Tag Archives: rape

Kavanaugh, Boys Will Be Boys, and Why This Problem Will Never Go Away

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I was watching Vice News Tonight, and they were covering some of the Kavanaugh garbage that we’re seeing on a daily basis right now, and it just sickens me that we have a bunch of men in charge of our government who apparently don’t care one iota that they’re about to empower (with enormous power and responsibility) someone who may have tried to rape another woman. And even more allegations are starting to emerge. And they’re trying to railroad him into the position so fast that NO OTHER WOMAN can possibly come forward in time to stop it.
 
One thing that was interesting was that they brought on a woman who was literally halted from testifying during the Anita Hill hearings for Clarence Thomas who ALSO had a sexual harassment story about Clarence Thomas, but she was shunted away by the people who wanted him put into power until the hearings were over. They made sure that atrocity happened, and THOSE SAME PEOPLE ARE STILL IN POWER TODAY. They’re the same people trying to push through the current guy.
 
But you know what really got me? At the end of the whole segment, four or five other women were giving their own stories of when men attacked them sexually but they were also never believed when these things happened. And it got me to thinking: How many of these types of guys have I known my entire life? The cool guy in high school. The jock in college. That guy who got all the girls. And now the weird guy who no woman ever talked to but is now in an office establishment with all sorts of other women who are forced to be around him all day long. So many people, and so many stories, which could mean this happens all the time.
 
Because that’s what I’m getting from all of these stories. These incidents aren’t rare. They’re more the norm. And if you are brave enough to hold a conversation with a group of women and just let them start talking about it, what you’ll discover is that almost ALL of them have a similar story of when this happened to them. Not one or two out of a room of 50. But 49 or 50 of them all have a horrifying story of some guy that violated them in some way.
 
And this is what we should be facing.
 
But we won’t. We’ll shuffle it under the rug, pretend it only happens with really bad people who, oh I don’t know, must not go to church or something equally ridiculous. And it will continue happening because we choose to let it happen.
 
Like people shooting up schools with guns. Because we choose to let it happen.
 
We’re all responsible, but we will blame a boogeyman who doesn’t exist, or just might exist. But we’re all responsible. And we’re responsible because we don’t do anything about it but act shocked and surprised.
 
Right now. Instead of doing something about this, the people who CAN do something are saying: “This is just a political witch hunt. Get him in the office and the problem goes away.”
 
And that’s what’s probably going to happen.
 
Or, we’ll get brave this one time (honestly, I don’t believe that will happen), but we’ll do nothing about the larger problem because it’s too hard. It takes too much work. We can never solve this. Or whatever weak excuse we will give, including my favorite: “It’s not me, so I don’t see what trying to stop it will do because there’s no way to tell who is responsible.”
 
I already told you. WE are responsible.
 
And WE will do absolutely nothing.
 
Now, I’m going to go back to killing aliens in a video game because at least there the world makes a lot more sense.

When Did HBO Become the Sex Channel?

Television, Writing, , , , , , , , ,
I've been in love with her since the first time we met in ancient England, but that doesn't mean I want to see her having sex with other people
I’ve been in love with her since the first time we met in ancient England, but that doesn’t mean I want to see her having sex with other people

One of the more popular shows in America right now is Game of Thrones, which airs specifically on HBO. It’s a pretty decent show, has great acting and writing, and can definitely tell a story. Well, I could probably say that about most HBO shows that I’ve watched over the years, and that includes The Sopranos, Deadwood, Rome, True Blood and the Wire. These were all great shows.

One thing that distinguished most of these shows from regular network programming is that they were on HBO, and as a result, they could sometimes be a bit more risque than your usual show. This usually meant nudity, sexual situations, drug references and possibly violence (although violence is the one area that regular networks have little problem glorifying). But something changed over the years, and I think what has happened is that the programmers at HBO are now more interested in glorifying sex than in actually telling a story that involves sexual situations. I know that sounds like I’m saying the same thing, but I really think there’s something to this.

Let’s look at the time when this started to change. The show True Blood has always been a bit on the edge when it comes to sexual situations. However, a few seasons into its run, the story line, which used to be the center of the show (the underworld of the vampire universe) somehow turned into sex central, to where the main story seemed much more about who Sookie Stackhouse was going to fuck, or who amongst the rest of the cast was going to have sex with someone else. So they started introducing female on female sex, male on male sex, animal on human sex, animal on animal sex, hybrid animals on hybrid animals of different genders having sex, and don’t get me wrong but somewhere down the line I think they were experimenting with mermaids, fairies and werewolves. I’d say they kind of jumped the shark, but so far they haven’t tried to have sex with a shark yet. I imagine that’s in the next season.

Basically, what this has developed is a sense that HBO is on the edge when it comes to sex so that it’s treating it like the new violence variable that network programming used to do, and by that I mean that every season to television around the 1980s was designed to push the envelope on violence to see what they could get away with. HBO, having gone completely over the edge with violence in its shows, is now trying to push the very boundaries of sex with its series.

Last week, HBO crossed the line with Game of Thrones by going way overboard with rape. One of the main characters raped his sister near the dead body of her son in a very nonconsensual rape scene that the director Alex Graves, indicated was his favorite scene he’s ever done.  The problem I perceive is that he’s so enamored with how he’s overstepped the boundary of decency that he believes that he’s taken the show (and the network) in a positive direction, when in fact he’s actually done the entire genre a complete disservice. There was a story a few weeks ago of a woman who was sued by an affiliate of HBO for refusing to do a topless sex scene.  The commentary on that story from the readers is amazing, but I’ll let you read into that yourself. To sum up, basically people are upset at the actress because she signed a contract to appear naked and do sex for a television role.

My question is to ask why a sex scene is all that necessary to a particular story line. As a writer, I understand that sometimes sex is a necessary element to move a narrative along, but I can’t remember ever writing a sex scene because I started thinking “I really need to spice up this book”. And that’s the problem I think we’re running into because I believe a lot of the sex we’re seeing on the screen these days is just bad writing that takes the lazy way out of a plot device that they didn’t want to waste time trying to create. I remember once, in my earlier days of writing, where I actually found myself having to figure a way OUT of a sexual situation in one of my stories because I realized the sex would have been too easy to write for that scene, and I actually reached a far better place for the story by having the sexual situation avoided by the main characters (which brought a lot more drama to the moment than if they did the deed).

What I do know is that quite often when I’m watching a television show and it moves off into sex mode, I often find myself doing other things than watching the show because I find the “sex” in a television show to be very uninteresting. And it’s not because I’m a prude; I’m about as far away from that as possible. It’s because if I want to watch porn, I’ll watch porn. When I turn on the television set to watch drama, I want to watch drama, not ten minutes of young people trying to simulate copulation on the screen (or actually doing it, which is often even worse). I know there are some people who watch certain shows just in hopes of seeing some actress or actor naked, but I’m not one of them. Maybe when I was 13 and hadn’t seen all that many naked women in my time, but these days I need real narrative elements to get me going, and watching sex on the screen rarely does that for me.

Media STILL doesn’t understand the difference between a “sex scandal” and “rape”

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Lackland Air Force Base is having a bit of a “sex” problem lately. It appears that one of its soldiers allegedly raped young recruits going through training. Now, that’s a real problem, and I sure hope they get to the bottom of this and make steps to keep it from happening again.

But my gripe isn’t with the case itself, but with the media and how it has this real problem whenever it comes to framing “sex” stories. There’s this, which is a newspaper article from the Global Post, which actually gets its story from NBC. This story refers to the act of rape as a “sex scandal”. Okay, for all of those who will never read my blog, here it goes:

A “sex scandal” is something that occurs when someone has been caught with his penis where it shouldn’t be. That’s the likes of a politician who is fooling around on his or her wife/husband. That’s someone who got arrested for soliciting a prostitute. THAT is a “sex scandal”.

Rape is forcing sex on someone. Okay, there are all sorts of variations of that, but usually it’s an act of violence, or coercion, or forcing someone to do something he/she wouldn’t normally do in the form of sex. Notice how it’s NOTHING like a “sex scandal”?

The media has this HORRIBLE tendency to call “rape” a “sex scandal”, possibly because they’re under the impression that using the word “sex” in the headline will cause more eyes to look at their story. It’s wrong. It’s incorrect. It’s misleading. And it does a HUGE disservice to the people who were victimized by an ACTUAL RAPE.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Gender Issues at West Point

Politics, Relationships, , , , , , ,

There’s a story that’s been making the rounds this week from both West Point (the United States Military Academy) and Annapolis (the US Naval Academy) about women who were allegedly raped and then pushed out of their respective academies by a system that wants nothing to do with providing justice to women who might have been sexually abused by upperclass cadets and midshipmen. As someone who attended West Point back in the 1980s, all I can say is that I’m ashamed that such actions are taking place today and really wish I hadn’t read about such things.

You see, when I attended, women were just breaking ground at graduating from West Point, and it was not rare to see a lot of hostility waged against any woman that attempted to get through a very male-centered environment. My first squad leader in cadet basic training was a woman, and she instilled high standards in me that I never forgot. As the leader of our squad, she had several women in this squad, and all I kept thinking to myself during that first summer was how hard those women had it. The male cadets were complete assholes around them, yet they struggled through and somehow made it. Not all of them did, but they persevered. It was kind of an honor to see them go through the work they went through to make the inroads they did.

I’m sorry that there are men today who are still thinking of women in the Corps of Cadets as potential targets for doing things that men should have evolved way beyond. Especially at an esteemed institution like that. Over the years, I used to think that West Point was way above such things, and when the Citadel was going through its gender problems years later, all I could think was that West Point got through it before them, and it was only a matter of time before all the rest of the military institutions did as well. Turns out, I saw things to be better than they actually were. Apparently, we still have a long way to go.

Hopefully, we move forward. But I suspect that we still have a long way to go yet. And that just makes me sad. Especially when I saw the crap women had to go through over 20 years ago to make it easier for women who might come later. It’s like their sacrifices were for nothing.

21st Century Technology for a World Stuck in the Middle Ages

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Sometimes when I read the news, I’m just too amazed to believe that what I’m reading isn’t in fact something from the Onion, rather than from the actual news. The other day, I caught the story where an Egyptian general, who is still a general today, indicated that female protesters who were arrested were administered virginity tests because, and this part still floors me, they wanted to make sure that when the women claimed they were raped, they could be proved liars because:

“We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place,” he told the American network. “None of them were [virgins].”

What really gets me is the gall the guy had to actually make some kind of in your face comment that somehow any claims of rape would be false because they weren’t actually virgins, the translation meaning that in Egypt, a woman can’t be raped if she’s not actually a virgin. Think about that for a second. Now think about it for a minute. Did any more time somehow make that come off as making any more sense than the ridiculousness of when you first read it? I would hope not. Or you’re a part of the problem, and you really should be reading comic books instead of this blog. No, I take that back. Comic books shouldn’t get that kind of an insult.

Every day, I read more and more ridiculous stories like the one I just mentioned, and every day they just keep on coming. It’s like we don’t learn anything, and the stories just get worse. To add even more insult to this injury, I can’t even feel comforted by saying, well, that just happens in some obscure part of the world. Way too often the stories are coming right from the United States, where you read of some politician who makes some kind of statement that you feel even a general in Egypt wouldn’t be stupid enough to make. Like the subject of abortion. Recently, it’s been used as justification for all sorts of ridiculousness, so that whenever it’s brought up in subject, people throw all sorts of common sense out through the window. Male politicians in this country, who would never advocate that raping a woman is an okay thing, will then turn around and say, “well, it’s probably God’s way” if someone raped a woman and some anti-abortion person doesn’t want to use this to justify why she shouldn’t carry a baby to term, specifically one that came from someone who raped her. It’s like people have a tendency to turn off the “common sense” knob whenever we start talking about political issues.

But when it comes to relations between men and women, this country, this planet, is like some kind of purgatory for the Middle Ages because we’ve stopped learning anything and suddenly no longer think in common sense terms. I’m reminded of the Civil Rights movement, which most people who have some sense of common sense will argue on the right side, but when it comes to offering those same civil rights to gender, suddenly we’re back in Dred Scott days. So few people even realize that at one point, African-Americans were finally able to gain the right to vote, specifically through an alliance they made with women, who put off their own struggle for equality by dealing with the race issue first. But when it came to the Equal Rights Amendment, suddenly African-American men immediately remembered they were men first before being black men, and they turned completely against the same people who offered them assistance in their most needed hour. There’s something about gender that people just don’t seem to get.

In the 1970s, there was a huge battle in gender roles, mainly because men didn’t seem to see any actual issue when it came to rape. Believe it or not, in the 1970s, a woman had to prove that she wasn’t a slut before she was able to prove that someone may have taken liberties that he shouldn’t have taken. But you’d think that we’d gotten over that. Instead, every now and then, you’ll see some court case appear where some company is being sued by a group of women because it is STILL acting like its mentality is stuck in a loop in the 1970s, not the 21st century. And people will STILL side against women, as if the issue is brand new. And then you’ll get sniping from other guys who start to yell “reverse discrimination” and all sorts of other things, mainly because there’s still this belief that women need to be in the kitchen making dinner, or in the bedroom making babies. It’s amazing how quickly we fall into these roles yet again.

Anyway, I found myself reading the newspaper today again, and I began to wonder if I was stuck in a time loop again. But I guess I’m not. I have a feeling this is going to be the way things are for a very long time to come. So women, I guess you’re going to just have to learn to live with it, because apparently, I’m the only one who seems to care.

“Perhaps you need to live in the real world….”

Politics, Social Networking, , , , , ,

A couple of days ago, a female reporter from CBS was sexually assaulted in Egypt. What’s unique about the whole situation is not just that it happened, but it occurred right after a number of assaults on western media entities by pro-government forces. To put it more poignantly, it happened after those pro-government forces stopped attacking and took place during the celebrations of the succeeding revolutionaries who managed to overthrow the Mubarak government. In other words, she was attacked by a bunch of Egyptians celebrating a successful revolution against oppression. In even more other words, they were celebrating their freedom by sexually assaulting some random woman.

There are a couple of things that haven’t received a whole lot of attention because right now everyone in the world is so happy that “freedom” won the day against oppression. Yet, right after this horrible oppression, a newly “free” people took it upon themselves to conduct horrific, barbaric activities perpetrated against a woman, as if freedom is great, but it should never get in the way of a bunch of guys getting together and taking sexual liberties with random women. After all, isn’t that what freedom is all about? Sadly, there is probably an entire country of people who may be thinking just that.

But what bothers me about this is not just that it happened, which does, of course, bother me, but how I first found out about it. I follow news through a number of message boards, and it just so happens that there are a couple of computer gaming boards I follow where some of the more brilliant current events people hang out. I take great pleasure in debating all sorts of issues with these individuals, and it was on that particular day when I first read a thread of this event happening. However, what kept bothering me about the thread was not that the event had happened (which again, bothered me a great deal), but that almost all of the commentary was from people indicating that Lara Logan was the one who should be considered at fault, because she should have known better than to be in a place where she might possibly be raped by men.

I remember staring at the screen, thinking to myself, how could anyone even think something like that? In all of the years I’ve been arguing with these people, not once did I ever think of them as a bunch of Neanderthals who thought that women should be treated as sexual fodder to be used randomly because they’re soft and cuddly, and men are going to do what men are going to do. Yet, in post after post, that’s all I was reading.

So, I fired off a response in which I indicated that I was shocked that we still have people who think this way in this day and age. I was astonished at this behavior, and I couldn’t believe they would EVER blame a woman for the simple crime of, well, being a woman in a man’s world. I knew I was going to rile up some people, but right after I posted my response, the usual suspects started chiming in about how “you need to live in the real world” and that the world is a dangerous place, and if I can’t handle the way things happen, then maybe I should stay inside and not dare to play with the big boys, because “your panties might get tussled.”

Shortly after this, one post after another came across indicating that I was clueless as to how people live in the real world. Then, one of the posters responded with “um, guys, you know he’s an Army veteran, right?” And then suddenly the insults stopped. But it literally took another member from the group to point out that the person they were insulting was actually someone who wasn’t some girl-like guy for them to actually stop treating me like I was some wastoid of humanity.

But that never changed the perspective of the people who were posting. They still believed it was her fault for being in a place she should not have been.

Shortly after this, Nir Rosen imploded on himself with his tweets saying almost exactly the same thing. The upshot was he lost his job, and today Rosen has tried to salvage any future career by writing a veiled article about how his undoing was really his “enemies” out to get him by taking pot shots at him for things he didn’t mean to say. Unfortunately for him, most of the comments generally aren’t buying his banter, as he already threw away his career by saying some of the stupid things he said.

But the sorts of things he said were no different from any of the people who I was talking about from that message board. Yet, what I’ve discovered is that once these people realized their comments were seriously wrong, and they were, they’ve now just stopped talking about it, moving onto the next subject and pretending nothing happened. That, unfortunately, is what happens all of the time with our mainstream media, and I don’t think people really recognize what’s going on. People feel they can get away with it as long as they move onto the next subject and pretend they never said anything ridiculous. Mainstream news pundits are filled with morons who do that sort of thing. I’ll be honest. I’ve done it from time to time where I’ve taken the wrong tact on an issue and then just tried to pretend I never said anything and moved on. So, it’s not just enough to point fingers and leave it at that.

The problem we really have is that people do not take accountability for much of what they say and do. Yet, people like Lara Logan still have to get up and try to make it through the next day, realizing that when things turned bad, the people who claim to be the voice of the rest of the people threw her under the bus and hoped no one would ever hold them accountable for doing so. I can’t imagine how it must feel for someone who has been treated like dirt, after being treated like an object, and has to face a new day alone.

That’s someone who has to live in the real world. I’m just not sure that’s all that great a world to have to live in.