An Open Letter to Feminist Sex Educator Laci Green
Dear Laci,
We love love love your sex-posi pointers on YouTube for men and women, straights and gays, and everyone in between!
Especially important is Consent 101, your video about consent—what it looks and sounds like, and the importance of being sure all sexual acts are consensual. This is very helpful for a lot of straight guys who have learned that you infer consent through a series of self-serving and arrogant interpretations of women’s “signals” or—worse yet—that you intentionally incapacitate a woman (which they call “loosening up”) so as to “get laid” with no resistance. You are spot on to suggest that coercing or pressuring someone into doing something sexually is creepy, rapey, and douchebag-y.
Your video also shows women how to set boundaries in a way that is fun, playful, sexy, and also seriously self-assured and firm. However, we wish you’d acknowledge that, in some cases, women do set such boundaries only to have them disregarded. What’s a girl to do when her date, boy toy, or hookup partner doesn’t listen to her assertions of non-consent?
This is where we’re hoping for a Laci Green follow-up video, one that would show that she still has options: she might be able to get up and walk away or, if he’s physically forcing her, she has physical self-defense options such as an eye strike, a testicle twist, or something as simple as pulling one of his fingers backwards.
Self-defense moves can never be guaranteed, but as we well know, neither can assertive verbal communication of one’s sexual boundaries. When a woman’s rapey rendezvous doesn’t respect her wishes, she needs to be able to enforce her boundaries and know that doing so is not mean but necessary in some circumstances. Such is the logical next step to having good, fun, sex-posi sex.
Without this part of the message, your video, sadly, implies that verbal communication skills will prevent rape and/or that women either cannot or should not feel entitled to enforce their boundaries physically when necessary.
Like you, we encourage women to enjoy feeling sexual. Please show women that part of being able to enjoy their sexuality is to enjoy being strong—both verbally and physically. At least until we’ve rounded up all the rapey guys and reprogrammed them.
Thank you! And, of course, we’re here to help. Have your secretary call ours (oops, just email us because we don’t actually have a secretary).
Love,
Martha McCaughey & Jill Cermele
Self-Defense Can Work Well for Trauma Survivors
When we advocate women’s self-defense training, we often hear worries about the possible victim-blaming that is implied (“it will only make victims feel bad for not having defended themselves” and “it will only make people expect women to fight back in order to make a legitimate claim in a court of law”). We also hear related concerns about survivors of interpersonal violence. Won’t they feel bad for not having “successfully” defended themselves? Won’t they blame themselves for the attack they suffered? Will they be too traumatized to go through self-defense training?
Survivors are not necessarily ready for self-defense training, but some are. In fact, some survivors are even referred by a therapist to self-defense training because it can be helpful for reclaiming their power and sense of safety. Of course, for these reasons self-defense classes must be taught by well trained, feminist instructors who are sensitive to the many issues around gendered violence that can emerge when training women how to practice self-defense techniques. In the 2014 Special Issue of Violence Against Women on self-defense against sexual assault, Gianine Rosenblum and Lynn Taska outline the elements of self-defense training specifically for trauma survivors. The self-defense curriculum they helped develop is based in research on trauma and its treatment. In a class like this, a therapeutic teaching team works to understand each student’s needs, triggers, and window of tolerance. Students also have the option of requesting custom scenarios to (re)enact past events or trigger experiences, providing an opportunity to re-script the event or experience. In these self-defense classes, trauma survivors who are ready to enter self-defense training can experience therapeutic benefits such as the internalization of new emotional and physical resources.
Self-defense training is not just for the strong, the young, or the unscarred among us. And above all, self-defense need not blame past or future victims. Its aim is to empower us to challenge the rape culture that we live in, and the rape culture that lives in us.
Why Shouldn’t Women Prevent Rape?
An Open Letter to Tara Culp-Ressler and thinkprogress.org
June 11, 2014
Dear Tara Culp-Ressler of ThinkProgress.org:
Rock The Slut Vote linked to your post lambasting all the bogus advice women in this rape culture are given as “helpful” strategies to resist rape, which include:
Make it less fun to be a rape victim; buy special underwear; stop taking public transportation; and get married. Ok, we’re with you there. We get that it’s totally stupid to suggest women wear modern-day chastity belts or forgo the transportation necessary to move around freely in the world.
But you lose us—and women’s rights—when you suggest that taking a self-defense class is the same type of bogus, ultimately sexist advice.
Many, many feminists have supported women’s taking a self-defense class for the same reason we’ve supported women’s learning how to swim, learning how to change a flat tire on our own cars, or learning how to do breast self-exams. Such knowledge can be empowering and enable women to navigate real risks more effectively, thereby supporting their freedom to move around in the world.
Come on, Tara, what is YOUR advice to women about how to prevent rape? Get men to stop raping? How’s that been working for us?
Besides, it’s the sexist rape culture that has peddled the myth that women’s bodies can be no match for a man’s. It’s rape culture that has sexualized women’s vulnerability relative to men that has eroticized women’s weakness and men’s strength. It’s rape culture that has taught women the embodied habit of feminine politeness such that—let’s face it—a lot of young women do not know how to push, yell, or summon the sense of entitlement required to get a guy to back off.
Does self-defense work 100% of the time? Of course not. Does it work most of the time? Yes it does. And there is lots of data to back that up (see the March 2014 issue of the academic journal Violence Against Women, which is devoted to scholarship on self-defense against sexual assault). Self-defense training, as a method of sexual assault prevention, expands women’s freedom, mobility, and choices rather than limiting or narrowing them. Is a sexual assault ever a woman’s fault? Of course not. Does teaching women self-defense still put the legal and moral burden on rapists to stop raping? Yes it does.
Please join us in challenging the view of women as damsels in distress who must wait for the legal system, a GPS app that alerts first responders, or benevolent “bystanders” at a party to save them. And please, please let’s stop this business of pretending that if you teach women anything empowering you’ve given up on the struggle to make men more accountable. You’re not going to suggest women stop doing breast self-exams because they should be insisting that we find a cure for cancer or because it will cause people to blame women for getting breast cancer, are you?
Tara, we’re as tired of the rape culture as you are. But you do women and the women’s movement a tremendous disservice to ignore all the research on the effectiveness of self-defense training when you peddle such bogus and ultimately sexist advice.
Yours sincerely,
Martha McCaughey & Jill Cermele
An Open Letter to Girls’ Life Magazine
May, 2014
An Open Letter to Girls’ Life Magazine
OMG, a magazine, like, just for girls. Wicked cool. Only not. Why? Because you, GL, are shooting girls in the feet when you’re trying to get them running.
We had high hopes. Right there, amidst the advice column on fifty ways to flirt, the incisive investigative report on lip balm addiction, the savvy section on bedroom redesign, and the photo shoot of perfect swimsuits, is an article by Katie Abbondanza on nonconsensual sex (Feb/March 2014 issue).
“Hands Off!” tells the stories of several girls who, in a GL reader survey, said their rejections were ignored by guys bent on pushing the boundary. So far, so good. Even though it’s just a survey of GL readers, we know that girls and women across the United States report similar experiences, and we know that one in five college women are sexually assaulted while they’re there. So we do need to reach girls while they’re still teenagers.
This article offers girls the important message that “NO” is a boundary, and girls have a right to assert it, and that it’s always unacceptable when a girl’s boundaries are disregarded, whether the “NO” is to give her phone number, walk with her, go to a private place, or touch her. You’ve even provided girls with the phone number of RAINN, the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network, in case they have been raped or sexually assaulted.
You are right: girls get to say “N-O”. And the article’s “five more things you need to know about saying N-O” includes some basic things girls will hear once they get to college from their sexual assault prevention program: that no means no and that a guy should stop as soon as he hears the word; that some guys will try to negotiate with or pressure girls into saying yes but that girls are entitled to stick to their guns; that a girl should, if possible, remove herself from the situation; that if a guy pressures a girl in a social setting he’ll probably continue to do this once he’s alone with her so let that be a red flag; and that if a girl says no, and it’s ignored, then “it’s not [her] fault.”
Hold up. What’s not her fault? If a girl says no and it’s ignored, then sure, the guy’s ignoring her is not her fault. But we’re afraid you’re assuming, and leading any given girl to assume, that if a guy ignores her no, then she’ll have been assaulted.
It’s important for girls to be aware of boundary violations, small and large, and to assert their boundaries. It’s also important to know what sexual assault is. While its precise legal definition varies from state to state, sexual assault is generally unwanted sexual touching that stops short of (completed or attempted) forced sexual intercourse; forced sexual intercourse, whether the force is physical or verbal, is rape. Sexual assault includes all kinds of troubling and illegal behaviors that can lead to rape. But here’s the good news: both verbal and physical self-defense techniques can stop these behaviors from progressing along that continuum.
This is not the time to be vague; it’s the time to be crystal clear, just like the word “N-O”. So let’s be clear: assault is never the victim’s fault. Never.
But’s let’s be clear about this also: “Ignoring a N-O” can mean a variety of things, including a guy trying to assault or rape a girl. And a girl has a LOT of things she can do in between indicating, saying, or yelling “N-O”, and a completed assault or rape. And it’s just as important to tell our girls that as it is to tell them all the other things we tell them about safety.
Here’s the crucial information missing from your article: How a girl can enforce her N-O if it’s ignored. It’s called self-defense. Self-defense training empowers girls to go beyond hoping their use of assertive communication techniques don’t fall on sexually entitled, arrogant asshole ears.
That’s right, an important thing to know about saying N-O is how to F-I-G-H-T.
Your article tells a story of a girl who quickly told a guy, “Don’t touch me!” and I consider that a great example of self-defense. When girls learn self-defense, they practice speaking precisely that way; but they also train to use physical techniques that can back up such verbal techniques. You’d be surprised how much easier it is to tell a guy to back off when you know that you can, if necessary, land an elbow strategically into his nose. A broken nose is a whole different level of N-O.
Please, GL, let girls know that there’s more that can happen between saying N-O and calling RAINN.
Sincerely,
Martha McCaughey and Jill Cermele
{ My Vagina Has a Dream }
Each year around Valentine’s Day hundreds of college campuses across the country put on benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler’s famous play about our. . . . ahem.
The Vagina Monologues has become the Lion King of feminism. It is performed to large audiences on campus after campus. The show’s popularity also underpins the organizational success of Ensler’s V-Day campaign, the national structure that organizes all the local benefit productions of the show.
I’m no prude. I’ve produced the play on my campus, which raised $10,000 for local charities.
But I have a problem with V-Day. The V-Day campaign has raised tens of millions of dollars to stop violence against women. But has it actually stopped violence against women? And should that be the sole target of the money raised by a play about vaginas?
If a vagina could speak it might ask to put some money into stopping sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy, cervical cancer, or infant mortality. I’m pretty sure mine would.
Why the sole connection between vaginas and violence against women? Does having a vagina automatically make women vulnerable? Is a vagina an opening to oppression?
Ensler’s play has a great monologue called “My Vagina is Angry. ” But the broader organizing and fundraising structure of V-Day equates vaginas and women with victimhood, not ferocity. No wonder V-Day discourages donations to self-defense training for women.
When I produced the show, V-Day headquarters dissuaded me from donating the money from ticket sales to an organization dedicated to women’s self-defense on the grounds that self-defense uses violence and so is not truly anti-gender violence work.
V-Day encourages producers of the play to donate money instead to help women who are recovering from sexual violence and domestic abuse, build coalitions, and end violence and oppression. Most of the millions of dollars raised have gone to battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers. In a few cases, money has been donated to Planned Parenthood offices and even a college Women’s Studies Program.
I have personally trained in both women’s studies and in self-defense, and I promise you that a good testicle twist is far more effective for thwarting an attack than even the smartest feminist literary criticism.
Counseling, hotlines, task forces, and even performance art pieces are legitimate and effective ways to end violence against women. But not without also training women to stop the perpetrators in their tracks. Self-defense must be a key part of our efforts to stop rape and battery. Besides, women tend to find self-defense training incredibly empowering and transformative, which helps transform our rape culture.
I love the The Vagina Monologues and the V-Day campaign. But I’m sad that this theatrical tour de force never touts the effectiveness of self-defense training or names any of the many nonprofit self-defense organizations in the U.S. as legitimate beneficiaries of V-Day fundraising efforts.
It’s time to rescript the female body, to think of our bodies not as vulnerable victims but as strong, resisting bodies. And it would be nice to see some of the proceeds in the V-Day campaign going to help train women in the empowering tactics of self-defense.
When women need help and shelter I’m all for providing it. But my vagina has a dream.
Special Issue of Violence Against Women on Self-Defense
The special issue of VAW is out!
View the Table of Contents online at:
http://vaw.sagepub.com/content/20/3.toc
The full Editors’ Introduction–by Martha McCaughey and Jill Cermele, the guest editors for the special issue–is online.
Obama Creates Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault
Obama Creates Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault
January 2014- Will the Task Force recommend self-defense training?
See Jane Fight Back 
Recent Comments