Reactions to rape

By Awget

Note: this post may contain triggering content.

I have studied and read about violence against women for years. I have read the theory, the explanations for how it can be that women and girls (and transpeople) are subject to so much hurt, betrayal and fear, mostly from the other half of the global population. It seems like no one can escape victimhood when a dangerous person, a family member, a friend, or a stranger on the street comes to the idea that you will be the one he will target.

Why? Because of power, control, to inflate their sense of selves, out of sheer entitlement?

I understand the historical reasons, the complex nature of gender and race and class and how they affect peoples’ choices. I have not quite fully wrapped my head around rape culture, this idea that an entire society, a system, is based on the subjugation of women and girls; that it is a given or commonplace that violence happens to women and that there’s nothing anyone can do about it. I am of course not of the mindset – that rape is inevitable.

This focus, this curiosity in the ways in which a woman is in danger of serious harm everywhere she goes just for being who she is, continued on without my first-hand knowledge. I didn’t personally know of a woman who was raped or assaulted or a woman who was a victim of incest. Rape made and continues to make me angry, as it should make all of us in the world, enough to finally say, “NO, this can’t be allowed to happen anymore”. But it never personally touched my life until recently.

Coincidentally or not, given that the statistics say that every other second a woman is raped in the world, young women whom I am very, very close to had this happen to them. This violent act, this horrifying event, just happened to women I love.

I can’t even describe how I feel. Possibly empty, at a loss for words (of what to tell them). Definitely angry. I want to curse in the street, I want to yell at every person who thinks a woman would ever bring this huge violation of her personhood on herself. I want to be violent myself to the rapists who thought it was okay, that it was somehow possible for them to mess with the people I care most about. Beautiful, vivacious, intelligent, admirable, funny, women I love, whom I never tell enough that I love. I want to take a bat to their evil heads and scream, “Why did you think it was okay to do this? Did you really think you could get away with it?!” I am all about vengeance and taking sweet revenge on criminals.

But it is not my choice. Even with all the reading I’ve done, I didn’t understand how victims of rape will not all deal with what happened the same way, or what I’d consider the “right” way. In the cases in my life, these women have decided not to call the police, not to talk to a counselor for help, not deal with it right now or at all. How can my response and theirs be so different?

So I made a call to the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre/Multicultural Women Against Rape. I found myself immediately at ease speaking to the counselor who was patient, who listened to my agonized frustration and really understood and empathized with the place I was in. She told me it was their choice; that every woman would have to deal with the injustice in her own way. All I could do was be supportive, listen when they want to talk and give advice when they ask for it. I thought the only feminist action to be taken was to accompany the women in my life in marching down to the closest police station and reporting the crime to try to throw rapists in prison and remove them from civilization, to try to stop them from ever doing this again. But that is not my choice and not my decision and at this moment. I have to be okay with that.

Filter bubbles and net partiality

From inphobe.blogspot.com

I saw this TED Talk on Facebook and felt some serious cognitive dissonance. It’s an Eli Pariser presentation on the “Filter Bubble” many popular websites apply to customize a user’s web experience and parcel out information that “suits” them. But in the process of this algorithmic filtering based on a user’s past web activity, locale and a host of other information, opinions and ideas that don’t fit the user’s presumed preferences get left out.

The filter bubble makes me particularly concerned about information, news and ideas related to violence against women. Unlike other forms of crime and violence, violence against women is subject to a strange kind of endless social debate – is it violence that needs to be addressed in public? Or is it just “between him and her”? It it murder of women grounded in power and control or “honour killing”, explained away by “culture”? Is it rape or did she “ask for it”? I know where I fall in the debates but I want to understand where others fall. I want to read how others position the issue and, where necessary, challenge it in a way people can connect with and respect even if they disagree. How can I even begin to do that if I’m trapped in my own happy internet bubble?

Which brings me to the issue that causes me to hyperventilate every so often: net neutrality. How much more entrenched our bubbles prisons will be if websites that can’t afford high speed and quality get filtered out – not necessarily by algorithms in this case, but by users themselves. Just thinking about my own impatience on the web in a context of “net partiality” makes me weep. Websites such as the Ontario Women’s Justice Network, METRAC’s home website, onefamilylaw.ca and challengesexualviolence.org, all sites that METRAC helps administer, simply won’t have the relevance, ease-of-discovery or ease-of-use they have now if net neutrality is lost.

Check out the Save The Internet Coalition for more excellent and terrifying information about net neutrality.

What a man should have: gender stereotypes in Canadian society

By Sogol

In my first week of arrival in Toronto as an immigrant, I decided to give myself a treat by dragging my sister to one of the most popular book stores in town. While she was wondering around, I was enjoying myself browsing through some of the books that were put on a special table for display. The books on this table were more focused on politics, conflict and international development – the latter, my personal and professional passion. Two books, one on education in Afghanistan and the other on child soldiers by Romeo Dallaire (a great book by the way) caught my attention.

From theonion.com

I was about to pick these two books for purchase when I looked up and read the sign on top of the display table. It read: “What every Man Should Have”. I was astounded. This sentence clearly and explicitly stated a generalized presumption that politics and serious public issues are men’s domain. I raced to the counter and conveyed my utmost disappointment and resentment towards this offensive sentence and bitterly (yet humorously) told the sympathetic staff member, “I bet there is a section of chick flicks and fashion magazines that reads, ‘what a woman should have’.” She sheepishly smiled and shyly said yes!

Coming from a region that has always been criticized for a patriarchal system and visible discrimination against women legalized in law, I had never observed such visible gender stereotypes in Iran where I spent most of my life. Of course, it would have been very naïve of me to expect that Canadian society has addressed and dealt with all kinds of structural gender inequalities and stereotypes. However, I did expect more nuanced, less visible examples of sexism. My shock was to an extent that it took me a couple of minutes to process the data in my mind and ensure I was not getting it wrong! To get some reassurance, I showed the sign to my sister. She tried to calm me down and said, “You are blowing it out of proportion. I guess ‘man’ means ‘mankind’, not men.”

From washingtoncitypaper.com

Given that there are different levels of law and regulation in Canada, federal to provincial, geared towards promoting gender equality and bearing in mind “zero tolerance” policy ideals for sexist remarks, it is not surprising that my sister was trying to justify what the sign meant. I, a gender specialist by practice and a feminist, was fooled for a moment too.

Since then I have been getting my daily dose of gender stereotypes on a regular basis. In another instance, I made it the mission of my life to find something that did not contain the colour pink when I went shopping for my friend’s three-year-old daughter. Pink, from clothing to hair ribbons, haunted the stores.

From vuerydesign.com

Equal law is definitely required for a more just, gender-balanced society. Zero tolerance for sexist and other oppressive remarks has to be in place. So does harassment law and gender equality action plans such as that of the Canadian International Development Association. But such stereotypes and many more like “men are better at technical jobs”, “women are more honest”, “men are more risk-taking” and “women are more interested in and better at caring jobs” are so deeply rooted in our institutions from families and communities to the labour market. A change in law can only deal with the tip of the iceberg.

We need to remind ourselves that we have a long to go.

2011 in review: Megaphone Diaries

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 17,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Blog power

My apologies for this post if we’ve already achieved Web 3.0 – I don’t really understand what it is and I’m still struggling to remember to write “2012″ at the moment. I just read this great but unfathomably old article by Clay Shirky written in 2003, Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality:

A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world … A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.

Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

The article goes on to demonstrate the reality: many, many blogs are out there and are started every day; many, many people blog and many, many people read blogs. But the vast majority of blogs do not get read. The ones that do get read are read a whole lot. It’s a “predictable imbalance” and a speeding-train trend:

Though there are more new bloggers and more new readers every day, most of the new readers are adding to the traffic of the top few blogs, while most new blogs are getting below average traffic, a gap that will grow as the weblog world does. It’s not impossible to launch a good new blog and become widely read, but it’s harder than it was last year, and it will be harder still next year. At some point (probably one we’ve already passed), weblog technology will be seen as a platform for so many forms of publishing, filtering, aggregation, and syndication that blogging will stop referring to any particularly coherent activity. The term ‘blog’ will fall into the middle distance, as ‘home page’ and ‘portal’ have, words that used to mean some concrete thing, but which were stretched by use past the point of meaning.

That was written in 2003. It is now 20 .. 12. Nearly a decade has passed. If the point of no return was already a memory in 2003, bloggers these days – especially the newer ones – have a problem. This problem is perhaps intensified by the changing nature of blogs and our relationship to them. Some say blogging as we knew it, a single person writing posts, is dead.

In some ways, you might say “boo hoo” and wish this post was on a less boring topic. And as mentioned above, it’s old news. I may be the only one even stewing about it anymore. Of the top five tech trends to watch for this year, none touch on the traditional blog we have loved for too short a time; in fact, 2012 may be a year of social media exhaustion. I’m tired just thinking about it.

But the power law issue that gets to me is this: the world of small non-profits and local causes, including much of the women’s and violence prevention sector, seems about a decade behind everything else. Forward-thinking superstars are out there but I don’t think they encompass the majority. Most are scrambling to gain momentum and keep things going. If they don’t have the funds to hire a social media fleet, and they usually don’t, they’re pushing against a tonne of bricks to blog and Tweet and Facebook and LinkIn and Google+ it up. They’re fully aware of the importance of this “21st Century” communication and conversation to their work, their relevance and, yes, their bottom line. Yet most of their energy is spent standing on the edge of the blog and social media abandonment cliff without falling off, not really base-building or thriving. They continue to stay small and fitful in comparison to non-profits and causes with social media stars and fleets. They don’t shine or inspire the same kind of public support and involvement, even if their work is incredibly important.

I’m not sure how the power law can be busted – Shirky’s article says it’s simply the way the cookie crumbles, the way aggregate choices are made. That may be the case but some people are constant skeptics of “the way things are”. They always seek alternatives. Is there an alternative to this social media arrangement?