The XX Factor: What women really think.

You Can't Always Have Childbirth "Your Way." It's Not Burger King.

When I first read about the pregnant Arizona woman whose hospital stopped performing VBACs, prompting her to plan to drive 350 miles to Phoenix to a hospital that would allow her to deliver her baby vaginally, I sympathized. I wouldn’t have made the same choice, but I sympathized.

Now, though, the Daily Beast reports that the woman painted minivan to say “Page Hospital, enter my body without permission ... Sounds like rape to me.” She’s not alone in her sentiment. The mom at birthtruth.org has an essay titled “8 years later” in which she talks about her “grief” over her C-section and reprints a poem from a mom who discusses her “mourning” over hers. Birthcut.com is full of C-section horror stories. The Daily Beast’s Danielle Friedman writes: “Women who feel violated by the notion or experience of a C-section often feel misunderstood—family and friends can’t grasp why they can’t just get over it and move on" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

The Upsetting "Blame the Victim" Mentality in this week's "Friend or Foe"

To the DoubleX commenters who were outraged with Lucinda’s “Friend or Foe” column from Monday, and who don’t feel mollified by this morning’s apology: I see where you’re coming from. When I first read Lucinda’s response to the girl who says someone “slipped [her] a mickey” at a concert and then was ditched by her friends, I gave Lucinda the benefit of the doubt. I’ve talked to her before; I like her; I didn’t want to believe she’d be quite this flip about such a troubling tale.

So I reasoned that Lucinda, who is older than you’d think by her impeccable skin, just didn’t know what “slipped me a mickey” meant. It was this line, I thought, that revealed her ignorance:

Yes, overnights at the E.R. are the opposite of fun. So are disastrous drug trips. (I had one in my twenties, which pretty much sealed my fate as an illegal-substance ninny.)

This was not a disastrous drug trip. This was someone being drugged. To conflate the two is to imply that a woman getting drugged at a bar is as responsible for that outcome as one who willingly sneaks into a bathroom stall to snort a line. That couldn’t be what Lucinda meant, right? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

Polanski's Case is About Rape, Not Nubile Hotness

A post from DoubleX blogger Amanda Marcotte:

Jessica, your observation about the probation officer's report highlights the fatal flaw in Michael Cieply's argument: Polanski's case was more about 70s attitudes about forcible rape than about 70s attitudes towards sex with teenage girls. What Cieply discovers in investigating the soft hand the media and law enforcement took with Polanski is that rape wasn't taken seriously as a crime in the '70s, at least if the rapist knew his victim. That's what all those feminists taking back the night were protesting! ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Polanski's Probation Officer's Disturbing Report

The New York Times quotes extensively from the September 1977 probation officer's report about Roman Polanski. The report is appallingly sympathetic towards Polanski, describing his rape of Samantha Gailey as "spontaneous and an exercise of poor judgment by the defendant" and placing the some of the blame back on Gailey and her mom. But the most upsetting part of the report is the part that excuses Polanski's behavior because he's a creative genius and an immigrant ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Lowest Number of Reported Rapes Since 1989

Did Pete Campbell Rape the Neighbors' Au Pair on Mad Men?

Slate's incredibly thorough and compelling Mad Men TV Club has a question I'd like to pose to the Mad Men-watching DoubleXers out there: Was Pete's interlude with the German au pair rape, or was it consensual? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

A Genius Exception for Rape?

A guest post by Elizabeth Wurtzel:

There is a complicated old joke, not worth telling, but to partially paraphrase the punch line: The difference between heaven and hell is that in hell, the Swiss are the lovers and the French run everything, and in heaven, the French are the lovers and the Swiss run everything.

Obviously, this conclusion has been thrown into question by the botched Polanski pick-up, proving that the Swiss are not really the best stewards of swift order and that the French have some very odd ideas about the art of love, or whatever you want to call it. The joke does not make mention of the United States, but I have a suggestion: In heaven, the Americans are the keepers of justice, and in hell, the Americans are ... the keepers of justice. Because if you are hauled into court in this country, as the Polanski brouhaha displays, it is both the best of times and the worst of times ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

"My Husband is Not Secretary of State, I Am."

At an event on Monday in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a young man asked Hillary Clinton what "Mr. Clinton" thought about a potential loan from China to the financially strapped country. She paused, amazed, and replied: "You want me to tell you what my husband thinks? My husband is not secretary of state, I am. If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.''

My first thought upon seeing the clip of the exchange was, of course, good for you, Mrs. Clinton. But my second thought was: that poor guy ... (Read more in Double X.)

Article About Congo Male Rape Victims May Change NGO Attitudes

Linda Hirshman: I Didn't Call Anyone at Jezebel a Slut

A guest post from Double X writer Linda Hirshman:

In responding to my column, “The Trouble With Jezebel,” Jaclyn Friedman writes that I "said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if they’re going to insist on being such public sluts." 

Friedman says she is paraphrasing. Definition: "to rephrase, summarize, reword, interpret, translate, restate." Only problem: Something like the words used to paraphrase must be there in the first place. I have never... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Blame Rapists for Rape, Not Women

A guest post from Double X writer Jaclyn Friedman:

Last Tuesday, in the debut of Double X, Linda Hirshman said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if they’re going to insist on being such public sluts (I'm paraphrasing here, but not as much as I wish I were). Latoya Peterson responded by rightly pointing out that screeds like Hirshman's give feminism a bad name. The internets erupted. And now, just what we needed, the Observer has swooped in to Explain It All To Us, clucking their editorial tongue about the whole "infighting" mess.

With Feminists Like This, Who Needs the Patriarchy?

A guest post from Double X writer Latoya Peterson:

You know, screeds like Linda Hirshman's in Double X are why I waffle so much about identifying with the feminist label.

The Central Park Jogger Speaks Out, 20 Years Later

Tara Parker-Pope has an interview on her New York Times "Well" blog with Trisha Meili, otherwise known as the Central Park jogger. To refresh your collective cultural memories: Meili was raped and viciously assaulted in Central Park in 1989. A group of Harlem teenagers was arrested for the crime, and convicted on scant evidence, only to later be exonerated. The case was famously written about by Joan Didion in the New York Review of Books and became emblematic of a racially and socioeconomically divided New York City.

Meili discusses with Pope her decision to come out publicly as the jogger in 2003, when she wrote the memoir I Am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility:

The media keeping my anonymity is something that I do appreciate. I was known as the Central Park jogger, and when I told my story it was my choice. That was a degree of control that I had completely lost with the attack and the rape. When I’d meet someone it’s not like I would say, “Hi, I’m the Central Park jogger.” It’s kind of a conversation stopper. I decided to share my story because I had a real sense that sharing the story would help other people. That’s the message I’ve gotten, that sharing has given them hope.

I found this particularly interesting because Didion's essay has a large passage about the American media convention of keeping rape accusers names out of the press, something I've written about here before. Because of this convention, according to Didion, Meili was referred to by name frequently everywhere but the mainstream media.

Everyone in the courthouse, everyone who worked for a paper or a television station or who followed the case for whatever professional reason, knew her name. She was referred to by name in all court records and in all court proceedings. She was named, in the days immediately following the attack, on local television stations. She was also routinely named—and this was part of the difficulty, part of what led to a damaging self-righteousness among those who did not name her and to an equally damaging embattlement among those who did, in Manhattan's black-owned newspapers, The Amsterdam News and The City Sun, and she was named as well on WLIB, the Manhattan radio station owned by a black partnership which included Percy Sutton and, until 1985 when he transferred his stock to his son, Mayor Dinkins.

Though New York City is not the tinderbox of racial unrest that it was in the late '80s and early '90s, nor is it anywhere near as crime-ridden, reflecting on the Didion essay makes me wonder if the case would play out in the media in quite the same way if it had occurred in 2009. Would the existence of bloggers make anonymity impossible for a woman like Meili, the unhappy victim caught in such a public trial?

Love, Marriage, Recession ... Rape?

Two notable pieces of news about women's rights and rape.

On the domestic front: Could the recession end up leading to a drop in rape convictions? Yesterday, ProPublica noted that the Los Angeles County police department is severely backlogged in processing rape kits—which sometimes contain DNA that leads to arrests and convictions. According to the site,

The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has 4,700 untested rape kits, which potentially contain DNA evidence taken from sexual assault victims. The police department's backlog, which was the subject of a ProPublica and Los Angeles Times investigation [2] in November, is currently more than 4,000 cases. LAPD officers never sent many of the kits to the department's lab, which is underfunded and understaffed. ...

Meanwhile, on the foreign front: Is Afghanistan sliding backward in its treatment of women? According to the United Nations, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has signed a bill that is a blow to women's rights; and it looks like he did so in a craven bid to gather votes before the summer elections. From what I can tell, not a peep yet from the White House about this bill. But activists are already demanding a response, and you can see why. According to the Independent,

the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman's right to leave the home. ...

The bill draws explicit lines in the sand about consensual sex within marriage. It apparently "stipulates that a man can expect to have sex with his wife at least 'once every four nights' when travelling, unless they are ill." There is, however, a silver lining, as Beliefnet points out: The bill's proposed marriage age for girls was originally 9; in the final version, it's 16. It also originally contained "provisions" for temporary marriage, which some believe to be a form of legalized prostitution; those provisions were removed.

Convicted Rapists Serving in the Army and Marines

CBS News has discovered that both the Army and the Marines have given "moral waivers" to men who have been convicted of rape and sexual assault—related felonies—despite an initial denial from the principal undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, Michael Dominguez. In the clip below, Katie Couric talks to a former military medic named Wendy who was sexually assaulted twice while serving abroad. According to CBS:

Wendy’s experience is not unusual. Since 2002, the Miles Foundation, a private non-profit that tracks sexual assault within the armed forces, has received nearly 1,200 confidential reports of sexual assaults in the Central Command Area of Responsibility, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan. Those reports have increased as much as 30 percent a year.

Congo: Condition Critical

Not long ago, I was contacted by a representative from Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, who pointed me to Condition: Critical, an online project that seeks to give voice to victims of violence in Congo. I've written about the situation in Congo here previously; New York Times East Africa bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman has done an amazing job of chronicling the atrocities and their aftermath in a civil war-torn country where rape is used as a war tactic. "According to the United Nations," Gettleman reported, "27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country."

Condition: Critical looks to bridge the gap between Congo and the outside world with testimonies, videos, and photographs focusing on Congolese women who are victims of sexual violence, who emerge from the jungle after being kidnapped, raped, and enslaved by soldiers, who in some cases are unable to speak. Gettleman: "Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair."

A 45-year-old widow called "L." was raped by two armed men, an attack that left her pregnant, suicidal, and an outcast.

L. gave birth to her child today. Her mother was at the hospital for the delivery. But her father in-law refused to visit her. “The family has rejected me,” explains L. “I cannot live with them anymore. A neighbour has taken me in, and that’s where I stay now. I still need support. I have been stigmatised and rejected by my family, by some of my children and by my community. 'A widow who gives birth at her age, it’s shameful,' that’s what they say about me."

"My two elder sons have been with the military service for a long time. Another one lives in the street and when he heard that I was pregnant, he sent death threats to the baby and me. He said that he would kill both of us if I gave birth to a boy who could claim fields for himself later on.”

Today, L. holds a little girl in her arms. She is breastfeeding her. “This child has no problems. I must accept her, welcome her and take care of her. My daughter is innocent and today I look at her as a mother. We must stick together. I’ll go back to my village soon. I’ll continue to stay with my neighbour. I’ll have to carry goods for people to earn a bit of money because my family-in-law won’t let me work in the fields any longer."

"I would like to have my own house one day, from where no one can drive my daughter and I.”

[Condition: Critical]

"Gray" Rape Doesn't End When You Start Going Gray

The economy is on life support, yesterday's bloodbath in Bombay has thrust terrorism suddenly back to the forefront of the international agenda, a record number of Americans are on food stamps…well, here is something I for which I am thankful: that I am not Lois Feldman of Carroll, Iowa. Who says she does not recall stumbling drunkenly into the men's room during a football game at the University of Minnesota Metrodome last weekend, having sex with a stranger 12 years her junior in a stall as a crowd assembled to watch and cheer or even being subsequently arrested by the police, to whom she could not even recall her correct middle name, for indecent exposure. "What Lois Feldman, 38, will remember," writes the Des Moines Register, "is the humiliation afterward." She's been prank-called by all manner of trolls and fired from her job as a receptionist, but credits her husband Kelly, who regrets not accompanying her to the bathroom, for being "supportive."

Uhhhh, yeah, maybe he's supportive because it sounds like she was…raped? Not that Feldman is using that term. Nor does she seem like the, er, "type." Nor is it clear just how drunk her partner in misdemeanor crime, Ross Walsh -- who came to the game with his girlfriend, for Chrissakes -- was when Mrs. Feldman showed up in his stall, or however it happened.

But I'll be interested to see how this news plays out on the feminist blogosphere, which does not seem to have yet seized upon it. Because it's possible Feldman was the victim of what Cosmo last year controversially termed gray rape -- a term I halfheartedly endorsed, because I think it captures the fogginess of circumstance that enables people on both sides of an unintentional incident to understand, make sense of and ultimately get past what happened.

It's also possible, of course, that she was the victim of a predatory overgrown frat boy with serious mental issues. I don't know, and I don't have a strong view on this; my inclination is to hope it's the former, and that one day the Feldmans can joke about their Larry Craig incident -- but either way, she doesn't remember. What is true is that it wasn't so much the event that traumatized her: it was the aftermath. And while it is clear that whatever the case, Feldman was the victim of a lot more than her own inebriation, her own employers won't stand by her. It's sickeningly reminiscient of a depressing Modern Love last year written by a woman who'd been publicly date raped by a frat boy her freshman year, only to find herself a pariah in her own sorority, an event she blamed for turning her into a misogynist. Ugh. Well, the bad news is that crap like this doesn't stop happening after one deactivates from one's sorority. The good news is that Feldman, a married mother of three, is courageous enough to tell the media exactly what happened. She has nothing to be ashamed about, of course -- beyond being a lightweight, which I find admirable -- but there a lot of societies that don't see it that way.

Alaska’s High Rate of Rape

A new message to Sarah Palin popped up on YouTube this weekend. The video features young girls begging that she not "undo everything they (the girls' feminist mothers and grandmothers) fought for." What stood out to me was the statistic that "women in Alaska get raped over twice as much as women in the rest of the country." It's true.  

Alaska has struggled with a high rape rate for years, especially among its rural population. According to an FBI report in 2007, the rate was 77.4 per 100,000 people, which is 2.58 times higher than the national rate of 30 per 100,000.

The video also claims Palin has done nothing to reduce the high rate of rape and doesn't care about violence against girls and women. It's worth noting that the problem existed long before she made the jump from hockey mom to political figure. But is there anything to the criticism?

Last year, Amnesty International blamed the federal government, along with state government, for the high sexual assault rates among Alaska Native women. At the state level, the report cites the difficulty state troopers, a group of 240 commissioned troopers, have patrolling the large state. Responding to a call can take hours, or even days, the report found. In 2005, troopers received a call from a village 150 miles away in which a man had beat his wife with a shotgun and barricaded himself in the house with four children. Troopers arrived more than four hours later and after the man had raped a 13-year-old Alaska Native girl.

Rape In Congo, A Year Later: Change?

Every woman should read New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman's latest missive on the rape-as-war-tactic epidemic in Congo: "Rape Victims' Words Help Congo Into Change." A year ago, Gettleman exposed the horrors happening in Bukavu, Congo, where thousands of women were being brutally raped as a consequence of the country's ongoing internal strife. In 2006, according to the UN, some 26,000 women were victims of sexual assaults in South Kivu Province alone. As a Congolese gynecologist stated, the savage attacks, which sometimes involve bayonets and piece of wood, resulting in the destruction of victims' reproductive and digestive systems, are "done to destroy women."

Since, the UN has declared such grand scale acts of sexual violence "a tactic of war." Now, Gettleman returns with another report from the frontlines. "Congo, it seems, is finally facing its horrific rape problem," he writes, "which United Nations officials have called the worst sexual violence in the world." Today, due to international attention, outside aid, and local efforts, a "culture of impunity" is breaking down, ending the silence when it comes to rape. More arrests of perpetrators are taking place than ever before, but, Gettleman is quick to point out, the number of those charged remains relatively small, particularly in a culture "where women tend to be beaten down anyway." 

In makeshift forums, women are telling their stories. "'There was no dinner,'" one woman's tale begins. "It was me who was dinner." In the audience, several women wore T-shirts that read in Kiswahili: "I refuse to be raped. What about you?" Eve Ensler, best known for having written "The Vagina Monolgues," is seeking to put an end to the worst rape problem in the world. Ensler deems the phenomenon "femicide": "'I have spent the past 10 years of my life in the rape mines of the world,' she said. 'But I have never seen anything like this.'" The playwright is helping to open a center at the heart of the problem that will provide counseling and support to thousands of rape victims. If you want to learn more, you can read about the project or donate here.

Should There Be a Spokeswoman for Rape?

On Monday, there was an outrage when Politico's Jonathan Martin reported that the Obama campaign was seeking a rape victim for an ad. Apparently, the campaign had contacted Kiersten Stewart (Martin misspelled her name as Steward) with the Family Violence Prevention Fund to help them find a victim for an ad relating to rape. According to the e-mail obtained by Politico, Stewart was unsure of the specifics regarding the ad.

At first, this made me queasy, too. A spokeswoman for rape? But then I thought about it. Why is this any different than using Gianna Jessen, an abortion survivor, to do an attack ad on Obama's position on the Born Alive Infant Protection Act in Illinois? Or using a POW who served with McCain to make an ad saying that he is unfit to lead?

Newsrooms have an ongoing debate about whether to name rape victims. The names are public record, but out of either respect or discomfort, newspapers decline to name them. But in the case of a political ad, the woman has a say in the matter. If the Obama campaign finds a woman to speak in its ad, she would have volunteered. If she wants to let herself be used this way, then who's to stop her? Many feminists have argued, after all, that shielding rape victims is misplaced chivalry and only compounds the shame.

The other difference here is that most of the testimonial ads are put out by independent groups, not by a political party or candidate. Jessen's ad was created by a group whose sole purpose is to reveal Obama's support of infanticide. No doubt this is something Jessen approves of—she's involved with the group. In Obama's case, he is asking a rape victim to talk about just one issue on his platform. Who knows if she supports all, or even most of, his positions. Planned Parenthood aired an ad today featuring a rape victim. There was no similar reaction. In Obama's case, the woman ends up speaking about rape but really serves as a spokesperson for Obama's campaign. In the Planned Parenthood situation, the woman talks about rape, but her speech doesn't have the same endorsement quality.

Obama's campaign wasn't wrong in seeking a rape victim for a political ad, but it does feel a little like exploitation. Then again, if she volunteered, no harm, no foul.