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Feminists are sounding alarms online about the return to cyberspace of a male blogger who sexually assaulted a fellow college student in early 2007.
Kyle Payne, a self-described male feminist and anti-pornography activist, was an undergraduate at Iowa’s Buena Vista University, working as a resident advisor in BVU’s dorms, when he undressed and videotaped an unconscious, intoxicated student under his care.
Months after the assault, while his crime was still unknown, Payne began blogging on pornography, sexual violence, and other issues from a pro-feminist perspective. He continued to do so, without acknowledging his wrongdoing, even after he was arrested for, and pled guilty to, the assault. It was not until he was on the brink of incarceration that publicity forced him to admit his crime on his blog.
Both the fact of Payne’s crime and the manner in which he chose to discuss it generated tremendous outrage among feminist bloggers, and that outrage was revived and intensified last month when Payne, released from a six-month jail term, began blogging again.
Payne’s earliest post-incarceration posts made no mention of his crime or his punishment, although they did include reprints of pro-feminist essays he had written before the scandal broke — including several relating specifically to campus rape prevention. In response to subsequent criticism, he added a disclaimer referring to the sexual assault to his earlier pro-feminist and anti-rape posts, though no mention of his crime appears on the front page of his blog or in his new posts. (He discloses it at the very end of his “Blogger Bio” page, in a one-sentence statement that refers to the assault as a “non-violent sexual offense.”)
For a sampling of response to Payne’s return to blogging, see Renegade Evolution, Natalia Antonova, and Hugo Schwyzer.
Students at the University of Minnesota Duluth staged a protest and counter-concert when rapper Soulja Boy performed on campus on Friday night. UMD student Arielle Schnur said Soulja Boy’s songs “degrade half the student body as sex objects and the other half as sexual assault perpetrators.”
Protest organizers sat down with the director of the UMD student center to plot strategy for a protest that would raise awareness without disrupting the event. In an effort to ensure an orderly demonstration, organizers required participants to attend an informational session on protest rules before the gig.
The demonstrators’ counter-concert, held at the same time as the Soulja Boy show, was free and featured a lineup of local bands.
The protest was given a boost on Friday afternoon when Soulja Boy mentioned it on his Twitter feed.
(This is part three of a four-part series. Parts one and two are here and here.)
The posting at the NSIE site said that the April 1 action was going to kick off at “the 12th Street building” at 2 o’clock. It didn’t give an address.
I Googled up a campus map without too much trouble, though. The New School only has two buildings on 12th Street, it turns out, and since one of them is a dorm, I figured I was looking for the other one. I’d previously arranged to meet someone on the Lower East Side at three o’clock, so I planned to hang around for the first half hour or so of the NSIE event before heading across town.
Iowa’s supreme court has unanimously granted legal recognition to same-sex marriages!
More cool details:
- The ruling will take effect on April 24, three weeks from today.
- Two of the justices behind the unanimous opinion were appointed by Republicans.
- The decision is based on the Iowa state constitution, so it cannot be appealed to any other court.
- It appears that the earliest the decision could be overturned by constitutional amendment is November 2012.
- Such an amendment would require approval by the Iowa state legislature prior to a popular referendum.
The majority leaders of both houses of the state legislature can be expected to oppose any effort to overturn the decision by constitutional amendment — they released a joint statement today hailing the ruling as an example of “Iowa common sense and Iowa common decency.”
It’s been a long, long time coming, but I know … a change is gonna come.
So it turns out that the porn flick that state legislators managed to get banned from the University of Maryland College Park has been playing on college campuses across the country.
And it turns out that the reason it’s been playing on college campuses across the country is that the movie’s distributors have been giving it away to campus groups for free.
And it turns out that the reason they’ve been giving it away for free is that they’re trying to build some buzz around their product at a time when the porn industry is suffering huge losses.
Nice work, doofuses. You just gave a bunch of pornographers a bunch of free press, and the revenue that goes with it.
Sunday update: The Student Power Party, a slate of candidates in UMD’s upcoming student government elections, is planning to screen the film and host a free speech forum tomorrow night.
studentactivism.net 
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