An Open Letter to Jon Stewart about the “The Fault in Our Schools”
Dear Jon Stewart,
Kudos to you and correspondents Jessica Williams and Jordan Klepper on a brilliant, hilarious, and unfortunately, all-too-accurate take on sexual assault on college campuses and the radically different messages offered to men and women on how to negotiate their college experiences with regard to fun and safety – um, that would be fun for men, and safety for women. Because, as we know, from all the typical “how to avoid sexual assault advice” out there, we tell men to have a blast, and women to hunker down, look out for red flags and green dots, travel in groups, and hope for the best. This is exactly the skit I would have done had I not been a double-major-in-psychology-and-theatre-arts-who-dropped-the-theatre-arts-major-to-a-minor due to…well, a total lack of acting ability. There. I said it. Despite my bitterness about my thwarted acting career, I’m no less appreciative of a fabulous performance when I see it.
But you forgot Part II, Jon Stewart, where you show what college women are actually capable of doing in the face of assault. Show what self-defense looks like. Show that it can work. Without that, we are left with only a great parody of the status quo, without reminding everyone what’s WRONG with the status quo: it’s damaging, it’s sexist, it’s inaccurate, and it’s NOT what we should be communicating to women or men about sexual assault. So don’t stop there, Jon. Keep ‘em coming! Part II…I can see it now: Jessica Williams and Jordan Klepper in “Transforming Rapists: The Age of Extinction. Or “A Million Ways to Have Rape Die Out in the West, And Anywhere Else”. Or “Kneed for Speed.” Let’s incentivize that.
Jill Cermele and Martha McCaughey
Open Letter to the American Association of University Women
Dear American Association of University Women (AAUW),
You have championed women’s equal rights to and in education for over a century. You were the organization that challenged bogus ideas back in the day, like that zinger about women being unable to go to medical school because it would compromise their fertility.
We were so glad to see that your website offers “10 Ways to Fight against Sexual Assault on Campus” but sad that self-defense—training in it or doing it when assaulted–is never mentioned. Precisely because research shows that self-defense training is often an effective and empowering way to thwart sexual assault, we take your concept of “fighting against sexual assault” a bit more literally, and so suggest here a modification or addition to each of your 10 action tips for fighting against sexual assault on campus.
- Share resources and groups that help survivors. One such resource is self-defense training. Research has shown that good self-defense programs have been developed for trauma survivors and that those programs lead to increased feelings of empowerment, reduction in psychological symptoms, and reduction in self-blame for survivors.
- Know your rights. You not only have the right under Title IX to equal access to education but you have the legal right to defend yourself from someone attacking you.
- Take action on the Campus SaVE Act. Push your campus administrators to comply with the Campus SaVE Act in a way that includes self-defense training for college women.
- Write an op-ed. Include the importance of self-defense training in the op-ed piece you write, and include stories about women’s and girls’ successful resistance to violence to broaden our narratives about women and sexual assault.
- Use social media. Spread awareness of the power and potential of teaching college women the empowering practice of self-defense, and share stories about how college women fight back in the face of assault.
- Start a conversation on victim-blaming and how to stop it. Advocating self-defense should never be construed as victim-blaming. Self-defense helps women hold perpetrators accountable for their violent actions, and women who have taken self-defense training, including women who have been raped or sexually assaulted, report that they feel more empathy, not more blame, for victims and survivors.
- Hold a bystander intervention session. Bystanders can help stop a sexual assault in their midst by intervening in a situation. If a bystander doesn’t catch such a situation and stop it, a woman can very likely use self-defense skills to do so. So, hold a self-defense training session as well. Self-defense training will empower everyone to act, whether they are the targets of sexual assault or the bystanders to it.
- Get involved in national campaigns. In addition to the Clothesline Project, V-Day, and Take Back the Night, there are national campaigns and organizations such as the American Women’s Self-Defense Association, Rape Aggression Defense, and the National Women’s Martial Arts Federation, which support women’s self-defense training. Get involved, and while you’re at it, demand that the Clothesline Project add a new color T-shirt for women who thwarted their attackers, and that V-Day channel some of its millions of dollars to women’s self-defense training.
- Volunteer. In addition to helping out at your local rape crisis center, learn self-defense and get certified to teach it to more women. Wouldn’t it be great if women needed rape crisis centers less often?
- Apply for Funding. AAUW branch members can apply for funding, but don’t expect most major organizations that give out money to service victims, prosecute perpetrators, and educate bystanders to intervene to give you any money to get women trained in self-defense… unless major gender equity organizations like the AAUW legitimize self-defense as an important component of sexual assault prevention on college campuses.
The AAUW has always challenged the idea that women were not capable. Please make a point of challenging the idea that women aren’t capable of stopping most campus sexual assailants.
Yours truly,
Martha McCaughey and Jill Cermele
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
WAY TO GO, MISS USA. WAY TO GO.
June 9, 2014
An Open Letter to Miss USA, Nia Sanchez
WAY TO GO, MISS USA. WAY TO GO.
On June 8, 2014, Nia Sanchez, (“Miss Nevada”), was crowned Miss USA. And, in the question-and-answer portion of the finals, she said something totally radical about sexual assault against women:
“More awareness is very important so women can learn to protect themselves….[Y]ou need to be confident and be able to defend yourself…That’s something we need to implement for a lot of women.”
We completely agree, Nia Sanchez. And given the influence you have as the newly crowned Miss USA, we are delighted that you shared this perspective on national television, so that the millions who may have been watching got to hear you say it. It’s a message that young men and women need to hear.
You may or may not have thought about what kind of a reaction you would get for that statement, and you may or may not have cared one way or the other. We, as academic feminists and self-defense advocates, applaud you. And we are disheartened, but not surprised, that this is not the response that you will get from all women who identify as feminists, and that in 2014, after decades of work by feminist scholars and activists advocating for women’s empowerment, broadly defined, that such a statement is still criticized. Consider the piece in Jezebel today, where Rebecca Rose takes exception to your comment, writing:
“While I certainly admire how hard she’s worked to obtain her status as a black belt, college women shouldn’t have to “learn to protect themselves.” College men should “learn not to rape.” But somehow I doubt we’re going to hear those words come out of the mouth of a national beauty pageant contestant anytime in the near future” (http://jezebel.com/new-miss-usa-says-women-need-to-learn-to-protect-themse-1587972074)
Rebecca Rose positions women learning self-defense against men learning not to rape—as if these are mutually exclusive choices, where one is clearly better/more radical/more feminist. Rebecca Rose also questions why women should “have to” learn self-defense. Well, why should we get mammograms, learn to change our tires, use birth control, get cervical screenings, or learn how to swim? For that matter, why should we learn to drive?
Here’s the answer: Because the best way to protect ourselves from risk, human or environmental, is to have any and all options at our disposal, any and all kits in our tool bag. Preventing sexual assault includes awareness and prevention work of all kinds, including working to teach men not to rape. But none of that precludes teaching women that resistance is an option—and a really, really good option in most cases.
Amanda Marcotte criticizes you in Slate, saying that self-defense probably won’t work, and that talking about self-defense is victim-blaming and disempowering to women, and even that self-defense will make claims of rape in court impossible. “Most disturbingly,” Marcotte writes, “the focus on self-defense allows some to argue that a rape doesn’t count as a rape unless the woman attempted to use violence in self-defense.” Marcotte goes on to suggest that “in a society where women are urged to take on the responsibility for stopping rape through self-defense, it becomes incredibly easy to start to see rape not as a matter of the rapist’s choices, but of the victim’s. Which, in turn, becomes an excuse to let rapists off the hook….” (http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/06/09/miss_usa_on_campus_sexual_assault_nia_sanchez_a_black_belt_in_tae_kwon_do.html)
Don’t worry, Miss USA, we—like you—know that we do not live in a society urging women to stop rape through self-defense. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find any information about women’s legal right to defend themselves or where to get that training in any given campus’s rape prevention materials. It is not taught in public high schools along with CPR; it is not taught by the American Red Cross; and it is not recommended by the Center for Disease Control, despite their focus on sexual assault. Nor is it listed anywhere in the recent recommendations of the White House Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault. Overall, our culture still prizes docility and vulnerability in women and values strength and assertiveness in men. And in fact, in a culture that steadfastly refuses to acknowledge women’s rights to defend themselves against sexual violence, the question of “Did she fight back?” has been, and continues to be, trotted out in the legal arena as “evidence” as to whether a rape occurred. We have nothing to lose by letting women know this is a viable option. We cannot conceive of a reality where anyone would prefer to be the victim of a completed attack just to be able to successfully prosecute the attacker later (as if most college rape victims ever go to court anyway).
We also know that self-defense is not victim-blaming, and that self-defense is an option, not a responsibility. And we know that it does work in the vast majority of cases—according to LOTS of data, including that published in our own March 2014 special issue of the academic journal Violence Against Women.
While we support any legal response that women and girls have in the face of assault, we think it’s really important for them to know that self-defense is an option. And knowing that it’s an option is a whole lot better than sitting demurely by, crossing our ankles, whether in our Christian Louboutins, our Birkenstocks, or our Uggs, and waiting for someone to teach men to stop raping.
People like Rebecca Rose and Amanda Marcotte are going to assume that you don’t believe that we should teach men not to rape, that you have somehow naively accepted sexual assault as the natural course of things. We, however, are happy to see a lovely young woman advocate self-defense training—and we apologize for our fellow feminists who are using your beauty against you to indicate that you must not be progressive enough. They’re the ones who aren’t progressive enough. Keep up the fight.
Jill Cermele and Martha McCaughey
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
Open Letter to Vice President Biden and the White House Task Force on Sexual Assault on College Campuses
Dear Vice President Biden and the White House Task Force on Sexual Assault:
We’ve read the press release, explored the web site, and followed the mostly positive media coverage about the recommendations of the Task Force. However, as feminist self-defense scholars and activists, and as college professors, we find it interesting, and problematic, that women in the 21st Century continue to be seen as damsels in distress.
We applaud the Task Force for underscoring the seriousness and prevalence of the problem of sexual assault on college campuses, for highlighting the need for better data on the incidence rates, and for requiring colleges and universities to act. However, it’s striking that the only people who can act, it seems, are men. Men can stop raping. Men can serve as “bystanders” and stop their friends from raping. And (mainly male) university administrators can implement programs to reach men, and to better serve the (mainly female) victims that men have raped.
That approach presumes that women are sitting ducks. Easy targets. Rapeable. The best we can hope for, we are being told, is that campuses will adopt better policies, in compliance with Title IX of the Educational Equity Act for reporting the already-completed rape of women, and teach the good guys—the knight-errants roving from party to party—to save the damsels in distress.
But that’s not the best we can hope for. The highly regarded academic journal Violence Against Women just released an entire special issue in March 2014devoted to scholarship on self-defense against sexual assault, for which we served as the guest editors. In that issue, scholars present data on how effective training in and using self-defense can be for women. These scholars show that self-defense is usually effective in thwarting an attack (Dr. Sarah Ullman of the University of Illinois at Chicago); that self-defense typically results in no further injury to the women defending themselves(Drs. Jongyeon Tark and Gary Kleck of Hannem University in South Korea and Florida State University); that self-defense helps women of a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds (Dr. Lisa Speidel of University of Virginia) as well as women who have been previously victimized (Drs. Gia Rosenblum and Lynn Taska, trauma psychologists in Lawrenceville, NJ); that a good self-defense course is incredibly empowering in a number of ways for women, outside of their ability to thwart an actual attack (Dr. Martha Thompson of Northeastern Illinois University); and that because of the wide range of benefits self-defense training has, it actually helps change the gender norms and ultimately prevents sexual assault more broadly (Dr. Joceyln Hollander of University of Oregon).
We wish to be clear that women are not responsible for rape, no matter their behavior, their attire, or their level of intoxication; promoting self-defense training for women in no way suggests that the onus is now, or should be, onwomen alone to stop rape. Nor would we want to suggest that men who rape can’t ever change their ways, or that college administrators shouldn’t do more to ensure that there is gender equity in all areas.
But we do note, and question, the absence of self-defense as a goal that is part of an overall sexual assault prevention approach. Self-defense is no more individualistic than training individual bystanders to stop a guy before he rapes. Self-defense is no more victim-blaming than suggesting women communicate clearly on dates. Self-defense should be just as much a part of sexual assault prevention efforts as training bystanders and improving policies are. Besides, women really shouldn’t have to wait on government and university bureaucracies when, in a matter of weeks, they could learn the empowering, and effective, techniques of twisting the testicles, kneeing the groin, or gouging the eyes of Joe College Rapist.
Moreover, self-defense training doesn’t just teach women such physical techniques. It teaches women to take themselves more seriously, that they have bodies and lives worth defending, and that they are not pieces of meat, playthings, or pretty prizes of men. That, it seems to us, is an incredibly important message to give to women and their co-eds who are supposed to be learning that men and women are equally deserving of the right to an education. Practicing self-defense enables women to practice being taken seriously, in and out of a bedroom.
The White House Task Force urges colleges and universities to collect better data, to adopt better policies, and to protect the confidentiality of victims. We agree. But we argue that the Task Force must also urge college and universities to put into action what we know from the findings of decades of research: that women can safely and effectively defend themselves against rape, and that self-defense training for women benefits everyone. You want true educational equity? Then teach self-defense.
Martha McCaughey and Jill Cermele
An open letter to Kurt Cobain, in response to his oft-cited quote about teaching men not to rape:
Dear Kurt Cobain,
First, my sincere condolences on your untimely death; second, I understand that, seeing as you are no longer with us, the likelihood of your reading this message is fairly slim. However, given the number of people who place classified ads and post Facebook messages to those who are not longer with us, I feel it is worth a shot.
According to internet lore, at some point you said, “The problem with groups who deal with rape is that they try to educate women about how to defend themselves. What really needs to be done is teaching men not to rape. Go to the source and start there.” So I write to you under the assumption that you did say that, and if you did, I say, “Not bad, Kurt, not bad. You got it half right.”
I am all for teaching men not to rape – for teaching EVERYONE not to rape, actually, but since all of our data suggest that men are the overwhelming perpetrators of rape against both women and men, both boys and girls, I am comfortable with that framework. I am delighted that you said this, given that your coolness factor as a rock star is far greater than mine as a feminist academic, and so I suspect that your saying this means more to the masses than my saying it.
But I take exception with your second sentence: “The problem with groups who deal with rape is that they try to educate women how to defend themselves.” If only, Kurt – if only! While there are many individuals, groups, and organizations that work to educate women to defend themselves – physically and verbally – against rape, sexual assault, and all forms of interpersonal violence, there are far more that do not, and in fact, many that advocate AGAINST women defending themselves against rape, due to their (false) beliefs, NOT supported by the data, that somehow attempting or enacting resistance strategies will either make things worse or will somehow not reach men on that whole not-raping pedagogy you (and I) espouse. There are a number of studies now where the data clearly indicate that resistance is effective in reducing the likelihood of an assault being completed, and that resistance does not “make a situation worse”. If you can access any academic journals where you are, look up Sarah Ullman at the University of Illinois at Chicago – her work on the effectiveness of resistance is great. It’ll blow your mind.
But more importantly, Kurt, why make it either/or? I don’t have to choose between peas OR carrots, or better still, cheesecake OR crème brulee. I can have both. And, in fact, have, on more than one occasion. I am in full support of attacking the horror of rape from as many angles as we can think of, and in as many ways as possible. So there is no need for anyone targeted for rape to sit down and wait for the men to stop raping. I can teach men not to rape, AND teach women, and others, to use any verbal or physical strategies available to them to thwart a rape in progress. We can multi-task, Kurt. And we should. Besides, if you are in touch with any God(s), Goddess(es), wise ancestors, or spiritual presence(s) well-versed in feminist theory, I bet they would be happy to dialogue with you about how changing the gender script for women ALSO teaches men not to rape. Recognizing women’s strength, and willingness to enforce their own boundaries, can give your average date rapist pause.
I believe, if you were here to have this conversation with me right now, that you would agree. I don’t think you would want Francis Bean to have to wait it out if someone tried to rape her. And I bet she could learn a mean knee to the groin.
All the best,
Jill Cermele
PS. Loved “Nevermind”. Great album.
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