The Lady Garden
Tea and Strumpets
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Things we liked, or didn’t like, from around the internet this week.
Try Bedsider’s contraceptive method explorer: from “party-ready” to “do me now”.
The Vancouver Sun looks at a survey on sex education comparing the U.S. Canada and Great Britain. Results much as you’d expect. Oh, Canada. You’re so awesome.
Clarisse Thorn on how to deal with BDSM encounters that go wrong:
Sometimes, these things happen. One partner pushes a boundary, breaks it; maybe the boundary was unspoken; maybe the dominant misreads signals; maybe the submissive didn’t yet realize that the boundary was there. When it comes to S&M, these things can be so dramatic … yet sometimes they’re nobody’s fault. We find these mental and emotional blocks, and we call them landmines.
Forbes published some drivel by Gene Marks about all it taking to succeed is hard work, especially for poor black kids, titled “If I were a poor black kid.” Dude is ah… white, and privileged, of course. Funny thing is, a month or so earlier, Marks wrote a piece pointing out that women face nearly insuperable barriers to progress. The contradiction… it burns. Isis the Scientist had a few things to say about it: Dear black kids, you need to work harder. But women will never succeed! And this is why I (Deb) love Isis, aside from the shoes. Here’s her conclusion.
Next month I’d like to see Marks write an article titled, “If I were less of a goatfucker.” I suspect that one might actually be informative.
Slightly irritatingly only women get raped, and only by men, but this article raises the point I (Talullah) always try to make, that ” I also think most women already live in a constant state of low-grade fear.” We don’t need to be reminded of what makes us vulnerable.
Some serious statistics on rape. From a comprehensive US-based study, but it’s probably reasonable to assume that the broad pattern is the same in New Zealand. Long story short: 1 in 5 women, and 1 in 71 men have been subjected to forced penetration, 1 in 21 men have been forced to penetrate someone else, 13% of women and 6% of men have experienced sexual coercion, 27% of women and 12% of men have experienced unwanted sexual contact.
For all the language nerds: English Pronunciation
If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.
This week’s pretty, taken from my (Deb’s) personal blog: a USS Enterprise pizza cutter. You can see more pictures of this wonderful piece of geekery here.
USS Enterprise pizza cutter
I’m sceptical of the figure of 27% of women experiencing unwanted sexual contact. It seems extremely low to me.
I checked the report. It gives figures of 18.3% for rape, broken down into completed penetration (12.3%), attempted penetration (5.2%), and alcohol/drug facilitated penetration (8%), and other sexual violence is 44.6%, broken down into sexual coercion (13%), unwanted sexual contact (27.2%), and non-contact unwanted sexual experiences (33.7%). NB: These are the figures for women.
I’ve got to head out to run some errands: I’ll try to put up a post later in the summarising the results, and the methods they used for the report.
Since I brought it up, I had a look at the report myself. The survey is done by telephone, and although they say they spend time at the beginning of the survey “establishing rapport”, I strongly suspect that this methodology is likely to lead to underreporting. I think people are much less likely to disclose these kinds of experiences to a random stranger on the phone, official imprimatur and rapport-establishing notwithstanding.
Thanks for the love! Right back at y’all!
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I wonder why they felt the need to separate out rape that involved penetration and rape that didn’t. Although it’s a step up from the idea that rape MUST involve penetration, it still seems to be drawing a distinction for no reason other than allowing the people who think rape requires penetration to dismiss a certain number of cases.
I can’t think of any situation where the distinction between penetrative and non-penetrative rape would be useful.
I’m not positive, but I suspect it’s a legal thing?
I would hope not.
Well, I am not sure about the US, but New Zealand legislation specifies rape (as involving penetration), as distinct from unlawful sexual connection.
Really? That sucks. But I guess that’s a topic for another post.
unlawful sexual connection was brought into the legal definition of rape because clever defence lawyers were using the technicality
that the assailaint “only” digitally, ie used his fingers, to penetrate
the victim, to claim no rape had taken place.
In the USA rape is legally defined as PIV with a cis female victim by the FBI. There was some mention recently that they’re thinking of changing that (http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/10/23/fbi-redefines-rape-to-mean-like-rape/).
The NZ thing of “unlawful sexual connection” is not much better, not least because it still revolves around penetration as the be-all and end-all of sex. Saying “ooh, but this allows for penetration with something other than a penis” is bullshit. They should all be rolled up in “sexual assault = assault with a sexual element” and let the judges make what they will of that. Fiddling with “what is sex” smells too much like the Clinton inquisition.