Sexual assault, like many other crimes, usually occurs when no one’s watching. Given the absence of a third party witness, how are we to decide guilt/innocence? Circumstantial evidence is often not helpful because consent, that which differentiates between legal and illegal sex among adults, is essentially a mental event, and of this there can be …
Category: gender issues
May 21 2010
A Man Shaken by a Bomb
I picked up a sci-fi novel the other day at a used bookstore. The jacket said it was set after a nuclear war and written by someone who’d rubbed shoulders with a lot of military people. Well, I figured it’d be interesting to see what they imagined life’d be like after a nuclear war. (The …
Apr 30 2010
First (and last) Contact
Women have a long tradition of being diplomats. “Historically, … marriage has been the major alliance mechanism of every society, and little girls are trained for roles as intervillage family diplomats…, the married woman straddles two kin networks, two villages, sometimes two cultures” (The Underside of History, Elise Boulding, p.53-54). Many women have decades of …
Apr 09 2010
Macho Music for the Mensa Crowd
Music and men has always been an iffy combination. If it involves banging on things and making a lot of noise, well, that’s definitely male, on both counts, so being a drummer is okay. And if it involves plugging something in—that ultimate test which separates the men from, well, from the women—that’s good, so playing …
Mar 16 2010
Gay Bashing
Gay bashing. Now there’s something I don’t understand. ‘Queers are disgusting, man. Men touching other men, that’s really sick.’ So, yeah, go beat ’em up. Get real close and touch ’em all over. And they say men are the logical ones. But of course it’s not just the no-necks roaming the streets at night. It’s …
Mar 11 2010
Freakonomics’ Big Revelation
So I just read Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics, in which they present the astounding connection between access to abortion and crime: twenty years after Roe v. Wade, the U.S. crime rate dropped. Astounding indeed. That men are so surprised by that! I mean, just how clueless are you guys? —about the power, the influence, of …
Mar 05 2010
Whose Violence?
I read the other day that “Violence in our society continues to be a problem.” One, duh. Two, no wonder. I mean, we haven’t even got it named right yet. ‘Violence in our society.’ It sounds so—inclusive. So gender-inclusive. But about 85% of all the violent crime is committed by men. The gangs are made …
Mar 04 2010
I’m not a feminist. Feminism is so over. We live in a post-feminist world.
It used to be that men pressured women to have sexual intercourse with them. And despite the fact that it meant risking years of unhappiness for us (unwanted pregnancy, unwanted children), for ten seconds of bliss or relief for them, we’d do it. How stupid was that? Of course, without the weight of the patriarchy, …
Mar 01 2010
Let’s Talk About Sex
Disc jockeys generally come in two sexes: male and female. So what, you may think; sex doesn’t matter. Oh but it does, so sad to say. On any given night, one or two of several things might happen. And until recently, I never gave them much thought. But when all of these things happened during …
Feb 15 2010
Figure Skating: A Very Gendered Thing
Many call figure skating a sissy sport, a feminine thing. To the contrary, and to my unrelenting irritation, it is a very gender-inclusive sport, a sport of both sexes, a sport where men must be men and women must be, well, girls. Consider the costumes. The men usually wear ordinary long pants and a more …
fiction
