When superfluous quotation marks meet a public can of Austin: Hearts and Paws dog training facility, Leander TX.
I laughed the hollow, mirthless laugh of an obstreperally-blocked spinster aunt when I read this story about the two butt-slappin’ 7th-graders in McMinnville, Oregon whose ‘horseplay’ — that is, an avocation leading them to cavort through the halls spanking female students — has landed them in juvy, facing felony sex charges. The responsible adults in their lives are now scrambling to determine whether their actions were criminal or just a matter of boys-will-be-boys engaging in “a common form of greeting.”
I laughed because these boys are precisely the product of their culture. Do these outraged parents and attorneys and sociologists and radio jocks and sexperts really expect that boys will not initiate attempts to dominate girls as early in their lives as possible? Do they imagine that misogyny is a figment? Do they delude themselves that the attempt by these boys to join their elders in satisfying, lifetime careers of culturally-approved sex-based harassment was merely an anomaly, an aberration?
Apparently not everyone does. As the father of one of the jailed ‘McMinnville Two’ whined, “We’d all be in jail if everyone got arrested for this kind of stuff.” Too true, Mr. Redneck, too true. Everybody hates women; why, it would be insane to criminalize patriarchy. Which is essentially the argument in favor of defining the efforts of pubescent boys to forcibly dominate pubescent girls as ‘horseplay.’ How can it be antisocial when all of society condones it? Quoth a dudely editorialist in the Salem StatesmanJournal: “[T]o criminalize […] brutish behavior is irrational and counterproductive.”
Blowhards variously use the words ‘irrational’ and ‘insane’ to describe this case, but what is really nuts is that anyone should expect anything but criminal behavior from kids raised to revere a culture of domination.
As usual, the real nub of the controversy, although nobody is acknowledging it, is not over whether a couple of 13-year-old boys facing 10 years in the hoosegow for butt-swatting is an “overreaction.” It’s whether female humans have a legal right to personal bodily sovereignty. Incredibly, in 2007, the jury’s still out on that one.
[Thanks, Lisa]
I thought ofyou the minute I read the father’s comment, as well as the comment of one of the other students — did you see that bit? They got some young woman student to claim that “we” all do it. Yes, clearly. Young women run through the hallways of that school slapping boys on the ass. I’m certain that is true.
Guys used to run through the hallway of my junior high/high school (we were a combined building) when I did a brief stint in KS, grabbing our breasts. Did teachers stop them? Do anything? That’s funny!
I tripped one, once, after he did this. He was running, remember. Fell flat on his face, his friends laughed at him, he came back to me, outraged, and, get this, wholly surprised. “Why did you do that?” he demanded.
He really had no clue.
Bet he doesn’t to this day.
Bet these guys and their dads, and their mothers, still can’t see what’s wrong with slapping girls on the ass.
The StatesmanJournal article compares this to the Duke Lacross case.
After I picked my jaw up off the floor I pondered this comparison and found it telling. No one is saying the boys didn’t do it. Rather, they seem to be saying something along the lines of, “Everyone does it so it’s no big whoop.”
So why the comparison? Is the writer arguing sexual harassment and rape cases shouldn’t be tried at all? Do we need four male eye- witnesses for the prosecution and a consensus the act in question is not commonplace to bring a case forward?
And if girls had done this, would all the dads be saying “girls will be girls”? I think not. Although, if it wouldn’t land the girls in a whole bunch of hot water , it would be an interesting experiment to see who got the harsher treatment, both socially and legally. Or do we need to bother with the experiment?
I would guess that every man who is defending these boys will have behaved in the exact same way towards girls when he was a schoolboy, and every single woman who is defending them will have had similar things done to her and learned to pretend it didn’t matter because nobody with any power would provide her with protection.
Are there any women who escaped the experience of being groped at school? I’m imagining that the only way to escape the barrage of sexual assault would be to attend an all-girls school.
oh I had a similar opstreporal lobe burstage when my nephew kept exposing himself to my daughter. He wagged his penis at her, touched her with it, fake masturbated and eventually peed all over anything that moved. When I got “all stroppy and feminist” about it, I was told by my sister in law that this was normal behaviour among pre-pubescent boy children. Normal it may well be, but it shouldn’t be. Where my sister in law saw a healthy expression of gender difference and exploration of body parts, I saw sexual aggression and dominating behaviour. I stood my ground. I did not allow it to continue. Normalizing this kind of behaviour is how we keep our girl children (and to a lesser extent our boys) trapped in patriarchal limbo.
Even in this society, pippa, that ain’t normal. There’s something else going on with that boy.
Pippa, that behaviour is way outside “normal” in any society. He should be put under watch, and any adult caretakers around him as well. Right now being prepubescent he can get away with it, I expect by the time he’s 20 he’ll be in some jail for a good part of his adult life. Probably by 15 if he’s black.
How old is the nephew? When you were describing the behaviour, my immediate thought was ‘Mm, sounds like a two-year-old in need of some guidance’. Then you said he was pre-pubescent, and my mind switched to an image of an 11-year-old rapist-in-training.
pippa, that’s scary - he’s too old to do things like that benignly. Yes, a two-year-old might do that just exploring his body, and need correction that it isn’t acceptable. But at 11, that’s aggression. Whatever she says, it’s NOT normal behavior amongst boys that age.
I agree with what everybody else has said Pippa, and also want to cheer you on for standing up for your daughter and protecting her. The betrayal of adults who allow children to be mistreated in small ways or large ways is something that never leaves any of us that it has happened to (which is probably most of us).
Oy. I spent two years in a Christian middle school, and one of the boys’ favorite hobbies was to run through the hall grabbing the asses of the girls (who later told me, when I objected, “But you don’t even LIKE him,” that “I don’t mind it, and they like doing it, so what’s the big deal?” Eventually, one of them was emboldened by their lax attitude to try that shit with me - turning around in class, rubbing his inner thigh, and asking, “Want some of this?” (I don’t think he was quite clear on the concept - his hand was nowhere near his genitals).
I was too humiliated and shocked that the teacher, as usual, refused to do anything to stop this behavior, to respond until after class had ended, at which point I went up to the boy, grabbed him by the shirt, and told him, “Don’t you EVER do anything like that to me again!” He apologized, but later spread the rumor that I’d been expelled. I’m sure by now he’s graduated to the more violent and despicable forms of patriarchal domination.
I can’t say I ever personally witnessed this behavior in public high school, although I did witness a group of boys throwing rocks at a friend of mine, who begged me not to report it on the logic that, if she ignores them, they’ll stop (how much internalized responsibility for men’s violence must she have had to believe that she was causing their behavior by not “ignoring them” enough as she sat by herself reading a damn book? The mind boggles). Thankfully, the administrator (a dude! Maybe there is hope!) I reported this to immediately believed us, and camped out in a nearby building to catch them in the act, before promptly suspending/expelling the lot of them.
Hmm. Likely these p-infected tots have been wanking it to “XXXYourMomSpanked!.mpeg” for a few years now.
Pray tell there comes a day when cookie and temp files are public knowledge. Patriarchy-avoidance would be so much easier.
Pippa, I agree with others here, the boy’s behavior is far from normal and more than likely an indicator of behavior learned from someone older. Question is, what else has he been taught and who will bother to find out? And kudos for you for standing up for your daughter and to his possibly in denial mother.
I don’t recall being groped in school by other boys, I was the outcast, nerdy shy girl. I was harassed, but not sexually. Sexual harassment I recall came from pedophiliac teachers, not fellow students.
Carol the punishment dished out to girls who would dare to sexually harass boys, or display any sexually positive or aggressive attitude/behavior at all is the humiliation of being labeled a slut.
This would qualify them for social ostracization by their peers and boys, save for possibly more humiliation of the sexual kind. Of course, standing up to the assaults would also mean possibly mean social rejection or revulsion as well.
Since humans fear social rejection most, girls have little choice, or so they have in the past, but to take it and shut up.
Kate, when I was in high school a couple of boys tried to “initiate” me when I was in grade 10. The usual crap, shaving cream int he hair, lipstick smeared on glasses. I grabbed the stuff away from them, it them with it and reported them. They got suspended. I was not labelled a slut. Of course, the way I responded wasn’t overtly sexual either.They DID stop trying to mess with me. But, if enough girls behaved in a sexually dominant fashion, then the term “slut” would lose it’s sting. It would become just another word. Of course it would be nice if girls stopped caring about the term and just went on their merry way. Too bad it’s not going to happen.
Wow, I figured that was something unique to my old junior high.
At my middle school, out in the sticks, the guys came up with a game they called “The Game.” (Original, I know.) Basically, you played the game by grabbing girls when they didn’t expect it, such as when they were at the water fountain, or at lunch, or when they were coming out of the bathroom, or, really, any time. Points were awarded for body part groped (1 point for ass, 5 points for boobies), with extra points awarded for originality or an especially hard slap on the butt. It lasted for, as I remember, the whole of the school year, and nobody ever put a stop to it.
As much as I hate to admit it, I scored one point that year, because, well, closet-case trying to look straight. I blame the patriarchy, and lax teacher supervision.
I endured this kind of harassment, also in middle school. The boy who groped girls (there was only one, as far as I knew) got away with it because we were embarassed and didn’t tell on him. When one girl mentioned it in a group and we realized he was doing it to all of us, we started to yell “stop that!” at him, and he did stop. We needed adults to do something, though.
The problem with sending kids to jail for this kind of harassment is that it’s going to stop girls from speaking up to teachers. Adults have to stop this shit much sooner, before it gets to the point of assault. Don’t students who hit other students go to detention first? The story said that the cops did hours of interviews. There were hours of interviews? That must mean this went on for awhile! Calling in the cops and coming down like a ton of bricks–in some ways, that’s too little, too late. The first time it happened a teacher should have been on it, taking names, calling parents, being pre-emptive.
I’d be fine with life imprisonment. These are clearly future rapists, so why give them a chance? If parents don’t like that, they can raise their children to be not-rapists. Simple.
At the school I was in, in Kansas, the girls reinforced the male behavior — calling other girls heifers, ganging up on girls who didn’t fit the (patriarchal-approved) norm — that sort of thing. I was outside of the “set,” since I came in from New Orleans at age 12 and left at 14, and never really learned the rules (I felt like an anthropologist from Mars, let me tell you, they kept trying to get me to act right, I couldn’t even see the signals, ai), but I recall being confused by it: why go along with something that clearly doesn’t benefit you?
It took me a long time to see how it might benefit some of them; or how it might look like it benefited some of them — that this might be enough to get most of them to play. Like the lottery! Or capitalism!
In New Orleans, to whic I returned when I was 14, I attended an all-girls school. Now that’s a planet of its own.
Stories like this one just make me want to get out the tree loppers and start gelding.
Guess I was lucky, because nothing like this ever happened to me at any time in school. Of course, I had the advantage of skipping lotsa grades and therefore needed to learn alpha bitch skills really early. (And I’d publicly demonstrated those skills once when a nasty little pest was teasing my eczema-covered younger sister. I grabbed his arms, swung him around my head several times and let him go. He never bothered either of us again.)
The ass-grabbing-in-school thing happened to me (and many others, surely) from 2nd grade all the way through high school. It took me a few years to tell anyone because I was embarrassed and didn’t want to draw attention to it. Plus, I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble and then have that to deal with. The guys who did it (many different guys through the years) weren’t otherwise mean to me, so I just kept it to myself till one day I spilled why I didn’t want to go to school. This was 5th grade. The advice I got was to smack in the face any guy who touched me like that and “he’ll never do it again.” I took the advice, and it worked with that guy. Doesn’t really address the problem, though. I’d have to have smacked a lot of guys all the time all through school, and I just didn’t have it in me.
I don’t know the answer, though. How do we impress on kids that this behavior isn’t okay? 10 years institutionalized probably won’t help anyone. And, what should a young girl do when this happens? Isn’t there something between taking it quietly and getting the ass-grabbers locked up? School counselling? Parental involvement? Sensitivity classes? Like I said, I don’t know the answer(s).
“And, what should a young girl do when this happens? Isn’t there something between taking it quietly and getting the ass-grabbers locked up? School counselling? Parental involvement? Sensitivity classes? Like I said, I don’t know the answer(s).”
Maybe it falls to the parents and schools. I agree with posters above that girls do not greet boys this way. So parents of daughters need to make sure girls do not accept this behavior, and report it immediately. I agree with you that giving the advice to smack the boy, while it may actually work if done, may be too intimidating. But if even some of the parents caution daughters to report the behavior to the school, and then check with the school to make sure it’s being handled, maybe that’s a good first step.
It’s interesting that they’ll punish these boys for their behaviour but they never punish adult men. Shouldn’t the adults get it worse?
Sending kids to jail doesn’t teach them how to respect people. They’ll probably learn even worse behaviours.
“But if even some of the parents caution daughters to report the behavior to the school, and then check with the school to make sure it’s being handled, maybe that’s a good first step.”
I agree. How do we get them to feel comfortable reporting it? I’d like to suppose things are a little more open now between parents, kids and teachers than they were in the 70s and 80s, but I would guess that so much of this goes unmentioned because bringing it to light is so daunting. And we’re just talking about ass-grabbing.
The school has to take it seriously. If the school doesn’t take it seriously, the child will never feel comfortable reporting it, and shouldn’t. Schools can also be proactive about it. There are curriculum units about bullying that are available to them. They just need to decide addressing it is a priority, and take the time to implement the program, and to make sure everyone understands the school culture is officially intolerant of that kind of behavior.
So I talked to all three of my teenage girls about this, pointing out to them that many people, and not just dudely assholes, think this is “no big deal.” The two that have been with me their whole lives were horrified at the thought that some people think this is ok. The one that I got as an 18-year old shrugged. It kills me that girls are conditioned to think this behavior is acceptable or even nothing that deserves their fury.
I saw the AP video for that story. The whole point of view was from the boys; no mention of the girls who were singled-out for assault solely on the basis of gender. Again, this is the damn AP. Objectivity is supposed to be the goal of reporting, not advocacy. The boys cried about how horribly unjust this was as they were the true victims. All bigots have to do is coat their hate in sexuality and it is immediately deemed acceptable, if not ideal. The story itself was filed under “offbeat.”
On where the boys get this idea from: I just finished reading this post at ThinkProgress (a website of the “liberal” Center for Progress) and it was whether dogfighting was worse than rape. Overwhelmingly, the men posted that the former was worse, much worse because dogs die while women and girls live on (9/10 rape victims are female). I have never, not once, read a post where atrocities committed upon human beings (not involving murder) was ever compared, let alone considered the lesser offense, than anti-female violence (e.g., Imagine comparing the beatings and amputation of arms of all blacks or Jews versus dogfighting.). When ever a woman dared question the bigots, they accused her of bigotry (she must belong “man-hating club”). God, help me.
I remember there was a conversation a few days ago here about how misogyny is so blatant that women and girls will “wake up.” As a young woman myself I can honestly say that is dead wrong. I remember when Eminem first came out (I was a teen). I was shocked when I finally heard his CD and realized this is what the critics were raving about: mass rape, torture, and brutal killings of countless women and girls. That was the “humor.” Worse, my friends (of the strong, independent variety) thought he was “mischievous.” Not only didn’t I oppose them, but I totally doubted myself, “What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I get it?” Today, little tween girls have his posters on their wall and he’s been branded the “voice” of my generation.
My apologies:
In my second paragraph, the third sentence should finish: I have never, not once, read a post where atrocities committed upon human beings (not involving murder) was ever compared, let alone considered the lesser offense, than DOGFIGHTING.
Again, sorry.
Well done, Twisty, and welcome back. We missed you.
(I can’t really comment on anything, because if I did it would be something like “I am so happy to be reading this stuff!”. Purely because of sheer happiness at finding this blog and people who can see Twisty’s point. Once the excitement wears out, I’ll go into full patriarchy-blaming state.)
In my school, it was snapping the bra straps. Delightful!
“In my school, it was snapping the bra straps. Delightful!”
The popular-and-mean girls did that at my school.
Also note that parents of boys need to explain in no uncertain terms that ass slapping, bra snapping (which we had in my schools like the plague) name calling, breast grabbing and the rest of that patriarchal horseshit is completely and totally unacceptable. Nigel Jr ever pulls that crap and I’ll - well, I don’t know what I’ll do but my first instinct will not be pretty.
IBTFB.
‘And if girls had done this, would all the dads be saying “girls will be girlsâ€?’
Nope. If girls had done this it would barely be remarked because the oppressed can’t really achieve harassment of the oppressor. No one would feel threatened or dirty or used or powerless. The boys would probably smirk about it in the same way grown men approve of the dominatrix role or husbands joke that their wives rule the household. It’s cute/hot when women behave in male-aping powerful ways since everyone knows that they don’t really have the power.
The equivalent behaviour with a gender reversal would be if someone who actually had power in the social system (more power than a prepubescent boy, anyway) - say an adult female teacher were to make sexually explicit remarks to the boys or slap them on the ass. I’m guessing the general public would be rightly nauseated over that and no one would be crying about overreactions if that teacher got jail time.
Nice blamin’, Megan.
Thank you everyone for sharing your experiences. It is still amazing to me when I read about how this wasn’t just me. And you know what, I’m still angry. Fuck Chris Carey for slapping my butt after a Student Council meeting in the ninth grade. Fuck that. I’m not okay with it.
I told this story not so long ago for some reason, and it really brought up a lot of anger that I would have thought would be gone after 35 fucking years. I am surprised at how angry I *still* am.
We had a little band of boys in my rural junior high who did the body-parts grabbing thing - en masse, the chickenshits. Five-on-one. In my case they tried to get a hand IN MY GODDAMN JEANS while I was sitting in class. Let me repeat that: WHILE I WAS SITTING IN CLASS. With a teacher at the front of the classroom. I assumed a sitting fetal position and kept them from achieving their aim, but the (male)teacher never said one thing - to me, or to them, or to the administration. I wonder if he would have said or done anything if they had dragged me into the coatroom, or the hallway. I honestly doubt it.
That school was disfunctional in a billion ways, but that incident was so far beyond even the previous stupidities I’d dealt with that I am still amazed and appalled.
I take it that there’s consensus here that ten years in prison is an appropriate societal response to thirteen-year-olds seeking to discover (and thereby transgressing) the limits of society’s norms.
Respectfully, I disagree.
They are children. They should be punished, and taught why their actions are unacceptable. They should not be fed to America’s “Criminal Justice System”, which is little more than a college for anti-social behavior.
If you think they’re dangerous at 13, playing slapass in the halls of the junior high, wait till you meet them on the street when they get out of detention at 21.
Oh yeah, and another thing - where are the goddamn fundy purity police when you need them? You’d think they’d be raising a hell of a ruckus over this butt-touching bullshit. Oh right, but it’s HITTING - and that’s okay, I guess.
Hey de Selby - no, there’s no such consensus. Some posters have said that this is too much punishment far too long after the situation should have been dealt with. However, most of us are focusing - appalling, I know - on SOMETHING OTHER THAN THE BOYS. Plenty of places where you can wail “but what about the men??!” It’s not the main course here.
And your “limits” and “playing slapass” attempts to make this incident into nothing much are offensive. The purpose of girls’ existence is not as objects to be used and acted on by boys, to be used to define limits or as toys or anything else.
As usual, the real nub of the controversy, although nobody is acknowledging it, is not over whether a couple of 13-year-old boys facing 10 years in the hoosegow for butt-swatting is an “overreaction.†It’s whether female humans have a legal right to personal bodily sovereignty. Incredibly, in 2007, the jury’s still out on that one.
Since I live near McMinnville, I’ve followed this story since the beginning, and I can testify that the local news coverage has completely missed the point as you describe. I’ve seen so many pictures of the “poor boys” and their houses and their moms and their dads and their siblings that I could forcibly vomit all over the next “boys will be boys” letter to the editor in the Oregonian.
As it is, co-ed junior high school is hell, junior high school is hell, school is hell.
However, most of us are focusing - appalling, I know - on SOMETHING OTHER THAN THE BOYS. Plenty of places where you can wail “but what about the men??!†It’s not the main course here.
I think you’re missing my point. It’s not the boys that I care about. It is civil society. Our growing willingness to punish children as adults is an indicator of our failure to create a properly functioning culture, and it is destructive toward that goal. It is my sense that legitimizing the projection of the sins of adults upon the kids can only exacerbate the pathologies of our society.
And your “limits†and “playing slapass†attempts to make this incident into nothing much are offensive. The purpose of girls’ existence is not as objects to be used and acted on by boys, to be used to define limits or as toys or anything else.
“Playing slapass” was an infelicitous turn of phrase. I should not have used it, because it is, indeed, weighty with gender assumption.
As to “limits”, thirteen year-old boys, and girls too, “use” anyone and everything in their orbits as “objects to be acted on” in testing the circumscription of their actions in society. They are obnoxiously immature. Boys are especially difficult, and it’s true that they require more constraints on their behavior than girls. It is also true that they are often failed by us, as adults, in that regard.
The incident(s) that Twisty describes, and our responses to them, are of the kind that will define our society’s “limits” in the future. Now here’s where we may part - it is my position that if the misbehavior is treated as obnoxious and unacceptable toward people, we take a step toward building a common civilized respect toward one another. If they are viewed as an outrage against the little helpless women, we perpetuate the patronization of patriarchy.
If you wish to carve out a unique “Personal bodily sovereignty” for females, you should consider the implications carefully.
*Microwaves popcorn; pulls up chair*
I think that there are many, many problems with juvenile justice (and justice/penal system in general). But if you are going to say “Don’t throw these boys into it because the juvie system sucks,” fine. Then you need to say that about any juvenile who commits any crime in the juvie system. That is an issue with what we do with juvenile offenders as a whole, not whether this particular behavior is a crime or not. This behavior is a crime. Now, I wouldn’t totally rule out an in school/in family approach on a first offense, one-time incident scenerio if all parties agreed to it and there was some form of restorative justice involved. Fine. But the issue in this case is whether a recurring behavior, that is a crime among adults, should be treated as a crime among kids. And I say, yes. What is to be done in response to that crime is another matter entirely that affects all of juvie justice as a whole.
For example, if a kid steals a pencil, stealing is a crime. Perhaps that can be handled in house and the kid can just apologize and buy another pencil for the ‘victim.’ But if a student goes around stealing all the student’s lunches, books, shoes and jewelry repeatedly and no one makes any effort to stop it because it is just what kids do, well then you have a problem that is going to lead to bigger problems. The sexual harassment of these boys is even worse because it is a crime against one’s own person. This ‘boys will be boys’ crap is just a way to perpetuate the power of men to use women as objects. Not to mention teaching girls that they have no right to bodily integrity.
Okay, here is my little school harrassment story. (I actually have more than one, but this one is the worst.) In the second grade, I was in line outside during a fire drill. The boy behind me, who I think was a couple of years older (say 9?) repeatedly reached his hands in my shorts and into my underwear and around my vulva and almost into my vagina. Then (TMI warning) he showed the other boys his fingers that had some vaginal mucus on them. Mortifying.
But then it gets weirder. I did tell my mother, and she said that she was going to talk to the teacher about it. I said that I would be really embarrassed that she did that, so she didn’t do anything about it. I know that at the time she was trying to do what was best for me. But now I can’t imagine having that happen to one of my kids and basically shrug it off. I think she knew that absolutely nothing would happen if she talk to the school so why put us through that. Sad. A great lesson for me at age 7 about how I don’t matter for shit as a girl.
As for the boy, don’t know what became of him. Wonder if there were future victims of more severe crimes, though.
Hands Shira the salt.
Marzipan: I agree. How do we get them to feel comfortable reporting it?”
yankee transplant: “So I talked to all three of my teenage girls about this, pointing out to them that many people, and not just dudely assholes, think this is “no big deal.†The two that have been with me their whole lives were horrified at the thought that some people think this is ok. The one that I got as an 18-year old shrugged. It kills me that girls are conditioned to think this behavior is acceptable or even nothing that deserves their fury.”
I think yankee has it right on. It’s critical to drill down very early on the fact that things may seem a certain way on the surface, but here’s the history of where we’re coming from, and here’s what to look out for and nip in the bud. I have a three year old and so this hasn’t been relevant yet (who knows, maybe soon!). But we’ve been talking about how to raise consciousness without making her paranoid. That’s a fine balance and I’m not sure how to do it.
I do think that “take it as it comes” won’t work. This discussion brought back for me the time when a rude seventh-grader grabbed my breast at the YMCA. I was taller and pushed him away and it didn’t reoccur, but it didn’t really hit me at the time how odd it was that this would happen to a girl, but that I or my friends would never do the equivalent to him. I don’t know what I would’ve done differently in that instance, since it didn’t reoccur, but I think it would have been helpful to have some tools for how to think about it — in case it did. And of course, in other ways, it absolutely did.
Reading this story made me furious. Reading the comments reminded me of a similar problem my daughter had in the 8th grade. A boy in her class who sat behind her kept attempting to grab her breasts. She complained to the teacher (female), who did nothing. Finally the next time the boy tried it, my daughter picked up a metal ruler and turned around and whacked the hell out of him, upside his head! (Her momma done raised her right…)
The teacher sent my daughter to the Principal’s office. Not the boy…my daughter.
The Principal (female) called me at home, and told me that no, my daughter would not be punished, yes, the boy would be, and then said (off the record) that she wished more girls would do what my daughter had done.
Mind you, this was in the great, backwards State of Texas! And this was in 1993…so maybe there IS hope…someday…
So do thirteen-year-old girls normally “use” people as objects to be acted on by actually violating the personal bodily soveriegnty of those people? Are they routinely excused such violations by reference to those limit-testings? You do see that the problem is not just boys being obnoxious by nature, on which I am not expressing an opinion by the way, but that they often are expected and allowed or at least excused for being *physically* obnoxious so long of course as it’s girls to whom they’re being obnoxious.
I mean - do you expect that a band of 13-yr-old boys who went around popping other boys in the mouth would be described as “testing limits” and “playing smashmouth?” No, they’d be described as thugs and suspended, and not after months of misbehavior, either.
I do not see where the misbehavior is NOT treated as obnoxious and unacceptable toward “people” as opposed to women, and I have no idea why you would think that we’d part ways there. I believe in fact that most folks here are ARGUING that we should treat the behavior as obnoxious and unacceptable towards “people,” since girls are after all people. And by the way, that stupid thing where treating victims as if they were actually victims somehow makes them into victims is just a bait&switch. “Oh well! I don’t want to be treated like a little helpless woman! So it’s okay for girls to be used in limits-setting ‘play.’”
I do agree that we are punishing children as adults far too often. It seems bizarre to me that this case is one of them, to be honest - perhaps there is a fundy purity policeman involved here after all.
Great post - and this is a good point:
“The problem with sending kids to jail for this kind of harassment is that it’s going to stop girls from speaking up to teachers. Adults have to stop this shit much sooner, before it gets to the point of assault. Don’t students who hit other students go to detention first? The story said that the cops did hours of interviews. There were hours of interviews? That must mean this went on for awhile! Calling in the cops and coming down like a ton of bricks–in some ways, that’s too little, too late. The first time it happened a teacher should have been on it, taking names, calling parents, being pre-emptive.”
Adults in and around my school said this kind of behavior was normal and girls had to get used to it. I slugged a boy out for it and neither he nor anyone understood why, although I explained. They found the explanation irrational and decided I must be having hormonal problems myself.
When I was at school in Zimbabwe, the black girls hazed us one day by grabbing our nipples as we (white girls) walked through the school corridor.
Shell Goddamnit -
I think we’re actually closing in on partial agreement.
No, 13-year-old girls don’t normally do such things. 13-year-old boys do, and I’m pretty sure that it’s at least partly because they are encouraged to do so. We should just stop that, agreed? I don’t excuse boys for their violations of personal sovereignty, but I can assure you that they are not limited to male-on-female crimes. I think you would be surprised at how often 13-y-o boys get their mouths smashed, and their asses slapped. I’m perfectly serious. Yet I’m also of a mind to view overtly sexual aggression as a worse crime than mere violence. Is that because I’m a patronizing patriarch? I don’t think so. I think it’s a matter of the strong vs the weak, and sex is an exceptionally vulnerable target.
Fair enough. I erred in implying a monopoly on this attitude.
I never told you what stance to take on this issue. I merely suggested you consider the implications. Bear in mind that the implications will become manifest within the existing Patriarchy. Not fair, I know.
my 54yo mother, who is the head secretary at the elementary school i attended as a mini-blamer, was slapped on the ass this spring by a kindergartener who was four. she spoke to his parents who spoke to him, but they seemed more concerned about the violence of it (slapping) than the sexual/female-body-as-public-domain issue.
de Selby: “If you wish to carve out a unique “Personal bodily sovereignty†for females, you should consider the implications carefully.”
I don’t think this is what anyone here is suggesting. Everyone has the (moral*) right to personal bodily sovereignty. Women are people, therefore they have that right just as much as men: there’s nothing ‘unique’ about the right being claimed by women. Nobody’s carving out anything, because it already exists (morally*).
The point is that despite the moral power of this universal right to personal bodily sovereignty, where women are concerned, society doesn’t recognise, apply, or enforce this right equally for women and men.
*I’m saying ‘morally’ to avoid confusion regarding the nature of ‘rights’ as I’m using the word here, and to distinguish them from legal rights. Of course in some countries, women don’t even have the legal right to personal bodily sovereignty.
I don’t excuse boys for their violations of personal sovereignty, but I can assure you that they are not limited to male-on-female crimes. I think you would be surprised at how often 13-y-o boys get their mouths smashed, and their asses slapped.
Yes, but as others have pointed out smashing other boys in the mouth is considered unacceptable and can lead to expulsion, while sexualized violence against girls is seen as a natural part of growing up and is ignored (or even encouraged) by adults.
That’s absolutely true, and it’s the tricky conundrum I’ve wanted to engage.
I haven’t done a fine job so far, so maybe (certainly) I should give it up.
Fun, though, I must say.
Cheers, all,
de Selby
Oh dear. Scratch ‘even’ from my last sentence in the comment above.
Additionally I want to say that while I don’t recall any physical acts of the appalling nature described in this article (and blamers’ personal stories) happening in my mixed primary school, there were definitely verbal incidents of the “Hey, baby, come over here and sit on my lap!” variety.
I went to all-girls schools from the age of 11 and though this environment is not without its difficulties, it was very refreshing not to have to deal with the boys on a daily basis. I cannot exaggerate the difference it made.
Pardon me for saying this so bluntly, but bullshit.
Smashing other boys in the mouth is required.
Misogyny is merely encouraged.
de Selby, I’m afraid (and by “afraid” I mean that “I am terribly pleased to do so”) that I must now call bullshit on YOU. I, as so many other women here were, was harassed in most of the ways listed, and a few more. By sixth grade I figured out that I did in fact own my body, and I began to respond when boys PHYSICALLY ASSAULTED MY PERSON. I yelled STOP!, and if (and by “if” I mean “when”) I followed by smacking the boy in question back. On the face. This resulted in the my repeated suspension, because remarkably, none of the teachers or other male students witnessed the provocation. After I explained, to my MALE teachers and MALE principal, they responded that I should not have let the boy provoke me - i.e., they believed what the boy did, but felt that my response was the ACTUAL wrong.
And guess what? It is INCREDIBLY disrespectful of any man to come to a feminist forum and say “Misogyny is merely encouraged”
Misogyny is the foundation upon which every privelage of yours is built. Which is why we blame the patriarchy.
The third sentence down should read “when they continued to harass/abuse me, I followed up by smacking them.
Forgot to mention - not one of those boys was ever even reprimanded for abusing me.
Should not post when infuriated.
It is INCREDIBLY disrespectful of any man to come to a feminist forum and say “Misogyny is merely encouragedâ€
Yes, I had that reaction to the statement too.
Plus, my hackles were raised by what I see as the patronising tone contained in this statement made by de Selby:
“…you should consider the implications carefully.”
“Misogyny is merely encouraged†was intended as an ironic bit of jest, because I know it’s so true.
If I admit that you’ve whupped my Patriarchal carcass, does it make it less likely that Junior High girls will get their asses slapped?
I’m deadly serious about this, because my third daughter starts Junior High this fall.
Am I to understand that I’m to stay strictly away from her experience? That I am of no use in this context?
In my primary school we had “skirt raising” and sort of general groping, but we (the girls) fought back. sometimes vehemently. the adults (teachers, parents, etc.) saw the whole thing as “kids will be kids”. the boys were reprimanded for their behaviour, but it was allowed to continue and when they got beaten up for it by girls, they were either too embarrassed to complain or if they did complain, they were usually told they deserved it. On the other hand, when girls complained they were told that this was a peculiar little boys’ way of saying that they liked you.
This is where it gets a bit complicated.
As much as boys scored points by “number of skirts raised”, girls started keeping count of “number of boys to raise skirt” (i.e. “number of boys that actually like me”) not withholding the beatings, though. I think this is where the concept of “no really means yes” gets introduced, which is probably the most dangerous consequence. And I can’t exonerate myself completely, because, well, even though I never really felt “safe” at school, even though I was always on my guard, and I fought back, I still made sure I wore pretty knickers.
The thing is, though, there were limits. If a girl ended up crying, it was stopped - and not by adults, but by the kids themselves. No matter how cool you were, you could not get away with being mean. Sorry for the rambling on, but my point is that despite punishments, teachers’, parents’ interventions, nothing made an impression on these boys as much as other kids making it clear their behaviour was not acceptable. And that’s what’s missing in this story (or perhaps I don’t know the whole story). What was the rest of the school doing? Were the girls completely passive? Were there no other boys to stand up to the bum-smackers?
Cara-he: I’m not sure what exactly was so different about my social context, but I remember a few (that is, two) incidents similar to the ones you narrate which came out rather differently. That is, some boy perved on me, I socked him, HE went to the authorities, and HE got in trouble ’cause I was a “good kid” and so he must have provoked me for something like that to have happened.
I, of course, have no explanation — only anecdotes. Reading this thread, though, is making me want to go kneecap some creepy dudes and then hug my thus-far-uncorrupted little brother for being a cool kid.
de Selby –
Start by not defining your daughter’s experience before it happens, and start by not deciding issues of “personal sovreignty” for girls and women. Above all, quit arguing semantics and philosophy as though this scenario had occurred lo those many years in the past and we are all curious anthropologists theorizing about it. (Whew! mixing my metaphors today; trying not to short-circuit my keyboard with blamer-induced outrage-spittle, so please forgive me.)
If you want to effectively parent your daughter through the hell that is about to begin for her (actually, if you could encourage her to talk about it, and she felt safe and not too patriarch-ly shamed, the hell that has already begun for her and girls her age), I invite you to meet your daugher where she is.
If indeed you are a man, you have no idea. Absolutely none. You have not been shamed, ridiculed, harassed, and physically assaulted for the crime of having a vagina and breasts and 2 x chromosomes and whatever else deems one fodder for abuse by the patriarchy. You have not had your body made public property by strangers. You have not had to sit by in scarlet, silent shame while classmates used your body — with impunity! — as a sexual assault training ground. You have not had to suffer the uneasy and confusing shame (ha! there’s that word again!) when grown men, some even the fathers of your friends, leered at your early pubescent body.
If indeed you are a woman, tell me how you escaped all this thus far, because I believe you alone may hold the key to the secrets of the universe.
Question: Do you think if the boys went around smacking puppies that there would’ve been outrage? Sadly, I can’t help but think there would be. There would be soul-searching in the community: Where did they learn that abusing defenseless animals was acceptable? The boys would be shunned and likely evaluated by psychologists.
On the issue of schools being used to condition acceptance of rape culture: In just 10 years the problem has gotten radically worse. I remember hearing a man who normally enjoyed the genre of rape “humor” complaining about teen boys today whose “sense of fun” he felt was exponentially more hateful and violent than what he heard during his *Coast Guard* days. He said it was enough to make him “blush.” I honestly tremble in fear for today’s girls. I can only imagine how bad it will be when these boys assume the mantle of social, economic, and political power in the decades to come.
Interesting how your acquaintance is shocked, shocked, to find that enjoying rape “humor” has evolved into even more violent hatred toward women.
Where would we be had that man, and all others like him, been called out and taken to task for making/appreciating rape “jokes”?
In my junior high boys would “accidentally” bump up against girls coming around corners, to get a “free feel” of their breasts, and then laugh loudly with their buddies about it. Girls talked openly about this among ourselves, and passed on warnings about prime offenders and ways to protect ourselves. We didn’t think to tell adults about it or to push back. In retrospect, I think there were two reasons for this: 1) We experienced this harassment as just another facet of the facet of the fascistic school environment, in which our bodies were not considered to belong to us (the need for a hall pass to go to the bathroom; the requirement to prove we were menstruating to get out of swimming class; etc.); the boys were merely junior enforcers; and 2) When I would proactively hug my books to my chest as I turned a corner, the “popular” boys would jeer and snicker, making cracks about how I flattered myself by assuming that anyone would want to touch me (not in that language). This was something I didn’t talk about with my friends, because I assumed I was the only one–that they were all “worthy” of this attention, and I was ashamed. So as horrible and invasive as it was to be touched that way, calling them on it would have been unthinkable, as they would have turned it around to a critical evaluation of our desirableness–and we’d already learned that our worth depended on pleasing the male gaze.
I have wondered whether this institutional overreaction to disgusting behavior that could be addressed more effectively by concerted efforts by parents and administrators isn’t itself a way to discourage girls from speaking up. There, little missy! You are responsible for ruining an innocent boy’s life! Are you satisfied now?
dr. sue,
Your comment about how gender harassment and assault is perverted to be synonymous with positive attention one has to be “worthy” of is so disturbingly true. I remember questioning my own sanity as a new middle schooler when girls were being harassed and I wasn’t. I didn’t want to be groped–at all–but I didn’t want to be considered unattractive either. Quickly enough, an older boy (a stranger) groped my pre-pubescent breast at age 11. I decided right then and there I’d rather be considered ugly if just to protect myself, which of course, ingrained the assumption that women and girls’ attractiveness was to blame (Yes, we are the evil responsible for male heterosexuality).
Even then we learned this twisting of love and hate. All harassment is meant to intimidate, but there were boys who honestly liked some of these girls and thought it was a way to tell them so without losing face. These boys have grown into the men that insist all women like to treated horribly while condemning those who don’t as horribly unnatural (without a touch of irony) and never questioning how such women learned to accept, even desire, this behavior.
I’m really shocked that this problem is so universal. I don’t think my school ever had this problem. I was never sexually harassed and I don’t think anyone in my school touched each other except for the couples who used to make out in the hallway. I’m only 23 so it’s not like it was a long time ago. I’m guessing that it’s because I’m from a small town in Canada. I’m reading all your stories though and if/when I become a teacher I’ll keep this in mind.
Why do I continue to be amazed at how many of us can tell some personal variation of the butt-slapping/bra-snapping/boob and/or butt-grabbing story? You’d think I’d be used to it by now.
Having been an early bloomer, I didn’t know I was supposed to welcome the attention and simply lashed out at the offender. All the shame and self-blame didn’t really take root in me until a few years later. And it took a long time to finally rid myself of it.
Because we live in a world where the coin o’the realm is one’s value as a sexual object.
“I never told you what stance to take on this issue.” — de Selby
No, you threatened us, actually: “If you wish to carve out a unique “Personal bodily sovereignty†for females, you should consider the implications carefully.”
Since it is clear that you are literate, I can only surmise that you wilfully chose to ignore the reminder, located just above the comment box, not to be a fucking pedantic asshole. The words ‘you should’ are considered hate speech on this blog, Chet. Particularly when followed by concerned exhortations that females use caution when proceding with feminist thought.
By the way, only a member of the dominant class would describe women’s personal sovereignty as something ‘unique’ to be ‘carved out’. Women already have personal sovereignty; we are, in fact, human. We don’t need to ‘carve out’ anything. If men declined to participate in the Circus of Neanderthals that passes for civilization, the problem would be solved instantly.
I’m in a hurry, so I haven’t read everything yet, but to answer Carol. I didn’t have the courage you had, although boys didn’t do anything like that to me, I doubt I would have fought back like that. I did though, in my neighborhood fight with a boy a lot who teased me, but there was nothing sexual about it.
The patriarch in my family had some serious woman issues and I grew up hearing about awful sluts and the rest, so I was in constant fear of falling off the edge of male approval due to succumbing to my natural female evilness.
I can’t even begin to tell you how much that messed up my mind, it even seeps out of my comment response!
I need to get my sister to read this post. She’s just emerging from Jr. High, and she often regales me with tales of boys going around flipping up girls’ skirts or pulling down their pants. When I tried to explain that this is harassment, and that she shouldn’t be forced to put up with it, her response was the equivalent of “It’s just a game. It’s fun! Besides, if I wear pretty underwear, it doesn’t matter”.
The mind boggles. When I was harassed in Jr. High (admittedly, not to the same extreme, since I wasn’t pretty enough to garner much male attention), I was upset about it, not pleased at the attention. I worry that no matter how often I try to explain this sort of thing, she won’t get it, because she’s totally internalized the values of the patriarchy.
dr.sue writes:
I have wondered whether this institutional overreaction to disgusting behavior that could be addressed more effectively by concerted efforts by parents and administrators isn’t itself a way to discourage girls from speaking up. There, little missy! You are responsible for ruining an innocent boy’s life! Are you satisfied now?
You’re scaring me now, dr.sue, but I admit this is quite possible. McMinnville is not otherwise known as a bastion of advanced thinking, so their hard line on this issue has puzzled me.
“If you want to effectively parent your daughter through the hell that is about to begin for her (actually, if you could encourage her to talk about it, and she felt safe and not too patriarch-ly shamed, the hell that has already begun for her and girls her age), I invite you to meet your daugher where she is.”
Considering the creepy attitude of De Selby on display here, I would advice him against speaking with his daughter at all about this. He will do more harm than good.
“If you wish to carve out a unique “Personal bodily sovereignty†for females, you should consider the implications carefully.”
Well, THAT certainly sounds like a threat, bubba.
What, if we don’t act like good little girls then we might get HURT by the big bad boys? Like women don’t get raped, murdered, and beaten EVERY DAY ALREADY? Psh.
To add to the anecdata - I remember being in 7th grade, wearing a skirt and sitting in the front row of social studies class. Tony M. sat right behind me and reached his arm under his desk, up through and behind my chair so that he could unzip my skirt. I remember getting fed up with this, leaping from my chair spinning around and scolding him roundly for his behavior, interrupting the teacher’s lecture. I did not get sent to the office for interrupting the behavior, but I don’t remember if Tony faced any consequences.
I also remember being in elementary school and having a whole thing (4th grade? 3rd?) where the girls would all kick the boys squarely in the crotch for whatever offenses we deemed appropriate. I begin to suspect we should not have stopped doing that.
Ew, did that de selby dude actually say that? I stopped reading his posts after the stench of entitlement in the first one.
Well count me as one of the minions who had to survive Jr. High sexual harassment.
In 7th grade, I was standing in the quad, minding my own business when Mark Hall decided it would be fun to load up a mouthful of water at the water fountain, walk over to me, and spit the entire contents of his mouth all over me followed by the raucous laughter of his friends. I didn’t know him at all. I had never had a single interaction with him until then.
When I yelled at him for doing so, I incurred the wrath of him and all his friends. Not only did they call me a stuck up bitch on that day for not quietly putting up with their abuse, for the next week, they waited for me before school to unleash a variety of harassment. One day they lobbed baseballs at me. They did indeed do the ass slapping on another day, all the while commenting on how huge and ugly my ass was. Another day they stood in front of my locker and refused to move.
And, no, not a single adult intervened. Then again, I had a deep mistrust of adults in general, so going to them never would have occurred to me.
I could go on and on about all the abuse I went through in school and learned to internalize, but that would make me a bandwidth hog.
And yes, while jail time for the aforementioned little rapists in training will ultimately just make them better rapists, there needs to start being a bigger response to this behavior by the culture at large.
Add to all of this that if you stand up to the creeps when they act this way you get labeled a ’stuck up bitch’ or a ‘lez’ and they escalate their abuse as punishment for being uppity.
All I’m going to say is that, when I was thirteen? There is no WAY I’d've wanted any dudes slapping my ass. In fact, there would have been very few dudes I’d've wanted touching any part of me, period. They did anyway, though, one time when I was hanging out with a guy friend and two of his new ‘friends’–the ‘friends’ lifted me into the air without asking first and attempted to make me ‘hold still’ while they tried to do…something, I can’t remember what. It could’ve been as ‘innocent’ as tickling me, but I didn’t know that. I escaped by kicking madly, my parents didn’t believe that it was ‘all that bad,’ nevermind the fact that they knew the father of one of the boys and thought that “he couldn’t be bad.” They thought differently when he ended up desecrating a teacher’s car the following year. Oh, and my actual guy friend had a falling-out with these guys because of it, so at least one person had some sense.
Maybe the adults should think about THAT, instead of how ‘badly’ their precious boys are being treated. Guys going around touching girls, especially in this sort of way, without asking them for permission, is wrong, and I’m glad someone’s doing something about it in this case.
Zofia:
“Add to all of this that if you stand up to the creeps when they act this way you get labeled a ’stuck up bitch’ or a ‘lez’ and they escalate their abuse as punishment for being uppity.”
No, I was taken to the principal’s office and chastised. I protested and my mother was summoned. She agreed that I’d acted in self-defense, and asked the principal what he was going to do about the original offense. He sputtered and stammered, and the upshot was We’ll Just Forget It Ever Happened. There’s a small part of me that has remained angry lo these many years.
But this particular offender did not target me again. What he whispered with his little rapist-in-training friends concerned me not at all so long as he kept his paws to himself.
Am I to understand that I’m to stay strictly away from her experience? That I am of no use in this context?
Stay away from? What does that mean? You might try *listening* to her and not trying to *tell her* what her experience is/should be.
As far as your “use” in this context, start by telling her that no one has the right to touch, fondle, hurt, slap or tweak her body IN ANY WAY and that if they do, she should immediately:
1. Tell them to stop–loudly. Teach her to say “NO!” and “STOP NOW!” in clear, confident tones.*
2. Inform the high-ranking nearby adult at once (in a calm, reasoned tone, outlining the exact details as clearly as possible.) “He grabbed my right breast and twisted it” will be taken more seriously than “He smacked me!” or “he touched me ‘up there’”
Also:
3. Remind her everyday that she is strong, confident and can take on *whatever* challenges life throws at her.
4. BELIEVE HER when she tells you X happened. BELIEVE HER when she tells you how it made her feel. DO NOT try to tell her her feelings are overreactions, or wrong, or that maybe she misread the situation, or she’ll get over it and shouldn’t make a fuss.
5. Be prepared to go down to that school and be the wrath of God if anything happens to her. BACK HER UP.
*I have run through a practice drill with my daughter, and am always amazed how the loud-mouthed, confident girl got very quiet on her “no” even in our reenactment. By the end of the drill, she was yelling “NO!” and “STOP NOW!” with great abandon. Pray god/dess she will never have to use this skill. I wish the same safety for your daughter de selby and ALL OUR DAUGHTERS.
And PS what kind of “unique Personal bodily sovereignty†is your precious daughter entitled to? How would it differ from that available to your son?
Cheers to everyone who has called attention to the problem of the media only speaking about the experience of the boys in this case. Not listening to the experiences of female-bodied people perpetuates male privilege by ignoring anything else that would challenge it. After all, one of the defining aspects of having privilege is being blind to its existence or at least to your personal possession of it.
To de Selby and others trying to unpack their MP: Listening is the primary role of an ally. You’d be surprised how much support you’ll be able to give you daughter when you admit that even an 11-year-old can intuit more about sexism than you can if she’s female. The next part of feminist parenting is giving her the tools of feminist analysis (vocabulary, history, lists of demands) with which to defend herself when she intuits that she’s being mistreated on the basis of her sex. Remember that every time your daughter experiences the downsides of being female in a patriarchy is a opportunity for you to check your opposite experience of being male in a patriarchy.
Antoinette Niebieszczanski, thank goodness your outcome was better than mine. I was actually kicked out of the class and then mercilessly tortured the rest of the year.
Not long ago my very feminist eleven year old daughter was approached by a group of boys on the playground. They were hoping to embarrass her by asking if she was on her period and if she used tampons (ah, the joys of coed sex ed classes in Massachusetts) and she told me she smiled and said, “why, are you on your period, or do you need to borrow one to stick up your butt?” End of conversation.
Her school has a very clear policy about keeping your damn hands to yourself.
Goddessladymother, that is beautiful. I cannot begin to tell you, my fellow blamers, how much totally awesome parenting advice I get from this board.
Practice drills - Maribelle, I cannot thank you enough for that idea.
To Do List for Mothers of Boys:
Run practice drills for boys who see sexual harassment of girls teaching them to say “HEY, STOP NOW.”
Teach boys that they may not touch anyone without express proactive positive enthusiastic consent.
I wrote about this a while ago (pre-McMinnville) http://joltblog.wordpress.com/2007/06/11/stop-the-shame-and-confusion/
Thank you as always Twisty and blamers for saying things more coherently and trenchantly.
I was talking to my friends and hubby about this. 2 things were said. A story was told to me by my friend as follows: She and her (other) friend were on a crowded streetcar going to university one day. As often happens, a male used the opportunity to grope. The friend grabbed his hand, held it up in the air and loudly yelled “Whose hand is this I found on my breast? Did you wash it first?”
I thought this was too funny.
Second, my husband’s first response was “did the boys get slapped?” And his second was that the boys own asses would be red for a week if it was HIS son. And the son would also be exhausted by all the manual labour. When I asked what manual labour he responded,”Whatever. Carrying dumbells from the basement to the attic if need be. Whatever wears him out so he hasn’t got this excess energy”
I had to share…
I recall being at my grade nine grad party. I was wearing a dress my mother had selected, and it had a large rosette in the middle of the neckline (I blame the late ‘80s). One of the boys in my class decided to poke the rosette and surrounding area: “What’s this? What’s this?”
I slapped him so hard he had a hand-shaped bruise for a week. I was fed up with boys snapping bras, grabbing asses and generally being awful, so I did something about it.
I did not get punished. I thank a very feminist teacher-librarian who was nearby when it happened. Mrs. MacRae was a good friend to us girls.
I’m just checking in one last time to thank everyone for engaging my comments so forthrightly.
I ordinarily have better sense than to invite myself to a party and create a scene, but I was feeling unusually refreshed last night.
I regret that my sloppy, garrulous work created ill feelings. I am particularly unhappy that something I said was construed as a “threat” (of what, I’m still unclear). That couldn’t be more remote from my intent, and I apologize for creating that impression.
Frankly, I rather enjoyed the vigorous exchange, and I certainly found it instructive. However, I recognize that my disputations broke the rules of this site, and I retire, chastened.
The fact that this occurred in Oregon reminded me of Terri Jentz’s book, “Strange Piece of Paradise”. She describes her experience of being viciously attacked while camping in rural Oregon, and her later efforts to discover who the perpetrator was and bring him to much-belated justice. One powerful theme running through the book is how “boys-will-be-boys” leads inexorably to extreme misogynistic violence.
“It is my sense that legitimizing the projection of the sins of adults upon the kids can only exacerbate the pathologies of our society.”
It is an inescapable fact that pooh-poohing “boys-will-be-boys” behavior is training for, and encouragment of, their future misogynistic role as adult males in the patriarchy. Pointing this out is far from “projection of the sins of adults upon the kids”. These boys are being explicitly taught exactly what “sins” are expected of them when they grow up.
…de selby, still a condescending asshat….
When deSelby warns us to be careful about expecting to have sovereign rights to our bodies as women, maybe he means this:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20030873/?GT1=10150
Woman who value themselves and try to negotiate better wages are penalized fo