Coming right on the heels of watching this TEDx talk by Jackson Katz, arranged by women in San Francisco's Financial District, the subject of the following news snippet is... pretty disappointing

West Virginia senator: Women senators ‘are on top of’ military sexual assault reports

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) suggested in an interview on Tuesday that it was his female colleagues’ responsibility to monitor reports of sexual assault in the U.S. military. “I talk to all the different senators, especially to our female senators, who are really on top of this and watching it very close and following it,” Manchin said in a CBS News interview. “It is very concerning and I can tell you, we’re all in concert with this, as far as changing the dynamics of what’s going on in the military.”

Source: RAW STORY

What.  Ever. Dude.

What's so cool about Katz's approach is that he's pretty aggressive about countering the "good man" notion of "sensitivity" victims, and the more mainstream notion that sexual assault is a women's issue.  Instead he said, quite bluntly, that sexual assault is a leadership issue! 

Because contrary to most of our narratives the biggest issues aren't about who the victims are.  It's not really even about who the perpetrators are.  Katz's point is that it's about who the bystanders are.  And Sen. Manchin clearly lodges himself firmly in the moist, brown, smelly orifice of bystanderhood.  "'Female' Senators have a handle on that embarrassing ladybusiness assault shit," quoth the male Senator, consequently it's cased closed for him.

Which is bull. Shit.

Katz points out, correctly, that stopping relationship or sexual violence isn't a matter of sequestering potential victims, and it definitely isn't a means of waiting to intervene.

Instead it's about leaders leading on the matter -- not tolerating it, scowling at attempts at humor, dismissing attempts at excuses or justifications, and in particular by benching not just offenders but bystanders -- by snubbing them, calling them out, letting it be known that no promotions or bonuses will be available, by turning their backs, by making their displeasure with failure known -- in other words doing what leaders do when instilling all other company, military, academic, or moral/ethical standards: leading!

Leaders who are men.  Leaders who are women.  Doing what leaders do naturally in virtually all other circumstances.

Not focusing on victims.  Not even really focusing on perpetrators.

Insetad letting it be known that there will be no patience, no tolerance, and no future in the enterprise for passive, flabby, weak, useless bystanders.

As Katz points out in his video, at Penn State plenty of people knew Jerry Sanduski was a serial abuser.  But it was a low-level whistle-blower who finally, well, blew the whistle outside the normal channels of leadership.

But at no point did any Penn State leaders lead!  The fabled head coach Joe Paterno?  Of all people he wasn't a leader, he was just another lousy bystander! The various presidents of the college who also evidently knew?  They turned out not to be leaders either -- malingering bystanders the lot of them.  Just like Sen. Manchin.Pretty contemptable, really.

Graph from The Enliven Project, cached on-site as a bandwidth-saving courtesy.

The gender distribution of sexual violence isn't as black and white as Patriarchal ideology would have us believe.  A post and accompanying graphic by Sarah Beaulieu called "The Super Bowl statistic we aren’t talking about" really puts it in perspective.

We are all talking about the Super Bowl. We are ranting and raving about the Ravens and the 49ers and the fact that their coaches are brothers. Every imaginable statistic about the teams, the players, and the coaches is available on every major news site. We are eagerly anticipating the commercials, planning our menus for the Super Bowl parties, and placing bets on who will win and what the final score might be.

But there is one thing that we aren’t talking about this week.

It’s that 1 out of 6 men on the field next Sunday could be survivors of sexual violence.

That’s right, 1 out of 6.

Source: Sarah Beaulieu's The Enliven Project

While this puts the canonical statistic about 1 out of 4 women in better perspective, what I think is even more important is that it helps unify the methodology: 

Just to be clear, we don’t know whether specific players have had specific experiences. We simply want to you to look at the men in your class, the men in your family, and the men on your favorite sports team with this statistic in mind.

Yes, someone can attempt to deny or dismiss the statistic about men as "fuzzy," but by doing so they inescapably deny or dismiss the corresponding statistic for women.  Similarly, those who dispute how the statistics about female victims are collected and compiled are inextricably throwing male victims under the bus.

Here's a point that really matters to me (emphasis mine.)

Too much shame and stigma exists for all victims of sexual violence.

And a point that's too-often overlooked both by patriarchists and doctrinaire/conservative feminists alike:

But the stigma is even greater for men, many of whom believe they should have been able to protect themselves or fear that friends and family members will think less of them if they come forward.

There have been a handful of brave and courageous men – R.A. Dickey, Tyler Perry, Scott Brown, and Keyon Dooling to name a few – who have stepped forward and are generous in sharing their stories and experiences so that others can be less afraid to break silence. But these men are not the exception. And their stories are more common than you think.

She ends her post with a welcome and heartfelt reminder

When you are watching the Super Bowl next weekend, begin the conversation by sharing this graphic. Ask yourself whether you are open to the truth in your own life and in the lives of the men you love.

 I'll just say again, as I've said in the past, that the closer we get to acknowledging this as a universal issue the further we get from dismissing this large fraction or that, the closer we get to   managing, mitigating, reducing, and (why not aim high?) someday eliminating sexual violence.  All of it.

Head's Up: This post discusses specific forms of sexual violence in order to indicate how narrowly such violence is typically defined.  I use the word "rape" as a specific legal and social term.

So in comments Jacob Taylor took issue with my fairly routine assertion that if men want male victims of sexual violence to be taken seriously we to take women victims seriously.

You demand a quid pro quo condition that male survivors and their advocates must meet before anyone should support them.

You're really not going to find anything in this blog that says men have to make sacrifices to "earn" anything from women. And if I ever, ever say men need to make sacrifices or otherwise pay women before "anyone should support them" it'll either be a serious typo or I'll need medical attention.  And so it's unlikely that I'm ever going to say that if men earn enough cookies we'll get taken seriously.

Instead I'm saying that as long as there are jerks out there like Todd Aikin saying it's only rape if an assault is so brutal the female victims organs of reproduction go into failure then society isn't going to take seriously what happens to men. And I'm saying as long as there jerks like Whoopi Goldberg saying it's not "rape rape" if all the attacker does is drug a minor girl, chase her screaming through the house when the drugs weren't strong enough, subdue her and anally penetrate her" then society isn't going to take seriously what happens to men. And I'm saying that as long as all the other smug dirtbags who say violence less than Aikin's or Goldberg's definitions -- stuff like threats, intoxication, "date rape," etc., is all a just a big misunderstanding or malicious "crying rape" go unchallenged then society isn't going to take seriously what happens to male victims.

So when I say men should take female victims seriously I mean we need to be landing like a ton of bricks on the likes of Aikin and Goldberg when claim that for all intents and purposes not even women can be raped. Because as you've probably noticed, the people who define the universe of sexual violence that narrowly aren't even going to register what happens to men until it's so bad that authorities (again,overwhelmingly male) simply have no way left to deny it.  Sure, that (finally) happens in cases like Mary Letourno, and Penn State (and all state pens!), and pedophile priests where it's so overwhelmingly obvious even the newspapers start to pay attention.  But for the most part?  They've never heard of it and aren't interested finding out.

Helping them get their heads out of their butts about <em>all</em> victims of non-Aikin/Goldberg violence -- the kind society doesn't even take seriously when it happens to women! -- therefore helps everybody.  Which is why I say it's important to for advocates for ,a;e victims of violence to take seriously female victims of violence.

If you look at it that way, the way I look at it, then it probably won't look so much like "quid pro quo." And if you see it that way then if someone claimed I'm just saying men have to somehow "pay" women to take our problem seriously then you'd probably be as annoyed and frustrated as I get.

Instead what I'm saying is that society is completely bound up with the deep, historical, and completely gender-defined idea that "rape" is something that can only happen to women -- "good" women at that!  It can happen at the hands of strangers.  Under the most horrifically violent circumstances. And it says that anything and maybe everything else is lies, avoidance, or even consensual "cuckoldry."

For this reason I don't think taking assault against women seriously is some kind of "quid pro quo" to getting men taken seriously. Nor do I endorse doing it to "earn" respect or cookies or any of the rest of that patriarchy-inspired crap the way "Good Men" Galahads do it.

Instead I'm saying men who care about male victims should take female victims seriously because until society starts taking them seriously it's not going to take male victims seriously either.

This would be so whether or not the Feminist Illuminati Conspiracy ever gets on board. Because for all the squalling feminism is obviously not the problem. Not unless you think the abuse-condoning Joe Paterno was a radical feminist. Not unless you think the entire abuse-condoning Catholic hierarchy is radically feminist. Not unless you think Scott (Dilbert) Adams is a raging feminist. And so on. Those guys are a much bigger obstacle, and their kind has been around thousands of years longer than feminism. So blaming feminism for anything is, as I've said repeatedly, like the bull charging the cape instead of the matador.

So a little more than a year ago at my other (mostly safe for work) blog I wrote a post about "jokes" about sexual violence in prisons: Still Not a Joke — Good Awareness Campaign From Just Detention International.

It got picked up on Tumblr.

So far it's been reblogged more than 13,000 times.

You never know when you're going to make a difference.

Patriarchy demands that men should value themselves by the (external) approval they earn from others, as collected in the currency of "worthiness," of "respect" or "status," of "scoring" with women, of "promotion" by their superiors, and so on.  I've been thinking lately that the way men (everyone, actually) should at least try on valuing ourselves by the difference we make in the world.  If that's true then I made a difference, for 13,000+ people and their followers no less, by passing along that picture.  Back when I used to just derail complain about sexual violence in prison in comments on other people's blogs I might have only reached a few dozen.

Image from The Enliven Project nicely illustrates the problem.

While I don't want this blog to be all about sexual assault of men, the issue of sexual assault looms large for a lot of men who have a) been or felt assaulted and b) have had their experience discounted or disbelieved.

Also, who c) often find themselves clogging feminist survivor's forums because, frankly, it often feels like there aren't a lot of other avenues in general society for broaching the subject.  To, d) the dismay and frequent exasperation of the hosts of those forums who for better or worse feel derailed.

As I said, I don't want this blog to spend too much time on sexual assault of men.*  But it is a blog about the impact Patriarchy has on men.  And one area where that impact looms large?  Well, there's the blunt fact that the concept of "rape" and related forms of sexual assault have been so completely bound up in patriarchal understanding of women as transferrable, depreciable property that there's simply no social location, construct, or concept in which men can be the assailed rather than the assailant.

As usual it's patriarchy, not feminism, that screws male victims of sex crimes.  (And just to bring the point home and to anticipate one possible objection, the extent to which some older-school feminists said only women can properly be victims is the extent to which they grew up mired in the language of patriarchy.)

Want proof the legal concept of rape is so tied up with patriarchy that we ought to throw the whole thing out and start over?  David Ferguson says a California appeals court has supplied the last straw:

A California appeals court has overturned the rape conviction of a man charged with raping a sleeping woman, basing the decision on an 1872 law that does not protect unmarried women the same protections as those who are married. According to the LA Weekly blog, the court found in favor of Julio Morales, who was convicted of rape after he slipped into bed with a sleeping 18-year-old woman and initiated sex with her, pretending to be her boyfriend.

...

Judge Thomas A. Willhite, Jr. wrote in the court’s decision, “Has the man committed rape? Because of historical anomalies in the law and the statutory definition of rape, the answer is no, even though, if the woman had been married and the man had impersonated her husband, the answer would be yes.”

The court argued, however, that the case should be retried and that the archaic law should be examined and possibly overturned. Willhite called Morales’ actions in the case “despicable,” but that the state’s law left the three judge panel with no choice.

Source: The Raw Story

First of all, pause for three deep breaths: a) the defendant was initially charged and easily convicted; the appeals court recommended a retrial rather than dismissal; the appeals court judge called the law archaic and the defendant despicable.  So we're not exactly in conspiracy theory land here.

But!

As I've harped on endlessly about, the entire foundation of "rape" law rests on the bedrock idea from English Common Law that rape is a property crime against women's custodial males: their husbands, fathers, or others the value of whom's dowries or bride prices depend on the "condition" of their property's (a.k.a. the female victim's) genitalia.  In other words virtually everything about rape as a crime is based on literal, men with beards and hats, capital-P Patriarchy.

Thus the conceit, embedded in California law (and elsewhere), dug up by a particularly enterprising defense attorney, and despised by appeals court judges, that it makes a criminal sexual assault conditional on whether a woman is married or not.

You want to know why sexual assault of boys and men is disregarded?  You want to know why sexual assault on unmarried non-virgins is taken so seriously?  You want to know why so many jurisdictions here and around the world consider it "rape" if and only if a penis (but only a penis) penetrates a vagina (but only a vagina?)  You want to know why there's so much "she must have asked for it" and so much concern that "she must have wanted it but changed her mind?" (Note: in comments feel free to add more of the plentiful outrageous examples to my partial list.)

It's because in its heart of hearts the entire concept of "rape" isn't about assault at all.  It's about vandalism of some guy's unguarded property.  Where the "property" can't be counted on (entirely reasonably!) to share the interests of her property "owner."

Meanwhile, here in the American 21st Century there's a whole 'nother, non-gender-bound way of addressing the various sex-related crimes against people not property.  Like sex-related variations of crimes like assault, battery, kidnapping, fraud, false pretenses, impersonation, intimidation, misuse of authority, and of others wherein neither the victims nor the perpetrators sex, gender, orientation, relationship status, sobriety, attire, or consensual activity have any bearing on how or even whether charges should be made or dropped.

Because (sweet Krishna on a rye crisp!) how many other deplorable little easter eggs from the 19th Century and before are still lying around in various local, state, and national laws regarding "rape?"  The whole thing's a patriarchy-soaked, gender-bound nightmare.  It's bad for women.  It's bad for men.  It's bad for prosecutors.  It's a moral fucking sinkhole for defense attorneys  It's bad for respect for the law as a whole.  And it's bad for society.  Time to chuck it. Whatever they're called there are crimes still being committed, but what we're continuing to call them is getting in the way.  We're already 13% of the way through the 21st Century.  We've waited long enough to get serious about this under the law.

* So unfortunately this blog isn't the best place for that either, but see suggestion.

Gathering statistics on human violence in America (as with violence around the world) is a perilous enterprise for a number of obvious and non-obvious reasons. Two being:

1. Aside from categories that tend to result in medical treatment or death, it's not always clear to either victims or perpetrators what constitutes "violence." (To the extent that some perpetrators will confess to behavior their victims will decline to recognize or acknowledge violent!)
2. Under-reporting of violence of all kinds, by perpetrators of all kinds, as recorded by law-enforcement and social scientists, is a giant, frustrating black hole of insufficient information. Oh, and a giant informational Rorschach Test on which people can project all their own personal agendas, biases, blind spots, and legitimate but difficult-to-support-because-the-data's-crap issues.

Today, with the House Republican engineered expiration of the not-entirely-well-named Violence Against Women Act, refining that evidence has just become a lot more difficult.

I say not entirely well-named because despite it having been written and passed (by mostly male legislators) with baked-in assumptions that only hetero women are victims of violence and that only hetero men are perpetrators in recent years it was becoming more inclusive.

But that was then. Until Jan 1, 2013, this was now: studies included information gathered about most intimate partner violence, about most intimate partner coercion, about most intimate partner sexual assault. About most intimate partner stalking. Not just women victims. Not just perpetrating men. Not just white people. Not enough, nearly, about trans people... but again until Jan. 1, it was starting to look like they were starting to get interested in that group as well.

Now! How do I know this? Well, I know it in part from a much-trumpeted but evidently poorly read executive summary of the CDC's The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Summary Report (pdf). Which, among other things, provided hard evidence that based on available information, see statistics-gathering problem #1, above the reservoir of probable victims of intimate partner violence is at least half again as large as prior studies assuming only female victims would lead us to believe. That there's a reservoir of at least 10% more perpetrators of sexual assault as prior studies assuming only male perpetrators would lead us to believe.

And in absolute terms those reservoirs of present and future violence, coercion, stalking, and assault problematic in terms of perpetuating further perpetration and victimization.

And in absolute terms those reservoirs are also a source of a critical and often more, well, violent violence: reciprocal violence. (John Bobbet was only the most lurid example of reciprocal violence -- there are plenty of instances where men or women badly injure or even kill partners who previously had physically, sexually, or psychologically assaulted. These instances are so routine they're rarely picked up at all by news outlets.)

But worse, in relative terms the failure to recognize those reservoirs actually keeps them even larger by making it difficult for an unknown but probably far larger number of victims and perpetrators to even recognize themselves, let alone to report themselves to law enforcement, let alone researchers. And thus the real number of victims and perpetrators will remain unreported. And large. And therefore perpetuated. And therefore more people are going to be coerced, stalked, assaulted, and all-round hurt.

Anyway, thanks to a bunch of snit-picking, feather-bedding, incompetence, and pure gender-bound vindictiveness House Republicans have made sure it'll be a heck of a lot harder to gather, compile, or disseminate the information that had heretofore begun to be made public, and made part of policy.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from that stereotype-challenging, gender-determinist-subverting, more-inclusive NISVS 2010 Report. Read it and, literally, weep. There might not be updates for a while.

Key Findings Sexual Violence by Any Perpetrator

• Nearly 1 in 5 women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives, including completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration.
• More than half (51.1%) of female victims of rape reported being raped by an intimate partner and 40.8% by an acquaintance; for male victims, more than half (52.4%) reported being raped by an acquaintance and 15.1% by a stranger.
• Approximately 1 in 21 men (4.8%) reported that they were made to penetrate someone else during their lifetime; most men who were made to penetrate someone else reported that the perpetrator was either an intimate partner (44.8%) or an acquaintance (44.7%).
• An estimated 13% of women and 6% of men have experienced sexual coercion in their lifetime (i.e., unwanted sexual penetration after being pressured in a nonphysical way); and 27.2% of women and 11.7% of men have experienced unwanted sexual contact.
• Most female victims of completed rape (79.6%) experienced their first rape before the age of 25; 42.2% experienced their first completed rape before the age of 18 years.
• More than one-quarter of male victims of completed rape (27.8%) experienced their first rape when they were

Stalking Victimization by Any Perpetrator

• One in 6 women (16.2%) and 1 in 19 men (5.2%) in the United States have experienced stalking victimization at some point during their lifetime in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed.
• Two-thirds (66.2%) of female victims of stalking were stalked by a current or former intimate partner; men were primarily stalked by an intimate partner or an acquaintance, 41.4% and 40.0%, respectively.
• Repeatedly receiving unwanted telephone calls, voice, or text messages was the most commonly experienced stalking tactic for both female and male victims of stalking (78.8% for women and 75.9% for men).
• More than half of female victims and more than one-third of male victims of stalking indicated that they were stalked before the age of 25; about 1 in 5 female victims and 1 in 14 male victims experienced stalking between the ages of 11 and 17.

Violence by an Intimate Partner

• More than 1 in 3 women (35.6%) and more than 1 in 4 men (28.5%) in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
• Among victims of intimate partner violence, more than 1 in 3 women experienced multiple forms of rape, stalking, or physical violence; 92.1% of male victims experienced physical violence alone, and 6.3% experienced physical violence and stalking.
• Nearly 1 in 10 women in the United States (9.4%) has been raped by an intimate partner in her lifetime, and an estimated 16.9% of women and 8.0% of men have experienced sexual violence other than rape by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime.
• About 1 in 4 women (24.3%) and 1 in 7 men (13.8%) have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner (e.g., hit with a fist or something hard, beaten, slammed against something) at some point in their lifetime.
• An estimated 10.7% of women and 2.1% of men have been stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetime.
• Nearly half of all women and men in the United States have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime (48.4% and 48.8%, respectively).
• Most female and male victims of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner (69% of female victims; 53% of male victims) experienced some form of intimate partner violence for the first time before 25 years of age.

Impact of Violence by an Intimate Partner

Nearly 3 in 10 women and 1 in 10 men in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner and reported at least one impact related to experiencing these or other forms of violent behavior in the relationship (e.g., being fearful, concerned for safety, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, need for health care, injury, contacting a crisis hotline, need for housing services, need for victim’s advocate services, need for legal services, missed at least one day of work or school).

Violence Experienced by Race/ Ethnicity

• Approximately 1 in 5 Black (22.0%) and White (18.8%) non-Hispanic women, and 1 in 7 Hispanic women (14.6%) in the United States have experienced rape at some point in their lives. More than one-quarter of women (26.9%) who identified as American Indian or as Alaska Native and 1 in 3 women (33.5%) who identified as multiracial non-Hispanic reported rape victimization in their lifetime.
• One out of 59 White non-Hispanic men (1.7%) has experienced rape at some point in his life. Nearly one-third of multiracial non-Hispanic men (31.6%) and over one-quarter of Hispanic men (26.2%) reported sexual violence other than rape in their lifetimes.
• Approximately 1 in 3 multiracial non-Hispanic women (30.6%) and 1 in 4 American Indian or Alaska Native women (22.7%) reported being stalked during their lifetimes. One in 5 Black non-Hispanic women (19.6%), 1 in 6 White non-Hispanic women (16.0%), and 1 in 7 Hispanic women (15.2%) experienced stalking in their lifetimes.
• Approximately 1 in 17 Black non-Hispanic men (6.0%), and 1 in 20 White non-Hispanic men (5.1%) and Hispanic men (5.1%) in the United States experienced stalking in their lifetime.
• Approximately 4 out of every 10 women of non-Hispanic Black or American Indian or Alaska Native race/ethnicity (43.7% and 46.0%, respectively), and 1 in 2 multiracial non-Hispanic women (53.8%) have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
• Nearly half (45.3%) of American Indian or Alaska Native men and almost 4 out of every 10 Black and multiracial men (38.6% and 39.3%, respectively) experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime.

Number and Sex of Perpetrators

• Across all types of violence, the majority of both female and male victims reported experiencing violence from one perpetrator.
• Across all types of violence, the majority of female victims reported that their perpetrators were male.
• Male rape victims and male victims of non-contact unwanted sexual experiences reported predominantly male perpetrators. Nearly half of stalking victimizations against males were also perpetrated by males. Perpetrators of other forms of violence against males were mostly female.

Bummer.