victims respond to gropers

4. Sexist Beatdown: Guys Who Grab Butt Edition, in which, yep, more groping.

5. Sexist Comments of the Week: When Dudes Don’t Wear Condoms Edition, in which you do the talking.

Photo via George Eastman House

The death of feminism ain’t news. Feminism has died a thousand deaths by this point. But wait a second: Today, someone is killing feminism in a totally new way, and this time it involves something called a “diamanté phone cover,” whatever the fuck that is. This, according to Nina Power in her book “One Dimensional Woman.” Power writes:

Stripped of any internationalist and political quality, feminism becomes about as radical as a diamanté phone cover. [Jessica Valenti] ‘truly believes’ that feminism is necessary for women ‘to live happy fulfilled lives’. Slipping down as easily as a friendly-bacteria yoghurt drink, Valenti’s version of feminism, with its total lack of structural analysis, genuine outrage, or collective demand, believes it has to compliment capitalism in order to effectively sell its product. When she claims that ‘ladies, we have to take individual action’, what she really means is that it’s every woman for herself and if it is the Feminist™ woman who gets the nicest shoes and the chocolatiest sex, then that’s just too bad for you, sister.

That’s right, everybody. You know that sparkly, fun-loving, chocolate-coated feminism that’s so popular among capitalists nowadays? Not familiar? Well: It is killing feminism! And how: By making it accessible to more women. Wait, what?

Valenti herself has already responded to Power’s critiques on behalf of non-humorless-feminists everywhere, and her points are quite reasonable, particularly when you consider the fact that she’s responding to a person who has just compared her to a yoghurt drink. “First of all,” Valenti writes, “why anyone wouldn’t want feminism to be the latest must-have accessory is beyond me—because that would be awesome.” Agreed.

Join Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown as we draft an application for inclusion in the Real Feminists Club, bedazzle our feminist credentials, and attempt to get to the bottom of this feminist yoghurt drink analogy once and for all. I’ll tell you one thing: There better be some fruit at the bottom of this sucker.

SADY: Hello! I have chosen to make myself accessible! In the name, of course, of FEMINISM.

AMANDA: On to it!

SADY: Yes! Are too many of the kids today into it? Should we make it harder for them? SHOULD THERE BE A WRITTEN APPLICATION? Such are the questions before us now.

AMANDA: I have to admit, I found the whole accusation that Jessica Valenti is not a serious feminist a bit … puzzling. If Jessica Valenti is a fluffy feminist, then what are we? Are we like marshmallow feminists?

SADY: I am a pure spun sugar feminist made of glitter and twinkles. I am the feminist that floats upon the air, so lightweight am I. And this is the thing, the thing that gets me kind of so angry: For years and years and years upon years, people have been like, “Well, of course The Patriarchy will attack us for being humorless and dour, but that is a harsh stereotype and a lie!”

AMANDA: Hah!

SADY: And, yes: Yes it is. So why is this lady suddenly piping up to tell Jessica Valenti to keep it down over there and not have so much fun?

AMANDA: Well: I understand the general argument. If people accuse me of being “too serious” about feminist issues—which they do, whenever I write about harassment or assault or rape or whatever—the appropriate response would not be to just sexy up my sexual assault coverage. However! There are issues related to feminism that are, in fact, not depressing at all! Like, when feminism happens, and then we can all have sex with whomever we want to when we want to without being assaulted or called whores. This is, indeed, a sexy development! And I fail to see the harm in celebrating that.

SADY: Right you are! It is extremely sexy. And, I mean, I think there’s a line between “feminism that is accessible”—let us say, YOU, for I am in a complimentary mood this evening—and “feminism that is so very accessible that it is even accessible to people who are not feminists because it is not actually feminism at all” —let us say, Sarah Palin. And I think that a lot of people are just trying to figure out where that line gets drawn. I understand the calls for more “seriousness,” insofar as they are asking you to “seriously” think about the issues in question. But I do not understand “seriousness” insofar as it is like, “I am sorry, this must be written in some modern super-language, for I can read it even without a post-graduate education in Ladyology.”

AMANDA: Right. Like if you’re a teenager who happens to not identify as a feminist, which is the group Valenti was largely writing her book for. I think one of the arguments against the happy-go-lucky feminism was actually like, Oh No! If we pretend that feminism is a wonderful happy thing, these women will be sorely disappointed when they become feminists and realize that there are like, some serious issues to deal with as well. Again … I fail to see why the soft pitch ends up being a bad thing. If a girl decides she’s interested in feminism because she understands what Valenti has to say about the more “girl power” type stuff, and then she ends up realizing why it’s important to support feminism for ALL women, what is the problem?

SADY: Right. And, I mean, there is something to be said for the gateway drug. The only problem is if the kids don’t get past the gateway. Like, let’s just point out that I am not talking about Feministing or Valenti here, because they have in fact always managed to cover the hard stuff as well as the basics—more of the hard stuff than I have, in fact, because my goal is basically to be the Skittles of feminism—BUT. There is, in fact, something to the idea of “consumerist feminism” or “lifestyle accessory” feminism. Which is, I do think there are some ladies whose involvement with feminism is exclusively confined to their own problems, which they elevate to the position of WORST PROBLEMS IN THE WORLD, even though they are like, “a guy won’t like me unless I shave my personal regions” or “I worry that women nowadays are taking the pole-dancing classes, which is gross!” Which: nothing to be said against those problems! Mandatory bodily presentation or the idea that women are always sexual and that “sexual” equals “sex industry performance” at all times are things we can talk about! BUT, it’s when we get stuck there, because then feminism becomes sort of obsessively, exclusively personal, and you’re not thinking about anything else.

AMANDA: Agreed. I’ll reiterate that presenting Valenti as the representative of that kind of feminism is whack, however. I mean, Nina Power compares Valenti to a “friendly-bacteria yoghurt drink.” What the fuck does that mean?

SADY: I have NO IDEA. It reminds me of those Activia commercials, though. And, on the overpersonalizing-feminism thing, can I say? I think that’s a line everybody has to walk, and I fall on the wrong side of it sometimes. If by “sometimes” you mean “A LOT OF TIMES.” But I think that this is the thing, like the core problem with the argument insofar as I understand it: she IS CONFLATING “accessible” with “shallow.”

AMANDA: Yeah. I’ll tell you one thing that’s not going to make feminism accessible to the masses: Feminist infighting! I realize I may be implicating this very Sexist Beatdown by saying this, but feminists arguing about who is the bestest feminist? Not particularly riveting to non-feminists.

SADY: BUT I WAS GOING TO GET THE BEST FEMINIST AWARD! WHY ELSE WOULD I BE DOING THIS.

AMANDA: But since Nina Power is concerned with feminism becoming too accessible, perhaps this was her plan all along! “I know. I’ll write a book dedicated to feminist infighting that makes absurd claims about several well-known ‘accessible’ feminists. That’s sure to throw them off their work of making feminism more accessible! At least for a few blog posts!”

SADY: True! Now we can all quote Serious Theory at each other until we fall asleep. Also, in the morning, there might still be some sexism? But whatever! I get Cixous!

AMANDA: I get Yoghurt.

SADY: Um, OK. Lightweight.

Photo via love♡janine, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

In this week’s episode of the Real World D.C., cast member Andrew’s dubious relationship with consent jumped from cartoon panel to bedroom; Mike wishes Ashley would play with her vagina; Andrew gets an all-night boner (Refresh yourself with the first, second, and third episode sex recaps here).

The top 10 sex-ish moments of the third episode, after the jump.

10. ANDREW POSITIONS HIS CROTCH NEXT TO THIS WOMAN’S CROTCH

Andrew actually finds a woman who tells him that she “loves nerds!” He responds by aggressively making out with her . . . and then making out with her best friend in front of her. Busted. At least he got his creepy crotch action in early in the game.

9. MIKE CALLS ASHLEY A BITCH OVER AND OVER AGAIN

8. ANDREW GETS SOME ADVICE FROM THE LADIES

The women in the house join together to instruct Andrew how to pick up women. One golden rule: “No whispering in her ear creepily.”

7. TY GETS REAL

Realest moment of the episode: Ty tells Ashley, “I need you to trust me. I need you to take my hands right now.”

6. ANDREW TOUCHES BRA

.

When the women in the household announce they’re “going to teach him how to one-handedly take off a bra,” Andrew holds a real, live woman’s brassiere in his hands. It takes him a few minutes to get it right-side up.

Thanks to Alyssa Rosenberg for pointing to the new trailer for Roman Polanski’s upcoming film, “The Ghost Writer.” As Rosenberg notes, the movie looks extremely silly, from Kim Cattrall showing up with some sort of non-specific accent, to a sign for the “Fisherman’s Cove Inn” ominously swinging in the wind, to Pierce Brosnan acting as blatantly evil as he can possibly get away with. There is a silver lining here, however.

Finally, we’ve got the perfect rejoinder to one of the most common Roman Polanski defenses out there—you know, the arguments Polanski defenders throw out in order to justify not prosecuting a convicted rapist who skipped the U.S. to avoid serving time for his rape. That argument is this: “But Roman Polanski made the Pianist!” And if Polanski had been forced to actually serve jail time for bedding a 13-year-old, the argument goes, perhaps the fabric of time would have been irrevocably torn, resulting in the Pianist never been made, or something!

This was the argument preferred by the hundreds of Hollywood luminaries who signed a petition for Polanski’s release: “Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, September 26, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison.” In other words: Roman Polanski makes good movies (just like we do!). Give him a pass.

If The Ghost Writer is half as bad as the trailer, it looks like it’s time for the free pass to be revoked. Now, an appropriate response to the “But he made the Pianist” argument might be this: Well, if Polanski had been kept in prison last year instead of being whisked away for house arrest at his Swiss ski chalet, where he reportedly finished up work on The Ghost Writer (presumably to ensure that that dramatic musical swell behind ominously-swinging sign was synced up just so), then—my God!—maybe somebody else could have made this movie, someone who wouldn’t cast Pierce Brosnan in it. Plus, Polanski would have actually served his time for raping someone. And everyone wins.

The Metro transit system is one of D.C.’s most popular venues for public gropers. Whether it’s the guy pushing his erection into your back on a train or the man reaching out to grab your genitals at a bus stop, these transit-based assailants have at least one thing in common—they’ll almost certainly be assaulting again somewhere down the road. Eager to help stop the Metro system’s most egregious offenders? Last week, I spoke with Captain Kevin Gaddis of the Metro Transit Police about how victims can report their Metro-based sexual assaults.

* Metro sexual assaults are underreported. In 2009, Metro police received 47 sexual assault cases—”anything from unwanted touching to groping to indecent exposure,” Gaddis says. (To date, 13 of these cases have been closed). To Gaddis, the number is “miniscule.” “We have a million people riding Metro every day,” Gaddis says. “Forty-seven cases a year is a very small number.” But the true rate of sexual assaults on Metro is impossible to tell: “I honestly don’t know how often it really happens, but I know it happens far more than it’s reported,” Gaddis says.

* Report ASAP. If you witness or experience a sexual assault on a train, why not alert police while the assailant is still stuck in transit? Call Metro Transit Police immediately—either from your cell phone, at (202) 962-2121, or from one of the call boxes at the end of the car (just pick up the receiver and ask the operator to connect you to Metro Transit Police).

In Maryland, Virginia, or D.C., Metro Transit Police will deal with incidents in Metro cars, platforms, parking lots, and garages. With a little bit of information—a description of the suspect, the line, and the train number—an officer may be able to reach you immediately. “We have a lot of officers out there on foot,” says Gaddis. “The best thing we can try to do is intercept the incident at the next stop or a couple stops down.”

* Or: Report later! “If the suspect is already gone by the time the victim reaches us, the victim can still identify the person and allow us to get an arrest warrant later on,” says Gaddis. Even victims who never see their assailants—or can’t provide a complete description to police—are encouraged to report their assaults.

“Some of these people—particularly the indecent exposure suspects—are repeat offenders,” says Gaddis. Even reporting the time, place, and nature of an assault can help police figure out assault patterns. “The ones that do it, it’s probably not the first time they’ve done it, nor will it be the last time. In 2009, it’s unlikely that our 47 cases involved 47 different assailants . . . We know that a lot of these repeat offenders always ride on the same line. There’s usually some type of pattern. Every little bit of information helps us.”

Illustration by Brooke Hatfield

Date Rape Anthem: Up next in our date-rape anthem series: Ke$ha’s “Blah Blah Blah,” a track about how Ke$ha just wants to fuck you—not fucking listen to you! (Thanks to Heartless Doll for bringing this track to my attention).

Relevant Lyrics:

Coming out your mouth with your “blah blah blah”
Just zip your lips like a padlock
And meet me at the back with the Jack and the jukebox
I don’t really care where you live at
Just turn around boy and let me hit that
Don’t be a little bitch with your chit chat
Just show me where your dick’s at.

.. . .Come meet me in the back with the Jack and the jukebox
So cut to the chase kid
Cuz I know you don’t care what my middle name is
I wanna be naked but you’re wasted.

Why It’s So Rapey: First, Ke$ha is concerned that her sex partner is not unresponsive enough to fuck. Next, Ke$ha is concerned that her sex partner is too drunk to fuck. Mixed signals, Ke$ha! Here’s one great thing about sex partners who are allowed to communicate with you: You never have to guess as to whether your sex partner is (a) incapable of consenting to revealing the location of his dick, or (b) simply being coy at your request. Blah, blah, blah: It really helps eliminate the guesswork in that whole date rape thing.

Last week, the Sexist highlighted a fairly common reaction of groping victims around the metro region—say nothing. A woman who got assaulted on a crowded dance floor, a woman who got rubbed on Metro, a girl who got her ass grabbed—they all kept it to themselves. What if they’d said something? What kind of reception would they get? Below, five groping victims who spoke up—and what happened next.

THE INSIDE VOICE.

Vee Meadows’ job required her to stick her butt out a little bit. Meadows, a seasonal employee at a Dupont Circle bookstore, had bent over to fetch a bottom-shelved cookbook for a waiting customer, forcing her posterior to jut slightly into the aisle. “I suppose it was an irresistible temptation for a couple of guys walking by,” Meadows says. “So, one of them grabbed my ass.”

Meadows, 25, wasn’t expecting anybody to sexualize her cookbook duties. At that job, she had always felt like “less of a woman and more of a bookstore clerk.” And so Meadows assessed the situation like a bookstore clerk would. “I did feel like I had to act professionally in front of the customer,” she says. “I ended up having to be polite to my customer while I was inwardly fuming.” Post-grab, Meadows whipped around and administered a verbal response befitting her position: “As professionally as I could, I did say, ‘What the hell?’”

THE TIMID REPORT.

When Elizabeth, 28, felt a guy “shove his hand between my legs, all the way to the front” while waiting in line for her morning bus at PG Plaza—then caught the creep smiling at her—she didn’t say a thing. What she thought was, “Oh my God, I’m going to miss the bus.”

So she hurried on board and sat through the 15-minute ride to her museum job in College Park. When she arrived, she headed straight for the office bathroom and dry-heaved. Even though her body was attempting to puke the experience away, Elizabeth says she “played it down” when she informed her boss what happened. “I was agitated and livid, like, ‘Why are some men jerks like that, what is wrong with people?’…[But] I wasn’t calling it what I felt it was—and what I now know it was—which is a public sexual assault.”

When it came time to replay the scenario to her boss, “I felt ashamed—not of what happened to me, but of how I responded,” Elizabeth says. “I feel like I should have known better. I should have screamed.”

FLIPPING YOUR SHIT.

Emily was walking down U Street on a Friday night with a few girlfriends when a man walked up and helped himself to her scalp. “His hand went up to hold the back of my neck, then up my scalp, and down through my hair,” Emily says.

Emily, 22, has had her run-ins with gropers before. She’s endured an ass slap at a crowded bar a few times. But nothing like this. “It was such a violation. All I thought was: Wait. He’s groping my hair. What the hell is going on?” Emily says. Her response was too explicit to repeat: “I just started screaming at him: ‘What the bleep are you doing? What the bleep is wrong with you? Don’t bleeping touch me like that!’”

The man who reached out to caress Emily’s hair without her consent was not very open to considering Emily’s feelings. He fell back into a group of friends and joined them in “laughing at the 5′4″ white girl
flipping her shit,” Emily says.

Emily’s friends begged her to stop yelling and resume their stroll to the bar. “My friends just kept saying, ‘Come on. Come on. It’s not worth it. You’re embarrassing us.’ When I finally left, I told them, ‘I’m sorry, guys. He was really close, and it creeped me out,’” she says. “I shouldn’t have apologized for myself. I hadn’t done anything wrong…I could still feel him in my hair.”

Dani, a friend of Emily’s who witnessed the petting, says the crew wanted to err on the side of caution. “I definitely am in support of Emily reacting that way, because it can make people think,” she says. “On the other hand, it’s not the safest of neighborhoods. After it happened, we were just kind of like, ‘OK. Lets keep walking.’ We didn’t want to cause any more trouble.”

THE PUBLIC ACCUSATION.

Jessica Graves screamed, too. Graves was waiting in line for the bathroom in an Austin, Texas, coffee shop when a man walked by, dragged his hand under the hem of her skirt, and grazed her butt. “He got a pretty good swipe,” Graves recalls. She followed him out the door. “Did you just touch my ass?” she demanded. “Why would I want to touch your ass?” he replied.

Graves had refused to be a passive victim. Her groper got even more of a thrill out of that. “I could see the sick sense of satisfaction on his face,” she says. “His expression said, ‘Gotcha! I can deny this, and you can’t do shit about it,’” says Graves. “I was enraged for hours. I didn’t sleep,” she says. “It made me so angry that I wanted to hurt people, and I’m not a violent person. I was so pissed off that I just shook with rage.”

THE JOKE.

The hug was not Allyson Rudolph’s idea.

Rudolph had hailed a cab after a night of drinking with some co-workers. It was late, she was tipsy, and a secure cab ride from the West End bar to her home in Shaw sounded like a good idea. “The bartenders had started bringing us shots, which is usually about when I realize I need to go home,” she says. “I’m a very cheap date.”

On the ride, Rudolph struck up a conversation with the driver, and the discussion turned to cab-riding etiquette. Both concurred that it’s important to exchange pleasantries between cabbie and customer. “We
were in solid agreement that one should never ignore a person they happen to be sharing a car with,” she says.

That’s when the proposition came. “Can I have a hug?” the cabbie asked as the ride came to an end. Rudolph obliged. “I was drunk and we’d been chatting, plus I love hugs, so it seemed like a great idea,” she says. Rudolph and the cabbie both opened their doors and stepped out of the car. “Then he squeezed my boob and tried to kiss me.”

Rudolph, who says she was too tipsy to report the cabbie, settled for laughing at him. When Rudolph tells this story, she casts the cab driver as a pathetic buffoon, his unsolicited grab at her breast marking him as inept instead of threatening. “I make light of this a lot and tell it to friends as a funny story, but actually it really angers me,” says Rudolph. “It’s easy to see how the story could have had a much less funny ending.…It’s only when I start to put the story in the context of a major social issue that it stops being funny. It’s a really clear example of the way the world is just different for girls, and that is something that I don’t find entertaining at all.”

This column is the third in a series. Catch up with Part 1: Touch and Go: How Groping Happens. And Part 2: I Just Wanted Him to Finish And Leave”: Why Some Groping Victims Stay Silent. (Illustration by Brooke Hatfield).

Yesterday’s post on a guy named “Dirty Jersey” who refused to strap one on sparked a more general discussion about guys who refuse to wear condoms. Then, commenter Shinobi chimed in with an area  for further inquiry: “Hilarious reasons guys can’t wear a condom.”

Shinobi kicks it off:

Can I get a WTF on college aged guys who bitch about wearing condoms? Not that I took a represenatative sample or anything……. but it happened a LOT. (Actually, after college too… again, not a representative sample.)

I think what college papers actually need is a column about how men who want to get laid need to have the testicular fortitude to wear a fucking condom, and in fact, provide said condom, and show a little fucking consideration for the girl and not make her practicly beg you to put it on.

Also, don’t take it off in the middle, because that’s fucked up and means you are a scumbag.

I think I needed to use the f word more in this comment.

Liss chimes in:

Super extra fail to the guy who told me that he “couldn’t” wear condoms because he was JUST TOO BIG for them! (Even though bigger guys than him had worn the exact same type of condom and gotten off just fine with them.)

So: Have you heard a hilarious reason why a guy won’t wear a condom? Even better: Are you a guy with a hilarious justification for why you won’t strap one on? Best: Are you a lady or guy with a hilarious justification for why you don’t want your sex partner to condom up? Even bestest: Do you totally object to the idea that your reasons for not wearing a condom are, in fact, hilarious? File it in the comments.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

In November, transgender Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike Penner was found dead of an apparent suicide. Penner, who wrote for the paper since 1983, made headlines himself in 2007 when he he came out as transgender, began living publicly as a woman, and changed his byline to Christine Daniels. In 2008, Daniels quietly detransitioned back to Mike, leaving mourners with an identity problem: Should they eulogize Mike Penner or Christine Daniels?

After Penner’s death, transgender activist Autumn Sandeen spoke to the importance of identifying Penner as Penner. “In my heart, I know her as Christine. In my job as a writer, I have to think of him as Mike,” she said. “I would love to remember him as Christine, but he didn’t give us that opportunity, and I’m going to be sad about that . . . How he identified was important. We can’t just pick and choose how we want to identify someone. I’m militant about that, but I’m frustrated at my own militance.”

Recently, Sandeen attended a memorial service for Daniels, where she heard some stories that changed her position on how to publicly refer to the deceased:

[S]ince I’m now going to refer to the Los Angeles Times sportswriter who wrote under the Mike Penner byline as Christine Daniels again, I thought I needed to explain why . . . And, the reason has to do with how Christine identified herself in conversations with her minister, and to one of her very close friends—Susan Horn (who delivered the eulogy to Christine at the memorial service)—after she detransitioned. To the both, she said words to the effect of: “I never stopped being Christine,” and . . . “Don’t you ever think I’m not Christine.”

So now, knowing how she identified, I can—and will—stop calling her by male pronouns, and stop calling her Mike Penner. She detransitioned to Mike not because she wasn’t Christine, but for whatever external pressures to which she succumbed because presenting as Christine became too hard to bear.

In death, how do we reconcile a person’s public and private lives? After he publicly detransitioned back to Mike, Penner indicated that he still wanted to be identified as Christine to his minister and a very close friend of his. That’s private. In his professional life, however, Penner was still writing columns as Mike and presenting outwardly as male. At the memorial service, the Reverend Dr. Neal Thomas made Penner’s private identity public by delivering a eulogy remembering Christine Daniels. In death, should we defer to Penner’s wishes in life by keeping his private identity private? Or should we pay tribute to the reality of her life by finally publicly eulogizing her as Christine?

It’s time for more Dr. Laura YouTube fun! This time, Dr. Laura Schlessinger answers the age-old question: Can (hetero) men and women be “just friends”?

Answer: Men and women can be friends as long as it’s a “cool quality, casual friendship fun thing where they both golf together, and that’s it,” Schlessinger explains.

But once these opposite-sex friends start having conversations that go beyond, say “Fore!,” it’s time to adopt an extreme concern for their ability to remain monogamous to their partners. Schlessinger explains the rules of hyper-monogamy: “Is this someone he tells the privacies of his life to? Ultimately, that would be his wife—and if that worked out, it would be you,” Schlessinger says. “If a married woman is spending time with a guy, sharing intimacies about her life, that’s inappropriate.”

So: Talking to other people is considered cheating now. Let’s see how this moral position might play out in a typical marriage: “You have a life outside of this marriage? That’s cheating.” Or, “You told your friend that I cheated on you? That makes you a cheater.” Or, you know, “You told your friend that I accused you of cheating because you found out I cheated on you? I can’t believe you cheated on me again.”

Welcome back from Winter Break, sexually active college students (and old people wondering what those darned kids are up to these days)! The battle for ideological dominance in our nation’s capital’s collegiate sex columns continues. Are our local campus columnists on the forefront of radical sex writing, or are they bringing back the good old days of pretending that sexual orientation is just a “phase.”

This week: When you’re fucking a guy named “Dirty Jersey,” and he doesn’t want to wear a condom; how to stop being friends and start getting laid; is bisexuality the new black?

HOWARD UNIVERSITY:

Sex Tips: in “Is Bisexuality the New Black?”, Aaron Randol surveys Howard University students about this crazy new “trend.” “Is college a catalyst for bisexual behavior? And if so, does this mean bisexuality is nothing more than a trend, the new black?” Randol writes. “The notion that bisexuality in college is just a trend proves controversial for[one bisexual man]; as he, like many others, have had feelings towards both sexes before college.”

Life Lessons: One of Randol’s classmates describes the campus male bisexuality epidemic: “I am positive more guys at Howard than girls are trying bisexuality. Less than 5 percent of the girls that I know of here are trying or have tried it, but I’d say 50 percent of my guy friends have tried. I don’t know if it’s Howard or if it’s how people are leaning in general. But it seems like here, 1 in 3 guys are gay or bisexual. It’s not even weird to hear a guy is gay or bisexual at Howard any more.”

Progressive Meter: After setting up the trendy bisexual straw man argument, Randol is ready to smack down that particular theory. Let’s hear it, Randol! “So is bisexuality the new black, nothing more than a trend, a staple on the public scene?” he concludes: “Maybe not.” Bleh. ZERO.

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY:

Sex Tips: Georgetown Hoya dating columnist Colleen Leahey reflects on the Swiftian nature of her romantic life. Taylor Swiftian.”The entire situation was straight out of a silly Taylor Swift song: I had a thing for my best guy friend. While he dated various girls, I put myself in the friend zone, giving him advice and being there when he needed to vent to someone,” she writes. “Secretly, though, I was hoping he would realize that I was the one he truly liked.”

Life Lessons: Refreshingly, Leahey combats this trademark Swiftian passivity by advising unrequited lovers how to step up and do something about it. “So, this new year, if you’re finally ready to admit to your inner desires, then do be more aggressive with your feelings,” she writes. “Go with your impulse; if you think there’s a spark and it’s not one-sided, make a move. . . . Don’t overanalyze or freak your friend out, but you do have to make a slight effort if you want something to actually happen (unless you’re trying to be the next victim of the T. Swift syndrome).”

Progressive Meter: Slight effort! What can I say, I’m a sucker for refusing to fall victim to the T. Swift Syndrome. SEVEN.

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

Sex Tips: Hatchet sex columnist Layla admits she’s done it without a condom—with a guy she calls “Dirty Jersey.” “Since [the first night we had sex], despite his protests, I insisted on a condom every time like I knew I should,” Layla writes. But that didn’t last: “Somewhere during the next five or six times we had sex, my resolve dissolved. I went from being adamant about using protection, to making Dirty Jersey pull out to get a condom, to finally staying quiet about it. Part of me hoped that he would catch on to my desire to use a condom, but he never did. To be perfectly honest, it felt amazing without it and it was just as much my fault as it was his.”

Life Lessons: Fuck that guy! “I may be guilty of condom-use abuse in the past, but now, I am most definitely reformed,” Layla writes. “It also helps that I’m not dating Dirty Jersey anymore.”

Progressive Meter: What does strapping on a rubber say about your politics? According to Margaret Talbot’s “Red Sex, Blue Sex,” teen pregnancy is higher and condom use lower in this country’s red states. So we’ll count this prophylactic flip-flopper as a moderate. Feminist bonus: She ditched a guy who clearly didn’t give a shit about what she wanted in the bedroom. Too bad she softens that with a healthy dose of self-blame.  FIVE.

photo via nerdcoregirl, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

After some very productive discussions about comment moderation on this blog and others, the Washington City Paper has decided to try out a new comment flagging system. It debuts today on the Sexist.

Here’s how it works: You’re reading along in a heated but interesting Sexist comments thread. You come across a comment that you feel derails this fine discussion. It’s so personally vicious, so explicitly bigoted, so off-topic, and so annoyingly capitalized that you just have to let your displeasure with the comment be known. Below the comment, you’ll see a button that looks like this:

Click on it, and the comment has been flagged. When a comment has been flagged by enough users, it will be hidden from view. If you’re one of those commenters who’s into seeing the flagged stuff, just head to the bottom of the comment thread, where you’ll be able to click a link to reveal the hidden comments.

What comments deserve to be flagged? For now, that’s left up to the commenting community. More on the flagging system, from CP:

From time to time, particularly when there is an influx of ugly comments on a popular blog post, people ask what our comment moderation policy is. The official answer is that we try to stay as hands-off as possible, and step in when a discussion is being completely derailed by offensive and/or irrelevant comments. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason or no reason at all, but we generally try to avoid it.

Starting today, we’re going to try something new. We’re adding a “flag this comment” button below each comment. If a comment is repeatedly flagged by the community, it will be hidden from view by default. You’ll be able to show comments that have been flagged via a link at the bottom of the comments thread.

What makes a comment flag-worthy? To some degree, that’s up to you. Most people feel that they know a valueless comment when they see it, and a comment must be flagged repeatedly by different people before it will be hidden. We recognize that no technological solution can enforce civility, and that flagging systems can also be abused. However, we hope that adding this mechanism will help create a better forum for thoughtful (if occasionally pointed) discussion on our blogs.

There you have it. As always, you’re invited to file your feedback on this new system in the comments thread here. And please be patient: It may sometimes take a moment for the “Flag This Comment” buttons to appear.

Photo via hopelessmatty, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Last week on the Sexist:

1. Lil Wayne Jokes About His Own Rape, in which the rapper spells out the cycle of abuse.

2. “I Just Wanted Him to Finish And Leave”: Why Some Groping Victims Freeze, in which frotteurs practice their fetish in the D.C. Metro system.

3. A Groping Victim’s Guide to D.C., in which you can get help.

4. Can Having Three Condoms In D.C. Get You Arrested?, in which D.C.’s policies are bad for sex workers.

5. Rape Analogy Redux: The Stroll In The Jungle Theory, in which comments abound.

Photo via Flickr Commons