Rape/Sexual Assault Culture

Na, two paragraphs is enough, specially with your added info.

 

Not my genre - what is the censored name?

 

It's also strange that that word is censored, but porn is not.

 

GMU has grown quite a bit in recent years. It has three campuses in Northern VA.

I'm a grad student at the main campus, btw.

 

NVCC and GMU are formalizing that arrangement in the next few years.

 

The academy for the Nobel Literature Prize is having their own issues. A couple of things jumped out at me:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/style/knytblus-bow-blouses-sweden.html

The #MeToo movement has hit Sweden with force, despite the country’s reputation for progressive gender politics.

Among those who have been accused of sexual misconduct is Carl Martin Timell, a prominent television host whose shows were canceled last year after he was accused of sexual abuse. Last month, Mr. Timmell was charged with sexual assault. The prominent theater director Benny Fredriksson resigned from his post last year after he was accused of enabling a culture of sexual abuse. Last month, Mr. Fredriksson committed suicide.​

Sounds familiar.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43942106

The man at the centre of a sexual abuse scandal at the Swedish Academy - the body that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature - has been accused of groping the heir to the Swedish throne.

French photographer Jean-Claude Arnault denies groping Crown Princess Victoria at an Academy event in 2006.

It follows a report in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper that quoted three people who said they saw the incident.​

Also sounds familiar.

 

Okay, not lets talk about how this stuff is complicated:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44081834

The Pulitzer prize board says it will investigate allegations of sexual harassment made against its member, Pulitzer-winning author Junot Díaz.

The 49-year-old, who was elected Pulitzer chairman in April, is stepping down from that role but will remain on the board, the organisation said.

He has been accused by author Zinzi Clemmons of forcibly kissing her six years ago when she was a student.​

Sounds familiar, yes? Probably have several examples of this going back 20 or 30 pages or so, right?

And then we need to add in:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/books/junot-diaz-accusations.html

Ms. Clemmons, in a statement to The Times, said: “Junot Díaz has made his behavior the burden of young women — particularly women of color — for far too long, enabled by his team and the institutions that employ him. When this happened, I was a student; now I am a professor and I cannot bear to think of the young women he has exploited in his position, and the many more that would be harmed if I said nothing.”​

But things are not always so neat:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-silence-the-legacy-of-childhood-trauma

I was raped when I was eight years old. By a grownup that I truly trusted.

...

That violación. Not enough pages in the world to describe what it did to me. The whole planet could be my inkstand and it still wouldn’t be enough. That shit cracked the planet of me in half, threw me completely out of orbit, into the lightless regions of space where life is not possible. I can say, truly, que casi me destruyó. Not only the rapes but all the sequelae: the agony, the bitterness, the self-recrimination, the asco, the desperate need to keep it hidden and silent. It ********ed up my childhood. It ********ed up my adolescence. It ********ed up my whole life. More than being Dominican, more than being an immigrant, more, even, than being of African descent, my rape defined me. I spent more energy running from it than I did living. I was confused about why I didn’t fight, why I had an erection while I was being raped, what I did to deserve it. ​

And then he says this:

It’s been almost a decade since the Fall. I am not who I once was. I’m neither the brother who can’t touch a girl nor the asshole who sleeps around. I’m in therapy twice a week. I don’t drink (except in Japan, where I let myself have a beer). I don’t hurt people with my lies or my choices, and wherever I can I make amends; I take responsibility. I’ve come to learn that repair is never-ceasing.​

So, there is a conflict here. Did Junot sexually assault? Yes. But what was the motivation? This is not Weinstein or Schneiderman or the President. This is a guy who was sexually abused as a kid, and went though textbook behavior (textbook because of how common it is), and did what he was taught by his abuser and by his society - to target people who he sees as weaker, and women he sees as attractive. So, on the outside, he is targeting Black women because Black women. And in that respect Zinzi is correct. But Junot was also acting on his own trauma, his own confusion, is own cultural constraints. He was acting as both the victim and the perpetrator as so many men do with his past. And in this, I will criticize Zinzi. According to what I have read of her, she comes from very well-off South African Black family. There is probably an aspect of her life in which she has not had a great amount of interaction with people who are as open as Junot about his past and how that dove his actions. What Zinzi seems to be looking at as this is another example of WOC, and Black women in particular, who were sexually fetishized, mistreated, assaulted, or abused. But this is not specifically about WOC, this is about a man who saw a type of women as attractive, and sought out those who he thought he could victimize. This is about a man who was abused as a boy and his responses to women in adulthood. And now he is taking responsibility for that.