Structure and Sexual Misconduct

We appear to be in a watershed moment. The floodgates have been opened to a seemingly endless cascade of sexual misconduct claims, ranging from the rape of minors to inappropriate and undesired language. One reaction I have heard is lament: "When will the accusations end?" This is understandable. However, I tend to see things much more optimistically: This is what social change looks like. It's uncomfortable and ugly and disappointing but good, good because it signals a change in norms. We are together affirmatively stating that such behavior is no longer acceptable; moreover, such behavior will be sanctioned. In a way, a desire to "make it all go away" is a wish to return to a time when our silence tacitly approved of such behavior and, thus, allowed it to continue unabated. As disquieting as it is, this is progress.

What's more, I think we can start to talk about the social structure and culture that has possibly and ironically elevated those among us who are more likely to do such deviance to positions of power, authority, and celebrity. Think about the presidency as an example. It takes a special--and not in a good way--person to consider him- or herself qualified to be the most powerful person in the world. To look at the impossibility of that political office, at the crushing and awesome responsibility it affords, and to say, "Sure, I could do that!" is the height of hubris. Not to mention the gauntlet one must travail to ascend to the catbird seat. We should not be surprised that virtually all candidates for president are, to some degree, clinical narcissists. We should recognize that it is a system of our own design that elevates people with these characteristics (and indeed perhaps even engenders these attributes) and that these very characteristics are what make such people feel entitled to act as they please without fear of consequences. Think Nixon and Watergate or Kennedy and Clinton and their sexual dalliances. Narcissism is not so much a personality disorder as it is an inevitable result of our way of doing social order. It is more bad society than bad actors.

This line of thinking can easily be translated to the systems that elevate movie stars, musicians, comedians, Senators, and CEO's. All require and encourage antisociality. This isn't to say that such behavior is confined to these fields. We ordinary folks are not immune. It is, however, an empirical question worth investigation: do people in positions of power, authority, and celebrity do sexual misconduct at a disproportionate rate?

An even more uncomfortable question to ask is, inasmuch as these elites, whom we've elevated, embody our ideals, what does this say about us?

Sex Ed by Roger Corman and the Bible

There is a storefront church in the community where I work that is infamous for the messages it posts daily on a large outdoor changeable letter sign. Previous messages have included:

• Not ML King but Jesus Christ![1]
• Abortion doctors are cold-blooded murderers!
• Gays and lesbians are disgraces to humanity! Leviticus 20:13[2]
• Beauty and the Beast teaches bestiality!
• Public school is child abuse by the state!
• Bikinis on the beaches is [sic] worse than oil!
• Replace the Constitution with the Ten Commandments!

The current message is, "Lesbianism is raw depravity! Leviticus 20:13 [updated 4/26/17] Romans 1:26-28 [3]." The "raw depravity" part strikes me more as a tagline for a women-in-prison exploitation film, like Caged Heat, than a biblical injunction. I don't think this is an accident. Sexuality in general, but certainly same-sex sexuality, understood through the heteronormative adolescent male perspective is something that is risky, dangerous, and difficult to restrain. It looks a lot like the B-movies that I grew up watching surreptitiously, late at night on USA's Up All Night. If one emerges from adolescence without reconciling these problematic notions of sexuality, he might find some of the fundamentalist ideas like those espoused by this church appealing.

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[1] The rhetoric around race in many of the messages are doubly interesting since the leader of the church, Robert T. Lee, is himself black.

[2] Leviticus 20:13 - If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.

[3] Romans 1:26-28 - For this reason, God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done.

Watch That First Step; It's a Lulu!

I learned from several of my students last night that I am on Lulu. It was a bit of an old-man moment because I had never heard of it. The company describes it as "the first ever app for private reviews of guys," where "[w]hen you meet a new dude, [you can] check his Lulu profile, and find out everything you want to know!" It integrates Facebook profile information, and the company goes to great lengths to keep men from surreptitiously infiltrating the service by changing their gender or creating a fake account on Facebook. My students tell me that many men are not so happy with the app, claiming that it is reverse sexism or libelous. Sociologically, men's negative reactions should not be surprising. Men have been engaging in the same kind of systematic objectification in locker rooms and bars for generations. To be subjected to the same practices challenges the status that men enjoy over women.

Does that mean that Lulu is good for women? I think there are two perspectives here. Within the current social system, Lulu does indeed open social space for women that was once the sole purview of men. While men have been able to control physical spaces, restricting women formally and informally from places like locker rooms and bars, virtual spaces like a web-based app are much more difficult to control; technology is an equalizer in this way. From a broader perspective, however, Lulu only expands the dehumanizing practice of objectification. It arguably and unwittingly buttresses men's claims to women's bodies. ("Women do it, too!"  or "Women are just as bad as men.") Even if it does level the playing field, it does so by lowering the playing field. A more lofty goal would be to elevate both women and men's behavior, improving interpersonal relationships all around.

Oh, and all of this is incredibly heteronormative if I haven't mentioned that, yet.

Valor, Gallantry, and Heroism by Sexuality and Gender

Just a quick thought here. Several of the victims of the shooting in the Aurora theater died while shielding their female partners. While the immediate emotion of the incident is probably pretty raw, it nonetheless offers a great demonstration of some sociology. Here are a few questions that might facilitate a discussion in class:

1. What if a woman had shielded a man?
2. What if one gay man had shielded another man?
3. What if a lesbian had shielded another woman?
4. Can you imagine any other pairings of shielder/shieldee that would run contrary to our role expectations? [e.g child shielding adult]
5. What can we learn from this about gender? sexuality? heroism?

Friday Music: "Whole Lotta Love" - Led Zeppelin

I give you Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love":



This one pains me a bit to include here as I am a huge Led Zeppelin fan going way back. Nonetheless, this song demonstrates several important sociological concepts. Take these lyrics, for example: "Way down inside, honey, you need it. Gonna give you my love." This could facilitate conversation on misogyny, objectification, and rape culture among other concepts.

Framing Encounter

As I keep telling you, I'm enjoying my free month of Netflix. Yesterday, I finished Ken Burns' The War. I am not a war buff, and I'm not all that interested in military strategy or history, which is probably why I didn't watch this film when it originally aired on PBS several years ago, but I must say, it is a great documentary. Burns and company are adept at taking would-be dry material and infusing it with personal significance. Mills wrote that sociology is the intersection of history and biography. By this definition, Burns is a sociologist par excellence.

I was struck, however, with the way that several who were interviewed for the film spoke about the encounters between returning veterans and civilian women. We are all familiar with the iconic photograph from Life magazine of the kiss in Times Square on V-J Day.

For many, particularly of that era, it invokes feelings of pride and nostalgia. From the contemporary perspective, however, it should invoke a tinge of horror. In the final episode of The War, a woman recounts a memory of being mobbed at a train depot by servicemen returning from the Pacific Theater. She had to lock herself in a room with a girlfriend until an officer corralled the men back onto the train. She remembered the tale with a smile and a laugh, but it was clear that at the time of the event, she was quite terrified. A veteran in the same episode recalls how one could "cop a feel" stateside without fear of reproach or punishment.

Today, we would define such things as sexual harassment at the very least but more accurately as sexual assault. I'm wrestling with whether the dismissal of these acts of deviance was/is an effect of the historical (and highly patriarchal) era or of the suspension of norms during wartime. I suspect that it is an interaction effect of both. Regardless, it's best if we stop romanticizing the whole thing. Men were kissing and groping--and undoubtedly worse--women against their will. By any definition at any time, that is harmful.

Cathleen Kaveny on The Daily Show

These are worth watching:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Cathleen Kaveny Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Cathleen Kaveny Extended Interview Pt. 2
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Thoughts to follow.

Hyperbolic Victimhood

Let me begin with a disclosure and a caveat. I have never been the victim of sexual abuse, and in no way am I excusing, rationalizing, or dismissing child sexual abuse with what I write below.

With all the fallout at Penn State this week, I've been thinking about how we talk about the victims. Is it possible that we cause more harm to victims by insisting that their experiences are catastrophic? Recent research summarized by the American Psychological Association indicates that:

Some children even report little or no psychological distress from the [sexual] abuse.... They may experience no harm in the short run, but suffer serious problems later in life.

In the past, we made sense of this by inventing the now-discredited notion of "repressed memories." Today, we might be tempted to think about this in terms of a "sleeper effect," in which the pain is simply lurking under the surface, waiting to emerge at some future point.

I would like to purpose an alternative explanation. Perhaps, by insisting that child sexual assault is so thoroughly and permanently damaging to the psyche, we are creating a situation in which victims are forced to play the "ruined victim" role. Why would we do this? I think that it might be because the issue is the intersection of two culturally troubling concepts, sexuality and childhood.

Childhood as a part of the lifecourse is a social construct. It wasn't that long ago in human history when we treated children essentially as short adults. When we were still an agricultural society, we needed all of the manual work that we could muster; we simply couldn't afford to make a distinction between kids and adults. We still make exceptions today for children who work on farms, allowing them to drive automobiles at an earlier age than their more urban counterparts and exempting their families from the usual child labor laws. It isn't until the industrial revolution that we really start to think of children as somehow different. As kids became competition for adults in factories, we pass the first child labor laws, booting kids out of the labor force. Rather than allow the kids to muraude around the streets reeking havoc, we make education compulsory and stick them in schools until they're adults. As a further way to inact social control, we start to think about children as uniquely vulnerable, both physically and psychologically.

We have always had our hangups about sexuality in the West. The connection between patriarchy, gender norms, and heteronormativity have left us with an experience of sex that is intimately connected to power. Men are aggressors who strive for power and domination. Women are passive and are thought of as generally being asexual or at least resistant to sexual advances. Notions of romantic love thus conflate social power and status with physiological and emotional stimulation. It's essentially BDSM lite.

So, sex is about power, and childhood is about vulnerability. Put them together, and we end up with deviance that seems particularly egregious, and we insist that the aftermath of this hyper-deviance must match-up in its direness. It then becomes deviant for a victim of childhood sexual assault not to exhibit the debilitating psychic fallout that is expected. It might be that this socially forced victimization, rather than the abuse itself, causes the late-presenting distress. In other words, perhaps victims don't learn until adulthood how upset they are really supposed to be.

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UPDATE: I also feel the need to state this is no way should be read as an apology for Paterno, Spanier, Schultz, or Curley and certainly not for Sandusky.

DADT Humor

Peter Sagal of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me:

The only resistance remaining to changing the policy [Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell] comes first from the Marine Corps because there’s nothing at all gay about really muscular guys with short hair and tattoos and a thing for travel.

Vampires and Virginity

[I originally posted this blog on Tuesday 18 November 2008 on MySpace. I'm reposting it here as part of "Brad's Greatest Hits."]

Let me start by being very forthright in that I have not read this novel nor am I likely to see the movie anytime soon. However, having read a number of plot summaries and reviews on the interwebs, I feel confident enough in my analysis to write this.

Stories about vampires, or something resembling them, have been a part of folklore for the entirety of human history. Beginning in the Victorian Era, vampire novels become a thinly-veiled erotica for a society intent on enforcing a restrictive sexual morality. While at first it may not seem patent, the sexuality becomes palpable after a few metaphors are deciphered: vampires are always beautiful and eternally youthful, they're always biting and sucking on other's necks, and sometimes, male vampires even feed off other men. From the Victorians to us today, the vampire and his urges have represented—and even reveled in—those culturally repressed sexual appetites that otherwise can't be shared. The most recent addition to the vampire mythology is a book and subsequent film, both titled Twilight. Without spoiling either, the plot involves a teenage girl who falls in love with a teenage boy, the latter of whom turns out to be a 100+-year-old vampire. The twist is that this vampire has chosen to "abstain" from feeding on human blood. From there, this vampire fights his own blood-"lust," and the pair must also fight off the advances of another, less-restrained teenage vampire, who would be happy to suck a little of the virgin's blood. The sexual metaphors remain, but unlike its Victorian vampire predecessors, Twilight is not about the purging of repressed sexuality; instead, the message seems to be that one should voluntarily repress his sexual desires, particularly if he is a teenage boy. Arguably, contemporary moralities are more ambiguous about sexuality in general and teenage sexuality in particular. The vampire motif is still a convenient vehicle for contemporaneous sexuality, but now, it seems the moral has been turned on its head.

I would be remiss for not pointing out that Stephenie Meyer, the author of this novel, is a member of the Latter-Day Saints church (i.e. the Mormons) and that the director of the film adaptation is a Presbyterian whose most recent film was the Christian-themed The Nativity Story. Given the above interpretation, it shouldn't be a stretch to connect the content to recent sexual abstinences movements, most of which originated in Evangelical Protestant congregations. Maybe we'll be lucky enough to see a novel and film in which school nurses are permitted to hand out latex neck prophylactics to the teenage vampires so that they can still gnaw on necks without actually tasting of their girlfriends' blood.