If you said “0-30 days” you are not alone: a Montana judge named Todd Baugh agrees with you.
Also, you and Baugh are among thousands of utterly stupid, non-compassionate extremists who turn a blind eye to rape in schools and seem to believe that a teenager committing suicide after being raped by a teacher is laughable enough to win the teacher only thirty days in prison.
I’m not calling him “judge.” He does not deserve such a title. He should resign.
Indeed, a teenager committing suicide after being raped is a very common incident; and it often happens after school administrations turn a blind eye. There is no difference between rape and bullying: if tough consequences are put on for one and toughly enforced, the same should happen for the other.
I encourage you to tweet with #JusticeforCherice to express your anger, and outrage. Or just copy/RT this person…..
I’ve recently written a couple posts (here and here) on rape culture and sexism in America. I’m going to add to the mix a Frank Bruni NYT op-ed on this matter from last Tuesday:
Tackling the Roots of Rape
By Frank Bruni
Steubenville. The Naval Academy. Vanderbilt University. The stories of young men sexually assaulting young women seem never to stop, despite all the education we’ve had and all the progress we’ve supposedly made, and there are times when I find myself darkly wondering if there’s some ineradicable predatory streak in the male subset of our species.
Wrong, Chris Kilmartin told me. It’s not DNA we’re up against; it’s movies, manners and a set of mores, magnified in the worlds of the military and sports, that assign different roles and different worth to men and women. Fix that culture and we can keep women a whole lot safer.
I reached out to Kilmartin, a psychology professor and the author of the textbook “The Masculine Self,” after learning that the military is repeatedly reaching out to him. Right now he’s in Colorado, at the Air Force Academy, which imported him for a year to teach in the behavioral sciences department and advise the school on preventing sexual violence.
He previously worked on a Naval Academy curriculum with that aim, and helped to write a training film for the Army. At a time of heightened concern about rape and related crimes in the armed services, he’s being welcomed as someone with insights into the problem.
Its deepest roots, he said, are the cult of hyper-masculinity, which tells boys that aggression is natural and sexual conquest enviable, and a set of laws and language that cast women as inferior, pliable, even disposable.
“We start boys off at a very early age,” Kilmartin told me during a recent phone conversation. “When the worst thing we say to a boy in sports is that he throws ‘like a girl,’ we teach boys to disrespect the feminine and disrespect women. That’s the cultural undercurrent of rape.”
Boys see women objectified in popular entertainment and tossed around like rag dolls in pornography. They encounter fewer women than men in positions of leadership. They hear politicians advocate for legislation like the Virginia anti-abortion bill that would have required women who wanted to end pregnancies to submit to an invasive vaginal ultrasound.
“Before you make a reproductive choice, you are going to be required to have somebody penetrate you with an object,” he said. “That’s very paternalistic: we know what’s right. You’re not in control of your own body.”
He noted that discussions of domestic violence more often included the question of why a battered woman stayed than the question of why a battering man struck, as if the striking was to be expected. Men will be brute men, just as boys will be lusty boys.
If Kilmartin’s observations can read at times like humorless chunks of a politically correct tome, that’s not how he actually comes across. He’s loose, funny. In fact he’s got a sideline hobby as a stand-up comic. No joke.
And he’s got a trove of less wonky riffs. He mentions the University of Iowa, which for decades has painted the locker room used by opponents pink to put them “in a passive mood” with a “sissy color,” in the words of a former head football coach, Hayden Fry.
He mentions the bizarre use of the term “sex scandals” for such incidents as Tailhook decades ago and the recent accusations that Bob Filner, the mayor of San Diego, groped women around him, among other offenses. “They’re violence scandals,” he said. “If I hit you over the head with a frying pan, I don’t call that cooking.”
The armed services are a special challenge, because they’re all about aggression, summoning and cultivating Attila the Hun and then asking him to play Sir Walter Raleigh as well.
But Kilmartin said that that’s a resolvable tension, if men are conditioned to show the same self-control toward women that they do, successfully, in following myriad military regulations; if they’re encouraged to call out sexist behavior; and if, above all, commanders monitor their own conduct, never signaling that women are second-class citizens.
The integration of women into combat duties will help, bolstering women’s standing and altering a climate of inequality, Kilmartin said.
But he and the rest of us are taking on fortified traditions and calcified mind-sets, and that’s evident in the enrollment in the two classes of Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Men and Masculinity that he began teaching on Friday. Although female cadets are about 20 percent of the Air Force Academy, they’re more than half of the students who signed up for Kilmartin’s course, he said.
He said that one of them, during the very first session, recounted that someone at flight school over the summer had told her that women shouldn’t fly planes.
“Oh, so do you fly a plane with your penis?” Kilmartin asked the class.
One of the male cadets responded: “Sounds like you’re issuing a challenge, sir.”
This has been out for a month; but it was on Colbert a couple days ago, so let’s talk about some blurred lines here.
Specifically, Robin Thicke’s hit-song “Blurred Lines,” which is you haven’t heard, 1) here’s the video and 2) get out from under a rock.
That was the CLEAN version I treated you to, okay? There’s also a dirty version involving naked girls dancing. Disgusting.
But the video, bad as it is, is not my major problem with the song. That part is the words. Let’s look at them:
If you can’t hear what I’m trying to say
If you can’t read from the same page
Maybe I’m going deaf,
Maybe I’m going blind
Maybe I’m out of my mind
Okay. It looks fine, but the real trouble is here….
OK now he was close, tried to domesticate you
But you’re an animal, baby, it’s in your nature
There. I’m a civilized woman, NOT an animal. And I’m not a bigot or a destructive warlord, who are the real animals among us.
Just let me liberate you.
Is this really what we want to teach our children? That women need men to liberate them? Because that’s just wrong. And it’s what the song suggests.
You don’t need no papers
Hey, hey, hey
That man is not your maker
Hey, hey, hey
Don’t know what the first line is about; the third line seems to be about the other guy. Let’s just move on to this…
And that’s why I’m gon’ take a good girl
I know you want it
I know you want it
I know you want it
“I know you want it.” Well, for the gentlemen out there, let’s put this out there. Women don’t always “want it.” You shouldn’t be assuming that. I’ll tell you want the woman in the cubicle across from you wants. She wants that promotion. And she’s more qualified than the guy who’s gonna get it; but your boss didn’t think there was sexism silently rooted into his decision.
You’re a good girl.
This sounds an awful lot like he’s encouraging a five-year-old to wait for everyone to start eating dinner. “You’re a good girl. He’s almost here. That’s the girl.” “You’re a good girl, you should do it with me. Be good.”
Not cool.
Can’t let it get past me
You’re far from plastic
Talk about getting blasted The way you grab me
Must wanna get nasty
Go ahead, get at me
He’s determined, but at the same time, the encouragement is there, as is the feeling that he knows what she’s thinking, even though he doesn’t.
What do they make dreams for
When you got them jeans on
What do we need steam for
“What do they make dreams for when you got them jeans on?” He’s basically saying, “I’ve been taught that I have this right [he’s a man, remember]. I’ve dreamt about this my whole life so do as I say.” Arguably worse than “I know you want it.”
You the hottest bitch in this place
I don’t care if it’s a woman or a Faux anchor, don’t call anybody that.
I feel so lucky
You wanna hug me
What rhymes with hug me?
The only part of the song that paints a woman in any positive light whatsoever.
One thing I ask of you
Let me be the one you back that ass to
Go, from Malibu, to Paris, boo
Yeah, I had a bitch, but she ain’t bad as you
So if a woman doesn’t do what Robin Thicke wants she’s bad. Why are we still wondering why women are afraid to report rapists?
I’m skipping a big part; it’s just not worth writing about.
Baby can you breathe? I got this from Jamaica
It always works for me, Dakota to Decatur, uh huh
No more pretending
Cause now you winning
Here’s our beginning
When you sleep with Robin Thicke, you win. If not, you loose. Again, not what we should be teaching our children. We should be respecting the woman in the cubicle across from you; not saying “she’s loosing” for being independent.
Okay. You’re thinking the tune is irresistable. Well, at least in this parody, Wendy Davis is more than an “abortion barbie.”
And finally, compared with the first video, how does THIS ONE make you feel?
I know; I’m a feminist and I had bigger doubts about posting that last one than the first one.
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