Remember that creepy commercial with the leering soap bubbles? Ad Age defends the pulled spot, saying:

Pretty funny, in our opinion, and in the opinion of most of the million who watched it on YouTube and elsewhere. Because it was about creepy male aggression. Alas, a handful of feminist bloggers were not only disturbed by the narrative, they saw the ad as condoning rape. The few turned into a few hundred, and Method pulled the spot.

They did believe that pulling the spot was the right choice in light of the viewer outrage. The bottom line is this commercial is still geared towards women. I have never been the target of a sexual assault, but it made me a little queasy– why depict a woman being intimidated and taunted while naked in a shower by… bubbles? It’s just ridiculous. The commercial displayed poor taste and judgment. And if you watch it half-paying attention, as I did (and I suspect most who sat through it) it might not be clear that the taunts are coming from the “enemy.”

***

The F Word has a compelling entry about what has frequently been called the “Amanda Knox Trial.” Two other men were also convicted of the Meredith Kercher’s murder (they would be Rafaelle Sollecito and Rudy Guede), but Knox has been the main target of the press. During the investigation, details not remotely related were circulated, such as how many men she had slept with, and how she had posed “promiscuously” in online photos. Her “beauty” was mentioned in nearly every article and op-ed piece I’ve read. I don’t know if she committed the crime, but regardless, the Italian press failed to explain why her sexual history or looks had any relevance to the case.

From the Guardian:

Italians shrug off extramarital sex, yet they are prim in their attitudes to premarital sex, at least outside the stable context of fidanzamento (engagement). They use the same words for boyfriend and fiance.
So many were taken aback to learn that, by the time she was arrested at the age of 20, Knox had had sex with seven men. They were less outraged by how this information was obtained: Knox was told in prison she was HIV-positive and asked to write a list of her lovers. Before she was told that a mistake had been made, the list was passed to investigators, one of whom passed it to a journalist.

***

Lastly, today is the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, in which 28 people (mostly women) were shot at the École Polytechnique by a gunmen in the name of “fighting feminism.” The anniversary is now known in Canada as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women.

Fiat Lux at Stanford discusses the potential upward trend in sexual assault reporting, and discusses how this development can benefit the campus.

Three lacrosse players from Sacred Heart University decided it would be funny to hold down a fellow student and pretend they were going to rape her. Now they’re being charged with conspiracy to commit sexual assault. Nathan Havey at the Huffington Post dissects the AP’s reporting, discussing its rape myths, (such as “boys will be boys”). It also notes that the woman’s side has been omitted, despite her version of events being reported in other news outlets.

Laura discusses victim blaming through the eyes of law students, and brings up a particular point:

Professor Seidman had an interesting thought about attitudes toward rape. We find rape shameful, she said, because it involves sex (though, she added, “I would argue that rape has nothing to do with sex”). We’re ashamed of the way we think about rape. I take this to mean two things. First, we’re ashamed that we, in the 21st century, are embarrassed to talk about sex. Second, we’ve all taken in pieces of rape mythology and we’re ashamed to admit it. Maybe she shouldn’t have had that last drink. Maybe her dress was too tight. What was she doing going up to his hotel room? Why did she lead him on and then expect him to stop? What was she doing walking alone at night? Why was she acting sophisticated beyond her years?

How good of you, President Sarkozy! Thank you ever so much for helping to release Roman Polanski from prison. It’s nice to know that you’re using your position to help rapists escape punishment.

Ad Week takes a look at some ads that were meant to show support for women– but had the opposite effect. Among them is the now infamous Method commercial, in which scrubbing bubbles leer at a woman and say very inappropriate things to her while she showers.

Another is just ridiculous, and makes you wonder how people are paid to actually come up with this stuff:

First, a Danish group called Children Exposed to Violence at Home introduced a Web site called “Hit the Bitch!” Bizarrely, it was intended to be pro-woman and anti-violence, but visitors might have thought the opposite. Set up as a kind of advergame, the site encourages you to slap and punch a woman on the screen over and over. Eventually the woman collapses, and you get called a “100% idiot” for hitting her — a rebuke that seems more than a little weak.

A NY Times editorial questions why, despite federal funding for DNA kits, thousands of rape kits go untested. It’s no surprise that the more rape kits that are tested, the higher chance there is of capturing a rapist. And yet:

… last March, Human Rights Watch found more than 12,500 rape kits in the Los Angeles area alone. The Houston Police Department recently found at least 4,000 untested rape kits in storage. Detroit’s backlog may be as high as 10,000 untested kits.

There is obviously no excuse for this. Cost cannot be considered a factor of the backlog. A single kit can cost between $600 and $1500 to process; however, after Congress passed the Debbie Smith Act in 2004 all DNA kit testing is federally funded. To take DNA and evidence for a rape kit can be a horrible experience for anyone who had just been sexually assaulted. To not honor the courage that those people show by following through and actually testing the kit is outrageous. Not only that, but it is likely that rapists who could’ve been captured earlier have not been due to this backlog.

A new bipartisan bill has been introduced that seeks to:

increase the number of trained personnel and further encourage lagging jurisdictions to routinely send all rape kits to crime labs. By requiring annual reporting of backlogs, it would increase pressure on states and localities to clean up their act.

***

A disturbing survey reveals that six percent of college students admit to attempted rape or rape. Four questions were asked of 1882 participants; none of the questions actually mentioned the word “rape.” The four paraphrased questions were:

1. Have you ever attempted unsuccessfully to have intercourse with an adult by force or threat of force?
2. Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone who did not want you to because they were too intoxicated to resist?
3. Have you ever had intercourse with someone by force or threat of force? and
4. Have you ever had oral intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?

How depressing.

***

Lastly, a op-ed piece from the NY Times concerning the Stupak Amendment, the trade-off made by Democrats in order to pass the healthcare legislation. As many know by now, despite the fact that abortion is legal under the U.S. Constitution,

House Democrats voted to expand the current ban on public financing for abortion and to effectively prohibit women who participate in the proposed health system from obtaining private insurance that covers the full range of reproductive health options.

It is true that private health insurance doesn’t provide much coverage for abortion in the first place. But for the government to specifically make the decision to dramatically reduce coverage in order to pass this healthcare reform still seems wrong. It’s more of a symbolic point than anything else– if the government does not side with its own laws, than why should they expect citizens to respect the reproductive rights of women?

Question: Is the health care reform a success? In order to secure votes from abortion opponents, Democratic leaders agreed to tighten restrictions on coverage for abortion procedures under any insurance plan that receives federal money.

If enacted, this amendment will be the greatest restriction of a woman’s right to choose to pass in our careers,” said Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, one of the lawmakers who left Ms. Pelosi’s office mad.
Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said the bill’s original language barring the use of federal dollars to pay for abortions should have been sufficient for the opponents. “Abortion is a matter of conscience on both sides of the debate,” Ms. DeLauro said. “This amendment takes away that same freedom of conscience from America’s women. It prohibits them from access to an abortion even if they pay for it with their own money. It invades women’s personal decisions.

It is becoming easier under the current administration to gain asylum due to domestic violence or homophobia.

In 1994, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno ruled in a case that persecution based on sexual orientation could be potential grounds for asylum. Until recently, those grounds have rarely been used.
But now, immigrant and gay activists say, more asylum-seekers from the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean are citing sexual orientation. Activists say the asylum-seekers are escaping violence and death threats from places where homosexuality is either outlawed or strongly, socially shunned.

The domestic violence case involved a Guatemalan woman, Rody Alvarado Pena, whose husband had severely beaten her multiple times. The courts would not govern a domestic matter, so she fled to the United States in 1995, leaving behind two young children. She filed a petition for asylum, and “if the court grants Alvarado’s petition, this will set precedent, by including domestic violence victims as a ‘particular social group’ categorically protected by asylum laws.”

Amazing video of a rape survivor confronting Senator Vitter over his opposition to an amendment that would prohibit the government from working with contractors who deny sexually assaulted workers to pursue charges in court. What’s even more amazing about the video is how Vitter is able to keep his composure in light of the woman’s questioning. You know you were hoping he would make a fool of himself too.

Honduran women’s organizations present a picture of escalating sexual violence after the coup led by Roberto Micheletti. On Nov 3, a new law passed in Honduras that prohibited the morning-after pill, despite strong condemnation from women’s groups. A full list of violations presented to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission is at the link.

Nice. Students from the University of Sydney created a “pro-rape” facebook page. It’s gone now, so there’s no point in searching for it, but it was up for three months before being taken down. Binge drinking and unreported sexual assaults are flourishing on the campus, all part of a growing rape culture. It also reintroduces a commonly seen issue on facebook– where is the line between freedom of speech and blatant hateful, violent speech?

Sarah forwarded me an email regarding Brigitte Harris, a woman who was sexually abused by nine members of her family, including her father, for fourteen years. According to both prosecution and defense experts, she developed Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.

In July 2007, deeply introverted and depressed, Brigitte planned to confront her father about the years of incest as a way to protect her young nieces with whom her father had recently come into contact.  Her plan, if her father refused to admit his wrongdoing and commit to change, was to castrate her father –to remove his weapon– and then commit suicide. At their meeting her father denied his abuse and Brigitte was forced to carry out her plan. Brigitte never intended to cause her father’s death, but her father asphyxiated during the incident.

She was charged with murder, but the jury found her guilty of manslaughter, a sentence that still carries a prison term of up to 10 – 15 years.

STEPS to End Family Violence wants the public to write letters to Judge Cooperman. The details are below:

How You Can Help
 Write a letter to the Judge for Sentencing
 We need your letters of support for Brigitte to ensure a fair and just sentence. This letter should be addressed to the Judge but mailed to Brigitte’s attorney who will use your letter to support his arguments for the most lenient sentence for Brigitte. Your letter should be mailed/faxed ASAP (and not later than Nov 2nd) and include the following information:
 
• How you know Brigitte – and for how long – or how you know of Brigitte.
• A description of Brigitte’s best qualities.
• Your opinion about why Brigitte should receive the most lenient sentence.
 
Letters should be addressed to:                           
Honorable Arthur J. Cooperman, Esq
Queens County Supreme Court                               
125-01 Queens Boulevard                                        
Kew Gardens, NY 11415 
 
Mail/Fax signed letters to:
Arthur Aidala,
8118 13th Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11228
Fax: 718-921-3292

Attend Sentencing
It is very important to attend the sentencing if you are able.  We need to let Judge Cooperman know that the public cares about Brigitte. We hope to see you all there.
November 6, 2009, 10:00 a.m.
Queens County Supreme Court, TAP–D, 3rd Floor,  125-01 Queens Blvd,  Kew Gardens

****

PTSD can lead to criminal behavior or sudden outbursts of violence. One way this can result is due to life events immediately preceding the violent act by the survivor, which forces the individual to face unresolved conflicts related to their trauma. For Brigitte, this was the recent contact between her nieces and her father.

There are also some questions that become relevant during sentencing proceedings, such as whether or not the defendant received treatment for their trauma, how their trauma affected personality development, and of course the psychiatric diagnosis given.

Prison can prove to be even more traumatic for the individual, and exacerbate their symptoms further. Also, it is doubtful that those with PTSD will receive proper treatment in prison. Whenever traumatic stressors are linked to a violent crime, sentencing is a difficult and sometimes unjust process.

Sarah recently blogged about a controversial sex column in a student newspaper, while Politics Daily discusses the trend and concern by some administrations that college students simply don’t possess the required knowledge to write on the subject:

The “qualifications and consistency” that Peak refers to prove to be a tricky goal for many sex columnists and their editors. The challenge editors face is deciding what the tone, or “voice,” as Peak says, of the column, and whether it will tack to the informative side, the snarky, the casual, or somewhere in between. Is the intent to push the envelope for readership’s sake, or is the column’s purpose strictly educational?

The Baltimore Sun editorial insisted that “the whole purpose of student publications … is to train students to become responsible journalists, and for that to happen, they need the experience of learning on their own what is and what isn’t appropriate.” The realm of the student publication sex column is still ripe for exploration, and will continue to serve as training ground for journalists not only concerning free speech issues but also concerning the cultural shifts in the accepted – and not so accepted – norms.

***

Women have come far in the workplace and society… and then backtracked? An op-ed piece by Joanne Lipman asserts that although women are the major breadwinners in 40 percent of families, they are stalling in other areas. According to the article, women earn 77 cents for every dollar made by a man, and only 15 women run Fortune 500 companies.

I completely disagree with one reason behind the pendulum shift backwards. The author says 9/11 is partly responsible– citing the many ways America was torn apart (the war in Iraq, the internet as a soapbox). Could it have made an trivial cut into womens’ progress? Maybe. But I don’t think it’s a significant cause.

The other reason she gives is is much more likely:

Part of the reason we’ve lost our way, part of the reason my generation became complacent, is that many of us have been defining progress for women too narrowly. We’ve focused primarily on numbers at the expense of attitudes.

***

And lastly, depressing news on the status of Sen. Al Franken’s anti-rape amendment.

The proposed amendment that would stop the Pentagon from hiring contractors whose employment contracts prevent their employees from taking “work-related allegations of rape and discrimination to court” is being targeted by– whose else– defense contractors.

According to the article, the Appropriations chairman, Sen. Daniel Inouye, is planning to strip the provision from the bill. However, other sources, including his own office, assert that he voted for the bill and strongly supports it. Confusing much? I guess we’ll just follow this story.