Category Archive

“There may be some well-meaning people in this audience who have never attended a woman suffrage convention, never heard a woman suffrage speech, never read a woman suffrage newspaper, and they may be surprised that those who speak here do not argue the question. It may be kind to tell them that our cause has passed beyond the period of arguing. The demand of the hour is not argument, but assertion, firm and inflexible assertion, assertion which has more than the force of an argument. If there is any argument to be made, it must be made by opponents, not by the friends of woman suffrage.”

–Frederick Douglass, 1888

“Gratuitous affection between adults is to my mind something you do not make fun of. The one thing you do not make fun of.”

–Padget Powell, Edisto

The things she knew, let her forget again —
The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold,
The gaping shepherds, and the queer old men
Piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold.

Let her have laughter with her little one;
Teach her the needless, tuneless songs to sing;
Grant her her right to whisper to her son
The foolish names one dare not call a king.

Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd,
The smell of rough-cut wood, the trail of red,
The thick and chilly whiteness of the shroud
That wraps the strange new body of the dead.

Ah, let her go, kind Lord, where mothers go
And boast his pretty words and ways, and plan
The proud and happy years that they shall know
Together, when her son is grown a man.

–Dorothy Parker, 1928

One of the great weird open secrets of American society is how much less crime there is than there used to be. Serious crime has fallen dramatically in just about every category since the early seventies — robbery is down 69%, assault by 62%, theft by 74%.

But even in the context of this overall decline in crime, one statistic stands out:

Rape is down 88%.

Yep. Eighty-eight percent. And this isn’t a shift in reporting to police — the figures come from the Bureau of Justice National Crime Victimization Survey, which interviews Americans directly about their experience of crime each year.

Now, there are a lot of reasons for the overall decline in crime, from advances in police work to simple demographics. And yet rape stands out. Of all the major crimes tracked by the NCVS, rape is the one where we’re seeing the most progress.

And what has changed in American society since 1973? We’ve begun to take rape seriously. We’ve started to move away from “blaming the victim.” We’ve moved in the direction of sensible and humane approaches to policing and prosecution. We’ve moved toward treating rape as the crime that it is, even in circumstances in which we previously shrugged it off.

And we’ve also moved toward a healthier, less furtive, more open attitude toward sexuality and gender. In a world in which women can say without hesitation that they have had sex, the rapist has far less power to shame and to silence. In a world in which people talk sensibly and publicly about sexual ethics, better sexual ethics emerge and propagate.

Finally, we’ve moved toward a world in which cross-gender socialization is the unremarkable norm. We’ve moved away from sex segregation in schools, in dorms, in the workplace, in social settings. Men and women (and boys and girls) now interact casually to a degree that would have been unimaginable a few generations ago, and that interaction has had a profound effect on how men see and understand women.

What’s changed? What’s changed is that we’ve become a more feminist society. What’s changed is that feminism and allied social movements have transformed the way we live, have fought and won battle after battle to make this country a better place.

There’s still a long way to go, obviously, but we’ve come far enough to know this:

Feminism works.

Last night Moe Tkacik, a blogger for the Washington City Paper, put up a post about the Assange rape allegations that mentioned the names of the women who claim he sexually assaulted them. When the #mooreandme folks got wind of it, they hammered her, and she replied with this (edited slightly for clarity):

I did not get the memo about how we were supposed to be all State Department “see no evil” abt accusers’ names at this point. From my perspective, names were just the obvious way of keeping their stories straight. They’ve been all over internet, tweeting etc about this.

Today the Executive Editor of the website Jezebel, called out for doing the same thing in a post a while back, replied with this:

Her name has been public for 4 mos. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

So okay. Here’s the deal. Three things:

First, and most obviously, a “public” fact can always be made more public. There are people in the world who haven’t read those women’s names, and none of us who write for public dissemination can know whether our site will be the place where one of them learns it. The risk of harm coming to these women from my publishing their names is clearly really small — really really really small — but there’s no way for me to know that it’s zero. It can’t be zero.

Second, potential risk to the alleged rape survivor you’ve named isn’t the only reason not to name her. What’s happened to Assange’s accusers in the wake of the publication of their names is horrifying, and it’s certainly given women who have been raped — or who may be raped in the future — pause about coming forward. It seems obvious to me what a journalist or blogger who names those names is saying to those other women:

“I may name your names too.”

It’s not just A and W who writers and editors need to be thinking about here.

And there’s another really crucial issue as well. New York Times columnist Nick Kristof has named the names of some women and girls who have been raped in the Congo in his stories, and earlier this year he responded to critics of that decision in a blogpost. His defense began this way:

“The only effective way to get people to care about a problem is to tell a story about an individual. … If we leave out names and faces, then there’s no outrage, and the rapes go on and on.”

You see what he did there? He led with the affirmative case for naming names in the specific story in which he’d chosen to do it. It was only after making that case — only after establishing that there was a compelling reason to name a particlar name in a particular story — that he turned to the arguments against, enumerating them in turn.

“I agonized over these tradeoffs,” he wrote, and eventually arrived at a policy. He would only name such names with the consent of the women involved. He would strive to make that consent truly informed and uncoerced. He would leave out any identifying details that might allow these women to be tracked down. And so on.

Some disagree — and vehemently — with Kristof’s decision. But he’s clearly framed the question the right way. If you’re going to even consider naming a name, you’d better have a damn good reason.

And no, “names were just the obvious way of keeping their stories straight” ain’t it.

Update | A concise summary of the case against, from @silentkpants on Twitter: “Naming complainants doesn’t destigmatize rape, it stigmatizes individuals for having made complaints of rape.”