Gay athletes and the cult of masculinity

Jason Collins came out today. The reason that this is noteworthy is that he is the first active male athlete in a major American sports league to come out as gay. Despite the progress that has been made in the past years and all the qualifiers in the last sentence showing how few barriers there are left, he will undoubtedly catch a lot of crap for being a male homosexual athlete, whether from fans or on the court or in locker rooms. I wish him all the best and that he'll get the support he deserves from fans, friends, the league, and his teammates.
However, I want to take this moment to talk a bit about sexism, femininity, and masculinity. The reason why coming out as a man in the world of professional sports is so rare is of course that there are certain gendered expectations in society: the stereotype is still to an extent that there's something wrong with gay men, that they are not quite masculine enough. Straight-up homophobia is definitely part of the equation, but to quote a New York Times article from a couple of weeks ago about female star athlete Brittney Griner coming out:

“We talk a lot in the L.G.B.T. community about how sexism is a big part of what contributes to homophobia,” said Anna Aagenes, the executive director of GO! Athletes, a national network of L.G.B.T. athletes. “It’s disheartening when there are so many great role model female athletes out that we’re so focused on waiting for a male pro athlete to come out in one of the four major sports.”

Vice versa, lesbians have often been considered "wrong" as women, and since achieving in the sporting world is not intrinsically tied to our notions of femininity, it's one reason why it's easier to come out as a female athlete (not that that means it's easy, of course), apart from the sexism inherent in the fact that less people pay attention to women's athletics.
The idea of masculinity and male homosexuality is a rather large topic to tackle in a short blog post, but let's just say that whether in the form of masculinity-eschewing or hypermasculine behaviour, the stereotypes of gay men that are common have been at odds with those masculinities thought appopriate for the sporting world. One is threatening by saying that men can be feminine, or at least not follow traditional standards of masculinity, and the other projects a kind of threatening male sexuality directed at other men. Both are anathema to the toxic notions of masculinity that still rule the day, exemplified in many ways in sports culture, which say that men should be strong physically and emotionally, have the capacity for violence, independent, competitive, and not cry, not show human weakness, not be victims, and not be vulnerable. To make sure athletes conform, the worst insults imaginable are often used in sports against those behaving wrongly: girl, lady, and fag.

A hope I have is that the discussion about homosexuality in men's sports that will result from Jason Collins coming out will also focus a lot on these pernicious notions of masculinity and the odious sexism that go hand in hand with it, and that the culture surrounding sports can be very negative and reinforce gender norms that are incredibly harmful (even though athletics, all other things being equal, is a good thing), both on the court and in the supporter culture (where predominantly European examples of hooliganism are the most obvious, but it's certainly not limited to those). What I suspect and fear, however, is that this will not be the starting point of a much-needed discussion about toxic masculinity and sexism, but will rather be a step in colonizing gay culture with the self-same ideals of toxic masculinity and thus establish them even further in the norm.
As J. Bryan Lowder points out, Jason Collins' coming-out article is also a display of anxiously defending his normative masculinity:

At least one of the answers, of course, is the homophobic nature of his industry, and, unfortunately, that is a state of affairs he never criticizes directly beyond promising to set “hard picks” against individuals who trash-talk him. If anything, Collins takes pains to appease the players, coaches and fans who make up the sports-masculinity complex that will determine whether his career continues, and unwittingly, insults some of his new friends in the process. To start, Collins makes the classic maneuver of exempting himself from the dreaded gay “LABEL” (I’m never sure what that means) and then spends multiple paragraphs telling us how butch and eager to foul he is. At this point, I’m waiting for it, and Collins delivers: “I go against the gay stereotype, which is why I think a lot of players will be shocked: That guy is gay?”

 I'm appy Jason Collins is coming out; it's an important step far too long in the making, but the way he (and a lot of commentators) needs to stress that "I'm just like you, in fact, I'm more like you than you are!" makes me think that the door that's opening will be quite narrow. In other words, it will be ok to be gay, as long as you're performing the same old athletic hypermasculinity, and that's a smaller step than I would prefer to see, and I fear that the stronger message will be for gay men to act more according to masculine norms that we should all work to tear down.

Manly men in Defiance

I've watched about half of the pilot to the new sci-fi series Defiance so far, and so far it is seriously disappointing me (having been a big fan of Rockne S. O'Bannon's Farscape), mostly because it seems to be a dick-measuring contest between alpha males (discredited though the concept may be). Rough male protagonist comes to the city which has a conflict brewing between the men of two families and then it just starts feeling like a display of different masculinities competing. Admittedly, the mayor of the city is a woman, who coincidentally is the only one who seems to be expressing doubt about her abilities in the series so far. Otherwise the women mostly seem to exist as daughters, sisters, prostitutes, and lovers, classic archetypes playing their background parts.
And it's just. So. Boooooring. Maybe this reflects a greater failure of the series to make me care for the characters, but a big part of that is that the genders seem like cardboard cutouts at this point. And for a series that's about the enormous changes that have happened to Earth after the arrival of eight alien races, it doesn't seem very imaginative. I think I will try to push through the first couple of episodes all the same and see if there's any improvement, but I'm not holding out hope.

Is Sweden suffering a rape and violence epidemic?

Yes, I know there's Betteridge's law for these situations, but I have noticed this issue being mentioned more often in places I frequent online recently. The idea is that Sweden is becoming horribly violent with rape statistics going through the roof, often with the implication that it's because we're too soft on crime or the ever-present specter of immigration. Naturally this is also a line pushed by populists and nationalists looking for more success in the next election, and it's a line people tend to believe.
However, the answer to the title's question is no. NO.

This is not to say that there isn't a rape problem or culture, that it's not something that is often treated incredibly poorly, that there doesn't exist extensive problems with victim-shaming and rape apologia, nor that Sweden doesn't have a high rate of rape and sexual violence (something that the EUICS from 2005 suggests). However, the charge that rape and violence is clearly on the increase is simply not true. For evidence, let us go to Brottsutvecklingen i Sverige 2008-2011 (Crime Development in Sweden 2008-2011) by the government body BRÅ (The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention).
Let's start off with two charts that people use to make the case that we're dealing with an unprecedented increase in violent crimes in Sweden (on page 73 and 115, respectively):

The thick line of the first graph shows the development of reported assault cases in Sweden since 1975 (the dotted line is assault against women age 15 and higher, and the lowest line is against children 0-14 years). The thick line of the second graph shows reported rape cases in Sweden since 1975 and the other lines other types of sexual crime. So, case closed, right? Since 1990, we've had more than a doubling of assaults and almost a quadrupling of rapes!
Well, no. These tables show crime reports to the police, which change over time due to many different factors. First and foremost, for a crime to be reported either a victim, bystander, or other person has to report it. To report it, the population has to think that the police are trustworthy, how easy it is, and that it would make sense to report it. Rape is a crime where the willingness to report has changed over time due to changes in social acceptance of rape and still depends very much on the nature of the crime. Standards have also changed as to what is an acceptable level of violence before you bring in the police (perhaps particularly when it comes to schools), and insurance companies demanding a police report can incentivize people to report crimes that they otherwise wouldn't.
Secondly, crime statistics depend on technical issues like how police register crimes, how much they are pushed to report potential crimes while patrolling, and how much repetition happens if several people report one crime (say if an assault is seen by 20 people) and whether duplicates are removed. In 1990 the Swedish police changed their reporting system and decreased the number of checks to get rid of duplicates.
Trust for police, police procedure for reporting crime, the accessibility given by the internet, and standards for what we accept in regards to violence before we go to the police are all things that change over time.

Some of this might seem a bit like hand-waving, so I'll give the best example of discrepancy between reported crime and actual crime (page 44):

The thick line here is the statistic for reports of "deadly violence". An increase from about 100 in 1990 to 250 in 2011. Also a shocking statistic, were it to reflect reality. The lower two lines, which are hovering around 100 the entire period, measure the number of people who have died from deadly violence per year according to cause-of-death statistics collected by hospitals and police. Deadly violence is one of the few cases where we can be relatively sure that there is very little underreporting; most people who are victims of it are found, and it's unlikely that attempts to hide bodies change over time. So in this case, the reported crime statistic is about 2.5 times higher than the actual number of cases in Sweden. Remember how I said that the Swedish police changed their system for reporting crime in 1990? Except for duplicates, many reported cases of deadly violence also turns out to be due to suicide and accidents, and unless they're removed from the system, obviously the total will be much higher than the real number.
Of course, deadly violence is a special case; every other crime is reported less than the actual number and by a significant amount, for several different reasons. An increase in crime reports can be a good thing if it means that more people report if they are victims to a crime, but it can also mean that the same cases that used to be reported are getting reported in duplicate and triplicate.

So what is the current state of rape and violence in Sweden? The answer seems to be "much the same as it was a decade ago". The reason I feel comfortable making that point is statistics derived from other sources. Every year government agencies send out large surveys about what has happened to people in the past year, and some questions ask about victimization. At the same time, all hospitals register the cause of patient injuries when they are treated in hospital. Both these measurements have problems, to be sure, but there is in my mind little reason to believe that there is much change over time in measurement error (in other words, while not everyone will answer a survey truthfully (and many won't answer at all) and hospitals can register causes wrong, this is not something that changes much over time - about the same amount of error will occur year-to-year, meaning that variations are more likely to reflect real-world trends). Let me begin with violence (pages 71-72):

 

The first graph here is the rate of people (as opposed to absolute numbers of the crime statistics above) responding with "yes" when asked if they have been targeted by any kind of violence (the thick line) or assaulted (the lower line) in the last year, the thick line representing the answers from ULF, the Swedish Living Conditions Survey, which has been going on longer than NTU, the national safety/security survey. As one asks about assault and the other any kind of violence, the levels are different where they overlap, but the message seems clear: among the respondents used in these surveys (a random sample of about 5000 and 13000 new people per year, respectively, which is a very good sample size), the rate of violence did not increase in the past decade (2006 seems to have been a violent year, however).
The second graph shows hospital records of people hurt by violence (thick line, in number of people per 500 000 of inhabitants in Sweden), knife-wounded (dotted line, in number of people per 1 million), or wounded by gunshot (lowest line, in number of people per 2 million). Though the thick line has more variation over time, it also shows little change in the level of needed care due to violence over the past decade.
As such, I see little reason to believe that assaults and other forms of non-sexual violence has increased particularly in Sweden over the last decade.

As for rape, I can't be as certain, since the NTU only asks (in one question) whether a person has been "molested, forced, or assaulted you sexually", which puts several different sexual crimes together. At any rate, here are the results (page 113):

Over the years the survey has been in use, the number of people in percent (thick line is women, middle line is the total sample, and the dotted line is men) who have answered that they have been molested, forced or assaulted has held more or less steady, possibly a small decrease. Now, it is possible that for whichever reason rape has increased significantly while other forms of sexual crimes have decreased, but I see little reason for that to happen. As we see in the chart over reported crimes at the beginning of this post, rape is a third of sexual crimes, and between 2005 and 2011 it increased threefold; for that not to show up at all here suggests to me that the reported crime increase is due to other reasons (increased likelihood of reporting, police procedure, etc), and indeed, the NTU survey has shown that people are becoming more likely to report sexual crimes to the police. 

So in all, I think the amount of rape committed is still horribly high, but that it isn't getting worse. We need take a strong stand against those who would claim that Sweden is a downward spiral of rape and violence because of whichever reason the reactionaries are currently pushing (which is most often immigration), and start dealing with rape culture, make sure rape survivors are treated well by the justice system, and stop legitimizing the behaviour of rapists. Those last three should be pretty obvious. But we all know that they aren't.

The problem of comprehensive sex education SOLVED

In two short music videos, at that.

DO:

DON'T (warning, NSFW):

SlutWalks: It's about changing society

In my previous post, I mentioned the importance of changing law enforcement and how they treat rape and what SlutWalks do to make that change happen. This was, however, not what I had intended to write in the first place, but rather what SlutWalks can do to change a society and a culture that clings to (double) standards and ideals that make no sense and are harmful to people in general and women in particular. It's also why I hope that SlutWalks or similar forms of activism will continue (and I'm sure it will, because moral standards tend to upset people, once they've been pointed out).
There are two main ways in which SlutWalks work to change the world for the better: by saying that sex is not a bad thing, and by exposing the word slut as having very little to do with actual behaviour and far more to do with shaming people you don't like with the notion that liking sex is bad.

The idea behind the word "slut" is, at its essence, that women having sex is a bad thing, and that it's valid to base social hierarchy on sexual behaviour. This is, in short, complete bullshit. While it is certainly true that people can have sex in ways that are negative (wilfully hurting others, and so on), the same is true of talking, and I'm sure most people would agree with me that conversation is, on the whole, a good thing. Sex simply does not have much of a moral value in and of itself - not, however, that that means sex is necessarily directly comparable to other activities; if we ignore the emotions of ourselves and our partners when it comes to sex, we will likely make no one very happy. However, sex based on enthusiastic consent with a compatible partner is pretty great, and doing it in a safe, responsible way (though as with all physical activities some risks remain) is easy as long as you've received a decent education (or take the time to look it up).
Of course, it's important to reiterate that this is a problem that exists overwhelmingly for women. Although there are some terms for men that could be comparable (cad, player), they are much less used and often old-fashioned; it takes a certain kind of blindness to think that this is not a way to judge women specifically. As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, I see no reason why moral behaviour would be different between genders, so on that principle alone the idea of enjoying and having sex being bad if you're a woman is absurd.

Yet sexual terms and judgements based on women's sexual behaviour are still used to create social hierarchies and impossible double standards, and it's that absurdity that SlutWalks speak out against. By saying that enjoying sex is good, that we would all gain by moving away from the repressive and negative messages we receive about sex and ourselves, and that by letting the word "slut" have such strong negative power we are accepting the framing of people who hate women and happiness, SlutWalks and other forms of activism against double standards and to improve sexual politics make the world a better place.

Secondly, SlutWalks also do the valuable work of pointing out that "slut" is a term that doesn't really have that much to do with actual sexual activity. Instead, it's a word used against women who someone doesn't like enough to use the word and where they have an opportunity to use it. To call someone a slut is to use the language of sexual shaming against someone you don't like, and due to the often private nature of sex and tip-toeing around the subject, it can cascade through groups and communities in a powerful way and become an accepted truth (whatever the word "slut" means to the people listening). Whether the word was first uttered by a man bitter at a woman who didn't want to have sex with him, for instance, quickly becomes irrelevant. Apart from all the other negative effects, this also has an effect on law enforcement, as the usual defense put up in rape cases is that the victim consented. If "everyone knows" that someone is a "slut", then that will also affect the attitude of law enforcement and give the victim less protection of the law than we all deserve.

Embracing sex as something good, getting rid of the absurd double standards regarding women's sexuality, and no longer accepting the language of sexual shaming are all incredibly worthy goals. SlutWalks might bother some people, but it's important to confront the language used in society directly to get at the negative values that underlie it, so I hope SlutWalks and similar forms of activism will continue to see support in every place where it is needed.

SlutWalks: it's about changing law enforcement

I was originally only going to write one post about the SlutWalk, but since I started thinking about it, I need to preface my intended post with this post outlining more directly what the SlutWalk was originally about.
 
While I was living in Toronto, the first SlutWalk happened. This was in response to a police officer in a safety information session at York University saying that women can keep safe by not dressing like a "slut":

“One of the safety tips was for women not to dress like ‘sluts.’ He said something like, ‘I’ve been told I shouldn’t say this,’ and then he uttered the words,” said Bessner, Osgoode assistant dean of the Juris Doctor Program. “I was shocked and appalled. I made contact with the police [...] and we’ve asked for a written apology and an explanation.”

 The problem with the police officer's line of thinking is that the main reason why rape happens because someone is willing to rape someone. There are certainly, as with other crimes, ways to protect yourself that are not unreasonable, and indeed most women are well aware of them, but the way you dress has very little to do with rape happening. I've been linking the Yes Means Yes blog post about Predator Theory about a million times now, and it's still true. The idea that what you wear could make, say, a man not being able to control himself is ludicrous; we don't have women being assaulted randomly on a crowded street, no matter what they wear, meaning that rapists can control themselves until they know there is less risk that they'll get caught - they are acting in a motivated and targeted manner, rape does not "just happen" based on the behaviour or dress of women. When it comes to assault rape, there is even more reason to think that the perpetrators are specifically motivated to rape someone if they get the opportunity. That means that you're dealing with people who will go after the "most vulnerable", and that being a relative term, means that someone can always be identified by a rapist as being such. To focus on what women wear or their behaviour is essentially to play a game of musical chairs and telling women to hope not to be the one left without a chair, instead of rejecting that idea and focus on perpetrators.

The police officer's comment was especially troubling since rape is a crime that is very underreported and that convictions are even more difficult to come by. By framing women's behaviour and dress as being an important point, the police are not actually helping women, but are blaming the survivors of rape for the harm they suffered and implicitly (or even explicitly) saying that certain women can't expect the full protection of law enforcement and that rape of certain women (insofar as the rape of them doesn't get punished) is tolerated. So the SlutWalk is, at its basic level, about telling law enforcement loudly and clearly to focus on perpetrators, and not be a moral tribunal against rape survivors.

In my next post I will write about the other important messages that I think SlutWalks have to communicate.

Quick hit: because you WANT to

I read this comment on the blog Love, Joy, Feminism, and it said something about sex and sex education that I find really important, which I'm not sure I wrote in my posts on sex education (my bolding):

What my mom said was that when you decide to have sex, it should be because YOU want to — period — not for any other reason — and that you should use protection, because you should also get pregnant because you want to and not because you weren’t paying attention. (Not, as it turned out, a problem I was ever going to have … but we didn’t know that when I was 14.) She didn’t tell me to wait till I was married, or even, really, to wait until I was ready — she told me to make sure I was doing it because I wanted to, and not because I felt I had to, or ought to, or didn’t have a choice, or wasn’t in control of the situation. And I think that was a really, really valuable piece of advice.

 The problem with saying something like "wait until you're ready" is to imply that there is a maturation process and when you're "mature enough" you'll want to. This ignores the existence of people who are asexual, on the one hand, and gives teens the message that sex is an adult thing to do, which at least to me sounds like a pretty irresistible framing to people who want to show themselves to be mature, and a pretty good tool for whoever wants to badger someone into sex (well, if you don't feel mature enough for it...). Better then to stress the values I've mentioned in past posts, and stress that wanting it for yourself and wanting to have sex with the person(s) you're doing it with.