How Deep the Bullet Lies, Part III

This story I’ve already told, at least the first part of it.

It was a perfectly normal guy who didn’t want to let go of me when I was in my late teens. We’d been hanging out, kissed a little bit, but I was done. He wasn’t. It took making it very clear that one of us was going to be injured to get him to realize I meant it and let go.

If I had been more intimidated (he was a big Navy boy) or less sober or less willing to risk hurting him or being hurt, there’s a very good chance it would have ended in rape. The fact that he was horrified when he figured out I really did mean it wouldn’t have changed that at all.

Unlike the events in Part I and Part II of this series, this wasn’t a traumatic experience. Quite the opposite. Oh, it was scary enough while it was happening, but the fact that fighting back solved the problem was…cathartic. Educational.

Then, nearly two decades later, I decided to mention it. That was also educational. Not terribly cathartic.

I’ve had a friend decide to “walk away” over everything that happened in the last week and a half. I discovered that the person whose behavior I asked my friend to look at, thus dragging him into the whole mess, was using me and everyone else to generate controversy and pull attention to a cause he’d adopted. (Why do I believe Jason? This, mostly. It’s all too familiar: the big idea, the disregard for whether anyone else has consented to participate or is being hurt, the “regret” that changes no behavior.)

I’ve learned a few things about myself. I’ve learned just how stubbornly determined I am to see some things through and to get something worthwhile even out of awful situations. I’ve learned much more about the limits of how far I can push myself into the territory of using myself up.

I’ve learned how sane and self-sufficient I sound even when I’m on the verge of cracking. Funny, even. I can’t drop all that, apparently. I can take someone apart and lay the pieces out for everyone to see, but I can’t lash out (even when it’s the kinder option). I can tell someone what I need, but I can’t make them feel it. The more that’s at stake, the less I’m able to make myself manipulate the situation.

I’ve learned how far I’ll go to protect my voice, including removing it entirely from play. There’s only one person who knows how close I came to deleting this blog and walking away from the internet. I found the support I needed and wrote these instead, amping up instead of shutting down, but the outcome was very much in doubt for a while.

I’ve learned how it feels to be on the receiving end of that off-topic kindness and silliness in the midst of a tough slog. I owe D.C., Ambivalent Academic, Will, Becca, DuWayne and Jason for that in ways I can’t quite express. Toaster, too, even if he wasn’t specifically trying to lighten the mood. I grin every time I see that cartoon.

But that’s enough about me and what I’m taking away from (hoo, boy) the first half of this month. This series of posts was originally intended to say something about the fact that we can’t know who we’re talking to when we’re talking about tough topics like this. I don’t know whether it’s done that, but either way, it’s time to shift the focus away from me. Back to the broader topic tomorrow.

For now, go find something fun to read at the blogs that are supporting Silence Is the Enemy with their page-view revenue. As always, Bioephemera has much that is weird and wonderful. Go read and marvel.

How Deep the Bullet Lies, Part III
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Iran by the Numbers

Want to know what happened in Iran but need to take a break from the violence? FiveThirtyEight is applying their usual beautiful math and savvy to the situation.

Statistical Report Purporting to Show Rigged Iranian Election Is Flawed

Like most Americans, there are few things I would like to see more than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s hateful President, to be voted out of office. Elections in thuggish, authoritarian states like Iran need be treated with the utmost skepticism and scrutiny. I can’t say I have any real degree of confidence in the official results, which showed Ahmadinejad winning with some 62 percent of the vote.

There is a statistical analysis making the rounds, however, which purports to show overwhelmingly persuasive evidence that the Iranian election was rigged. I do not find this evidence compelling.

Iranian Election Results by Province

Iran Does Have Some Fishy Numbers

Although widespread allegations of fraud, manipulation, intimidation and other all too common elections tactics have been be common, statistically detecting fraud or manipulation is a challenge. For example, while mathematicians have been evaluating vote returns for irregularities in normal situational random number distribution , determining what the “correct” results should be is very difficult.

However, given the absolutely bizarre figures that have been given for several provinces, given qualitative knowledge – for example, that Mahdi Karroubi earned almost negligible vote totals in his native Lorestan and neighboring Khuzestan, which he won in 2005 with 55.5% and 36.7% respectively – there is room for a much closer look.

Polling Predicted Intimidation — and Not Necessarily Ahmadinejad’s Victory

Ballen and Doherty are doing admirable and important work. Regular readers will know how difficult it is to conduct a good poll in the United States. Take that difficulty to the fifth power, and you’ll have some sense for how difficult it is to conduct a good poll in Iran.

Unfortunately, while the poll itself may be valid, Ballen and Doherty’s characterization of it is misleading. Rather than giving one more confidence in the official results, the poll raises more questions than it resolves.

Iran by the Numbers

Speaking of Torture

On the way home from the Atheists Talk show today, Mike had Speaking of Faith playing in the car. This is actually pretty common among the “active” atheists I know, this listening to religious radio. I, perhaps because I’m not one of the deconverted, don’t really get it.

However, today I was lousy company for the ride back home. I was engrossed in the show.

The topic? Torture. But this wasn’t the torture conversation that’s been going on: Who approved what when and did anything useful come of it and/or will we prosecute? This was actually a discussion of torture, how it moves through organizations and society and what it does to the people along the way, how modern torture has been informed by our advances in understanding the human mind so that “nonviolent” forms are nothing of the sort.

I don’t understand why this was on Speaking of Faith. Maybe they lumped it under ethics. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that people listen to this show, preferably before they try to discuss the topic again.

Seriously, go listen.

Speaking of Torture

How Deep the Bullet Lies, Part II

I was fifteen and sitting in the back of a pickup truck in a parking lot at UW-Stout on Christmas Eve eve. We’d gotten a bit off track.

On track would have been meeting the guy to whom I was going to “lose” my virginity. Virginity didn’t actually mean anything to me, but mine was getting annoying. I kid you not, there were two guys, uncle and nephew but very close in age, arguing over which one of them was going to take my virginity nine months down the road when I turned sixteen and was legal.

I had other plans, which included shutting these guys up already. They also included the younger brother of the fiance of a friend of mine. They didn’t include everybody but me, my friend, and her fiance’s father working until sometime that evening, but they all were. Hence the diversionary road trip until we could pick up younger son.

There was a topper on the back of the truck and maybe a heater. I don’t remember it being freezing. I do remember being offered a rum and Coke. My friend, who at eighteen was hoping she was pregnant, didn’t drink anything. I’m not sure whether I had a second drink.

I’m not chatty, so I didn’t really notice how hard I’d been hit until it was time to climb out of the back of the truck and back into the cab. If I didn’t have a second drink and the rum wasn’t 151, I was drugged.

He insisted that I sit between him and my friend. Then he unzipped his pants and explained that unless and until I “lent him a hand,” we weren’t going anywhere.

So I did. I was too intoxicated to think to counter-threaten with the fact that he’d already committed one federal felony by hauling me across state lines to get me drunk. I had nowhere to go, because I was trapped between him and my sober, silent “friend.” My one coherent thought was that this would be a very useful time for that passing out thing some people did around alcohol. I did that too.

I couldn’t stay passed out through the whole ride home, though, probably because it wasn’t safe. So there are nightmare flashes here and there of streetlamp illumination moving at freeway speeds. I remember being back at my friend’s house, younger son showing up after work, losing that pesky virginity because it was part of the plan (if not necessarily right then) and because if I didn’t follow the plan, I’d have to figure out what else to do.

My friend told younger son a few days later what had happened. It was apparently important to explain to him why I didn’t want to date him, although the truth is that he was very sweet but not that bright. She never said anything to me about why she didn’t try to stop it.

Every few years, she sends a note saying she’d like to catch up. She sent another one yesterday.

Lessons learned: (1) Letting someone mix your drinks means trusting them with your life. (2) The number of your friends is much smaller than the number of people you hang out and kid around with.

As I said before, I’m writing this now for the one person who deserves to know. I’m posting it because there are a few others who might get something out of it. I’ve never talked to anyone about it, not for any of (what I assume are) the standard reasons, but because I don’t want to spend any more time or energy on it. Even then, I knew people who’d been through far worse experiences and far worse betrayals.

This might be painful to you, which I understand and am sorry about. I still don’t want to talk about it. Or hear about it. If you feel you need to write something, Sheril’s got some suggestions about where your note can do some good for people who need it, badly. If that’s not enough for you, she has some other suggestions about things you can do to help those people. Not all of them involve your money. Do those instead.

How Deep the Bullet Lies, Part II

Where Not to Get Advice

We already know we shouldn’t rely on Oprah or her guests for general medical advice or for medical advice for women, her main audience. Turns out, somewhat unsurprisingly, that one shouldn’t listen to her on matters of sexual health either. From Carnal Nation:

Take sexual orientation, for example—a subject that’s been in the news once or twice lately. As recently as 10 weeks ago, Oprah was asking psychologist Lisa Diamond if women turn to other women sexually “because of a shortage of men.” Oprah also wondered why, when women turn away from men, so many seem to choose women who don’t, um, look so feminine. […]

Oprah is so focused on female victimization, in fact, that she even tells the astounding untruth that doctors pay more attention to the sexual aspects of prostate surgery than to hysterectomy. She also forgets to mention that more men die from prostate cancer than from breast or uterine cancer.

While I admire what Oprah did to make it okay for people to talk about being the victims of sexual assault, perhaps someone who is still so traumatized by her assault that she can’t name her own body parts is not the person women should turn to for advice on how to nurture their own sexual and reproductive health.

Well, you may call it the vagina, but poor Oprah just can’t stand that ugly word. “Don’t you think vi-jay-jay sounds better than vagina?” she asked with a pained expression. And the urethral opening? That’s “where you pee-pee,” said the 55-year-old Oprah on national TV.

Thanks to Lou for the link.

Where Not to Get Advice

Why “No Means No”

There are things that I can’t do regarding Silence Is the Enemy. I can’t donate my blog revenue, since I don’t make any. I can’t entice you to click to raise cash with weird science (much of it involving sex that is hugely more comfortable to read about than anything I’ve been saying), the way Scicurious is, or with delightfully and fearfully made shoes, the way Isis is. I can’t dig into the political problems that make war and wartime rape more likely, or incite people who were going to troll anyway to do it for a good cause, the way Greg can (at least not on my blog).

What I can do is write about the peripheral issues that come up in the discussions, the misinformation and misunderstandings that make the general topic of rape harder to discuss. I’ve already done some of that, and I’ll continue to do more.

One of the tangential issues that came up in the thread that would not die is the statement “no means no.”

I really hate to have to point this out, believe me… but sometimes a simple “I’d rather not,” “I shouldn’t,” or even “no” isn’t clear enough. I won’t try to guess at numbers, I’m not qualified, but there are most certainly women who enjoy that particular game. Keep in mind that we’re talking about college kids here. Boys and girls in their late teens and early twenties for the most part, and clear communication about sex and relationships is going to be fairly uncommon. Again, I’m not even going to pretend to put numbers on it, but I’m absolutely certain that sometimes it is honest miscommunication.

“No means no” is a simple slogan, but it just doesn’t reflect reality. Imagine stopping only to be yelled at because your partner was getting into it and you ruined the mood. Imagine it happening when you’re young and still inexperienced and emotionally fragile. How many times do you think that has to happen before a person is capable of mistaking a sincere “no” for a repeat of the previous situation, if only for a short time?

I’m not trying to say it’s common… I’m just saying I’d be amazed if it never happened, and that I’d be amazed if there aren’t piles of similar ways a misunderstanding could happen in a moment of passion. If the “victim” says that it was a misunderstanding, I’m inclined to believe her unless there’s some other information to imply otherwise.

I’m going to assume that this is an honest statement of confusion, not an attempt at rape denialism or some kind of justification. It is worth noting, however, that I wasn’t sure when I read it or much of the conversation that followed from it. But it’s not useful to think of this as anything but a misconception that can be corrected, so I’m sticking with that.

The big problem with this statement is that “no means no” is not a slogan, meant to tell us what people are saying. It’s an instruction.

The way that our culture talks about sex–or, more importantly, doesn’t–is fundamentally screwed up. We’re not really talking, most of us. We’re role playing. We’re taking the things that we’re supposed to think and feel about sex and repeating them to one another in the place of figuring out and talking about our own feelings.

Religion hasn’t helped, of course. The inequality between the sexes and mistrust of pleasure that the dominant religions of our society have promoted place particular pressure on women to deny enjoyment of sex, to deny desire. That means that “no” has frequently meant something other than “no.” This is not a new concept.

However, it is a concept that came to be used by men as a justification for rape. As a means of excusing nonconsensuality, it came to be accepted and enshrined in a not insignificant portion of our media and our cultural mythos. That acceptance had to change.

“No means no” doesn’t mean that everyone will always tell you the truth. It means “The only way to be sure that you do not victimize someone is to believe that they are saying what they mean. Do that.” That part of it is true, and using counterexamples of when someone has not been entirely forthcoming doesn’t change that truth at all. All it does is provide fodder for the people who don’t want to follow the instructions.

In case it needs to be said, “no means no” goes for both men and women, and men were not the only people who needed to change their behavior. Communication never involves just one party. Men needed to act as though they believed something that often wasn’t true, but women needed to learn how to tell the truth. “No means no” means that women had to learn to speak about their own desire. They had to take responsibility for their own sexuality, societal pressures notwithstanding.

I don’t know how many times I heard while growing up, “If you’re not mature enough to talk about sex, you’re not mature enough to have it.” The topic at the time was birth control and preventing STIs, but the same absolutely goes for the topic of consent. This is similar to the idea behind prohibiting statutory rape–consent cannot be meaningfully given at certain maturity levels–although honesty and thoughtfulness are much better indicators of maturity than age. (Incidentally, for the folks who worry about being accused of rape after consensual sex, attending to a potential partner’s maturity has benefits for you, as well.)

In the end, “no means no” is about making the sexual landscape a better place to be: fewer victims, less blame laid on victims, more people seeing their desires fulfilled, better distributed work of communication. “No means no” isn’t about describing the world as it is. “No means no” is about remaking the world as we want it to be.

Why “No Means No”

How Deep the Bullet Lies, Part I

It was the summer before fifth grade, so I was nine. My father had moved out, for reasons that no one would explain for a quarter century, so money was a bit tight.

We ended up with a boarder. I was nine, so what do I know, but he seemed fairly old to me. I’ll guess now that he was in his late forties or his fifties. Friendly guy named Howard. From my mother’s perspective, he was a godsend. He took care of us.

He took the whole family out to breakfast on Sundays. I’d eat the pancakes, then go into the bathroom and throw them up. It turned out that I’m sensitive to milk and needed to spend a year avoiding the stuff, but I now eat cheese and ice cream and drink mochas. I don’t eat pancakes. I don’t let myself throw up either.

He babysat too, when my mother needed an evening out. He would pull out magazines to show my younger brothers, ask them how they felt about what they were seeing. He wanted me to look and talk and show too, but as long as there were younger and more compliant children around, I could refuse. Not get away, because that would have meant being alone and more vulnerable, but not have to participate. I still learned far more than I needed to know at nine, none of it useful for doing anything more than separating me further from the other kids my age.

It stopped after a friend stayed the night and told her mother. Mine wanted to know why we hadn’t told her. I don’t know that we had any answers, but having been raised to do nothing in bad situations, I’m not surprised.

He went away. I don’t think he was charged, because I don’t remember having to talk with anyone about what happened. There are plenty of things I don’t remember from that age, though.

Lessons learned: (1) Protecting yourself often means failing others who need protection too. (2) Someone will always question how you handle it.

I’m writing this now for the one person who deserves to know. I’m posting it because there are a few others who might get something out of it. I’ve never talked to anyone about it, not for any of (what I assume are) the standard reasons, but because I don’t want to spend any more time or energy on it. There are things that did me far more damage. In all the stuff I carry around with me, this one is a minor scar.

It might not be minor to you, which I understand. I still don’t want to talk about it. Or hear about it. If you feel you need to write something, Sheril’s got some suggestions about where your note can do some good for people who need it, badly. If that’s not enough for you, she has some other suggestions about things you can do to help those people. Not all of them involve your money. Do those.

How Deep the Bullet Lies, Part I