male privilege personified.
know about the below article. and women should think what we re
licking the boots of.
includes no class analysis, no analysis of racism in the sex / porn
industry, no recognition that for the vast majority of sex workers in
the world economic coercion abuse fuel their situation, not free
choice. i ve been thinking of our rape culture, how rape
progressive male allies.
so he could rape and impregnate her to increase his capital.
their assaulters are memorialized as our role models. how
covered the mentally unstable woman accusing W. of rape, because,
haha, anyone can tell she s crazy and it makes him feel sorry for
bush.
and they can t find feminist articles more worthy than that
piece of shit to include regularly?
Hoffman into his world, for better or worse
August 6, 2006
Joe Francis, the founder of the Girls Gone Wild empire, is
humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my
arms twisted hard behind my back.
He s pushing himself against me,
shouting: This is what they did to me in Panama City!
It s after 3 a.m.
and we re in a parking lot on the outskirts of
Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the
street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching
He has turned on me, and I don t know why. He s going on and on about
Panama City Beach, the spring break spot in northern Florida where Bay
racketeering, drug trafficking and promoting the sexual performance of
a child.
As he yells, I wonder if this is a flashback, or if he s
thong. This much is certain: He s got at least 80 pounds on me and I m
thinking he s about to break my left arm. My eyes start to stream
tears.
Francis world. I ve been with him nonstop since early afternoon,
listening as he teases employees, flying on his private jet, eating
6-foot-2-inch frame, declaring, We want to go wild!
Above the dance floor, the stage is full of girls who rotate, twist
and shimmy their way up and down three strip poles.
One of them is
Jannel Szyszka, a petite 18-year-old who prances around the stage like
a star. At her feet, a crowd of hundreds is gyrating to the pounding
house music. Dozens of polo-shirted boys shout up to her, making
that night, Francis appeared, grabbed her arm and pulled her toward
him.
You are so going on the bus later, she recalls Francis saying.
I was like, Um, OK. I was shocked.
I was like, Whoa—Joe s, like,
trying to talk to me, like out of all the girls in here. Francis
invited her back to the VIP area to do shots with him, she says, and
she said yes.
Szyszka says the more shots she drank, the cloudier her judgment
became.
She says she agreed to join Francis and his crew on the Girls
Gone Wild bus. I thought Girls Gone Wild was like flashing, and I
thought I would flash them and be done. And so when I m walking to the
bus, that s all I m thinking is going to happen.
At first she felt comfortable, she says. Inebriated and excited, she
says she was led to the back of the bus, to a small bedroom. The
double bed, with its neatly folded iridescent purple sheets, takes up
most of the room.
A flat-screen TV faces the bed, and cabinets are
filled with remote controls, lubricants, condoms, sex toys in plastic
bags, baby oil, a DVD called How to be a Player and a clipboard full
of waivers for girls to sign. A small bathroom is off to the side,
with a half-sized shower with faux marble tiling, and on the floor of
the shower is a crate holding cheap and fruity-flavored rum, whiskey,
tequila and Kool-Aid.
license, proving she s not a minor.
The camera then captures Szyszka
lying on the bed. Her nails are chipped, her eyes coated with makeup.
Following a camerman s instructions, she shows her breasts and says,
Girls Gone Wild.
She seems shy but willing. She smiles. The unseen
cameraman asks her to take off her shirt, her skirt, then her
underwear.
She sprawls on the bed, her legs open. At his suggestion,
she masturbates with a dildo, saying repeatedly that it hurts but also
feels good. Francis enters the room at certain points and you hear his
voice, low and flirtatious, telling her, You are so adorable.
When
she says she s a virgin, he responds: Great. You won t be after my
cameraman gets done with you.
When I talk to Szyszka seven days later, she says she didn t quite
realize she was being filmed.
But I didn t care because I was drunk
and who cares? Then she adds: It didn t feel good to me at all, but
I was totally faking it because I was on Girls Gone Wild.
Eventually, Szyszka says, Francis told the cameraman to leave and
pushed her back on the bed, undid his jeans and climbed on top of her.
I told him it hurt, and he kept doing it. And I keep telling him it
hurts. I said, No twice in the beginning, and during I started
saying, Oh, my god, it hurts.
I kept telling him it hurt, but he
kept going, and he said he was sorry but kissed me so I wouldn t keep
talking.
Afterward, she says, Francis cleaned them both off with a paper towel
and told her to get dressed. Then, she says, he opened the door and
told the cameraman to come back, saying, She s not a virgin anymore.
them. She says she agreed, and they walked to the front of the bus.
Szyszka remembers that one of the crew returned her driver s license.
Another asked if she wanted to hang out on the bus. She declined, she
says, but asked for three pairs of booty short underwear that
Francis had promised her for appearing on camera. They gave me a
weird look like that was too much, Szyszka recalls.
They were, like,
Three of them? and I was, like, Yeah, three.
Within days, Szyszka says, she told her father, who was angry about
what she said had happened but kept quiet at her request.
A month
after the incident, she says, she told her sister and mother.
She s confused, she admits, about what happened. She feels guilty, she
says, for getting herself into the situation in the first place.
She
completely drunk. And she is adamant that she said no to Francis.
She says she s haunted by that night.
I feel like it was planned, she says. Sometimes I m driving along,
and I think about it and all of a sudden feel weird.
Six weeks after that night outside Chicago, when I call Francis on his
cellphone and ask him about the incident, he says he doesn t remember
Szyszka and that he didn t have sex with anyone that night.
He seems
to lose control, repeatedly referring to me by a crude word for female
genitalia. If you print that, I will [expletive] sue the [expletive]
out of you. If you print that, baby, you just put the nail in your own
coffin, he tells me.
You are a [expletive expletive]. You decided to
laugh on you. I will get you.
He then refers me to Burke, his lawyer.
In an e-mail, Burke says Francis and Szyszka did have sex—consensual
Wild gave her any alcohol. Neither Mr.
Francis nor any of the GGW
staff in or around the bus recall Ms. Szyszka making any complaint or
comment about Mr. Francis.
In fact, Ms. Szyszka was in good spirits
after the encounter, and numerous witnesses have stated that she
afterward, Burke writes. He adds: Though Mr.
Francis cannot speak to
Ms. Szyszka s discomfort during the encounter, other news stories have
commented that Mr. Francis is reputedly well-endowed.
the photographer and, um, I want to talk to you about it.
No photographer has been assigned to the story, and no excerpts have
been sent to anyone.
I don t call Francis back right away, so he calls my editor.
He tells
her that I have a crush on him, that I have an ax to grind because I
am jealous and angry.
I just felt that Claire may have had a little affinity for me, he
says as she takes notes. It may have come out when she had a few
drinks.
He describes my behavior as aggressively romantic.
Originally she hit on me. That s how I met her.
I took her to a
lunch. She called me all the time and it wasn t about work. It was
about me.
I know when a girl has a crush on me.
photographs to prove it. When my editor asks if he put his hands on me
that night, he doesn t hesitate.
I did absolutely get physical with her—but not romantically, he
says. We were outside standing by a police car. The officer told her
to quit taking notes on what he was saying.
I said, There s no
freedom of the press here. I took her arms behind her back and said,
Let s take her to jail. I said she should go to jail and the officer
agreed with me.
She didn t get the sarcasm. She listened to him. She
stopped writing.
Can you believe that? That s the 1st Amendment. She s
not a journalist.
I stand up for the 1st Amendment. But she didn t.
My problem, he tells my editor, is that I wasn t smart enough to
get what he was saying.
When I start to pull police and court records, I find that I m not the
only woman who s made Francis mad.
In 2000, the property manager of his Santa Monica apartment, Stephanie
Van de Motter, obtained a restraining order requiring that he stay at
least 100 yards away from her. According to court documents, she said
that Francis, upset about the noise garbage collectors made in the
mornings, had harassed and threatened her, twice climbing up to her
obscenities at her whenever he saw her.
He appeared in her office
several times, she said, asking for her by using the crude word for
female genitalia, and left messages with a co-worker: Tell the bitch
this is war. Francis lawyer says he can t comment on the case.
In 2003, Darian Mathias-Patterson, who scouted locations and arranged
for the rental of a space for a Halloween party Francis threw, filed a
police report, saying he had threatened to kill her when she told him
she couldn t return his $25,000 deposit because the 2,000 guests had
trashed the place.
He hurled profanities at her, she told police,
saying, I m going to [expletive] get you, you [expletive] whore and
repeatedly used the same crude word. Two weeks later,
Mathias-Patterson, who was pregnant, miscarried. She later sued
emotional distress, and the case was settled for an undisclosed
amount.
Francis lawyer says he can t comment on the case.
In 2004, a woman filed a police report accusing Francis of drugging
her. She told police that after she met Francis in a bar in South
Beach, Fla.
, where they argued over the morality of Girls Gone Wild
videos, she went to his room at the Ritz-Carlton for a drink and awoke
the next morning in bed next to him. Police dropped their
investigation, citing a lack of evidence, and Francis sued the woman
for defamation in state court in Miami, where the case is pending. He
is seeking $25,000,036—a figure that includes $36 in room-service
morning after they had consensual sex.
In a news release, Francis said at the time: I won t sit back and be
called a rapist. Rape is a very serious crime that I personally find
disgusting. As a son, and as the brother to three sisters I love very
much, I would NEVER have sex with a woman without her consent.
I have two more calls to make, this time about me.
I phone Ementi Coary, a Melrose Park, Ill., police officer who
witnessed Francis roughing me up.
He says he didn t intervene at the
I was just jealous.
I was under the impression that you guys knew each other, that
around, Coary says. I changed my mind when he was grabbing your arm.
bodyguard physically separated us, escorting me to the edge of the
parking lot, and when Coary called for backup; a patrol car arrived
moments later. He s one of those guys who has money and does whatever he wants to, Coary continues. I would ve been happy to put the guy in jail.
He had advised me to press charges that night, but I
declined.
Then I phone Leland Zaitz, who was working for Francis in Melrose Park
as a producer and was in the parking lot during the episode. Zaitz
toward me, despite the fact that the pressure he applied was so
intense that hours later, my arms were covered in red hand marks.
with him and he gets a little rough. I think it was just Joe s version
of being playful and goofy, Zaitz says. I think he was trying to
bring you in closer.
When I think back on that night, our very public scuffle isn t what
seems the most revealing. Instead, the moment I saw Francis most
clearly—his charm, his rage, his cunning and even his regret—came
later, when no one was looking. I was waiting, still shaken, outside
the club for a cab to take me back to my hotel.
Francis, who had
disappeared inside the bus, returned.
Ignoring the two policemen who hovered a few yards away, he tiptoed
past them to stand over me. He rubbed my shoulder.
His gestures were
oddly gentle—even fond. I felt sick.
I m sorry, he said, reaching over to tousle my hair.
We love our
little reporter. Don t we guys? We love our little reporter.
I stared down at the dirt as he whispered in my ear, I m sorry, baby,
give me a kiss. Give me a kiss.
would you buy me then?
does market follow demand, or demand follow market?
prosthetic bodies, $40,000 makeovers, features imprinted on your cock
and you tell me you don t understand this kind of competition!
you just follow the market, the ads, the art, the enterprize
refugees of false dreams to unite.
This brings up a good point; and I m sure Yolanda will be rewarded by protestations about the Dworkin reference for the same reason Dworkin got into trouble for saying such. Hits a bit too close to the bone.
The kneejerk from most men, if we anticipate it and think about what the reaction means, provides a hint about the assumptions under the reaction.
Dworkin talks about rape from the point of view of women (as Marx talked about work from the point of view of workers, and Fanon talked about colonization from the point of view of the colonized,etc.).
Dworkin sees rape as men s eroticization of power over women, as the sexual objectification of women, and as an attack on women s sovereignty, their personhood.
The law sees rape from the man s point of view (beginning as a property crime), and as an issue of self-control. That s why rape is so strictly defined; so men can know at what point the law forbids them to carry the eroticization of power over women, as the sexual objectification of women, and as an attack on women s sovereignty, their personhood.
But if the culture is one of eroticization of power over women, as the sexual objectification of women, and as an attack on women s sovereignty, their personhood then it is defining rape from the woman s point of view a rape culture.
These are the general behaviors of men; and rape by the women s definition is regulated (to use MacKinnon s term).
Men see the issue of self-control as we are on this road, and there is the sign the law that says here, and no further, and if we fail, it is a failure of self-control; and we are not rapists until we cross that line.
Dworkin is saying in the starkest terms, the bodies of women are littering the whole road.
The law defines the point at which rape becomes a crime against the property of another man. That s its tradition. Thanks to decades of feminist effort we are *almost* at the point where the law recognises rape as a crime against a woman, but not quite.
I m AWOL out in slow dialup land. Back in a couple of days
That this Francis guy is walking around loose is an indictment of the culture. When I return I ll have some more to say about crunk and the use of alcohol to enable/excuse rape and other violence against women.
Hits a bit too close to the bone.
Stan - I have had the sneaking suspiscion for a very long time that when in debates about rape with men - even so-called progressive dudes - they seem to get defensive and dismissive quite quickly specifically because the topic treads to close to some things they (and/or someone close to them) have done and they don t want to have to admit they are guilty of the crime as well. Because, apparently to them, rapists are only dirty brown men in alleys - not your best friend, your boss, your brother or yourself.
There is a rapist checklist that floats around the feminist blogs - and I can t tell you how many times I have seen the list posted and then seen a load of male posters show up to explain to the women why #x and #y aren t rape. As if only they have a right to decide, and only they have the clear and logical minds to decide. While symotaneously telling women what they can and can t do so as to avoid inviting rape.
Because while only men have a clear enough mind to decide what is rape, they can t be expected to not do it (it s apparently up to us to stop it). Boys will be boys, after all.
It is reassuring then, to see a man be candid about it.
Would anyone like to take a shot (no pun intended) at what is wrong with today s on Wikipedia? Here s the opening passage:
Erotic depictions include paintings, sculpture, photographs, music and writings that show scenes of a sexual nature. They have been created by nearly every civilisation, ancient and modern.
Early cultures often associated the sexual act with supernatural forces and thus their religion is intertwined with such depictions. In Asian countries such as India, Japan and China, representations of sex and erotic art have specific spiritual meanings within the native religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto and Taoism. The Greeks and Romans produced much art and decoration of an erotic nature, much of it integrated with their religious beliefs and cultural practices.
[1][2]
In more recent times, erotic depictions have gone from being a luxury item for the few to a propaganda tool and then an everyday commodity, and even a livelihood for some. As the technology of communication has changed, each new technique, such as printing, photography, motion pictures and computers, has been adapted to display and disseminate these depictions.[3]
Right now I can point out about five glaring shits jumping out at me from this passage, but I would rather throw the question out there for other folks to tackle with first.
Basically, this situation rakes up nearly every assumption we ve ever shot down about gender here at FS. De, help me out here. 
ya know, it s a pity in a way about that word rapist . see, we use it (like contortionist, illusionist, artist ) to mean someone who does acts of rape .
why it ended up with an ist ending instead of a er ending is etymology at work, with (I suspect) the -ere Latin verb family getting anglicised
but anyway. when we say someone is a racist there is an ambiguity at work: we may mean that this person actually commits acts of racist violence, or that they merely cherish ideas which support or justify acts of racist violence police who beat and shoot dead young Black men without cause, or racists like Mel Gibson and Mike Richards who we think, we don t know for sure don t actually batter or murder Jews or people of colour, but spout the language of those who do. we admit there is an ideology called racism and that racists are those who subscribe to that ideology whether they act it out or not.
and we admit a continuum and a cultural pervasiveness of this ideology.
despite the shallow similarity of the two words however, even folk-etymology does not back-form an ideology called rapism [but isn t that what we mean when we say a rape culture ?] and allow the ambiguity that a man may have rapist (as an adjective, here) ideas, without personally acting on them in his own flesh?
or at least, not in someone else s flesh? (for of course he may act on his own flesh while masturbating to rapist fantasies, many of which are also racist fantasies as we well know).
for those of us who aren t rapists was the phrase that elicited this little thought-detour for me: I thought, but it s a rapist [adjective] culture, how can any of us not be acculturated as [ideological] rapists, that is, believers in a mythos justifying rape by positing the inferiority of women?
and is American racism really an ideology in its own right, springing from some natural xenophobia? or an ideology which evolved to justify the confiscation of land from indigenes and the enslavement of Africans in the Americas etc? for there is some evidence that in cases of peaceable first contact, vile racist ideologies about indigenous people did not get traction in euro/anglo popular thought until after colonisation and expropriation were well under way.
privilege and exploitation require an ideology/mythos to salve the conscience; men who rape require a rapist ideology to salve their collective conscience.
rapism. I doubt it will ever catch on but it is another way to look at the actual, physical rapist that does not make him a special kind of criminal male who is strangely unlike the rest of us.
it makes the rapist like any other terrorist the operative arm of an ideology a hegemonic ideology. and allows us to include those who subscribe to the ideology under the general term rapists believers in the cult of rape. The -ER has more of a just does it ambiance, dont chya think?
It feels unconscious, where -IST denotes premeditation and practice.
Rapism is definitely a good way to pin the tail on our culture rather than making each act of rape some kind of isolated and aberrant individual act.
Sorry just random, De inspired musings.
the slight status marker on the -ist ending is pretty weak I think probably has something to do with the cachet at one time attached to French words, which in turn derives from the high status of the occupying Norman lords in colonised Britain after the defeat at Hastings. most words of French derivation ended up being more couth or polite than the Anglo-Saxon equivalent we eat pork (porc) rather than hog or pig , and so on. I fancy that most of the -ist family made it into English as Norman imports (-iste and the Normans were certainly arrivistes in a big way) but oddly rapist is not one of these as the French term for a rapist iirc is violeur, a violator which seems a more womancentric term.
I ll grant you pianist, cellist, violinist, flautist, watercolourist, dentist, etc, with their artsy/professional whiff; but we still have to account for composer, banker, lawyer, writer (isn t writer higher-status than journalist ? and is novelist swankier than author ?) so I call it a somewhat weak status marker.
I figure most folks know that rape in its Latinate origin (rapere) is to seize (by force), to carry off , which is why the raptors are so called (they swoop down on their prey, seize it violently, and carry it off), and the crime of rape was originally modelled under law as the carrying off (willing or unwilling) of a woman from her father s or husband s household. or indeed of any kind of theft (rapine), although it seems to me it leans slightly towards the theft of living property (chattel) as in reiving and raiding .
thus old Pope s long poem The Rape of the Lock over which generations of schoolboys have sniggered only to be disappointed, is not about some bizarre antics with a door lock but the theft of a lock of hair, and the Rape of the Sabine Women (Roman nationalist mythology) was the theme for more than one famous painting which depict the wailing and struggling women being seized and carried off, not (as we would say today) literally raped.
the meaning of the word has shifted over the centuries to focus particularly on penetration rather than kidnapping (though this more modern sense of rape was I think always implicit in the theft of women).
but we digress making me a digressionist, I suppose, or just a plain proletarian digresser. apologies for the momentary trivia fit.
it s been a depressing few days and my brain needed to play for a few minutes in the sandbox of etymology where words do not suffer and bleed.
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