New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood has concluded that seven New York hospitals illegally billed rape survivors for their rape kits, at least 200 times, for sums ranging from $46 to $3,000, and then sent collections agents after survivors who could not pay. Read the rest
In 2007, Florida multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to two felony prostitution counts in a sweetheart deal that sent him to a private wing of a minimum security prison, with a work-release program that let him go to an off-site office for 12 hours a day, six days a week, for just over a year. Prosecutors knew of at least 36 underage survivors of sex crimes committed by Epstein, but none of them were notified of the deal (this silence is a breach of federal law), and they were subsequently smeared by Epstein's lawyers who accused them of being "gold diggers." Read the rest
Last June, 18-year-old Daniel Fabian of Pasco County, Florida was playing Grand Theft Auto Online, when he informed the other players in his team chat that he was going to take a break to "smash" (have sex with) a 15-year-old girl. Read the rest
When Facebook hired Joel Kaplan to serve as Vice President for US Public Policy, who could have predicted that he would turn out to be a far-right partisan who would embarrass the company by throwing a victory bash for a serial rapist on the occasion of his being handed a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court? Read the rest
Yesterday, the Internet Archive published the 1983 edition of Cupola, the yearbook of Georgetown Prep, the elite academy and hive of rape-culture where would-be Supreme Court Justice drank his way through four years of tutelage. Read the rest
Say what you will about the Trump era: it has ushered in a SNL renaissance. Between Baldwin's eerily good Trump and McKinnon's Sessions, Melissa McCarthy's Spicer and Bill Murray's Bannon, SNL is proving Garry Trudeau's point that satire isn't supposed to change minds, it's supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Read the rest
When Anita Hill testified about the sexual abuse she'd suffered at Clarence Thomas's hands, Senate Republicans and the press pilloried her, calling her a liar and worse, and going on to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Read the rest
Bill Donohue, the president of the ultra-conservative Catholic League, has called the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's report on the official coverups of the priestly rape of children an "obscene lie," insisting that rape was relatively rare, because most of the sexual abuse committed by the priesthood doesn't qualify as rape, because the priests didn't penetrate their victims. Read the rest
For nearly 30 years, there was only one full-time gynecologist on staff at the University of Southern California's student health clinic: Dr. George Tyndall, about whom there was a widespread understanding among staff and students that he sexualized his examinations, making overt sexual remarks to the teenagers under his care, fondling them, and waxing creepy about his predilection for Asian women. Read the rest
With so many men in power getting caught with their pants down recently, lame "apologies" and excuses for their unacceptable behavior have become the norm.
Enter the "Celebrity Perv Apology Generator."
A project by Dana Schwartz (she wrote the apologies), Rob Sheridan, and Scott McCaughey, the website mocks all those lame, out-of-touch non-apologies abusers make by fabricating joke (though surprisingly/sadly realistic) ones with the click of a button.
Try it for yourself over at apologygenerator.com.
When Alabama GOP Senate nominee Roy Moore was accused of sexually molesting children as young as 14, his fellow hardcore evangelicals shrugged at the scandal -- it was "common knowledge" that Moore had a fondness for young teens. Read the rest
In the early 2010s, Quinn Norton (previously) was sexually assaulted by Robert Scoble (previously), a well-known technology exec and anti-privacy advocate while attending O'Reilly Media's FOO Camp, a private tech gathering that has a well-earned reputation as a safe and congenial space. Read the rest
The UK has been rocked by a series of "historic sex scandals" in which beloved cultural and political figures -- Clement Freud, Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris and many others -- have been revealed to have been sexual predators since the earliest days, using their money and respectability to rape children for decades with impunity. When each new horror surfaces, one of the first questions the public asks is, "Who knew about this and helped to cover it up?" Read the rest
Three CBP officers are facing criminal charges stemming from 2016 and 2017 incidents in which two newly hired CBP employees were locked in a small room, thrown on a table referred to as a "rape table" and then forced to endure a "simulated sex act" in which the senior officers ground their genitals against them. Read the rest
A GOP lawmaker swears he's not the notorious internet misogynist who said this... Read the rest
Under The American Health Care Act -- presently the subject of a full-court press by House Republicans -- insurance companies will be allowed to discriminate against customers who have "pre-existing conditions," refusing to pay for problems stemming from them. Read the rest
In this article for Aeon, author Sandra Newman makes a strong argument for the need to treat rape the way we treat other crimes. But first she digs into the history of the many other ways in which rape has been conceptualized over the years:
Read the restThere is a simple and surprisingly durable myth about what causes men to rape women. It goes like this: if a man is too horny, from sexual deprivation or from being constitutionally oversexed, he will lose control in the presence of an unguarded woman. Through the early days of psychology as a science, this basic assumption remained the same. When Richard von Krafft-Ebing wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), he assumed that rapists suffered from either ‘priapism and conditions approaching satyriasis’ or a ‘mental weakness’ that allowed lustful urges to escape their control. It was a simple matter of hydraulics. If the pressure was too great, or the vessel too weak, a horrifying crime would burst forth.
In the early decades of the 20th century, as human sexuality became the focus of intense scientific interest, this naive model of sexual assault went unquestioned by researchers. Havelock Ellis believed that all male sexuality was violent and predatory, and therefore saw no reason to doubt that rape was a normal manifestation of masculine desire. Alfred Kinsey preferred to ignore the issue altogether, dismissing most rapes as false accusations, and doubting they did real harm anyway. Thus the hydraulic model of rape persisted until the latter half of the 20th century, when it was abruptly shattered by a deadly combination of feminist theory and empirical research.
