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The Bullshit Excuses for Attitudes Towards Women Need to Stop

Warning: This post contains profanity and disturbing imagery. If this offends you, you may want to skip today’s post and I’ll see you next time around.

A couple of nights ago, I shared a link over on Facebook to an article over at RYOT. The piece references a project by Associated Press Chief Photographer for Spain and Portugal, Emilio Morenatti, which shares the equally horrific stories and images of women in Pakistan who refused forced or arranged marriages, and had acid thrown at them as punishment for their “crimes”.

It’s not just refusal to marry that’s punished – for some Pakistani women, just the fact their gender is “wrong” is reason enough to be punished, as highlighted by Najaf Sultana.

Najaf Sultana — Image copyright: Emelio Morenatti

Now 16 years old, Najaf’s crime was to be born a girl to a father who didn’t want another female in the family. So, when she was just five years old her father burned her as she slept. Her parents then deserted her, and she’s been raised by relatives ever since.

The image of Najaf, and many more, can be found on Morenatti’s Flickr album Acid Attack Survivors. I urge you to visit and understand how some cultures see this as an acceptable practice.

As horrified as we in the West may be, these attacks are, tragically, a violent addition to the culture of women as second-class citizens that pervades even our “advanced culture”.

Men in the Loosest Sense of the Word

Recently, I wrote about how certain cultures have an endemic hatred towards women. Because hatred is exactly what it is when you think of how women continue to be “treated” by men. And, in the case of the men highlighted here, I use that term in the very loosest sense.

Despite there being very high profile movements like the #OneWoman hashtag on Twitter and Instagram, highlighting the issues that women face every single day, still the degradation and misogyny continues. And it’s not going to get any better while we make bullshit excuses for this treatment.

Take the recent “punishment” doled out to NFL running back Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens. Rice was accused of beating his then-fiancee (now wife) and knocking her unconscious in an elevator in an Atlantic City, New Jersey casino in February, after she allegedly spat in his face. Video surveillance caught him dragging her from the elevator.

Because Rice accepted a pre-trial intervention program, his plea of not guilty to aggravated assault was accepted and he avoided jail. However, while non-punishment sends out a questionable message, it’s the actions – or lack of – of Rice’s employers, the NFL, that speak the loudest: Rice received a two-game ban and was docked two weeks pay as well as a match day check.

TWO. FUCKING. GAMES.

To put that into some kind of perspective, Cleveland Browns receiver Josh Gordon received a year’s ban for marijuana abuse. So, a violent attack on a woman is valued less severe than smoking pot? Clearly the NFL think so, as evidenced by their defence of Rice’s punishment.

“… if you are any player and you think that based on this decision that it’s ok to go out and commit that kind of conduct… in terms of sending a message about what the league stands for, we’ve done that.” Adolpho Birch, senior vice president of labour policy for the NFL. Source.

It sends a message alright – it tells players that you’ll only miss a couple of games for hitting a woman, but a year of your career if you smoke pot. So go out and hit away, because that’s okay – just don’t be high when you’re doing it, or you’ll really be fucked.

Yet perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this – after all, this is the NFL, purveyor of a sport that means so much to so many Americans. Just look at the recent Steubenville rape case.

Nothing More Important Than Our Game…

A 16-year old girl was raped by two players of the Steubenville school football team. The attack was filmed by several people and uploaded to Facebook and Twitter, with apparent celebration of the act (and the capture of it) by those involved.

When the attack eventually came to light, there was a huge backlash against the way the school had handled the case. There were examples of failure to report, alleged destruction of evidence, and more. The reasoning that came to light was endemic to all that’s wrong with how we treat women – the victim was so drunk she couldn’t look after herself, so essentially she brought it on herself.

Worse still, many people took to the web to “slut-shame” the victim and blame her for ruining two promising young stars of football. After all, their “lives were over”, as stated by one of the attackers. Yes, raping a girl and forcing her to live with that memory for the rest of her life clearly pales in comparison to your precious football career.

Ironically, Steubenville high school would seem to agree. One of the rapists, Ma’lik Richmond, is back on the school’s football team roster after serving just 10 months for his rape of a girl who clearly asked for it because she was drunk.

Like the Rice example above, to offer some context here, over in Broward County, South Florida, an 8-year old boy was banned from school for two years for taking a toy gun to school in his backpack. Now, in the light of recent tragedies like Newtown, the zero tolerance for guns policies that schools are enforcing are obvious paths to take.

But this was clearly a toy gun. This is a child – an 8-year old boy. Yet he gets a two-year ban, while a rapist that actually ruined a life gets back onto the football team and can aim for a scholarship in the big leagues after just 10 months?

Doesn’t that seem just a little fucked up to you?

Excuses are Bullshit Ways to a Clear Conscience

The thing is, we’re making excuses for the kind of mindset that encourages this second-rate view of women as property, and apportioning any blame directly onto them whenever a crime is committed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3K3pwBbK1o

Take the case of Seth Rudnitsky, who was tried for multiple sexual assaults on the University of Maryland campus in 2009. In the defence of his client, Rudnitsky’s lawyer, Mark Schamel, put the “intrusions” down to nothing more than a drunken mistake.

This is not a sexual assault case. You have a really good kid who has never been in trouble his entire life. It’s your typical freshman “I went out and had too much to drink and was being silly” kind of case. Source.

Right. Because sexual harassment and assault is always excusable when alcohol clouds judgement. After all, it’s not as Schamel?is alone in that thinking. When there was a string of similar attacks at the George Washington University, the school’s paper, The Hatchet, is quoted as reporting,

…[the sexual assault] shows that students have a responsibility to keep themselves safe.

Not that the University has a responsibility to provide a safe environment. Not that the assailant has a responsibility to his fellow human beings to respect their fucking rights. No, the responsibility should be on the victim – of course.

Because that’s always the easiest way out, right? Place the blame on the victim, because clearly if they hadn’t been asking for whatever punishment they got, or attack they endured, they were clearly asking for it just by being them – women.

Silence Is the Biggest Enemy to Change

These examples, old and new, are just the continuation of how women around the world are being treated. From hate crimes in Pakistan to sexual crimes in America, and across the world – women are being forced into situations and a “way of life” that we can never comprehend.

After all, as a guy, when was the last time you,

Heard a woman say,”He deserved it when I sucked his dick, he was so out of it”?
Had acid thrown on you because you ditched your fiancee for another woman?
Had women come up to you randomly and grab your crotch and ass, and say, “Come on, you know you want it”?

As Andrea Weckerle, founder of CiviliNation?- an organization dedicated to creating an online culture of acceptance and tolerance without fear of harassment or retribution – succinctly states,

I am sickened by girls and women being treated as second rate. I am sickened by misogyny, whether in “milder forms” as in North America or in the more extreme forms we see in other parts of the world. And I am sickened by far too many women buying into the negative messages females receive when they dare to demand equal treatment.

There is a major issue at stake right now, and there has been for a very long time. And it’s never going to get better if we stay silent and accept excuses. But we can change that.

If a culture believes it is okay to burn women and disfigure them because they don’t want to marry someone they don’t love, then that culture is fucked.

If it’s not the widespread culture but individuals hiding behind the culture, then punish the individuals heavily and make the culture one that won’t allow these people to hide behind it, or stay silent for fear of bringing shame onto the culture.

If you truly believe that a women deserves molestation and abuse because of how she dresses, or how much she drinks, or the way she walks, and that “boys will be boys”, you are not a man. You are a fucking beast that deserves to be put in jail.

We all have a choice – we can either excuse this hatred and misogyny by way of cultural and gender behaviour, or we can shout out against it until we’re heard. Either with our political votes; our voices; or, more likely than not in this world where the mighty dollar still talks loudest, with our wallets.

Boycott countries where the culture of hate is commonplace. Boycott organizations where the culture of violence against women is deemed less criminal than smoking pot. And boycott educational facilities where the protection of students seems to be less the responsibility of the faculty and more about the victim should have known better.

At the very least, stand up and say something if you see a friend, or colleague, or family member say or do something that you know isn’t right, and is only fostering more hate and misogyny.

Maybe it’s a dumb idea. Maybe I’m being naive. But something has to change – and naivety has ways of turning into educated decisions and making real change.

For the sake of our mothers, sisters and daughters around the world, naivety is a better start than no start at all.

image: marsmet tallahassee?

Endemic Cultures and Why We Need More Logical Indians

If you keep up with world news, you can’t help but have read (and hopefully been horrified by) the heartbreaking and anger-inducing stories coming out of India with regards the recent rapes and hangings of Indian women.

Last month, news broke (with accompanying graphic images) of two teenage cousins who were gang-raped and then hung from a nearby mango tree. Five men were arrested for the crime – but only after relatives of the girls refused to let their bodies be cut down until police investigated.

Where the crime was exacerbated (if that’s even possible) is that two of the five arrested were police officers, who refused to help the families when they reported the girls as missing.

Even as the horrors of this crime were still fresh in the minds of those in the village of Uttar Pradesh where the rapes and murders happened, two more reports came out of identical crimes involving a woman in her 40’s and a 19-year old girl.

Tragically, these stories are nothing new. The world was outraged in 2012 when a 23-year old woman was gang-raped on a bus for almost an hour, beaten and then thrown to the side of the road to die. She later died of her injuries in hospital.

In 2013, three young sisters – aged only 7, 9 and 11 – were raped and murdered after disappearing from their school. Much like the other rapes, family members speak about the lack of gravity given to the cases by the police, who initially dismissed the deaths as accidental.

These are just the stories that make the news – external sources believe the numbers are in their thousands, if not more, with the perpetuators (and those that should be protecting the women of India) truly believing nothing wrong has been done. At least, not by the men…

Endemic Cultures and the Power of Belief

Much like many ancient cultures, India has a complicated history of women often being seen as second class to their male counterparts.

While the Hindu faith places women on an equal status?(and blames Muslim and western intervention for the change in mindsets),??the crimes committed in Uttar Pradesh and other parts of India highlight how some parts of India view women.

Some of this stems from the Dowry. Originally a transactional gift when the daughter of an Indian family was married, a dowry (or “street dhan”, its original Indian name that was replaced by the European-born dowry) could be cash, real estate or something else that had financial value. This enabled the women to enter the marriage as an equal, and able to support herself.

As the economic structure of India changed, so did the value of the dowry. Instead of giving equality to the bride, the dowry became something the husband used for his own personal gain.

If the woman gave birth to children, the husband could demand more money from his wife’s family;
If land taxes were raised, the husband could demand more money to pay for those hikes, in order to keep his wife housed.

If the wife’s family could not meet these new financial demands (and many couldn’t), this would often lead to abuse by the husband, leading to countless suicides. If the wife didn’t commit suicide, many husbands “simply” murdered them, often by dousing them in petrol and setting them alight (known as “dowry burnings”).

This culture of male empowerment led to the introduction of the Dowry Prohibition Act in 1961. Sadly, despite amendments to the act, the practices of dowry killings and abuse are still common and widespread throughout India, with more than 8,200 reported in 2012.

The culture of men being superior and having more rights than women isn’t restricted to “honour killings” and abuse such as those inflicted through dowry arrangements. Forced marriages are common even when not in India – the culture and mindset transcends the locale.

When a cultural mindset is so endemic, how can we change it? Can we?

The Logical Indian and the Road Forward

One way is to understand that cultures are not defined by the endemism of some of that culture’s subsets. A perfect example in the case of India and the recent outrages is The Logical Indian.

While the recent atrocities committed in Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere highlight much of what is wrong with a culture that holds women and female children in such disregard, The Logical Indian shows that this is not a universally-held mindset.

Their Facebook page is an educational (and eye-opening) resource for stories that may otherwise be missed by the mass media. These are strengthened by powerful images that stop you in your tracks – like this one about labeling women.

Or this one, that highlights exactly why the battle to change mindsets and cultural upbringing is such a long one. After all, when your elected leaders and officials think there’s nothing wrong, what hope is there for the common voice to be heard?

This is why The Logical Indian is so important. If you visit their Facebook page, you’ll see that it’s not only the page owner(s) that are pushing thinking beyond that which is widely accepted today.

Commenters, too, are sharing outrage, and frustration, and anger, as well as their own stories. Take a look at the comments from the image above, many of which come from men appalled and disgusted by not only the views of the politicians, but those of their “fellow men”.

The Logical Indian tackles many issues that, often, are left unreported or – worse – viewed as the acceptable dangers of making a profit. Like the 25 children, aged between 6 and 13-years old, that were rescued from dangerous working conditions in a residential building.

What’s equally empowering about this story, in addition to the highlighting of the rescue and the bigger story of economics and profits behind it, are the words that The Logical Indian posted beside the picture.

This is something which one can emulate all over the country where a vigilant citizen, a group of dedicated volunteers, administration and the government together rescue 25 children from a hazardous factory.?Our dream of freeing India from the clutches of social evils can be fast tracked when we take up responsibilities into our own hands.

It’s this belief that we still can change and – more importantly, have the power to make that change – that gives hope that this can happen not only in one culture, but others that are becoming “the norm”.

Culture is Not Defined by Religion

I’m wary, for want of a better word, of concentrating on the example of India and the stories and atrocities shared in this article. India is a beautiful, historical country with much to admire.

My goal with writing this is not to demonize a country, or faith, or culture, but hopefully encourage conversation around endemic mindsets and how we can change. This is equally true of other “cultures” that are becoming more pervasive and common-place around the world.

Take gun culture, for example. Using Tumblr to answer questions from young Americans about the seemingly-daily news of yet another shooting in everyday America, President Obama shared his shame and fear of what his country has become. From that address,

No developed nation on earth would put up with mass shootings that happen now once a week and disappear from the news within a day ? no nation except America.

When asked about the recent tragedy near the campus of the University of California, and the painful ?image of the father of one of the victims talking about his son’s death, Obama stated,

As a father myself I just ? I couldn’t understand the pain he must be going through and just the primal scream that he gave out. Why? Why aren’t we doing something about this?

Why indeed.

The growing fears around rapes at universities and campuses also highlights why endemic thinking offers excuses for the guilty and little protection and comfort for the victims.

High profile stories about Stanford and Cornell?(and the inaction and lack of severity initially afforded to the cases by officials) are cited as being just the tip of the iceberg for young women attending college or University in America.

When TIME Magazine published a piece suggesting “rape culture is hysteria”, it was quickly countered (also in TIME) by political analyst and speaker Zerlina Maxwell.

In her piece, Maxwell shares examples from a Twitter hashtag she created, #RapeCultureIsWhen, that offer powerful rebuttals to the earlier TIME piece.

Rape culture is when women who come forward are questioned about what they were wearing.
Rape culture is when survivors who come forward are asked, ?Were you drinking??
Rape culture is when people say, ?she was asking for it.?
Rape culture is when we teach women how to not get raped, instead of?teaching men not to rape.

It’s not just America, either. Canada – that friendliest of countries – is also finding itself in the kind of spotlight no-one should ever want to be in, including?a high profile case surrounding the University of Ottawa hockey team.

Rape culture a result of media hysteria? Clearly…

Where Do We Go From Here?

As I mentioned in the previous section, my goal in writing this particular post isn’t to demonize a culture, at least not from a religious point of view. Nor do I want to suggest that the actions shared in this piece are systematic across the various cultures and countries.

But there’s clearly a cultural problem when actions that would normally create instant outrage are in danger of being shrugged aside as “just another day or example of what’s gone before”.

I’m not a politician. I’m not smart enough to be a cultural analyst or behavioural scientist. I don’t profess to know what the answers are to the various topics discussed in the words on this page.

But, much like folks behind The Logical Indian, I am a human being that wonders just where we’re taking our planet and those souls that inhabit it. Have we truly set ourselves on a path that’s too late to recover from? Have our mindsets – and, by association, culture – already been irrevocably damaged beyond repair?

Or can we still effect change?

The Logical Indian thinks we can. So do amazing people like Debbi Morello, Amy Vernon and?Amanda Quraishi, who highlight the news that we’d otherwise miss and work tirelessly to educate and share the bigger stories and pictures.

What about you? Where do we go from here? How do we truly effect change? Can we?

The comments are yours – let’s have an honest discussion.

image: Alain Bachellier

Make It Your Mission To…

Click through the URLs of your commenters to find a new blog, leave a comment and share a new person with your community.

Thank 10 followers on each social network you’re on for being there with you.

Cull the networks you’re told you should be on to only the ones you need to be on.

Praise a work colleague or team you lead for the awesome work they’re doing.

Leave that last report at the office until the next day and spend time with those that really matter.

Buy a coffee a day for a homeless person.

Speak up for someone you know won’t speak up for themselves but deserve to be heard.

Call someone up you’ve let slip off your radar and make them feel remembered.

Instead of talking about how we’d like to change the world, let’s start by changing us first.