Limbaugh is Sorry for Calling Fluke a "Slut," But Why Were We ALL Sorry, Too?

@RHRealityCheck

This week’s back-and-forth over Rush Limbaugh’s use of the words “slut” and “prostitute” illustrates our deep discomfort with women’s sexuality.

And in saying this, I am not referring to the fact that Rush Limbaugh massively misstated, misunderstood, and misrepresented Sandra Fluke’s congressional testimony on the medical need for contraception. Anyone with even a basic knowledge of the subject matter will know that 1) private health insurance is not paid for with tax dollars; and 2) you have to take birth control pills with the same frequency (once a day) regardless of the amount of sex you have.

I am talking about the discomfort with women’s sexuality demonstrated in the outpouring of support for Sandra Fluke. Lawmakers, pundits and even the president have reached out, expressing sympathy for the pain it must have caused her to be called a slut. Advertisers have pulled support for Limbaugh’s program. And Limbaugh himself found it necessary to apologize for his use of words, all the while reiterating his absurd read of the content of Fluke’s original testimony.

Implicit in all of this is the notion that it is a very bad thing to be called a slut. But why? There is, as Yasmin Nair pointedly says, nothing wrong with women who like to have sex “with one person or with many, at the same time, or sequentially.” And if that is true, how is it that advertisers can be convinced to pull support for a highly profitable show solely on the premise that it is bad for business to be seen to support someone who calls a woman a slut?

Part of the reason is historic. Perceived chastity has traditionally been linked to the legal definition of defamation and libel. In this way, English common law historically considered it libellous or defamatory “per se”—that is, without the need for further explanation—to insinuate that a woman is unchaste. Interestingly, some definitions of defamation per se considered impotence and a want of chastity to be equally damaging notions. Rush Limbaugh might agree with that, considering his run-in with prosecutors over carrying Viagra and his somewhat frequent use of the word “slut” as an insult.

What is disheartening is that some of the of sympathy for Fluke comes from a similar place of discomfort with and judgement of liberated female sexuality. If we say that slut is a bad word, we are implicitly saying it is bad for women to want to have sex. If we say that prostitute is a bad word, we are saying that taking money for sex is an insult. Neither is automatically true.

Limbaugh’s negative judgement of a woman having sex for anything other than procreative purposes is obvious and direct. After all, that is what his rant was about in the first place.

For many others the judgement is more insidious and in some cases directed at ourselves. Many of my most actively feminist friends have at some point or another expressed genuine concern that some man will think they are a slut because they had sex with him on a first, second, or third date. Apart from the obvious double-standard (the man had sex on a first, second or third date too—is he also a slut?), most people in the United States, at some point, have sex outside marriage and without a deep and lasting emotional connection. In other words, most people may be sluts, but only women pay a social price for it.

Limbaugh’s juvenile tirade illustrates the many levels on which women are held to different standards than men. A woman who speaks publicly about sex, even clinically, is automatically a slut, but no such term automatically attaches to men who routinely affirm their sexual needs and desires. Women who ask that the insurance they pay for cover contraception are not only freeloaders but are also prostitutes, while the men who rely on their female partners to take care of their contraception needs are presumably virile.

In addition, both Limbaugh’s carefully worded apology, and quite a lot of the anti-Limbaugh media flurry this week miss an essential point in Fluke’s testimony: women and men have different health care needs because of their different physiology, and those needs should be met equitably.

But more than that: until we stop assuming that women are bad if they have sex with someone they don’t know, don’t love, or aren’t married to, we will never be a modern democracy with equal protection under the law.

Americans Demonstrate Changed Attitudes Towards Poverty Since the 2008 Economic Crisis

@RHRealityCheck

If you are poor, chances are it is your own fault. At least that’s what Americans thought in 2001. In a National Public Radio poll from that year, about half of those surveyed said the poor are not doing enough to pull themselves out of poverty.

Now, one would think that since the recent economic crisis predictably has led to increased poverty people would start blaming circumstances more than the poor. This has not been the case in the United Kingdom. A recently published survey shows that Brits over time have become more likely to blame poor people themselves for their financial trouble. From 1986 to 2009, the proportion of people who attribute poverty to laziness and lack of willpower has grown to a little under 30 percent, with the proportion blaming “injustice in our society” conversely falling.

People’s attitudes towards poverty to some extent determine sentiments about health care, welfare benefits, and other collective interventions. Not surprisingly, the UK study found that more and more Brits believe government benefits are too high.

In the United States, the picture is, perhaps surprisingly, a bit more nuanced. The 2001 NPR poll shows that attitudes about welfare at that time were determined by the income of the person asked. Those who made more than twice the poverty level were almost twice as likely as those closer to being poor to say that welfare recipients had easy lives and could do very well without the benefits if only they tried.

This difference is significant. Since household income has been declining over time (and proportionally fewer individuals earn more than twice the poverty level), the silver lining of the 2008 crisis might be that more Americans start seeing poverty for what it is: not something anyone “deserves.” This could even help bring about more coherent anti-poverty policies when politicians, many of whom seem to want to appeal to the “poor people are lazy” sentiment as a way to obtain votes, realize their constituents understand reality better than they do.

And poverty is, in fact, becoming reality for more and more people in the United States.

In 2010 more people were recorded as living in poverty than in any of the previous 52 years for which rates have been published: 46.9 million (representing 15 percent of the population). About 17.2 million households were registered as food insecure for that same year, meaning they didn’t have consistent dependable access to enough food. This, again, is the highest number ever recorded in the United States. Even percentage-wise, poverty rates in 2010 were the highest they had been since 1993.

And poverty is not just something people “are,” something that might be inconvenient and often frustrating (though it surely is both of those things in copious amounts).

Poverty is a very real obstacle to exercising human rights, bringing with it substandard housing, under-resourced schooling, lack of health care, and at times unsafe neighbourhoods, as well as many other disadvantages. Children are particularly affected, since years of poorer quality education and potentially unhealthy living has consequences that to some extent continue even after a family pulls out of poverty—which only some ever do.

And not only is poverty an obstacle to exercising rights. It is also, in many cases, caused by rights violations. Four million more women than men live in poverty, and both African-Americans and Hispanics are over-represented amongst the poor. In 2010, women earned 77 cents to every dollar earned by men. For black women that figure is 68 cents, for Hispanic women 59. Unemployment rates fluctuate enormously according to sex, race, and marital status. Women constitute 65 percent of all part-time workers.

To be sure, everyone is ultimately responsible for how they deal with their circumstances, and some individuals pull out of poverty despite multiple odds stacked against them. But many more do not. This is not because poverty is inevitable. It is because it generally requires support for health care, education, housing, anti-discrimination initiatives, and other interventions at least partially sponsored by the government. Without addressing the growing poverty in the United States through collective action based on human rights, chances are that if you are poor you will stay poor. Through little fault of your own.

The FBI, Sandusky, and How We Think About Rape

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On Tuesday December 6, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Criminal Justice Advisory Policy Board voted in favor of changing its rape definition, which currently dates back from 1929. The old definition covered only female victims and archaically -- and imprecisely -- referred to intercourse as "carnal knowledge," whereas the proposed change is gender-neutral, contains a relatively objective description of sex, and does not require physical force. If the director of the FBI approves this change, it has the potential to change how we think about rape.

At least in part. Another equally important part is the definition of rape in the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code which remains unchanged.

Here is why that matters.

As a society, the way we think about most social phenomena -- including sexual assault -- is influenced both by facts and morals. Neither is immovable or entirely objective. Facts depend on how you study and define them, and morals depend on who you are. But in the United States, the way we think about rape has, for decades, been operating with an outdated version of both.

With regard to the facts, the FBI's rape definition determines what gets counted as rape in national crime statistics. These figures are used, among other things, to decide on government use of resources for rape prevention, and to determine the success of government efforts to prosecute this crime. A restricted definition is likely to lead to underestimates, which, in turn, leads to the assignment of insufficient resources to deal with rape. And, because government efforts to prosecute for rape often are judged by comparing number of rapes to numbers of cases filed, investigated, and prosecuted, FBI's definition also affects the evaluation of justice system effectiveness in this regard.

Of course, even if we use the current, potentially underestimated, figures for rape, resources allocated for prevention and prosecution of rape are insufficient and sometimes misused, and prosecution percentages appallingly low. However, a more accurate count of when and how rape happens can at least provide arguments for policy change.

With regard to criminal law -- the ultimate guide on what society believes is "right" and "wrong" -- our moral compass has been equally obsolete. The U.S. Model Penal Code, which was adopted in 1962 by the American Law Institute to provide guidance for state criminal law reform, does not reflect what we have learned over the past 4 decades about rape through service delivery and care. Unlike FBI's rape definition, unfortunately, change to the Model Penal Code is not imminent (though explorations of a potential project to do so are underway) and the deficiencies are potentially more glaring.

Over the years, scholars have explored many problems with the various sexual offence definitions in the model code. The four most conspicuous are these:

• The need for an "objective manifestation" of force - -that is, visible signs of physical force -- before forced intercourse counts as rape in the eyes of the law (we now know that threats, verbal violence, and other forms of non-physical coercion are equally if not more effective in subduing a victim).
• The definition of rape as always having a male perpetrator and female victim (the recent allegations of rape of boys by Penn State coach Sandusky have made abundantly clear that rape can happen across the board);
• The deliberate exclusion of marital rape from any criminal sanctions (it is now hopefully beyond discussion that spouses don't owe each other sex--even the Mexican Supreme Court has now acknowledged this); and
• The focus on the victim's sexual past and previous behaviour towards the perpetrators and others.

This latter part is particularly worrisome.

The Model Penal Code explicitly excludes date rape and rape of former partners or even those the perpetrator has casually dated or maybe just kissed or held hands with (the victim must not be the "voluntary social companion" of the perpetrator at the time of the crime, and should not have "previously permitted him sexual liberties.") This would also exclude rape against sex workers, which is a relatively frequent occurrence in part because many people believe sex workers automatically have consented to having sex with everyone because they make a living out of having sex with some.

At a time where the use of date rape drugs reportedly are on the rise, and where police officers already believe women are much more likely to lie about rape than victims of any other crime, there is no room for legal ambiguity.

Forced intercourse is rape whoever committed it, whatever the victim wore or said, and wherever it occurred. The American Law Institute should follow the lead of the FBI and update its definitions to reflect reality.

Penny-Wise and Pound-Foolish: Proposed Funding Cuts for Response to Violence Against Women

@RHRealityCheck

This week, Senators Leahy and Crapo introduced a bill to reauthorize and amend the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), a federal law first enacted in 1994.

This is mostly good news. The VAWA mandates federal funding for victim assistance and transitional housing, strengthens provisions to penalize offenders, and requires states to provide a certain level of services with a view to preventing violence from occurring in the first place.

The bad news is that the proposed bill substantively slashes the funding for the implementation of the bill, reducing the authorized funds by more than $144 million (almost 20 percent) of 2005 levels over 5 years.

To be sure, the federal government has to save quite a lot more than $144 million to overcome its spending deficit, and Senator Leahy justified the cuts by reference to heightened efficiency through the consolidation of services.  But if it is indeed possible to consolidate services and do more with less, would it not have been appropriate to ask, first, if the current funding levels adequately cover current needs?

To start with, it is clear that violence against women in the United States has not gone away these past 20 years.  The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 25 percent of women in the United States experience domestic violence some time in their lives, and that adult women experience over 5 million instances of violent assault annually.

Adolescents—even young adolescents—are also affected.  Over 70 percent of our 7th and 8th graders report they are “dating,” and in a 2009 survey published by the Centers for Disease Control about 10 percent of students overall reported being physically hurt by someone they were dating.

In addition, the economic downturn has substantially affected women’s ability to leave abusive relationships. In the best of times, women who want to leave an abusive partner worry about finding employment and housing, especially if they also need to provide for children.  During economic crises, these concerns increase dramatically and are exacerbated by the fact that governmental and non-governmental service providers usually face funding crises of their own and may have had to cut services. 

In 2008, the National Network to End Domestic Violence found that, on one day alone, almost 9000 requests for services went unmet because of lack of resources.  In 2009, that number had increased by 300.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline, set up by VAWA, reported that calls to the hotline increased by over 19 percent in the 12 months after the September 2008 market crash.

The director of the government’s Office on Violence Against Women testified before the Senate Committee of the Judiciary in May 2010 that, between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, one shelter alone reported a 44 percent increase in persons sheltered, a 74 percent increase in crisis response, and a 124 percent increase in calls requesting shelter

But most pointedly, domestic violence costs society a lot more than the $144 million the introduced bill would save by downsizing responses to it.  Those 5 million assaults on women annually resulted in nearly 2 million injuries, of which more than half a million required medical attention, the Centers for Disease Control estimated in 2003.  Victims of domestic violence lost nearly 8 million work days and 5.6 million days of productivity due to violence.

In all, assaults on women cost almost $6 billion every year. Because these estimates are based on rates of violence before the current economic crisis, the true cost may well be higher today

In other words: the bill proposes to cut $144 million over 5 years from services that seek to remedy a problem which, even with the current government involvement, will cost society about $30 billion over that same period.

Some might say that estimates about the cost of intimate-partner violence are notoriously unpredictable, that the federal government truly is broke, or that the proposed cuts really do reflect a consolidation of services that will result in more efficient use of funds. But even if they were right, that would not take away from the fact that domestic violence is a continuing, costly, and consistently underserved problem.

Cutting federal funds for dealing with it is not only bad news, it is a bad idea.

Sexual Harassment: Not Really About Sex At All

@RHRealitycheck

This week, a national study found that sexual harassment affects about half of the students in grades seven to 12. Some might see this as an indication that there is too much talk about sex in our schools. They would be wrong. Others have chalked it up to teenage hormones and suggested that we leave well enough alone. They would be equally wrong.

Sexual harassment is nothing new. In 2008, a study found that just over a third of middle and high school students had been sexually harassed. The National Coalition for Women’s and Girls Education put the percentage at almost 90 in 1997. And, indeed, discrimination based on gender has been an actionable offence under Title IX of the Education Amendments since 1972, and since then the courts have applied Title IX to various types of sexual harassment.

But the motivation for sexual harassment seems to be shifting. Bill Bond, a school safety expert for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, notes that attempts to exploit fellow students sexually have become less common, and that now students seem to use sexual remarks to degrade or insult someone else.

This sense, that sexual harassment nowadays is more about hostility than about sex, was validated by the study published this week as well as by the study published in 2008. Both concluded that most sexual harassment in middle and high schools in the United States is directed at girls and at children suspected of being gay or lesbian.

Where straight girls are targeted, the harassment is generally about their level of sexual activity, which is either deemed too much (they are “sluts”) or too little (they are “prudes”). In the case of youth who are thought to be gay, it is the mere fact that they might even want to have sex that is “wrong.”

In other words, the more frequent type of harassment suffered by children today—and the one they report as affecting them the most negatively—is expressing hostility at children who do not fit into some preconceived notion of what “normal” sexuality is. Normality in this connection apparently means that girls must display a level of sexual activity that can go unperceived (neither too much nor too little), and that everyone should be straight.

Or to be a bit more blunt about it: sexual harassment in middle and high schools today is motivated by either misogyny or homophobia. Neither has to do with sex. And neither would be helped by treating sexual harassment between children as a result of overactive hormones to be dismissed.

In fact, the solution is just the opposite: active and broad engagement about sexuality and sex roles. Because misogyny and homophobia are fuelled by ignorance and fear. And ignorance and fear can be fought with knowledge.

Unfortunately, broad knowledge-building is not generally the objective of sex education in US middle and high schools. At best, sex education deals with sexuality as a matter of biology: how do male and female bodies engage in (heterosexual and procreative) sex. At worst, the message is that all sex is bad unless you are married and want to procreate. These types of sex education do not transfer much needed tools to our children as they grapple with their evolving sexuality. Indeed, by ignoring (or vilifying) sexuality altogether, limited sex education may instead feed the fear that expresses itself as sexual harassment.

Comprehensive sex education, on the other hand, provides the broader knowledge our children need and want. At its best, comprehensives sex education engages children on their own level of comprehension in a conversation about what sexuality means, how to relate to ourselves and each other with respect, and how to make responsible and informed choices about our sexual and reproductive lives. Comprehensive sex education not only combats the fear and stereotypes that fuel sexual harassment, it also works in terms of delaying the age of sexual initiation and lowering the number of teenage pregnancies.

All children have a right to comprehensive sex education. Giving them the information they need and are entitled to has obvious benefits for their reproductive and sexual health. It is also a way to reduce the chances that they will subject their peers to sexual harassment.