She who stumbles

Deep apologies to everyone I have ongoing discussions with and those whose comments were left in moderation. My internet access at home is down and due to the public holidays there’s not much chance of it being fixed this week.

There won’t be any updates until it’s back up again, since I can’t do much research when I’m offline.

Have a happy holiday season, everyone, and if I don’t exchange greetings with you before then, have a happy new year.

I’ll be posting more on the Aurukun case in a little while. I’m slowly easing myself back into blogging… I have no idea how people with full-time jobs can make time for it, honestly!

But for now I have a bit of a commentary and critique of other things happening in the feminist blogosphere.

Jessica Valenti has announced that she has a new book contract and has put the call out for an anthology on rape culture that she’s co-editing with Jaclyn Friedman.

Co-editors Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti are seeking submissions for their anthology on rape culture, Yes Means Yes!, to be published by Seal Press in Fall 2008.

Imagine a world where women enjoy sex on their own terms and aren’t shamed for it. Imagine a world where men treat their sexual partners as collaborators, not conquests. Imagine a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished.

Welcome to the world of Yes Means Yes.

Yes Means Yes! will fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex. We are looking to collect sharp and insightful essays, from voices both established and new, that demonstrate how empowering female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture.

Potential essay subjects could include;

* Revamping how public sex education is taught, and to whom.

* The new backlash against rape survivors (i.e., media obsession with drinking, Girls Gone Wild culture being to blame for assault)

* Bringing men back into the conversation, making men leaders in the movement to end rape culture

* Thoughts on “enthusiastic consent”

* Taking Back the Porn: How changing the pornography industry can stop rape

* The power of language (naming rape for what it is, or the new myth of “gray rape”)

* A primer for men on sexual assault

* How good sex (where women’s pleasure is central) can mean an end to rape culture, and how a society that values genuine female sexual pleasure will make it easier to identify and prosecute rapists.

* Rethinking sexual interaction as a private joint performance, as opposed to as an exchange of a commodity or service

* An analysis of the economics of female sexual alienation/oppression, and an economic model for resistance

* Holding the MSM accountable for torture porn, kidnapping crusades and faux feminism.

* Desegmenting the Market: overcoming commercially enforced sexual stereotypes to organize across race, class, gender, and difference

* On pulling out the invisible lynchpin of rape culture: homophobia

* Creating accurate media representations of rape

Women and men, published and unpublished authors, are all encouraged to submit essays. Be creative, be forward-thinking, be funny! Perhaps most importantly, we are seeking essays with a pro-active bent that offer new and insightful thoughts and actions on how to dismantle rape culture. No more “No Means No,” let’s think “Yes Means Yes!”

In general, I’m very supportive of exploring consensuality as an element of rape culture, and some of the proposals in the call-out are exciting to me as a feminist. I think that good sex education ought to be a big priority of feminism, to empower young people to make healthy decisions about their lives and bodies. I also think that sex education can be a life-long endeavour, that adult feminists have a great deal to learn, and young people a great deal to offer, when it comes to understanding sex and revolutionising sexual practice.

However, the way this anthology is being framed seems really limited to me.

I’ve seen pro-consent activism that went into a great deal of depth about the needs of a consent-based approach to sexuality. Groups like worldwithout in Melbourne have some great resources on sexual assault based on ongoing activism they’re doing around the issue. So I’m in no way unsupportive of the stated aims of this project.

But while talking about the IDA for community response to sexual assault, I also heard some criticism of consent-based work on sexual violence because of all the people who experience sexual violence without having the opportunity to give or withhold consent. Indeed, given that the majority of sexual assaults occur in institutions, not within the family or amongst intimate partners, this is a glaring omission.

The use of sexualised violence to dominate and control people isn’t addressed by consent-based activism, and often there’s no legal protection against this kind of assault because it occurs in government institutions or is otherwise mandated by the state. For instance, women in Australian prisons are subjected to daily strip searches and cavity searches, where no hygiene is observed. Evidence shows that these women exhibit similar symptoms to rape survivors. Sisters Inside, a women’s prison advocacy group, have a research paper about it here.

This data reminds me of some of Bfp’s writing about women’s experiences of sexual violence when crossing the US-Mexico border, women who are raped by border guards or in immigration detention facilities…

And I think that this kind of blatantly non-consensual sexual contact, which can either serve the purpose of sexual pleasure or not, occurring in institutional contexts has to be considered when defining the term ‘rape culture’ and deciding what “the key to dismantling rape culture” really is.
I don’t think that the call-out for the anthology deals with systemic and institutionalised sexual violence very well, and it seems to privatise the issue, so that partner and acquaintance rape is central to the understanding of ‘rape culture’ being employed.

So if “female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture” in a world in which women are far from equal to each other, then which women’s orgasms are “the key to dismantling rape culture”?

That’s a very strong claim to make, and I have serious doubts that an anthology framed as it is in the call-out will be able to live up to that claim.

I think that this call-out is implicitly centralising certain kinds of women and certain kinds of rape by crowding-out many other kinds of women, and other kinds of rape. And I thought feminism, and Valenti, had learned enough from “identity politics” to realise how problematic that is.

And in that case, I don’t think it’s advisable to claim to “fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex” or to frame a pleasure-positive, consent-based sexual politics in opposition to an oversimplified caricature of older feminisms. For one thing, older feminists such as Betty Dodson have done ground-breaking work in promoting female sexual pleasure as a means of empowerment; for another, this newer work wouldn’t exist without that older work.

In fact, the only means I have of making sense of daily cavity searches in women’s prisons, or of friends telling me about the humiliation and fear they experienced when being strip-searched, is to divest myself of any concept of sexual consent and to return to the older feminist catchphrase: “rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power”.

Answer: when it happens to Aboriginal women.

Recently Cairns District Court Judge Sarah Bradley sentenced nine men, aged between 14 and 26, who pleaded guilty to the rape of a 10-year-old girl, to probation. I.e. no conviction is being recorded for this offence, according to Judge Bradley’s judgement.
One of the men has a prior conviction for child sexual abuse. Despite this, the Crown Prosecutor did not ask for custodial sentences for the men.
[***EDIT: Correction-- No conviction is being recorded against the juvenile perpetrators, who are getting probation. The adult perpetrators will have suspended sentences with convictions recorded. Articles were a little ambiguous on that point.***]

The lenient sentence was justified on the basis that the girl apparently “was not forced and she probably agreed to have sex with all of [them].”

Many of them are from powerful families in Aurukun, the remote Cape York community in which the rape occurred; the girl is not. She has now been placed in foster care.

The Queensland Attorney-General Kerry Shine is planning to appeal the sentence, although the appeal period of 28 days has expired, and the state Premier Anna Bligh will review all sentences handed down in Cape York over the past two years.

More details:

• Row over gang rape of 10yo - The Daily Telegraph
• Cape York sentences to be reviewed after rape judgement - ABC Online
• Qld A-G to appeal gang-rape sentences - The Age, Melbourne
• Indigenous leaders slam sentence - Courier Mail

The issue not being discussed in any of these reports is the whiteness of the judge who handed down the non-sentence. Why did she play havoc with the life of a young Aboriginal girl? Why is her life worth so little to this white judge? Why is she being kinder to rapists (black though they may be) than to young women? Isn’t it because Aboriginal women are considered worthless by the white legal system?

And why has this girl been removed from her family? In the Age article it suggests that the girl was initially placed in care in the Aurukun community.

I think Auntie Shirley said it best: for Aboriginal people, child removal equals paedophilia.

I think this case reveals the corruption and hypocrisy of Australian governments in dealing with child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities. While the state is enabling confessed abusers, it is also chastising the entire Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory with punitive welfare quarantines and paternalistic community managers. While Aboriginal leaders condemn the enabling of abuse and the malevolent neglect of governments, the state congratulates itself on taking military action. For eleven years John Howard let report upon report about abuse, poor health, inadequate housing, unemployment and poverty pile up and he did nothing but take a knife to the guts of Indigenous leadership and rights. And now all Aboriginal people get is their money quarantined and threats to roll it out to the entire country.

It looks like the ALP is tripping on whatever ideological sauce the Coalition was on. It’s the only way this kind of bullshit could possibly make any goddamn sense.

The government has announced that it will close the Nauru immigration detention centre and end the ‘Pacific solution’. 74 of the 83 asylum seekers on Nauru will be granted refugee status and full protection. The excision zone will be moved back to 2001 borders, meaning that new boat arrivals within Australian waters will be given legal protection.

However, the Christmas Island detention facility (which is currently not operational) will still be detaining refugees.

I’ve also heard that the ALP will abolish temporary protection visas (TPVs) and make substantial changes to mandatory detention arrangements, but those developments have yet to be documented. More updates as government moves!

December 17 is the International Day of Action to End Violence Against Sex Workers. I have a post in the works, but for now I’ll just re-post the call-out posted in the Feminist Sexuality Discussion LiveJournal community:

The official date is 17th December, but since we’ll have a bunch of out of town sex workers in Sydney on the 13th, we decided to do it then.

Instead of focusing JUST on the old demonising-clients victimising-workers stance that always takes precedence to the detriment of other, equally as important, issues, this year our focus is to be on other forms of violence, e.g.: the violence that comes from discrimination, unfair legislation, denial of basic human rights.

It is all these factors that actually create the environment in which physically and sexually violent people target sex workers.

SO. PLEASE COME AND SHOW YOUR SUPPORT, OPEN TO SEX WORKERS AND OUR SUPPORTERS.

4.45 for a 5pm start, Thursday 13th December 2006,
Local Council and Shires Association, corner of 28 Margaret Street Sydney,
corner of Margaret and York Street, 50 metres from Wynyard Train Station.
THIS IS A HIGHLY PUBLIC, PROMINENT PLACE IN THE CBDand will be taking place at peak hour as people start heading home orout for late night shopping! If identity is a concern to you, please feel free to wear a mask, or other disguisng clothing.

Sex workers and supporters in NSW are holding an end of year protest against the unfair brothel closures that local councils have led in NSW, thanks to the laws introduced by the Iemma Government in July thisyear.

Many Local Councils in NSW have discriminatory planning policies that make it impossible for the sex industry premises to be compliant. These Local Councils more recently have taken the extra step of enacting the new brothel closure orders against brothels, on the basis of complaints from larger brothel owners.
It gives councils the power to:
- shut off water
- shut off electricity
- evict people with no notice
- do all these things based on one complaint
and is a violation of basic human rights!
To register ‘legally’ as a brothel, the cost is prohibitive (over $20,000)and illogical planning policies make it difficult for small business to comply. Larger brothels who can afford the fees then target the smaller places. Under NSW legislation, an independent worker is defined as a’brothel’; meaning large brothels can also eliminate this sort of competition by making complaints against independent workers.
MOST INDEPENDENT WORKERS DO NOT WANT A BIG YELLOW SIGN ON THEIR FRONT DOOR STATING THEIR INTENT TO RUN A SEX BUSINESS, AS COUNCIL CURRENTLY REQUIRES!
There have already been several cases of council workers demanding bribes or sexual favours in exchange for looking the other way!!!!

The closures are anti-competition, anti-sex worker, and are the worst case of state sanctioned violence against the sex industry in Australia.

Stop State Sanctioned Violence Against Sex Workers
Carry a red umbrella for the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers
We demand local council policy INCLUDE the sex industry, and stop discriminating against sex workers
We demand an end to anti-competition collusion by local councils - stop the corruption erruption!

Wear red, bring an umbrella and see ya there!