#Metoo, R*pe Culture and the Media (powerpoint):

________ women are killed by intimate partners each year in the US:

- 1500

_____ people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner

- 24

Impact of rape, stalking and physical violence:

- What happens affects our bodies - Doesn't just stay mental - Mind/Body connection: multiple studies to prove mental stress correlated to increased cellular illness - 81% of women who experienced rape, stalking, or physical violence by an intimate partner reported significant short- or long-term impacts, such as *PTSD symptoms and injury* - Women who experienced rape or stalking by any perpetrator or physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime were *more likely than women who did not experience these forms of violence to report having asthma, diabetes, and irritable bowel syndrome* - Men and women who experienced these forms of violence were *more likely to report frequent headaches, chronic pain, difficulty with sleeping, activity limitations, poor physical health, and poor mental health than men and women who did not experience these forms of violence*

Why do so few report?

- Women are not believed - The process is difficult and complicated - Many women just want to put it behind them - Institutions (such as universities) simply drag their feet and don't act on allegations - The women who come forward are attacked - Blame is on victim; clothes, personality, cops don't believe you

Rape misconceptions and feminism:

- Women's movement of the 1960s fought against these extremely limited notions of femininity and female sexuality. - The women's movement punctured decisively the mythology of stranger rape and revealed the truth that most rapes happen between people who know each other and that it's much more common than people think. - Feminists fought for legalized abortion, the development of the birth control pill, new rape laws, sex discrimination laws, and laws against domestic violence.

What is rape culture?

- an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. - is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women's bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women's rights and safety.

Rape laws prior to 1960s relied on the image of the rapist as a ______ man and of _______ elite women as chaste and pure:

- black man - white elite women

Overall, a lower status for women is society (less pay for the same work, less power in society, devaluation of home work etc.) leads to their _____________ in ___________ texts as well.

- devaluation - cultural

"strong patriarchal attitudes are linked to an increased risk of violence by men in dating relationships. Dating violence is strongly associated with _________ forms of masculinity and femininity"

- dominant

Rape, physical violence, and stalking is disproportionately geared towards:

- female victims

Among female rape victims, perpetrators were reported to be ____________ partners (51.1%), _________ members (12.5%), _____________ (40.8%) and _____________ (13.8%).

- intimate partners - family members - acquaintances - strangers

Majority of rape, physical violence, and stalking incidents happen when the victim:

- knows the perpetrator

Example of patriarchy: Head and Master laws:

- legal reasons. - Women were forbade to keep their last names a short handful of decades ago, under the premise that the wedded couple were viewed as "one person" by the law. - That one person was the husband, whose identity superseded the wife's. He was the sole person who could vote, hold property, go to law, etc. - It was only in 1972 that every United State legally allowed a woman to use her maiden name as she pleased.

Victim: ___________ connotation Survivor: ____________ connotation

- negative - positive; persevered individual from a criminal situation

Intimate __________ violence, _________ violence, and ___________ are important and widespread problems in the United States.

- partner - sexual - stalking

The most common locations are the man's or woman's home in the context of a ________ or a _______. The perpetrators may range from classmates to neighbors

- party or a date

More than 1 million women are ________ in a year and over 6 million women and men are victims of ________ in a year by people they are in intimate relationships with

- raped - stalking

Prior to the 1960s, there was no concept of _________ ________________:

- sexual harassment

"Animals" by Maroon 5:

- stalking & obsession - fantasizing about her - Adam plays the role of a predator, dorky guy who can't get women. Reacts with violence with meat in butcher shop - Lyrics are suggestive of violence - Her saying "no" is just "playing hard to get" where "no" actually means "yes" - He's justified for his persistency

The Madonna image:

- the ideal woman was one who displayed no sensuality in her dress or her demeanor, went to great lengths to protect her virginity - i.e. the asexual Madonna.

Stalking in Twilight Saga:

- very aggressive, stalk-y, male dominant violence

Half of all student victims do not define the incident as "rape." This is especially true when no ___________ was used, there is no obvious physical ________, and __________ was involved — factors commonly associated with campus acquaintance rape. This is one reason rape and other sexual assaults on campus are not well reported.

- weapon - injury - alcohol

Examples of rape culture:

•Blaming the victim ("She asked for it!") •Trivializing sexual assault ("Boys will be boys!") •Tolerance of sexual harassment •Refusing to take rape accusations seriously •Inflating false rape report statistics •Publicly scrutinizing a victim's dress, mental state, motives, and history •Gratuitous gendered violence in movies and television •Defining "manhood" as dominant and sexually aggressive •Defining "womanhood" as submissive and sexually passive •Pressure on men to "score" •Pressure on women to not appear "cold" •Assuming only promiscuous women get raped •Assuming that men don't get raped or that only "weak" men get raped •Teaching women to avoid getting raped instead of teaching men not to rape

Campus Rape study:

- 27.2% of female college seniors reported that, since entering college, they had experienced some kind of unwanted sexual contact carried out by incapacitation, usually due to alcohol or drugs, or by force. Nearly half of those, 13.5 percent, had experienced penetration, attempted penetration or oral sex. - even in the most serious assaults, those involving penetration, almost three-fourths of victims did not report the episode to anyone in authority, let alone law enforcement. The reason victims gave most often for not reporting episodes was that they did not think the episodes were serious enough to report; others said they felt ashamed, or did not think they would be taken seriously. - The survey bolstered findings from previous studies but stands out for its sheer size — 150,000 students at 27 colleges and universities took part last spring — and for the prominence of the institutions involved, which include many of the nation's elite campuses, including all of the Ivy League except Princeton.

__ out of __ women are killed every day by intimate partners in the U.S.:

- 3 out of 4

Campus Rape: 1 in ___ women will experience a rape or an attempted rape.

- 5

1 in ___ women are raped 1 in ___ men are raped

- 5 - 71

Fewer than ____ percent of completed and attempted rapes of college students are reported to campus administrators or law enforcement.

- 5%

About ___ to ___ percent of sexual assaults reported by college women are perpetrated by someone known to the victim; about half occur on a date.

- 85 to 90%

Columbia University student:

- Columbia University student reported incident of rape - she protested by walking around with the mattress she got raped on until her graduation after Univ. staff didn't take her seriously - When Universities are confronted with sexual behaviors, they quietly settle it and send them off to other universities

Why gender differences?

- Due to unequal power dynamics and decision making in heterosexual relationships - violence is normalized - men told to bottle up emotions - violence seen as central dynamic of masculinity - rape comes from *serial perpetrators* - has to do with a *culture that accepts it*Ami

Repeat Offenders:

- Important research has been done that shows that men who rape are serial offenders - two studies - one conducted on a college campus and the other amongst new Navy recruits - found that it's actually a fairly small minority of men who rape - between 6 and 13% - more dramatically, a large majority of these men raped multiple times - an average of around 6 rapes each - on campuses, it's estimated that they account for about 90% of the rapes

#METOO:

- Oct 5th: NYT Weinstein article. Days later the New Yorker ran another article about the same. - Alyssa Milano started #Metoo (Milano didn't know at the time about TaranaBurke who first used the words Me Too 10 years earlier - 1.7 million tweets using this hashtag in a matter of weeks

Example of patriarchy: Maiden Name:

- The fact that a woman's maiden name is even called a "maiden name" is evidence that this practice is antiquated at best. - Unfortunately, a woman not taking her husband's last name is still viewed as abnormal, deviant behavior in the US. - This is supported by the fact that around 90% of American women still take their husband's last name at marriage, and a staggering 50% of Americans think it should be illegal for a woman not to take his surname.

Patriarchy idea origin:

- The idea came to England around the time of the Norman Conquest, as the French brought with them the idea of coverture — that "her legal existence as an individual was suspended under 'marital unity,' a legal fiction in which the husband and wife were considered a single entity: the husband." - As such, when married the wife would assume her husband's name to become Mrs. his name. - According to one court document in 1340, "when a woman took a husband, she lost every surname except 'wife of'". She was known only in relation to her husband, and that was in fact her only identity.

Madonna complex and how it controls women:

- This is ultimately a way of controlling and policing women's sexuality - when women strayed from this ideal, they were denounced as whores, and if raped or sexually assaulted did not recourse to justice in the courts.

Madonna Complex and race & class:

- This notion applied mainly to white middle and upper class women, working class white women and women of color where always denied seen differently. - Black women for instance had no right to claim rape because they were seen as highly promiscuous. As bell hooks explains in her book "Aint I a woman" the attitude was "they wanted it, they asked for it and they deserved it." - Women's movement of the 1960s fought against these extremely limited notions of femininity and female sexuality.