The video went viral, and the next Occupy Steubenville rally drew 2,000 people to the courthouse steps. Because MC brought the sound system, he ended up serving as the de facto master of ceremonies (which is how he ended up with his Twitter handle). As he played excerpts of the Nodianos video over the loudspeakers, he told me, people in the crowd grew so angry that he started to worry that they would riot.

When the Steubenville sheriff showed up, MC invited him up and grilled him about the case. In the end, he diffused the tension by giving the cop a hug. "I'm going to take this negative energy and turn it into a positive thing," he remembers thinking. "You've got to let the crowd vent."

And vent they did. For four hours, there was a catharsis of personal pain and grief that nobody in the small town could have imagined. Women who had been raped stood in front of the crowd, clad in Guy Fawkes masks, to share their stories. Some of them unmasked at the end of their testimonies as they burst into tears. Rapes at parties, date rapes, rapes by friends and relatives—their pent-up secrets came pouring out. "It turned into this women's liberation movement, in a way," MC recalls. "And it just changed everything. There was nothing anybody could do against us at that point because it was so real and so true."

Exclusive: Meet the Woman Who Kicked off Anonymous' Anti-Rape Operations ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/05/13/how-anonymous-got-involved-in.html/feed 16 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/31/for-anonymous-an-ode-to-the-d.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/31/for-anonymous-an-ode-to-the-d.html#comments Mon, 31 Dec 2012 16:41:38 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=203282 For Anonymous, by Nilanjana Roy.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/12/31/for-anonymous-an-ode-to-the-d.html/feed 1 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/09/court-sets-accused-rapist-free.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/09/court-sets-accused-rapist-free.html#comments Wed, 10 Oct 2012 02:12:07 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=186248 there was no evidence she could not communicate her refusal to have sex with the defendant." She cerebral palsy, cannot verbally communicate, and "is so physically restricted that she is able to make motions only with her right index finger."

(via HeratyLaw).

Update: Here's a different perspective: Part 1, part 2, and here's another.

Cory and I traded emails about this ruling, and here are his thoughts:

The judge ruled on the law the guy was accused of violating, which is a very narrow statute, and the guy was not guilty of violating the statute under which he was charged. The judge even told the prosecutor that this was the wrong statute to be using. The prosecutor -- for whatever reason -- stuck to his guns. Now because of double jeopardy, the guy gets away with it.

My guess is that the prosecutor chose to prosecute under the statute because it carried a higher penalty, and thought that he could intimidate the accused into settling with the threat of a much longer sentence. Instead, this backfired on him. But that's not the defense attorney's fault (his job is to represent his client), and it's not the judge's fault (his job is to rule on questions of law). It's not even the law's fault (there are statutes under which this guy is clearly guilty, but those weren't the statutes used in the case) Sounds like it's the prosecutor's fault for trying to shortcut the trial with a quick plea through a bogus charge.

I guess the point is that it's a different kind of problem: this isn't a case where society can't tell the difference between "legitimate rape" and some other kind of rape. It seems like the judge would have been happy to lock this guy up, if the prosecutor had charged him with the crime he'd actually committed, and it's probably good that judges aren't willing to convict people of crimes they haven't committed.

You see, what I said was, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” But what I meant to say was, “I am a worthless, moronic sack of shit and an utterly irredeemable human being who needs to shut up and go away forever.”

It is clear to me now that I did not choose my words with care and did not get across the point I was trying to convey. In hindsight, I guess instead of using the words “legitimate rape,” I should have used the words “I am an unforgivable, unrepentant, and unconscionable subhuman dickhead.” Or better yet, “I am an evil, fucked-up man who should never have been elected to the United States Congress, and anyone who would vote for me is probably a pretty big fucking dumbshit, too.” See how much more sense that makes? It’s amazing how a few key word changes can totally alter the meaning of a statement.

There's a lot more.

I Misspoke—What I Meant To Say Is 'I Am Dumb As Dog Shit And I Am A Terrible Human Being' ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/21/todd-akin-apologizes-for-leg.html/feed 29 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/21/going-medieval-on-the-female-r.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/21/going-medieval-on-the-female-r.html#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:28:36 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=177411 Cory posted yesterday about the history of the bogus idea that women who were raped (excuse me, "legitimately" raped) can't get pregnant from it, citing a medical/legal text from 1785. In a story at The Week, we learn that this particular bit of misinformation is, in fact, even older than that, dating back to 1290. So Akin is propagating a belief that has been spread—despite a complete lack of evidence to support it—since the 13th century. Good times. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/21/going-medieval-on-the-female-r.html/feed 18 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/21/science-rape-and-pregnancy.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/21/science-rape-and-pregnancy.html#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:18:23 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=177405

Kate Clancy is one of my favorite bloggers. An anthropology professor at the University of Illinois, she studies the evolution of female reproductive anatomy. Her blog covers science I don't see anywhere else—the human evolution, cultural anthropology, and behavioral science behind ladybusiness.

So Clancy's blog was one of the first places I looked yesterday after reading about Missouri Rep. Todd Akin thoughtful commentary on female biology. In a long, well-written, and (fair warning) rather graphic post, Clancy talks about what we know about rape—think of it this way, you know way more people who have been raped than who have a gluten intolerance—and the way that emotional trauma affects conception and pregnancy.

First off, there is absolutely no difference in the rate of conception between women who have been raped and those who had consensual sex. Clancy breaks this down nicely in her blog post, and even offers a surprising tidbit from the research literature that all people should consider—at any given day in a woman's cycle (even days when she is supposedly "infertile") there's about a 3% chance of unprotected sex leading to a pregnancy.

The impact of stress on miscarriage is a lot messier. I've mentioned here before that we know very, very little about miscarriage, relative to a lot of other medical issues. To paraphrase my family practice doc, when you start talking about conception and miscarriage you very quickly wander past the small amount of hard evidence and straight into voodoo. And also into the counter-intuitive nature of reality. For instance, from reading Jon Cohen's excellent book on miscarriage science, Coming to Term, I know that one of the very few miscarriage interventions that's ever performed better than placebo in multiple trials is something called "Tender Loving Care". The idea: For whatever reason, women who have had recurrent miscarriages have a greater chance of carrying the next pregnancy to term if they have regular access to mental health services, stress-relieving practices like meditation, and doctors who listen and respond to their fears. But that's not the same thing as saying that stress, or a scare, or a severe mental trauma will, inevitably, cause a miscarriage. Here's Kate Clancy:

Yes, psychosocial stress is associated with fetal loss in some samples. That is not the same thing as saying that stress causes fetal loss. Some women are more reactive to stress than others, and this seems to be based on genes and early childhood experiences. As I pointed out in my post, it certainly isn’t something women have conscious control over. And so it is irrational to link the stress of rape, while awful and severe, to fetal loss, when we understand the mechanism of the stress response and its relationship to pregnancy so poorly, and when we know next to nothing regarding how variation in stress reactivity is produced.

Basically, while stress (and the associated hormones) are correlated with a higher risk of miscarriage in some (but not all) studies, that seems to have more to do with an individual's biological makeup than it does with the source of the stress. And, frankly, we barely know enough to even say that.

• Read the rest of Kate Clancy's post on the rape and pregnancy

• Read Clancy's earlier (excellent) post on miscarriage

• Read Jon Cohen's book, Coming to Term. (I keep recommending this, but, seriously, it's wonderful. And a hugely sane-making force in my life.)

The un-bylined author of the Cookies for Breakfast tumblog publishes the story of two female friends attending a standup performance by Daniel Tosh, host of the notably unfunny Comedy Central show Tosh.0, in which the comedian made some stupid rape jokes. Not that there are any other kind of rape jokes.

“Actually, rape jokes are never funny!,” the woman in the published account says she replied from the audience.

Snip from her version of what followed:

I did it because, even though being “disruptive” is against my nature, I felt that sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman. I don’t sit there while someone tells me how I should feel about something as profound and damaging as rape.

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…” and I, completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening but knowing i needed to get out of there, immediately nudged my friend, who was also completely stunned, and we high-tailed it out of there. It was humiliating, of course, especially as the audience guffawed in response to Tosh, their eyes following us as we made our way out of there. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said about me.

Now, proposing that an audience member sitting right in front of you in a crowd of mostly men "get raped by, like, 5 guys right now" is in my opinion a whole lot heavier than letting a few random rape jokes drop in your lame standup act. Not that rape jokes are lulzy. But, Christ, what an asshole.

By way of this non-apology, Tosh appears to confirm the woman's story:

all the out of context misquotes aside, i'd like to sincerely apologize j.mp/PJ8bNs

— daniel tosh (@danieltosh) July 10, 2012

the point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them. #deadbabies

— daniel tosh (@danieltosh) July 10, 2012

More coverage around the web: The Atlantic, Jezebel, Videogum, ThinkProgress, Feminists for Choice.

The video above, and many others like it, and the dude's entire body of work show that this kind of stuff is hardly out of character for Mr. Tosh.

Jamie Frevele says:

I would like to know why the internet has only suddenly discovered that Daniel Tosh is a fucking pig.

— Jamie Frevele (@jamielikesthis) July 10, 2012

Never liked the guy.

The real reason I can't stand Tosh.0 is that it and Daniel Tosh have degraded Peter Tosh's google rank.

— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) July 5, 2012

Guys. Real shocker in@danieltosh rape joke brouhaha? Was at a @DaneCook show. Tosh is so lame, he managed to make Dane Cook look classy.

— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) July 10, 2012

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/10/douche-0-daniel-tosh-digs-rap.html/feed 40 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/14/the-invisible-genocide-of-wome.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/14/the-invisible-genocide-of-wome.html#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:37:42 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=143917

Video Link.

The recently-launched Women Under Siege website is a new project of the NYC-based Women’s Media Center, and features a number of powerful essays and features by women, about sexual violence against women. There's an account by CBS News correspondent Lara Logan, who survived a sexual assault while covering uprisings in the Middle East; another about covering sexualized war in Congo by Lynsey Addario, who survived the same.

In this post, I'd like to draw special attention to a feature on the site about a subject with which I have personal familiarity: violence against indigenous women in Guatemala. Though the country's long civil war is over, the femicidio is not. Snip:

More than 100,000 women were raped in the 36 years of the Guatemalan genocide in which at least 200,000 people died. In this video, photojournalists Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita interview survivors and document the ongoing forensic and legal investigation that has just indicted former Guatemalan President Efraín Ríos Montt.

There are so many powerful stories on the Women Under Siege website. Below, a photo by Ms. Addario, from Congo: "Lwange, 51, with her daughter, Florida, who had been raped the week before this photo was taken in 2008. The child had screamed at the time, then bled. With her vagina and her young psyche damaged, Florida would no longer speak."

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/14/the-invisible-genocide-of-wome.html/feed 10 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/30/project-unbreakable.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/30/project-unbreakable.html#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:05:47 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=141462

Grace Brown created "Project Unbreakable" in October, 2011, and the tumblog appears to really be gathering momentum. The idea: "Use photography to help heal those who were sexually abused by asking them to write a quote from their attacker on a poster and photographing them holding the poster."

So many stories from so many different people. Men, too, not only women. I was so moved by this post, which includes both a photograph and an audio narrative by an elderly woman who was sexually abused as a 12-year-old girl during World War II in Germany. Do listen to her story.

"You can never forget it. It is in your brain, marked like a stamp," she says. "I still suffer from it."

(via Jay Rosen)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/30/project-unbreakable.html/feed 42